Today's Top Stories Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) had to be happy to ring out the old year and ring in the new--especially after the way the old year ended. First the streaming service suffered a major malfunction on Christmas Eve; then its DVD website started acting up on New Year's Eve. Reportedly, the website started experiencing technical difficulties for some users, a problem a Netflix spokesman told The Wall Street Journal was being addressed by the company's engineers. On a brighter note to ring in the new year, Netflix's online video steaming service, which took a hit Christmas Eve thanks to problems with the Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) storage service, is "not impacted" by the latest problem. Meanwhile, Amazon posted an apology of sorts for the first problem in an explanation of what happened and how it apparently affected more than just Netflix. As part of the explanation, Amazon also offered up a promise that this kind of thing wouldn't happen again. The problem, the company said, started late on Christmas Eve and revolved around the Amazon Elastic Load Balancing Service (ELB). While the impact was restricted to "only affected applications using the ELB Service" and only a "fraction of the ELB load balancers," it had a "significant impact for a prolonged period of time," Amazon said in its statement. The problem, Amazon said, was the result of human error during a "maintenance process." From there, according to the company, it was a chain reaction of bad events until service was finally restored sometime after 3 p.m. ET on Christmas day. "We have made a number of changes to protect the ELB service from this sort of disruption in the future," Amazon said, before concluding with an apology. "We know how critical our services are to our customers' businesses, and we know this disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive further improvement in the ELB service," the statement concluded. Meanwhile, lest it be thought the Grinch stole the entire holiday from everyone at Netflix, at least one member of the embattled streaming service will have a good memory of the season. CEO Reed Hastings learned his compensation will double in 2013 from $2 million to $4 million, including salary and stock options. For more:
- see this Wall Street Journal story on the DVD website outage
- read this statement/apology from Amazon.com about the Christmas outage
- check out this story on Reed Hastings' salary bonanza Related articles:
Netflix blames Amazon for Christmas Eve outage
Hastings: Netflix 'can make it in the long term Read more about: Netflix
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Intel apparently doesn't believe the set-top box is dead. The monster chipmaker reportedly will use its press conference at next week's CES in Las Vegas to introduce a new box that reports say will contain elements of premium cable TV reception with access to streaming video services like Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX). The box is apparently being aimed at the U.S. market, where it will be launched on a city-by-city regional basis so Intel can "overcome licensing hurdles" for local content, according to a story in TechCrunch. It's also aimed at folks who don't want to depend solely on streaming online video for their home entertainment. Intel's incursion into the cable-streaming set-top box business comes as both Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) dither away with planned introductions of competitive TV services and also after Google took steps to sell off its Motorola Home Business unit to Arris (Nasdaq: ARRS). The most immediate benefit to Intel would be the inclusion of more of its chips into more devices across a wider range of users. Intel had originally been part of a Google TV deal with smart TVs, but that seemed to fall apart over time. Now, sources told TechCrunch, the silicon maker wants to go it alone and "do it right." The box is expected to appeal to people who want a subscription TV service but also want streaming TV access: the best of both worlds that gives access to the MVPD-provided live content like sports and the streaming movies and TV shows which would be piped in via traditional streaming players like Redbox and Netflix. The TechCrunch piece, written by Josh Constine, also noted a feature that "could be a real game changer for the digital video recorder experience": technology that would let people recall and watch any programming that aired in the previous month on any subscribed channel. "That means no worrying about scheduling what to record," the story said, before qualifying that it's possible this isn't feasible but "if it is, it could convince people to ditch their current set-top box for one with Intel inside and out." For more:
- TechCrunch had this story Related articles:
Google's Motorola Home set-top box biz goes to Arris for $2.35B
Amino lands new customer for Live gateway platform
Apple will build TV and companion set-top, Brightcove CEO predicts Read more about: Apple, Google
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While for most the holidays meant nail biting over the so-called fiscal cliff, overdosing on an unending string of college bowl games and watching in awe as NFL teams chopped more heads than the guillotine in the French Revolution, the U.S. Senate changed the rules of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). The move sated demands from Facebook and Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) to open up more information on what users were watching online but also opened up online video information that previously was somewhat protected. According to liberal blog ThinkProgress.org, the Senate didn't make a fuss about the changes, which were already approved by the House and are now headed for President Obama's signature. "The Senate didn't even hold a recorded vote. The bill was approved by unanimous consent," the site said, offering credit to Joe Mullin of Ars Technica for being the first to notice. The changes are significant for online viewers. Previously, the rules said individuals needed to give permission to share their video watching history each time they watched a video. More stringently, it stipulated law enforcement agencies needed a warrant, court order or grand jury subpoena to get access to that video watching history. With the changes, however, "video streaming companies that want to share your data now only need to ask for your permission once. After that, they can broadcast your video watching habits far and wide for up to two years before having to ask again," the site said. While the law's original intent was to block outsiders from tracking individual online viewing trends--or at least make it difficult for them--it also made it tough for Netflix to integrate its services with Facebook. Netflix therefore first went the legal route, challenging the law online, only to be rejected by a federal district court. The second effort involved money. Netflix poured $400,000 into a lobbying effort, and Facebook quadrupled that with $1.6 million of its own. Coincidentally or not, the changes then happened. There were, apparently, good intentions on the part of some senators. ThinkProgress.org said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) had originally proposed a trade-off with stronger privacy protections for e-mail and other personal online documents covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Then, however, "the House passed a version of the VPPA update without the balancing update to the ECPA. That forced a negotiation, and the Senate eventually gave in to the House's version," the site's story said. For more:
- ThinkProgress.org has this story Editor's Corner: Verizon faces media storm from targeted advertising patent
Editor's Corner: Carriers may hit the motherlode with customer data Related article:
Report: Majority of app users will uninstall over privacy concerns Read more about: Netflix, Facebook
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A group of investors has added $20 million to the coffers of TubeMogul, giving the six-year-old company more financial resources to attack a marketing plan to help advertisers buy video space through real-time auctions. The latest investment nearly doubled the total amount of money the company has raised, pushing that to $35 million. The investment was led by Northgate Capital and existing investors Trinity Ventures and Foundational Capital. The funds will be spent on hiring engineering, sales and marketing staff and expanding into more international markets, a story in Advertising Age said. TubeMogul's software gives advertisers the ability to buy video ad space for individual campaigns through real-time auctions from multiple ad exchanges and individual publishers. The company's CEO, Brett Wilson, told the magazine the goal is to make big brand advertisers comfortable with using automated features to buy ad space from exchanges. Everyone, according to most reports, is becoming very comfortable placing advertising in online videos. "We feel there's a market void at the intersection of programmatic and brand advertising that we can own," Wilson said, pointing to a TubeMogul survey product that gives advertisers viewer feedback while the ad campaign is still live. TubeMogul buys ad space for its customers from open exchanges like Adap.tv, SpotXChange, BrightRoll Exchange and Google AdX. It also purchases from publishers' private exchanges. Wilson told Advertising Age the company's revenue tripled in 2012 to more than $50 million, with about half of that money coming from ad-buying technology and the other from a video ad network business. TubeMogul is tapping a rich new revenue stream. While digital video advertising was worth about $1 billion in the first half of 2012 alone, "real-time bidding accounts for just a fraction of that," the story said. Wilson believes now is a good time to get funding and accelerate growth in that market. For more:
- Advertising Age has this story Related articles:
AOL: Short-form video content advertising most effective
Online video will take 'significant market share' away from traditional broadcast in 2013
Online video ad information provider Veenome gets $600K Read more about: Ad Campaigns, tubemogul
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Many Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) subscribers settling in to watch (or avoid watching) holiday movies on Monday evening received an unpleasant surprise in the form of an error message saying that the service couldn't be accessed. According to Netflix, a service outage on web servers provided by Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) Web Services caused the company's service to be unavailable on a number of streaming devices. Service technicians working through Christmas Eve restored service by Tuesday morning, the Wall Street Journal reported. Amazon's AWS-EAST-1 servers located in Virginia were "at the heart of this outage," GigaOM reported Monday night, with Netflix technicians noting an increase in errors on its Elastic Load Balancing API calls. Elastic load balancers distribute incoming traffic across servers to better manage increased demand. This isn't the first time Amazon Web Services has been blamed for outages at major sites. Reddit, Foursquare, and several other websites experienced difficulties in October after AWS East had problems with its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service, and two outages occurred in June, one after a massive thunderstorm in the area. Even more interesting, and something that has tongues wagging at some tech sites, is that the Amazon Prime Instant Video service worked just fine as Netflix struggled with its outage, on what is arguably one of the biggest nights of the year for online video streaming. GigaOM's Barb Darrow noted this as one of the big issues that online video providers face by using AWS. "Working with AWS now is a lot like a software company partnering with Microsoft in the 80s and 90s--it's both your biggest partner and your biggest rival so tread carefully." For more:
- Wall Street Journal has this story (sub. req.)
- GigaOM has this story Special Report: Top three Netflix competitors: Who's challenging the industry giant? Related articles:
Hurricane Sandy no disaster for Netflix
Amazon seen as 'potential Netflix killer' Read more about: data center
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