There's been a lot of buzz over the last few days about how all of Warner Music Group's music videos have gone missing from YouTube. Now Alley Insider reports that Warner, BMG, EMI, and Universal are talking about building their own site for music videos.

The idea would be to create a single destination where be able to find music videos from popular artists. There's some reason to think the site could work. After all, Hulu has become one of the top destination for online video by providing full length, ad-supported streaming episodes of TV shows and movies with the cooperation of several major networks and studios.

On the other hand, there's a big difference between full length TV shows and music videos. Like, a 40 minute difference. Part of the reason Hulu has been successful is because it offers users something that wasn't already available: A single location where they could legally watch high quality movies and TV shows to their heart's content. But there are already plenty of places to find music videos, uploaded by the music labels or uploaded illegally by users.

As far as I can tell, the world isn't clamoring for a Hulu for music videos, because there already is one. And it's called YouTube.

That said, a few months ago MTV launched a new music video page which is actually a pretty good one stop shop for many popular music videos. Maybe the music labels should just work with MV>

It's no secret there's bad blood between Apple and Universal Music. While Apple's iTunes is the premiere online music store at the moment, some of the biggest artists are signed to Universal. You could argue that the two companies need each other. But Universal has decided to let is contract with Apple expire. And Universal began offering DRM-free tracks for download this year, the label went with Amazon, Wal-Mart, and RealNetworks rather than Apple.

Now it looks like Universal is gearing up for a frontal assault. Business Week reports the company is planning to launch its own digital music store, possibly with support from Sony BMG and Warner Music Group. Pretty much the whole goal is to bust up Apple's near-monopoly on the digital music distribution business. Right now, record label execs think that Steve Jobs and friends have too much power. Apple has pretty much set the price for music distributed online.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Universal's proposal wouldn't necessarily cost you more. Not if you're a major music downloader, anyway. The plan is to offer a $5 per month subscription service that would let you access a huge library of music. You wouldn't actually own the music and it would all disappear if you cancel your service. But $5 per month is about as cheap a subscription model as we've seen anyone propose. And Universal is hoping to partner with cellphone companies and hardware makers to cover the costs. Of course, that's not really how the world works, and rather than getting free music with your next handset, you'll probably see a new $5 to $10 fee on your phone bill.

[via Techmeme]

Apple's number one seller has apparently just cancelled its contract to sell digital downloads of their shows via iTunes.

NBC Universal was unable to come to an agreement with Apple on pricing, bundling content and more restrictive DRM. This move is yet another grinding moment between Apple and the media companies who are unhappy with Apple for not giving them greater control over the pricing of music and videos it sells through iTunes. Could this just have been a way for them to finally jump over to NewCo (Hulu), their YouTube competition?

NBC has accounted for 40% of downloads on Apple's iTunes, and will continue sales through to December. Apple is now the third largest seller of music, passing Amazon, and just behind Wal-Mart and Best Buy. Say bye bye to your most important way of marketing new products to consumers NBC.

UPDATE: Apple beat NBC to the punch and will not be selling any NBC material starting in September.

Aiming to keep its lead in the music retail market, Wal-Mart is launching DRM free MP3 music downloads at Walmart.com for 94 cents per track and $9.22 per album. The uber retailer's music catalog offers digital tracks from major record labels EMI and Universal. The new MP3 format allows customers to play music on most devices, including the ubiquitous iPod, iPhone and Zune players.

Universal followed EMI in announcing DRM free music to major retailers but bypassed iTunes, which is in third place behind Best Buy's second in the music retail market line-up. This is a good move for consumers, allowing competition and hopefully provide more options for the digital music buying public.

DRM free allows users the ability to play songs on any device without copyright protection software, which not only limits unauthorized copying of songs, but on which devices the songs can be played as well.

Sorry, Mac, and Linux users, no rollback for you - only Window's 2000, XP and Vista are supported.

Video sharing sites like Youtube and Veoh have become easy targets for lawsuits from content owners. But when Universal Music threatened to file a suit against Veoh, CEO Steve Mitgang he didn't want to wait for Universal to follow through on that threat. Instead, Veoh filed a preemptive suit against Universal.

Basically, Mitgang's position is that Veoh is protected by the DMCA's safe harbor provision. In other words, the company can't be held responsible for every users who uploads copyright infringing content to the site -- as long as Veoh agrees to take action if alerted to illegal material.

Veoh is asking the court to issue an injunction that would prevent Universal from suing Veoh. If this works, we could see a lot of other companies following suit. But as much as they'd like to, we can't exactly see Daily Motion, Metacafe, and others filing preemptive suits against every content owner in the world. Our guess is they'll need a reasonable basis for their suits (like threats from Universal Music) if they don't want to be laughed out of court.

Following the lead of major label rival EMI, Universal Music is set to start offering DRM-free downloads through a variety of online retailers - but apparently not through iTunes. The New York Times has reported that Universal will be the second major label to try out DRM-free music, through a trial that will see its unencumbered tracks available through retailers such as Google Music, Wal-Mart, Real Networks and Amazon.

It's reported that Universal is saying that the DRM-free sales will be on a trial period up until the first quarter of 2008, however it is not clear if Universal will follow the lead of EMI and place the DRM-free downloads in the market at a higher price-point than its other DRM encumbered tracks.

The move also seems designed to continue to place pressure on Apple's in the ongoing dispute between Universal and Apple over royalties from iTunes and iPods. Back in June Universal told Apple that it wouldn't renew its agreement with iTunes to sell music through the online store for another year and would sell at will, allowing the major to potentially pull out of iTunes at any time. The DRM-free announcement seems designed to turn up the heat on Apple to reach a settlement on royalties.

The news is particularly good for Amazon who announced in April that it was going to launch a DRM-free record store, but with only EMI's DRM-free content to work with to date, the online mega-retailer was looking like it was going to enter the digital music space with a pretty mediocre offering. The news is also great for consumers, by leaving iTunes out of the loop for the minute, competitors to the dominant service may get a chance to catch up on a small piece of the market, thus increasing competition and hopefully providing more options for the digital music buying public.

[Via the New York Times]

The Google team is out and knocking at the doors of traditional media outlets trying to get them to supply their content to YouTube in an effort to knock off lawsuits that could begin to sprout up surrounding copyright issues. Google CEO Eric Schmidt and other executives have met with CBS, Viacom, Time Warner, NBC Universal, and News Corp. amongst others talking about offering payments upwards of tens of millions for broadcasting rights for YouTube. With YouTube dishing out over 100 millions video clips per day, it is the main destination for video online. Only drawback? The many copyrighted materials that are getting uploaded and viewed daily. So what works best now for YouTube and the involved media companies? Take the copyrighted materials off and not only YouTube misses out on potentials visitors, but media outlets like Viacom and CBS miss out on advertising their content, and getting their messages out. YouTube allows for mass promotion and advertising. Becoming partners with Google and YouTube will be more beneficial to traditional medias bottom line, with the added bonus of reaching a vaster audience. Weighing things out, it only makes sense that partnering will make all parties, and their boards of directors involved extremely happy.

Universal Music is the first, but undoubtedly not the last, record company to go after video-sharing sites whose users share their music videos without permission. Yesterday Universal sued Grouper and Bolt.com and is seeking up to $150,000 for each instance of infringement plus court costs. Grouper was acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment back in August and Bolt.com, whose market share has been rising fast, is privately held. Wwhy Universal didn't go after slightly bigger fish like Metacafe and Dailymotion isn't apparent. YouTube and its new parent Google were spared, of course, because of YouTube's recent deal with Universal and other record labels. This is undoubtedly just the first in many suits by record companies against video-sharing sites, whose uses not only post copyrighted music vidoes but also use copyrighted songs liberally in their own videos.

Looks like Google's new partners, Warner, Universal, and Sony, are pushing Google to develop a technology that allows copyright owners to search and locate their content and choose to whether they want remove it from YouTube. This new technology that is in development is said to be able to scan audio in mp3 or video and compare so-called electronic fingerprints. In order to make labels happy and avoid costly lawsuits, Google is going to have to implement this software, and prove to record labels that the YouTube service is going to make everyone happy.

Universal Music has accused YouTube and MySpace of infringing on the rights of their artists music videos during an investors conference. Universal's chief executive stated that the two companies owed them tens of millions of dollars in copyright infringement money. Universal is expected to release a statement about how they will deal with the infringers in due time.

YouTube has been known to take down copyright related materials when they have been notified by rights holder. It should be interesting to see how this pans out. The greatness behind sites like YouTube is held in the mass video appeal, from personal videos, to artist music videos. Take the music, and music videos away, and what are we left with? This could cause a little bump. However, what if YouTube and MySpace were to pay per view for each music video played?

In Universals Chief Executives speech to investors, he did state that record companies are keen at avoiding the mistakes that were made when MTV was set up, by letting artist's music to be aired for free, creating a multi-billion dollar company in the process.

NBC Universal, and NBC affiliates have teamed up to fund >nbbc, a company that will distribute and profit from video footage online. Noticing a rapid growth in the digital video segment, NBC thinks it has the perfect opportunity to get its toes wet. NBC will be tapping all affiliate channels, and other media sources for materials for the new online venture. Through the use of a user friendly video player created by >nbbc, website publishers can easily drop content into their websites, enabling them to profit from new sources of revenue, and a growth in website visitors from the new offerings.

>nbbc will be profiting by digital video syndication, revenue sharing, and different fee-based models. Through the revenue model, advertising dollars will be split between >nbbc, the content licensor, and the web publisher. This is a unique approach by a large broadcaster, leveraging the content they are already producing to provide for more streams of revenue, and aiding in the growth of revenue for other web publishers by harnessing the power of Internet content.

Phill Ryu is making us Windows users jealous (again) with his list of the Top Ten OS X Screensavers. With one $20 shareware exception, all of his picks are free, and all of them are universal binaries and look stunning. I'm particularly intrigued by the Simpsons-inspired Mr. Sparkle screensaver at #9, Hills at #3, and Fenêtres Volantes, which turns your windows into floating, drifting 3D objects, at #1. Ryu also names a handful of promising runners-up.

An intrepid PSP hacker has released a cool homebrew app called PSP Universal Remote that lets you, well, use your PSP as a universal remote for many, many TVs and other devices. To use it you'll need PSP firmware 1.50, and once you've got it set up you can choose your target device from a menu and let loose, confusing the public with your remote control shenanigans. PSP Universal Remote is a little feature-thin at the moment (for one thing I'd like to see a "favorites" list with quick access to the devices you use most often), but undeniably cool.

[Via Digg]