There has been widespread anticipation and rumours of a deal being concocted by Apple and Fox ahead of Macworld Expo ‘08. 

Now the details have been revealed by the big media.

The Financial Times reported (in its trademark salmon-colored pages) that Apple and 20th Century Fox, a entity held by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, inked a deal that would grant iTunes users the option to rent films produced by the studio.

The news of the impending partnership comes in anticipation of the consumer-centric conference to be held at Moscone West in San Francisco, California.

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Our sister site WebTVHub reported last week on the new YouTube channel completely devoted to the British royal family.

But we thought we should also share a thought or two about the Web-2.0-ification of Queen Elizabeth and her immediate familial subjects relatives – better late than never, right?

Okay, putting aside the fact that that little four-word adage went tired and expired many, many, many years ago, we must say we enjoy the fact that Her Highness has taken the royal family viral with the launch of The Royal Channel. 

Or at least taken herself and her kin to a place where things [have the option to] go viral.

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The MPAA is becoming increasingly like the RIAA, in its attempts at going after organisations, and individuals, who share (or allow the sharing of) illegal files over the Internet.

TorrentSpy was once a stalwart participant of the BitTorrent communications on the web, but found today that its future was soon to be short lived

It emerged earlier this week of the website’s defeat amidst the powers of the MPAA in court. 

The judge presiding over the case involving the link farm “made a default ruling in favor of the MPAA…(saying) the site’s operators had tampered with evidence.”

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We reviewed Avot mV back at the beginning of October, and were enthusiastic by how simple yet brilliant the application was.

Since then, the free program seems to have evolved, and added new features, as well as support for some more mobile devices, including the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

For those too busy, or lazy to read the original review, it is in a nutshell a small application which once downloaded from the Avot mV - product site, allows you to view videos unlimited, and unhindered on your mobile device.

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As regular readers of WebTVWire will know, Vuze is a video content distribution company built upon the P2P-based platform Azureus.

It’s similar to the iTunes TV shop in that it provides easy access to professionally-produced material both new and old – albeit with one great distinction: most of the stuff is free.

Making Headlines

Fairly recently, Vuze made a few headlines through the issuance of a petition to the FCC to investigate and halt ISPs’ practices of throttling bandwidth and network access to restrict the proliferation of data sent across the Internet via the BitTorrent protocol. 

It has demanded a stop to such selective restriction for the fact that it’s business model is wholly reliant on the technology, and stated that any blocks would shackle its business plan to the point of inoperability and out-and-out failure.

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Hulu launched back in October, and although opinion was divided, there were a fair few people who criticised the service. 

It looks like the NBC and News Corp. site has now managed to change the opinion of many of those critics, who derided the features.

The negativity has given way to more positive comments, as the service offered outstanding features implemented in to a clean and easy-to-navigate interface.

Not only that, but the private beta testing phase that the service has been under since going live also appears to be receiving all of the attention and updates necessary to provide a successful public launch, whenever that may be planned for. 

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The writers strike is now in its second month and shows no sign of ending. As we discussed when the strike began, this could become a catalyst for a shift from OTA/Cable to online/IPTV and here is why.

There has been a drain in advertising revenues for premium programming, and advertisers have been forced to compensate advertisers with cash (versus time). The trend has been one of declining viewership for OTA with a corresponding increase for cable.

In addition, revenue from OTA has been flat. Even if the strike were settled today, it would by some estimates take two or more months too ramp up production and inventory to offset the drain in revenues.

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