The Social

Disney's ABC Enterprises announced Thursday that it has entered into online-video joint venture Hulu, currently a partnership between NBC Universal, News Corp., and investor Providence Equity Partners.

This means that TV shows from Disney-owned channels like ABC, SoapNet, and ABC Family will be coming to Hulu. Among them are "Lost," "Grey's Anatomy," "Ugly Betty," and "Scrubs." There will also be Disney movies available on the ad-supported streaming video site, but a press release did not name any of them. Content will be available "soon," the press release explained.

Reports started to surface about a month ago that Disney was in talks to join Hulu.

Robert Iger, president and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, will take a seat on Hulu's board of directors, along with Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney/ABC Television Group, and Kevin Mayer, executive vice president of corporate strategy, business development, and technology at Disney.

ABC already streams a significant amount of television content on ABC.com, and Disney-owned television and video content was some of the first to make an appearance in the iTunes Store's video download section.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney's single biggest shareholder, having sold animation studio Pixar to the company in 2006.

This post was expanded at 8:15 a.m. PT.

Fandango, the movie-ticketing company owned by Comcast since 2007, announced on Monday that it has acquired Movies.com, a movie news and reviews aggregator. Movies.com had previously been owned by Disney's Walt Disney Internet Group.

Financial details were not disclosed.

The aim of the acquisition is to provide a one-stop movie hub for the Web, executives said.

"We are pleased to expand our rich-entertainment reach through this strategic addition of Movies.com," Chuck Davis, CEO of Fandango, said in a statement. The ticketing site currently sells admission to 15,000 theaters in the United States. "We'll be able to leverage our combined assets to offer millions of new moviegoers the best movie-related information available on the Web."

I guess this is what Disney would consider edgy: the company has reportedly acquired Ideal Bite, a "sassy" eco-focused e-mail newsletter that explicitly states it's "not for readers under age 18." The price was about $15 million, PaidContent reported. That's a lot smaller than Club Penguin, which Disney acquired for $350 million last year.

Ideal Bite is small even as far as e-mail lists go--it's no DailyCandy--but its demographic was likely of interest to a buyer like Disney. The site's median household income is $82,000, press materials state; the median age is 35; and the target demographic is the sort that "drinks organic wine after yoga." In other words, yuppie moms.

And "green" media is unsurprisingly a hot niche. Last year, Discovery Communications acquired the blog TreeHugger to accompany its Planet Green cable network, and the TreeHugger-Discovery partnership was recently selected to power the new eco-news division at the Huffington Post.

When we last heard from Ideal Bite, it was throwing a chic launch party in New York last year following an investment by the Pilot Group, the firm headed by MTV co-founder and former AOL exec Bob Pittman. The celebration featured a mechanical bull and dancers clad entirely in leaves, which I expect won't be featured in any kind of Disney-bought-us gala.

Then again, Disney is responsible for Desperate Housewives.

NEW YORK--In his keynote speech on Wednesday morning at the Media and Money conference hosted by Dow Jones and Nielsen, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner talked about writers as though they were a minority group that he didn't particularly understand well. "I like writers. Some of my best friends are writers," he said as though attempting to save face. But nevertheless, his foremost epithet for the ongoing Writer's Guild of America strike was "stupid."

"I see stupid strikes, and I see less stupid strikes. I see smart strikes," Eisner said in the keynote, which was structured as a conversation with Neil P. Cavuto, senior vice president and managing editor of Fox Business News. "This is a stupid strike."

The problem, Eisner said, is that the Writer's Guild is lobbying for a bigger cut of the profits from digital distribution--and according to the former Disney chief, those profits simply aren't there. Eisner, now the head of a private investment firm called The Tornante Company, has launched an online video studio called Vuguru, and said that it's still more or less a fruitless labor. Vuguru's debut series, a serial mystery called Prom Queen, "didn't make money," he said.

Cavuto, naturally, played devil's advocate and asked Eisner why he's sticking with it. "First of all, I'm doing it because I think it's fun, I think it's the future, and I think it's interesting," Eisner replied, "(but) I'm begging advertisers to give me enough money to break even."

At the moment, Eisner said, digital media is too new to be profitable. "The studios are there because they don't want to be in the transportation business and telling everybody that they're in the train business," he said. "They want to be in the entertainment business, and God forbid they should forget yet another distribution track." In other words, they don't want to get left behind.

He said it would take about three years for Web video and other forms of digital distribution to gain enough of a foothold to be profitable--and that's when the Writer's Guild would have a case to make. "What I'm saying is for a current writer, for six thousand people to give up today's money for a nonexistent piece today is stupid," Eisner asserted. "They can do it in three years. They shouldn't be doing it now." Right now, the profit from digital content is "a piece of a nonexistent flow, which won't be nonexistent, but it will be nonexistent for the next three years."

One thing Cavuto failed to ask Eisner, who estimated that the Writer's Guild strike would dissipate by the end of next week, was exactly how Web video would start to be profitable. Presumably, advertisers will warm up to the opportunity.

But Eisner acknowledged that the studios and networks aren't entirely faultless. Their problem, he said, is hyping up digital platforms as being more profitable than they actually are. "It's a double-edged sword. The studios deserve what they're getting, because they've been announcing how great (the Internet) is. But then they open their books."

Eisner, a well-known critic of Apple (whose CEO, Steve Jobs, is a powerful member of Disney's board of directors), suggested that the profits may be getting sucked up elsewhere. The studios "make deals with Steve Jobs, who takes them to the cleaners. They make all these kinds of things, and who's making money? Apple! They should get a piece of Apple. If I was a union, I'd be striking up wherever he is."

"Cupertino?" Cavuto offered.

Pirates getting in the way of business? Let's form Voltron.

(Credit: TV Tokyo)

The announcement has been made--read CNET News.com's full coverage here.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that an impressive cast of major media and technology companies plans to announce a high-profile list of joint guidelines for preserving copyright and fighting piracy online. Sources told The Journal that the companies involved include media moguls CBS Corp., NBC Universal, News Corp.'s Fox (and its MySpace social network), Viacom, and Disney, as well as tech icon Microsoft and French video-sharing site DailyMotion.

It's unclear whether these are the only parties involved in the deal. Inquiries to several of the companies allegedly involved in the agreement went unanswered.

The most notable party absent from the group is Google, according to The Journal's Kevin Delaney. Apparently, the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech titan had been in talks about joining but did not go through with it. Google is the parent company of YouTube, the wildly popular video-sharing site that had come under fire from media companies for making it easy to share copyrighted content.

Google recently announced an antipiracy technology initiative for YouTube.