Consumer content

SAN FRANCISCO--Lucas Cruikshank is to user-generated video what Tiger Woods was to golf or what Bobby Fischer was to chess when they were teenagers.

The 15-year old creator of the YouTube series Fred has become Internet video's hottest prodigy since last month, when the Fred channel amassed the most subscribers (585,506) on YouTube. He now has more than 645,000. Since launching six months ago, Fred clips have been watched more than 125 million times.

The series is a goofy satire of some YouTube video bloggers that Cruikshank considers self important. Fred is a fictitious teen with anger … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Let's try combining the Web and TV sets one more time, says Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

Hastings told an audience Thursday at the NewTeeVee Live conference that TV sets are key to the future of Internet video and all next-generation sets should come equipped with Wii-like controllers, browsers, video codecs, and some serious processing power.

"The real breakthrough will be in remote controls," Hastings said. "The video game generation is comfortable with pointers (like the one from Nintendo's Wii video game) for the TV. Remember, it was a revolutionary event when we went from … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Hulu CEO Jason Kilar readily acknowledges that digital movie sales from sites such as iTunes mean higher profit margins for Hollywood studios than ad-supported sites can deliver.

But Kilar defended ad-supported services like YouTube and Hulu--formed by News Corp., and NBC Universal--by pointing out that they can draw from a much larger market. Film sales account for $20 billion annually, while ad-supported revenue is $80 billion, Kilar said during his keynote address at the NewTeeVee Live conference on Thursday.

Kilar was responding to comments made by Tom Adams, who operates Adams Media Research, an entertainment industry research and consulting … Read more

There's little doubt that Apple has thousands of engineers working on all kinds of crazy stuff down in Cupertino, Calif., but are they really planning to take on Google?

That's the theory sort of advanced by TechCrunch on Thursday, with a post titled "Is Apple building a search engine?" Michael Arrington cites "multiple (if thin)" reports that Apple is working on developing its own search technology, presumably to get around using Google as the default search engine in the Safari browser.

The report, however, debunks itself, noting that Apple has not been hiring search … Read more

Google Earth is extending its satellite perspective to paint a picture of what the ancient city of Rome looked like nearly two millennia ago.

While satellites weren't around to give us a bird's eye view of the city in 320 A.D., Google's "Ancient Rome 3-D" offers a 3D simulation of the ancient city at the height of its power. The new layer for the tool allows virtual time-traveling tourists to fly around the city and zoom in to explore ancient structures as they likely looked at the time, including the Colosseum, the Forum, and … Read more

This post was updated at 10:55 a.m. PST with clarification from a source close to Allen & Co.

According to a TechCrunch report, mobile friend-finding service Loopt has looped in boutique investment banking firm Allen &Co. to land it a buyer or locate financing. However, sources close to Allen & Co. maintain that the $250 million number floated in the TechCrunch report is very high.

Loopt, which reportedly raised $13.3 million in venture funding from Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates, is facing an environment where money is hard to come by.

Mergers and acquisitions took a blow in the third quarter, … Read more

If YouTube and Hulu are to become Web movie houses, will they be the online equivalents of those gleaming multiplexes where all the latest releases appear? Or will they be the revival houses that screen only outdated flicks?

Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) caused a stir on Monday by announcing it will become the first Hollywood studio to post full-length feature films to YouTube. But while long-form movies are unprecedented for YouTube, MGM has plans to offer only a handful of older titles, such as Bulletproof Monk and The Magnificent Seven.

Some of the studios are easing their way into YouTube … Read more

When consulting online traffic maps to form your plan of attack for hitting the streets, how often do you suspect that the red, yellow, and green colors indicating the various speeds of traffic flow are inaccurate, show outdated data, or that they'll change by the time you get there?

The concept of online traffic maps makes a lot of sense, but until they're foolproof, users will always be skeptical. A new collaborative project between UC Berkeley and Nokia is trying to provide mapped traffic data with more accuracy than ever before. How? By tapping into the ubiquity of … Read more

I fear I'm going to be wasting a lot more time in the blogosphere now.

Google Reader is now automatically translating RSS feeds. It's easy to use too. You just subscribe to a feed in any language and when it appears in your Google Reader you click on the "Feed Settings" tab on the top of the feed and then click "translate into my language." Presto! The feed becomes English.

The translation seemed pretty good on the Spanish-language blog I experimented with. You could tell it was machine translation but it was very readable. … Read more