NBC confirmed the pulling of all official NBC content from YouTube ahead of the Hulu launch. The company believes that pulling the content will help push more traffic to the forthcoming online video service. Hulu will host NBC videos and distribute them through Yahoo, AOL, MySpace and other video destinations. However, it does not currently have a deal in place with YouTube. NBC says Hulu is still on track to launch before the end of the month.
MYSPACE will announce a new online destination for gaming through a deal with Oberon Media. The site will offer hundreds of free “casual” easy-to-play games to keep users coming back to the social network. Oberon provides customized games for cellphones, PCs and set-top boxes. The announcement is expected today with a full launch in January.
AT&T‘s U-verse IPTV service suffered nationwide outages on Sunday causing users to see error messages while simply trying to load certain channels. The problems lasted from Sunday morning until the early evening and left frustrated users flocking to online message boards to complain. AT&T has not released any explanation for the outage.
OXYGEN will launch its second web-only series this December. “Beauty and the Best” will be an online companion program to a series about a modeling agency. It will broadcast on SheDidWhat.tv, Oxygen’s broadband channel. Six episodes are planned and will be produced by Whizz Kid Productions.
MICROSOFT is giving up its nine-year antitrust fight in Europe by ceasing appeals against court judgments. The settlement will require Microsoft to slash prices on licenses that help competitors tightly integrate their software with the Windows operating system. It will offer licenses for all intellectual property not covered by patents for a one-time fee. As a result the EU has stopped adding to Microsoft’s daily fine of $4.3 million.