News Corp

Hulu launches friends lists, marks a year on the Web

Video hub Hulu now lets its members amass friends lists much like a standard social-networking service, the site said Thursday.

You can now invite friends from your e-mail address books or Facebook and MySpace accounts, and then see a feed of what your friends have been watching, commenting on, or subscribing to.

In the event that you find this creepy or don't want your boss to catch on to the fact that you watch reruns of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia all day long you can disable these activity-feed features.

The announcement comes in conjunction with the one-year … Read more

Hulu content returns to Boxee in a different form

Media-center start-up Boxee, which aggregates Web video for television set-top boxes, has launched a new version that restores access to video hub Hulu. The NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture had pulled its content from Boxee after content partners took issue with it.

But it's not really the same: Boxee has brought back Hulu by extending its support for RSS feeds, and is pulling the video content in that way.

"Like IE, Firefox, or Google Reader, the RSS reader supports Google Video, Yahoo, YouTube and feeds from many other websites," a post on the Boxee blog by CEO … Read more

Three MySpace execs depart for new venture

Three executives from social network MySpace, including Chief Operating Officer Amit Kapur, are departing the News Corp.-owned company to create a new venture.

The two execs leaving with Kapur are Jim Benedetto, senior vice president of engineering, and Steve Pearman, senior vice president of product strategy.

"We're incredibly excited to see what this team creates together and wish them the best of luck as they transition from helping run a company to building a new one," a statement from MySpace read. "Amit, Jim, and Steve depart as great friends of MySpace and of our executive … Read more

Is Hulu rethinking its distribution strategy?

There's nothing connecting Hulu's decisions to pull out of TV.com and Boxee on the same day, according to sources close to the company.

Hulu's managers were motivated by very different reasons in each case, said the sources (TV.com is owned by CBS, parent company of CNET News). Nonetheless, the decision to dump Boxee is bad for the start-up, for Web video fans, and for Hulu.

In a blog post published Wednesday, Hulu executives said they have asked Boxee to remove their content--starting on Friday-- because their content partners don't want their material to appear … Read more

Hulu pulls content from TV.com

Update at 11:38 a.m. PST, with comment from Hulu.

Hulu.com has pulled its content off CBS-owned TV.com, which relaunched last month, Hulu confirmed Wednesday.

(Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)

Attempts to access episodes of Heroes and other content from NBC and News Corp. partners in the Hulu joint venture, displayed a "video unavailable" message.

In a statement, Hulu said:

Hulu has contractual rights with regards to our relationship with TV.com and we are exercising those rights. Out of respect for their confidentiality, we will not disclose … Read more

News Corp. posts revenue drop, misses estimates

Buffeted by a steep drop in its advertising revenues, News Corp. on Thursday reported an 8.4 percent decline in its fiscal second quarter revenues and missed analysts expectations.

Revenues fell to $7.9 billion in the quarter ended December 31, compared with $8.6 billion for the same quarter a year ago. Wall Street was expecting the media giant to generate $8.39 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

News Corp. posted a net loss of $6.4 billion, or $2.45 a share, during the quarter, compared with a net profit of $832 million, or 27 cents a share, … Read more

Hulu: We're evil, and proud of it

Note: Spoiler alert, if you haven't seen Hulu's Super Bowl ad.

Google's "don't be evil" motto has been the target of the occasional critic. Hulu, however, has declared in its hyped-up Super Bowl TV ad that it is evil--and it's not making any apologies.

The Web video hub, a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., promised to "reveal its secret" in the Super Bowl ad created by agency Crispin Porter & Borgusky, which was running on NBC on Sunday evening. It was an important debut for Hulu, as many … Read more

Report: News Corp. lays off 5 percent at digital unit

The digital unit that oversees MySpace and Photobucket for News Corp. has laid off about 100 people, or 5 percent of its workforce, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Fox Interactive Media was formed in 2005 to oversee News Corp.'s digital holdings.

MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe said last year that the social-network site has seen big gains in ad growth. But some of News Corp.'s other digital holdings don't appear to be faring as well. Staci Kramer at the blog PaidContent.org reported last week that FIM had plans to shut down its storage site, Flektor and … Read more

Hulu to shock the world with Super Bowl ad

Well, well, well. Here's something that just came into my inbox, and presumably the inboxes of the rest of the digital-media press corps: an e-mail from the media team at Hulu, the joint video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., announcing that the company will be running an ad during Sunday's Super Bowl XLIII. Considering the game airs on NBC, a Hulu ad is not too hard to fathom.

It seems like there's always a rumor about some huge tech announcement that will come to light during the annual football-and-advertising bacchanalia, like that Beatles-iTunes thing two years ago … Read more