—Roku player gets Amazon VOD: Owners of the Roku "Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) Player" will soon also be able to download content from Amazon's VOD service. The deal adds more than 40,000 movies and TV shows to the library currently available via Netflix—though Amazon's content is on a pay-per-view model as opposed to Netflix' subscription. Crave poses the question of whether Roku will start rebranding its boxes to reflect the variety of content sources available, though it may face some opposition since Netflix invested $6 million for an undisclosed stake in the company last year.
—Online video viewing up 34 percent in November: The latest comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) Video Metrix stats found that Americans watched 12.7 billion videos in November 2008—up 34 percent year-over-year. Users watched 87 videos on average, amounting to about 276 minutes per viewer. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) (with YouTube) was the leader by a landslide, with 40 percent of all videos viewed. Fox Interactive Media (NYSE: NWS) came in a distant second place and Viacom (NYSE: VIA) Digital came in third, with 3.5 percent and 2.6 percent of video views, respectively. Hulu retained its sixth place spot, with just 1.8 percent of total video views—though it took the top spot in terms of video duration. The average duration for clips viewed overall was 3 minutes, but users watched clips that were nearly 12 minutes long on Hulu. Release.
—DECA pulls plug on Bush League : DECA has pulled the plug on its guy-centric online series Bush League, NewTeeVee reports. The BushLeague.tv site is still up, though new content hasn't been posted since December 18. The Santa Monica-based digital entertainment studio still has a number of original series left in its roster for 2009, including teen video brand and site Smosh (which it took an undisclosed stake in, back in October) and the mommy-blogger talk show Momversation, among others.
—RipCode picks up $12.5 million third round: Video transcoding firm RipCode has picked up $12.5 million in a third round of funding—bringing its total raise since 2006 to $32 million. Granite Ventures led the round; previous backers Hunt Ventures, El Dorado Ventures, Vesbridge Partners and ATA Ventures also participated. The company signed a deal with MySpace last month to allow the social net's users to stream video to their phones, highlighting a key feature of RipCode's technology: it transcodes the clips on demand, eliminating the need to store an entire video library in multiple mobile formats. Of course, the tech works on Web video too, but the big opportunity is in the mobile sector. Find out more at our sister site mocoNews.net.
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