It’s been a quiet week in etility news, probably because most of the world is either talking about the iPhone 3GS or Michael Jackson. The relevant news mostly revolved around Google’s various services and its attempt to complete its takeover of the digital world.

Google Voice can change your phone number for you

Phone number from an area code where you no longer are? Google Voice can help: for $10 you can change your phone number without any activation delay, and Google even throws in three months of continued service to your old phone.

Google is trying to attract news publishers to YouTube

Google wants more content from reputable, legitimate sources on YouTube, not just videos of your neighbor’s cat falling off a couch. It is obviously in Google’s best interest to take all of the content available on Cable TV and bring it to the web, as it increases viewership and therefore ad revenue. And so once you’ve registered your source with them (and there seems to be a review process before you’re approved), you get perks like featured premium placement, viewership analysis and even revenue sharing from Google’s ads. YouTube already has a pretty big group of sources, since it’s starting with all 25,000 registered organizations from Google News.

Google antitrust investigations heating up

We hardly need to point out that not only is Google already huge, but it also keeps on growing and growing, slowly penetrating all etility and online markets to the point where it is becoming ubiquitous. It is not surprising then that it is increasingly receiving pressure from various judicial bodies to answer antitrust charges, as is the case with its Google Book service which would establish a monopoly on orphaned books (copyrighted texts without an identifiable copyright holder).

©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

If there are two events that evidentially show the rapid pace of technology developments, they are the US Presidental Elections and each of the Summer and Winter Olympic Games.  Each occurs only every four years, making it easy to compare the technology used “last time” with the latest and greatest.

At nearly every Olympic event, commentators discuss the newest materials used for ice skate blades and luge runners, or the latest running shoe and swimsuit technology.  We can even look outside the sports themselves to the TV tech:  many folks won’t forget the first time the “underwater” lane markers and lap/split stats were displayed at the 2004 Athens Games.  Even fewer can forget how that feature was spotlighted in Beijing last year, during the amazingly close finishes of Michael Phelps.

Similar leaps and bounds have advanced the news coverage during this Presidential election/inauguration, compared with those before it.  (Please note: this is not a political commentary, we’re just focusing on the technology!)

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Blockbuster (Etilities Forum), the well-known movie rental company, announced on Tuesday that its customers will now be able to stream movies from the Blockbuster online library to their TV set.  The service will require a new device, the MediaPoint Digital Media Player, developped by new partner 2Wire.  The box will cost $99, which includes 25 free movie rentals.  Each additional rental will cost $1.99, for what is being called “DVD-quality” video.

Blockbuster, which has built a large consumer base during their 20+ years renting videos, has been struggling lately due to the fierce Internet-based competition in entertainment delivery services, especially that of Netflix (Etilities Forum).  Blockbuster’s move is clearly an attempt to catch up to the competition, but we cannot help but see the latest move as “too little too late.”

First, the fact that the player will deliver DVD-quality content is not a selling point, it’s a turn-off: iTunes (Etilities Forum) and Netflix both offer HD quality streaming content.  Second, they do not specify the size of their online library, only mentioning that includes “thousands of titles.”  Given the lack of specific numbers,  we can only assume that they are nowhere close to Netflix’s library of 12,000 online titles.  Lastly, their competitors have quite a head start.  The list of online entertainment providers is growing larger by the month, and a lot of them have been in the streaming business for some time: Netflix, iTunes, Blinkx (Etilities Forum), Hulu (Etilities Forum), Joost (Etilities Forum), Sling, YouTube…  Unless Blockbuster can come up with a true game-changer, all they will have going for them is their existing customer base, which has eroded significantly as consumers flocked to the early streaming services.

©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

We published a story last month on various new developments with YouTube, including its plans to become a profitable business by leveraging a massive user-base.  The string of proposed developments continues.  Last week, CNet announced that YouTube is also soon to start streaming full-length feature films on its site through partnerships with various Hollywood studios.

New details were given yesterday, specifically that YouTube will enter into a partnership with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).  YouTube will offer some of the studio’s content to its users, supported by ads.  The lineup is a bit underwhelming with older material such as “American Gladiators”, “Bulletproof Monk,” and “The Magnificent Seven”.  It is, however, an important step for YouTube, as it will need to create similar partnerships with many more studios.  It will be all the more difficult given Google’s history of legal issues with Hollywood during the early days of YouTube when users would post copyrighted content left and right.

This move was keenly anticipated.  You can expect fierce competition between YouTube and Hulu (Etilities Forum) in the months and years to come that will no doubt be covered in-depth by the digital media.  As we pointed out previously, it is worth mentioning that while Hulu has a significant headstart in terms of both content and revenue generation, YouTube does have the enormous advantage of its 80 million monthly visitors.  The good news for consumers is that no matter what happens in this stand-off, we can expect more and more publicly available free content, though it will be sprinkled with ads.

©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

When Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) acquired YouTube in October 2006, there was no shortage of speculation (and some doubt) as to how the user-driven video portal would grow.  Two years later, it seems that YouTube is only getting started.  We talked last week about the addition of retail links on the site that take users to Amazon and iTunes store pages.  As it turns out, that is only one aspect of Google’s strategy.

Earlier this week, YouTube started screening old, popular shows such as “Star Trek,” “MacGyver,” and the original “Beverly Hills, 90210.”  Although the selection is currently quite limited, this indicates the beginning of a new strategy for the media sharing site, which seems to be aiming to compete with companies like Hulu (Etilities Forum) and Joost in the online TV space.  While the established players have a bit of a head start, YouTube has the advantage of an enormous user base: in fact, it is now #2 (just ahead of Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) in the search market industry with a staggering 2.6 billion searches in August 2008.  If you combine Google and YouTube, the search giant fielded over 10 billion queries just for the month.

Although YouTube has not been profitable for Google so far, analysts project that it will generate $200M to $250M in revenue this year, and that it could contribute a significant share of the parent company’s revenue by 2011.

©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.