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Watch Shelly’s commentary on eBay’s (NASD: EBAY) legal victory over TIFFANY (NYSE: TIF) and how its blown deal with BUY.com will affect its brand.
MICROSOFT (NASD: MSFT) announced a deal with NETFLIX (NASD: NFLX) that will make the Xbox 360 a streaming center for thousands of movies available on Netflix. The deal will expand Netflix streaming services from Computer and purchased set-top box only to a made-for-TV model. Users will have to pay a yearly $50 fee for a “gold membership”, as well as at least $9 a month for a Netflix account, which would grant unlimited access to Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” library.
ACTIVISION BLIZZARD (NASD: ATVI), the new company formed by ACTIVISION and VIVENDI GAMES, will launch a digital download store. The store, which hopes to compete with APPLE’s (NASD: AAPL) iTunes, would sell music, videos and games. The store hopes to capitalize on Activision’s “Guitar Hero” and Vivendi’s UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP holdings.
GOOGLE (NASD: GOOG) has agreed to give VIACOM (NYSE: VIA-B) anonomized YOUTUBE data. The data includes IP addresses, videos watched, videos shared and videos uploaded of YouTube users. Google fought hard to keep the information under wraps, but earlier in the month a judge ordered the company to hand over the user data, which Viacom plans to use to study the popularity of viral video sites.
HOME MEDIA MAGAZINE found consumers are still purchasing DVD’s and BLU-RAY discs, despite P2P file sharing. DVD and Blue-ray disc sales rose a slight 1.1% from $6.8 billion last year to $6.87 billion this year, while rentals increased by 2.6 percent. Analysts believe the numbers indicate that legal and illegal downloading isn’t hurting the core of their industry.