BloGiza

Web entertainment talent gets a vote of confidence

Here's another interesting item on the Web video frontier: United Talent Agency, one of the biggest talent firms in Hollywood, has opened up an online arm in order to scout out potential talent from the Internet world.

The goal this time around, executives say, is not only to recruit the next generation of television and film writers and directors from the relative obscurity of sites like YouTube and Revver. It is also to help the major Web portals that are hungry for original content to find the creative people they need — just as movie studios have long turned to talent agencies when looking for new directors, screenwriters and actors.

“It starts with just helping identify people on both sides of the aisle,” said Brent Weinstein, head of the new division, UTA Online. “The barrier to entry is so low, everybody is now a potential artist. So there’s this great unwashed of talent out there, 99.999 percent of which is probably not good enough to have a traditional film and television career. But on the Internet, a lot of different types of things go. And yet for buyers, this is a wall of people, so how does a brand know which one of them can help it execute?”

This is yet another indication that we are seeing the rise of a new type of entertainment medium. Short-form video or semi-pro video or whatever you want to call it has gotten a real boost in recent months, certainly since the Google-YouTube deal.

It looks like the future of entertainment (or at least some of it) will reside in all the semi-professional stuff that makes buzz on the Web. Now it seems that Hollywood has started to take notice as well.

Vertical searching your way

Google recently launched an interesting new service that lets anyone define their own vertical search engine. Called Google Custom Search, the service is part of Google Co-Op, Goobe's new push to create API'd search features that users can install on their own sites.

Google Custom Search allows you to define a list of sites that you want it to search. It's quite easy to set up. It didn't take me long at all to define a vertical search engine for Web 2.0 and New Media sites (which you can try out on our sidebar to the right) and put it up on the site.

This is a smart move from Google's perspective in a lot of ways. Obviously, it gives Google inroads to a lot of new and fallow real estate. It also sets up a major challenge to the legions of VC-backed vertical search engine plays that have been popping up recently.

GooTube

Or should it be "YouGle"?

Well, it's now official: Google is buying YouTube for $1.65B in a stock transaction. The deal ends several weeks' worth of speculation about who would buy out the video-sharing site and how much they would pay for it. I had heard speculation that the deal would top a billion, but I think the final price tag will surprise a lot of people.

After all, although YouTube is probably this year's Internet success story and one of the best pure-Web brands (along with MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and several others) from the second wave of the internet it still doesn't have that much by way of revenues. Certainly not to justify its boffo price tag from a conventional standpoint.

All of which has some people mumbling about Bubble 2.0.

Anyway, some thoughts:

1. The deal confirms the belief that short-form video has emerged as the first new significant media form of the 21st century. YouTube has been evolving quickly and now provides not only a platform allowing people to express themselves but also a cutting edge distribution channel for semi-professional and industry content.
   
2. It will be interesting to see what kind of effect this will have on other video sites.  Specifically, I'm curious to see what will happen with Metacafe, Israel's main entrant in this space.
   
3. This was a surprisingly strong move by GOOG and breaks the conventional wisdom that Google doesn't make big strategic purchases.
4. I tend to agree with Om that the big loser in all this is Yahoo, which lost out on the deal. Yahoo will now be forced to scramble to close some other large deal (Facebook maybe?), which will likely be regarded as a "me too" play.
5. Google will now have to defuse the ticking legal bomb that YouTube represents. The only major threat to YouTube comes from the kind of concerted attack (by the MPAA, RIAA, and other large bodies) that brought down Napster. The success of YouTube is widely seen as coming from illegally distributing copyrighted materials. This includes not only last night's episode of "The Colbert Report" but also home videos of people dancing to Britney Spears.  YouTube will have to cut industry-wide deals in order to rectify the situation; if the industry is smart, they will embrace the new medium.
6. A grudging mazel tov to Sequoia, YouTube's sole backer, who will be walking away after two years with a 43x exit.
   

Cool Hack

Here's a little bit of fun for you. Find a Web page that has a lot of images on it. Copy the following code and paste it into your browser's address bar:

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i

Press enter and watch the magic happen.

Online Gambling Bombshell

Over the weekend, the US Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. Under the terms of the act, US credit card companies and banks are now prohibited from processing transactions for online gambling sites.

In one swoop, the lawmakers effectively killed the burgeoning online poker, casino, and betting industry in the United States. Unsurprisingly, shares of these companies (which over the last couple of years have risen dramatically) took a major bath. Companies such as PartyGaming saw their share prices drop by something like 60 percent.

The Congress has been talking about these measures for several months, so the bill itself did not come as a surprise. The timing, however, did. Analysts had not expected the US to move on this measure for several months. As it was, the gambling enforcement act was tacked onto a larger unrelated bill dealing  with US ports.

Despite what feelings you may have about online gambling , it's hard not to feel frustrated at this particular development. (Full disclosure: one of our portfolio companies provides enabling technology for mobile betting)

The move has a whiff of all the worst aspects of the American character: heavy-handed religious moralizing which masks a degree of anti-competitive protectionism. After all, the new law will have no effect whatsoever on the billions of dollars that are spent each year in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

The new law won't kill online gambling. There is a large (and still emerging) market for it in Asia and Europe. At best it will only retard Internet gambling in the States. We live in a globalized world; I'm waiting for the first wave of startups to come up with a slick solutions  that will allow Americans to use these sites while bypassing the financial regulations.