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According to an interview with NBC supremo Jeff Zucker — as reported by Variety magazine on its website today — the TV network hasn’t been happy with its iTunes deal for a number of reasons, including the fact that Apple wouldn’t let it experiment with differential pricing. But the real howler in the piece comes when Zucker huffs that the computer company refused the network’s request for a cut of Apple’s hardware sales:

“Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money,” Zucker said. “They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware.”

This, of course, is known as the “Sam Zell” strategy, in honour of the real-estate billionaire who attempted to argue that Google should pay newspaper’s a cut of its revenue because Google News carries excerpts from newspaper stories. Could Jeff Zucker seriously believe that Apple owes NBC a cut of hardware sales because iTunes carries some NBC shows?

He might as well argue that Google deserves a cut of the PC revenue that Hewlett-Packard and Dell generate, because so many people use their computers to go to Google’s website. What a maroon.

Update:

Not content with whining about Apple not paying a portion of its hardware revenue to NBC, Zucker also apparently said that the computer maker “destroyed the music business” in terms of pricing and threatens to do the same with video. Translation: Man, I wish we could get away with charging $40 for a DVD full of “deleted scenes” from Facts of Life.

So Hulu, the joint venture between NBC and News Corp. that some thought would be a YouTube competitor, has sort of launched — or at least it has given some of the chosen few in Silicon Valley a look at the service. As far as I can tell from most descriptions of it, it sounds like a video-distribution network that will compete more with Brightcove and other similar video services than it will with YouTube.

In other words, it has nothing to do with “user-generated content” or people uploading video — it’s all about network content from NBC and News Corp., distributed through a Flash player that can be embedded on other sites and will be white-labeled to partners such as AOL and MySpace. Still, the early impressions seem positive; even Kara Swisher seems to like it, and so does MG Siegler at ParisLemon.

To the extent that NBC and News Corp. are getting the idea that distributing your content by any means available is a good thing, I think Hulu is a positive step. But as Mark Hendrickson points out at TechCrunch, this is still very much a TV-centric model — that is, shows and content appear and disappear based on the TV schedule. It may be flashy and well-designed, but I wonder whether it will be compelling enough to really draw people in.

Further reading:

Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider has a nice rundown of the things that make Hulu less thrilling than it appears, and one of those things is the restrictions on the content that Hulu distributes. And Liz Gannes has more on that angle as well — as she puts it:

“Hulu can’t avoid the trappings of big media. The company is tied up in a contradictory situation, where it’s chartered to have web-wide distribution while trying to maintain tight control over the user experience wherever it goes.”

PaidContent has a nice overview of the launch as well, including the $100-million investment by Providence Partners.

The Boy Genius, who has a pretty good reputation so far for getting his rumours right, spotted an ad for the Canuck version of the iPhone, which is supposedly going to be here by December 7. But will it? Some have pointed out that the ad looks a little Photoshopped, and that the price — $499 even with a three-year contract — is a little usurious, even for Rogers.

Whatever the truth of the rumour, there’s no question that Rogers and Apple are being very coy about the timing of the blessed event, despite the fact that everyone knows the iPhone has to be on Rogers’ network because it’s the only one that does GSM. Just the other day there was a story in the Globe about a Molson contest letting the cat out of the bag about an iPhone launch in January, but both Rogers and Molson quickly backpedaled on that one and said it was a mistake, they haven’t got a deal yet, etc.

Why so coy? One reason could be that — as one of the commenters on the Boy Genius report and Engadget have noted — there is still the small matter of a trademark on the name iPhone, which in Canada is held by Comwave. Can they get a deal signed to everyone’s liking in the next month or so? Let’s hope so, or there will be a dark Christmas for many Apple fans.

So like the beta-whore I am, I downloaded the demo of Mozilla’s new web-desktop hybrid thing — which used to be called Webrunner and is now called Prism — and I installed it and created a desktop icon for Google Mail without too much trouble. But I have to confess that I still don’t really get it. I mean, it’s cool and everything, but well… I don’t get it.

So I can click on a desktop icon and open a Gmail window, which is great — but it’s really just a browser window with all of the browser bits (like the address bar and the back and forward buttons) taken off, as Phil Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped points out. It can be added to the Start menu on Windows, but you know… ho-hum. I seem to remember that Internet Exploder’s “Active Desktop” setting could do something similar, but no one really cared and so no one used it.

I realize that this is still an early demo, and there are no doubt all sorts of great things ahead for Prism, some of which Phil mentions in his post, and others of which are described by Ryan Stewart at ZDNet and the Wired blog. And there’s no question that the blend of desktop app and Web app is something that holds a lot of promise. So maybe I should give Prism more time to become amazing. As it stands, I’m underwhelmed.

Gobsmacked. That’s what the Brits call it when something jaw-dropping happens and you can’t think of anything to say. Microsoft’s blockbuster quarterly results kind of fall into that territory for me. I have to admit that I’m one of those skeptics who has been talking about the gigantic software maker as yesterday’s company: slow-growing, boring, etc.

Don’t get me wrong — I still think that Microsoft is most of those things, except maybe for the “slow growing” part. Who knew that the company had a quarter like that in it? Profit up 23 per cent to $4.3-billion, revenue up 27 per cent to $13.8-billion. To put that in perspective, Microsoft made almost $50-million in profit a day during the quarter, which means it took less than a week to pay for its recent Facebook investment.

Apparently the skepticism about Vista (which I have also shared) has been more or less misplaced (although it is important to remember that the 88 million copies sold are to retailers, not to consumers), and a strong Halo 3 launch also boosted the software behemoth’s bottom line by a substantial amount. And yes, all you Microsoft critics can rest easy — I know that a lot of those Vista sales and Office sales are a result of Microsoft’s virtual monopoly.

The only issue for Microsoft now is the curse of inflated expectations: can the company produce a quarter like this one every time? Unlikely. And if there’s one thing the company likes to do, it’s to talk down expectations and then outperform. That could be a little harder to do now than it has been in the past.

If you like satire and you don’t mind staying up late, you’re probably a fan of The Daily Show, that great showcase for the satirical jabs of Jon Stewart. If that’s the case, you might have been overjoyed to hear that Comedy Central (which is part of MTV, which in turn is part of Viacom) recently launched a website with 13,000 or so clips from the show, including some of the most-loved episodes.

Finally, you may have thought to yourself — after months of fighting with YouTube over clips from the show (which routinely appear and then are quickly removed), Viacom has decided that giving viewers what they want over the Internet is the right way to go. Bravo.

The only problem with that rosy little scenario is that Viacom’s largesse — like every other U.S. TV network that has decided to stream popular shows from their website — is completely unavailable to Canadian viewers (and to viewers in other countries as well). You can go to the website and click on a video, but you don’t get anything. To add insult to injury, the pre-roll advertising spot that Viacom has sold for the clip plays just fine, but is followed by a black screen — a screen that might as well say “Hey non-U.S. viewers — look at all the stuff you can’t watch.”

Why can’t you watch The Daily Show clips? The same reason you can’t watch an episode of Heroes on the website the day after it plays on TV, and the same reason you can’t download TV episodes from iTunes: Canadian networks like Global and CTV have paid for the right to broadcast those shows, and would no doubt raise a hue and cry if they were suddenly available for free on the Internet. That might destabilize the entire Canadian broadcasting business model, which relies on access to U.S. hits.

Update: On a more recent visit to The Daily Show website, I was automatically redirected to thecomedynetwork.ca, which carries episodes of the Comedy Central show in Canada (after a pseudo-friendly message popped up saying how “some jerk blocked ComedyCentral.com” and that this was a “load of crap,” but that clicking on the link would take you to The Comedy Network for all your favourites “and a whole whack of homegrown hilarity”).

You can watch some recent episodes of The Daily Show at the Canadian site, but there is only a small selection, in contrast to the complete show archive that is available at the U.S. site. I guess it’s better than a blank screen, but not by much.

Owen van Natta, the head of business development for Facebook, was pretty cagey on the Microsoft conference call when he was asked about other potential investors in the current round of funding — so it’s not really a surprise to see that two hedge funds have reportedly also invested in the social network at the same head-spinning valuation of $15-billion.

And while this news comes to us from Fake Steve Jobs, we all know by now that FSJ is really Daniel Lyons of Forbes — and as Silicon Alley Insider points out, the same word has also come from FSJ’s real-world colleague Elizabeth Corcoran, who wrote about it on her blog. It still falls under the heading of “rumour,” but at least it’s not just Fake Steve trying to pull one over on us.

In any case, it’s completely believable that two hedge funds would put in $250-million each, despite the high valuation placed on Facebook. After all, the whole sub-prime thing is a goner now, and we know that hedge funds will invest in just about anything. When a Canadian bank invests in Facebook, then you’ll know the bubble is really starting to get over-inflated.

I was going to post some of my notes from the Microsoft/Facebook conference call, and then I decided to search the blogosphere first, and decided that my notes aren’t really going to bring anything to the table. I already knew that Allen Stern of Centernetworks was live-blogging, because I saw his Twitter updates — which he wanted to post to his blog but couldn’t — and then later I came across Mike Arrington’s live notes from the call as well.

On top of that, there are some pretty good notes at the Seattle Times, at PaidContent and by Adam Ostrow at Mashable, and my pal Om Malik did some as well. It seems as though any competitive advantage that listening to conference calls might once have provided is pretty much gone now 🙂 I would echo the points made by Rafat and others: the call contained virtually nothing of any substance, and in fact no direct answers whatsoever. Lots of “win-win-win”-type talk from Kevin Johnson of Microsoft though, who really needs to stop yelling.

Forget about the $15-billion valuation for a moment — which I admit is difficult to do, since it amounts to about 100 times the company’s estimated annual revenue, a bubblicious multiple by almost any definition (Google is currently trading at about 14 times sales). Why wouldn’t Microsoft take a stake in a fast-growing social network?

• 1. It gets to keep Google out, so that’s good.
• 2. It gets to serve ads to those millions of devoted users who check their Facebook every five minutes.
• 3. It has effectively bought a call option on the future of the company.

It’s not like Microsoft has to come up with the $15-billion. All it has to do is structure a deal that is worth $250-million or so, complete with performance clauses and so forth, and it gets a piece of something that could be worth substantially more at some point (nice to see that Jon Fine of BusinessWeek agrees with me). Not to hype the Google comparison, since they are completely different animals, but wouldn’t you have bought a small percentage of Google if you had had the chance, regardless of the implied valuation?

Anyway, the bottom line is that it’s only a 1.6-per-cent stake. And it looks like this face really is worth $15-billion after all. So anyone want to take bets on how long it will be until Mark Zuckerberg decides to buy a jumbo-jet party plane just like the Google boys? I guess it’s a good thing Mark turned down Yahoo’s $1-billion takeover last year.

Further reading:

— Mike Arrington has been live-blogging the conference call.
— Silicon Alley Insider did too, by way of writer Peter Kafka.
— Some analysis from Ashkan Karbasfrooshan at WatchMojo.
— John Paczkowski at All Things D leads with the Ballmer quote about Facebook being, well… no big deal.
— Rafat at PaidContent says there’s still room for others to invest.
— Erick Schonfeld says Facebook took the path of least resistance.
— Rob Enderle tells the NYT “this was almost personal.”

It’s Google’s Web — we’re just living in it. That seems to be the message coming from the latest update to its PageRank algorithm, which has pushed some websites several rungs down the ladder due to the use of paid links. If nothing else, this kind of move reminds people that Google is not some kind of benevolent father figure that exists to make our lives easier — it is a corporation with its own interests at heart, and while PageRank is a tool, in some cases it is a hammer.

Andy Beard says that Google has slapped some of its biggest fans, meaning those who use a variety of tactics to boost their profile in the Google index — but those “fans” also include some marketing types who use what (to Google at least) are shady methods of conferring high PageRank on sites that don’t deserve it, such as the notorious link-farms we all come across now and then. Some self-promoters, like John Chow, have been removed from the Google index completely.

One no-no is the selling of links through things such as Text Link Ads (disclosure: I use Text Link Ads here, as an experiment, and it appears my PageRank has fallen as a result), because Google seems to want to maintain the “purity” of the linking experience, and not get people all confused about what’s an ad and what isn’t. That’s the charitable view. And the uncharitable one? If you want to sell links, Google would much rather that you use AdWords. And as Adam Ostrow notes at Mashable, Google makes a fair bit of money from link-farms itself.

Steve D. at TechVat has more on the PageRank issue, including a list of sites that have seen their rank decrease — and it’s a list that includes some well-known sites, including the Washington Post, Forbes and Engadget. And there’s some commentary at ProBlogger and Digital Inspiration. This is also an issue that Search Engine Land has covered before, including a well-timed piece by Danny Sullivan about the risks of selling links.

It’s a classic small-town newspaper story: the big fire, with all the pumpers and ladder-trucks on the scene, the volunteer firefighters helping out, maybe even a building or two evacuated. Makes for great journalism of the old-fashioned kind (remind me to tell you about the time I spent two hours trying to find the small grass fire in London, Ont. caused by a downed airplane — good times). The California fires are much bigger than that, of course, but essentially the same type of story: Man against Nature.

Now, however, the Web is doing much of the legwork, as Danny notes in his roundup of fire coverage and Allan Stern notes as well. The best thing a news outlet could do in a situation like this one — apart from maybe sending one of its reporters down to command central — is to pull together the threads that are out there: the Google Maps mashups (like the LA Times has put together), the eyewitness photos on Flickr and videos on YouTube.

In addition to that, someone could aggregate all the different fire reports, the details of what is burning and where, the evacuation centres and their locations, photos of the key spots, and facts about the spread of previous fires. Oops — someone is already doing that. It’s a little place called Wikipedia, which is rapidly becoming a key place to go for news about such events.

Update:

My friend Paul Kedrosky wonders if this is the first Web 2.0 disaster — which it might be, but the fact that it occurred so close to the heart of Silicon Valley probably helps — and notes that one paper is using a blog to keep readers updated. And in my comments, Holly points to a post by Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins at Mashable, in which he has lots of links to Twittered news and other sources (and just for the record, I remember Nando and Angelfire too, Mark)

I know this probably makes me naieve (not to mention old) but I just never figured Dylan would be shilling for Cadillac, driving a gigantic, gas-guzzling Escalade. The rest of the video fits — the dusty prairie, the gnarled trees and scrub brush, the rundown buildings. But Dylan driving a giant SUV just doesn’t work for me somehow.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRT7EFoWpZ4&rel=0&border=0&w=425&h=366]

(via The Listenerd)