Warner Bros. is jumping into the online video arena next month with a pair of sites, thewb.com and kidswb.com, which will show full episodes of its biggest series, like Friends and Smallville on the former, and stuff like Bugs Bunny, Scooby Doo and Batman (hopefully Paul Dini’s brilliant and amazing original animated series, not The Mediocre Batman) on the latter. It’d probably have made more sense for them to join Hulu, but Warner’s probably not keen on splitting the ad dollars. If there’s enough content, it could become a real destination, but we’re guessing you’ll still have to go to YouTube for “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarves.” [Yahoo]
Talking at the National Association of Broadcasters convention, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar implied that NBC and News Corp.’s (mostly) slick video service could be moving to mobile phones, saying that they’re “ripe for the Hulu experience.” But, it might not look like the Hulu we know and almost love, since he mentioned that it “may not be identical” everywhere, but he thinks “anything connected to the internet would be a good fit for Hulu.” Looks like healthy mobile TV might just materialise in the US. [MocoNews, Broadcasting & Cable]
YouTube is one hell of a bandwagon. Not only are regular folk getting on it to post inane and/or embarrassing clips of themselves to share with the rest of the world, but companies are starting to come up with products designed specifically for this use.
Take the Sony NSCGC1 “Net Share Cam” from Sony. It’s been around for a couple of months now, and its main purpose in life is to shoot video for the web. It doesn’t even have to be YouTube – any video or photo sharing site is catered for.
As part of its earnings call, Netflix dropped the bit they intend to finally launch their all-you-can-eat “Watch Instantly” online video service for Macs later this year. The only holdup is/has been the lack of a Mac-native DRM system that Hollywood approves as sufficiently draconian. Hurray! Sorta. Mostly. [Electronista]
