Metue.com

Corporate M&A activity is a little like addictive behavior. Once a company sets down the road to grow by acquisition, chances are they won’t stop at just one hit.  For Discovery Communications, parent of TV’s Discovery Channel, TLC and others, the M&A road leads to a convergence of TV and internet initiatives. It seems they’re on it and happy to pay the tolls along the way.

Monday, Discovery Communications announced they’d agreed to buy privately held How Stuff Works, the informative and educational website property for a price reportedly near $250m.

HowStuffWorks is very much what their name describes.  Click to Read More

Touch screens, video-on-demand, GPS, Portable Entertainment, taxi’s with TV, highway rest stops with WiFi hotspots …. Entertainment technology is reaching into our travels and changing fast.   No where are these changes more apparent than airlines.  New planes have new technology and are trying to keep up.

Last week Virgin America, the newly launched U.S. low fare airline chose a handful of prominent Internet personalities and blogger’s as cartoon faces to front their new ad campaign.  They included people like Kevin Rose (Digg) and the team at popular blog Boing Boing.   I wasn’t among the chosen few – Metue is a good ways from the scale of audience to draw that kind of attention -  but I have flown VA twice this month and the time seems right to take inventory and do a review; a closer look at the entertainment technology aboard the newest company to take flight.

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With the start of the fall television season, a great deal of attention is focused on traditional media companies’ online efforts.  Who’s streaming what.  Premiers being aired online before television.  Much of the discussion is centered on the television networks and their experimentation with video distribution strategies and platforms.   In the cacophony of all this noise, Disney, despite being the parent of a major network (ABC), has managed to stay relatively unnoticed.  Disney’s efforts are worth calling out.

Over this past year, Disney has launched a handful of online content and gaming communities. They’ve redesigned some of their existing properties. They’ve even bolstered their portfolio with the purchase of popular children’s destination, Club Penguin.   The combined efforts are paying off.

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With the market for Internet video exploding, so to is the market opportunity for companies providing back-end enabling technologies, notably encoding/transcoding and distribution/streaming services.   Investors are taking note.

One of the players, Utah-based Move Networks has just raised an additional $34m in a Series B financing.  The Reg D securities filing was dated September 24.  According to PE Hub (which has first-look access to the public record document thanks to parent company Thompson Financial’s service relationship with the SEC) prior investor Steamboat Ventures appears to have led the round. (Steamboat Ventures, which is named after the Mickey Mouse character Steamboat Willy, is the Walt Disney Company’s venture capital arm).

The new capital brings the total investment in Move Networks to about $45m.  Hummer Winblad and Steamboat previously invested $11.3m in a Series A round that closed in December 2006.

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Beta Tests in software development used to be sandboxes for limited 3rd party testing. That was before Web 2.0, before Internet based services and features became the new face of the software industry.  Now, increasingly Beta has become an ambiguous term. 

Today, Beta’s often start out limited, as invitation-only tests, but they morph into full fledged, publicly accessible services.  Beta has become code for “we may still change it” and “it may still break when you use it.”  It’s  a disclaimer for anything goes.  Company’s like Google have stuck the label on their services for years.  It’s no longer a clear marker, nor a clear meaning.

At Google, Larry Page, has said, “If it’s on there for five years because we think we’re going to make major changes for five years, that’s fine. It’s really a messaging and branding thing."

So, Beta doesn’t mean much as a word anymore. That doesn’t mean there aren’t notable milestones.  The transition from invitation-only to public access is a good one.  When a software product is officially unleashed on the world, it’s crossed a bridge.  Joost, the Internet peer to peer video service, passed that marker this weekend. Click to Read More

Friday, place-shifting TV technology company Sling Media announced a deal to stream NFL games to DirecTV customers. The move away from consumer hardware and software and into business to business services came as a surprise.  Even more surprising is Sling’s Monday evening announcement.  The company announced it will sell itself to DirecTV competitor Echostar (operating of Dish Network) for approximately $380m.

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YouTube’s on the iPhone. Now MySpace will be too, at least indirectly.   As of today, MySpace, and soon most of its siblings at Fox Interactive Media, will be available in a specially formatted mobile offering formatted specifically for cellular use.

Unlike MySpace’s existing subscription based service which is offered on AT&T and Helio wireless services, the new mobile MySpace launching today will be free and ad supported.   It will work on all U.S. carriers and any phone that has the ability to surf the Internet.  Popular MySpace functionality, like the ability to send and receive messages and friend requests, or update blogs, or search for friends will all be supported.

Fox Interactive is taking its mobile initiative seriously.  John Smelzer, a senior vice president at Fox Interactive believes "Accessing the Internet from your mobile phone will soon be as common as text messaging and voice calling."  

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