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While consumers are thinking about gifts to buy for the holidays, Walt Disney Company is getting their shopping lists in order too. Looking to potentially heat things up in the acquisition market, Disney has organized several executives into a specialized Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) division.

The group, division, or whatever loose title its given, is not necessarily a formal restructuring. Disney’s looking to consolidate management tasks and improve strategic communication in anticipation’s of increased spending. It’s about efficiency. Day to day responsibilities for those involved may go largely unchanged.

First reported by Tech Crunch, and later confirmed by other sources, the group will be run by Kevin Mayer, Disney’s executive vice president of Corporate Development. It’s unclear if he’ll take a new title or adjust his current operational responsibilities.

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Like much of the media industry, the U.K.’s  BBC is struggling to adapt the changing ways consumers are quenching their information thirsts.  At times, it seems like they’re trying everything, like anything goes; especially over the past few months.

In July, BBC released a second Beta test for peer to peer media player software dubbed iPlayer.  In October, the Financial Times and other publications reported  that as much as 12% of BBC staff would be layed off.  Now, November, add joint venture to the mix.

Tuesday, several UK top broadcasters including the BBC (BBC Worldwide),  ITV and Channel 4, announced they will jointly launch an on-demand Internet video joint venture in 2008. The partnership, which is codenamed “Project Kangaroo,” sounds a lot like NBC Universal and News Corps recently launched (beta) Hulu platform.

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Slacker’s a relatively old word.  It’s been around since at least the 1890’s and had a variety of meanings, most negative in tone.  San Diego based Slacker, a technology company of the same name, is focused on music distribution and hoping to give the word new life and new meaning; something traversing from lazy and laissez faire to easy to use and can’t live without.  Their biggest test is almost here. 

Though recent fanfare and marketing has been limited, on December 13, barely in time for the holidays, Slacker will ship their portable music player. 

The device is modern and slick in appearance.  With a four inch diagonal screen, on-board WiFi and a ten hour battery life, it might be mistaken as another iPod competitor.  It’s not, at least directly.  Slacker’s aiming for something altogether different.   Instead of targeting Apple head on, they’re competing for the same purchasing dollars but going after the radio market, trying to be Radio 2.0. 

The brainchild of three former music company executives, Slacker, the company, launched commercially last March with high hopes for changing music distribution.   Their concept was built around integrating three music delivery channels into a single interconnected product line.

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Songs capture a moment in time. They play in background as soundtracks to our lives. Games become pastimes. TV episodes, appointments. Movies remain our escapes and fantasies. At water coolers and barstools, we critique and borrow their dialog : “Here’s looking at you, kid.” “Phone home.” Don’t believe it? Fine, “No soup for you.”

From blogs to movies, webisodes and clips to comics and film, from ha-ha funny, to tear-jerker sad, we live in a world hungry for media. We feed that hunger with mass media and the alternative; with songs and sound bytes, in features and micro-chunks. We engage with it on computers, at home, at work, in the car, on the go. We consume it. On a phone. On a TV. Via consoles and portables, real-time and “time shifted” too.

“Content is King” or at least, esteemed royalty. Today, in acknowledgment of how the media world continues to evolve Metue presents a third brief collection of recent notable quotations, this time on “Content,” the manna that fuels our entertainment appetites:

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Money flowing into Internet video startups doesn’t appear to be slowing down. Just the opposite, the sector continues to expand globally. Pacific Epoch reports Chinese language site Youku.com has closed a $25m Series C Financing.

The round was led by Brookside Capital Partners (subsidiary of Bain Capital) and the Company’s three existing investors Sutter Hill Ventures, Farallon Capital Management and Chengwei Ventures.

Youku.com is very much like a Chinese languageYouTube, right down to the colors and layout of the pages. Also like YouTube, it is a forum for displaying and interacting with user-generated/user-submitted videos.

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When Sony released earnings data at the end of October two things were abundantly clear: i. the PS3 was still a major component of their future plans; and ii. unless they started changing things soon, especially in time for the holiday sales push, the future wasn’t going to be too bright.

Somebody at Sony got the memo.

Monday, in an effort to increase game development, Sony cut the fees charged to game developers. The change comes a month after Sony cut global prices for the console.

The Software Development Kit, which Sony calls the Reference Tool, will now cost $10,250 in North America, $8,600 in Japan, and $11,250 in Europe. Sony will also improve programming tools included with the kit.

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Macrovision, a leading provider of Digital Rights Management and Anti-Piracy technology for the film industry, announced today they had entered agreements to acquire the Blu Ray Disc Plus (BD+) security protocol along with related staffers from Cryptography Research Inc. for $45m.   The purchase of this somewhat esoteric technology isn’t  likely to get much attention outside the cryptographic industry but it’s notable if for no other reason than reports that  BD+ was just recently hacked/cracked.

BD+  is a Blu Ray exclusive security protocol that’s been billed as an added security feature for the Blu Ray platform. Click to Read More