Online Video

As speculation continues to swirl around Hulu, one of its corporate owners is forced to sit on the sidelines having no role in the fate of the popular online video site even though the outcome could greatly affect its own future. That's the position Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable and broadband operator, finds itself in with regard to Hulu, which has retained investment bankers to explore a possible sale of the company. Whereas Hulu's other majority owners — Walt Disney Co. and News Corp.

NEW YORK - Yahoo Inc.staged its glitzy presentation for advertisers in a theater near Central Park, with appearances by Katie Couric, "CSI" creator Anthony E. Zuiker and, via video, Tom Hanks. AOL Inc.rented out a three-story production studio in the gentrified Meatpacking District, which it filled with pounding dance tracks as gym-sculpted servers carried trays of beverages and snacks. A series of celebrity-studded presentations concluded with 1970s TV star Marlo Thomas taking the stage as AOL awarded prizes, including a new Ford Mustang convertible.

Youku Inc., China's leading online video site, reached an agreement to merge with its smaller competitor Tudou Holdings Ltd. in an all-stock transaction valued at more than $1 billion. The deal, announced Monday, creates an unlikely partnership between two companies that have struggled to turn a profit in China's booming Internet space. The two websites have long been bitter rivals, fighting in court over allegations of copyright infringement. The new company, named Youku Tudou Inc., would command more than one-third of the online video advertising market in China, challenging domestic online giants such as Baidu Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. in a country where YouTube is blocked by censors.

Providence Equity Partners is selling its stake in online video service Hulu for about $200 million, according to people familiar with the situation. The move is expected to give at least two of Hulu's media company owners — News Corp. and Walt Disney Co. — a greater ownership stake in the rapidly growing online service. It also would make it easier for the partners to achieve a common strategy for the asset without having a restive investor in the mix. The 5-year-old service has more than 2 million paid subscribers to its Hulu Plus offering and about 38 million visitors a month to its free site, which offers catch-up episodes of such popular shows as "Glee," "Revenge" and "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.

The number of people watching video on the Internet is expected to nearly double by 2015 to 1.5 billion while the amount of video they watch on the Web is also seen doubling to more than an hour a day, according to a forecast released Wednesday by Cisco Systems Inc. In the company's Visual Networking Index, which is released annually and forecasts Internet usage over the next five years, Cisco predicts Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010...

A plan by Time Warner Inc. and Comcast Corp. to ensure that people who watch TV on the Web are already cable-TV subscribers faces several hurdles, including the technical -- a workable encryption system -- and the political -- whether consumers will view it as an attempt to wall off free content.

NEW YORK - Yahoo Inc.staged its glitzy presentation for advertisers in a theater near Central Park, with appearances by Katie Couric, "CSI" creator Anthony E. Zuiker and, via video, Tom Hanks. AOL Inc.rented out a three-story production studio in the gentrified Meatpacking District, which it filled with pounding dance tracks as gym-sculpted servers carried trays of beverages and snacks. A series of celebrity-studded presentations concluded with 1970s TV star Marlo Thomas taking the stage as AOL awarded prizes, including a new Ford Mustang convertible.

Loved and feared, Hulu — the online video service that offers free streams of episodes of such popular TV shows as "Glee" and "The Office" — commands more than 43 million users. Hulu's rapid rise since its launch in March 2008 has provoked shudders in Hollywood, where it's feared the website is teaching consumers, especially younger ones glued to laptops, to expect easy access to TV's best shows — all for free. And that, providers fret, will only encourage people to drop their pay TV subscriptions, which pays for the enormous cost of producing sitcoms and dramas.

Following the lead of major league baseball and the National Basketball Assn., the National Hockey League is starting to charge fans for online video. The NHL announced a new service offering video highlights of goals, saves and other action for $4.95 a month, as well as "classic" games on demand for $1.95 to $2.95 per viewing. The league, which still will offer some complete games and highlights for free through Microsoft Corp.'

The Clovis High School Class of 2011 has left a lasting legacy: Members made a video aimed at portraying all aspects of their school life — and featuring nearly every one of the 600 graduates. In a lively, nearly 11-minute video posted on YouTube, the students at the school near Fresno lip-sync to two songs and lead viewers on a tour around campus. Nearly all parts of student life are presented, among them the athletes, the cheerleaders, the folklorico dancers. The video, "Clovis High Class of 2011 Lip Dub," was notable because the students shot it silently — the other students on campus were taking state-mandated exams and the seniors couldn't distract them.

When Dutch filmmaker Frans Hofmeester put the video "Lotte Time Lapse: From birth to 12 in 2 min. 45" on Vimeo one week ago, he thought it might generate some interest. After all, he had been filming his daughter Lotte once a week, every week, since she was born, and by stringing those videos together and speeding them up, he had amassed an impressive time-lapse-like record of his daughter as she grew from a wide-eyed baby  into a coy girl with a penchant for flower barrettes.

The online video touted an epic unveiling from one of Hollywood's most revered filmmakers: "In three days, Ridley Scott returns to the genre he redefined.... " For the next two days, subsequent videos ratcheted up the excitement for the new project from the director of "Alien. " Then, finally, it arrived: not the movie, not even the full-length trailer, but the one-minute "teaser" for Scott's upcoming 20th Century Fox release "Prometheus. " "We teased the teaser," Fox Chief Marketing Officer Oren Aviv said.

A federal appeals court judge has revived a $1-billion copyright infringement lawsuit by Viacom Inc.against Google Inc.'sYouTube, reopening a high-profile clash between old and new media. The dispute - which began when established media conglomerates were struggling to cope with the disruption of online video - reflected a frantic effort by Viacom to halt unauthorized snippets of its TV shows from showing up online. Ironically, the ruling, which revives the 2007 legal conflict, comes in the same week that YouTube announced an online movie distribution agreement with Viacom-owned Paramount Pictures.

It's a long way from Woody. In an upcoming animated series called "Electric City," Tom Hanks plays Cleveland Carr, a former police officer charged with maintaining order in a murky metropolis, where secret police and murder lurk beneath the veneer of a peaceful society. The series, conceived by Hanks and co-produced by his production company Playtone and Indian media company Reliance Entertainment, will debut this summer — not in a theater or on a TV screen, but on the giant Internet portal Yahoo.

Youku Inc., China's leading online video site, reached an agreement to merge with its smaller competitor, Tudou, in a stock deal between the two New York-listed companies worth more than $1 billion. The deal, which was announced Monday, creates an unlikely partnership between two companies that have struggled to turn a profit in China's booming Internet space. The two websites have long been bitter rivals, fighting in court over alleged copyright infringement. The new company, named Youku Tudou Inc., would command more than a third of the online video advertising market in China, challenging domestic online giants such as Baidu Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. in a country where Youtube is blocked by censors.

When an online video gets more than a million views, it's hard to ignore. That may be the reason the Transportation Security Administration took the unusual step last week to address an online video that claims to show how to circumvent the full-body scanners that the TSA has installed at 140 airports across the country. Jonathan Corbett, a blogger and TSA critic, posted a video this month on YouTube and his own Web page, www.tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com , titled "How to Get Anything Through TSA Nude Body Scanners.

Amazon.com Inc. and TiVo Inc. are trying to bridge the gap between the PC and television. The two companies plan today to announce an alliance that will enable some TiVo Inc. customers to use their TVs to watch movies and television shows purchased through Amazon's nascent online video store, Unbox. The service addresses one of the greatest impediments to the growth of Internet video -- viewers can't watch it on their living room TVs.

Who says no one wants to watch paint dry? In an effort to find out how easy it is to buy YouTube views, The Times posted two identical videos of a wet streak of blue children's paint. The 1-minute 47-second videos were given similar titles with deliberately misspelled words to lower the chances they'd be found in regular searches by Web users. One was uploaded to reporter Jack Leonard's YouTube account and the other to reporter David Sarno's. The Times randomly chose a pair of websites touting quick and cheap views for any video and purchased 40,000 views for Leonard's clip.