Today, The Deal got played, and claimed that Yahoo and Google were likely to abandon their controversial search ad outsourcing deal.

Wrote The Deal’s Cecile Kohrs: “A proposed joint venture between rival Internet companies Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. appears headed for the trash bin, just ahead of an expected U.S. Department of Justice challenge to the agreement, lawyers close to the deal said.”

Well, maybe it will die at some point. But, in the words of Juba in the last line of the greatest movie ever (“Gladiator,” of course!): Not yet.

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Today comes news that jumping-on-prone California Attorney General Jerry Brown is thinking of climbing onto the federal government bandwagon heading right for the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., to stop the search giant’s online ad deal with Yahoo.

Brown joins big advertisers, newspapers and whatever mudslingers Microsoft can gather (and, let it be said, Microsoft can sling a lot of slimy mud).

While Google would by no means control a lot of Yahoo’s search ads, the fact that the pair together have an 80 percent share of the search market apparently frightens ordinary mortals.

Maybe it should.

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I am back in Sin City to appear on a panel at the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) conference here today, along with former Walt Disney head Michael Eisner, former Viacom head Jonathan Dolgen and Dmitry Shapiro, founder and CIO of Veoh.
Titled “Possibilities and Perils of Internet TV,” it should be an interesting [...]

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Over the next week, I will be posting the most popular videos on BoomTown from 2007.
Before I interviewed Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, the crowd at D5 got to see a very funny video Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert did as an intro for his boss, whom he dubbed the “Dough Man.”
The Dauman interview took place [...]

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They say that only the grass gets trampled when elephants fight. And that grass might actually turn out to be Yahoo in the epic battle between Microsoft and Google.

While the New York Times spilled a lot of ink earlier this week in a very long piece about that massive mano-a-mano, the true fallout in the online ad space, at least, could be more painful for the No. 2 player–Yahoo–which sits smack in between No. 1 Google and No. 3 Microsoft.

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Why does the idea of a marriage between Hollywood writers and VCs make me slightly queasy?

But that’s just the feeling I got when I read the always sharp Joseph Menn of the Los Angeles Times, who penned an interesting piece earlier this week about writers in Hollywood turning to venture capitalists as the strike drags [...]

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I like Mike. Volpi, that is, Joost’s new CEO. The 40-year-old longtime tech exec is a nice choice to run the moderately hyped online video television site. But I will admit it–I have not been gung-ho on the prospect of Joost–which I have called a potentially “messy control freak of a service.”

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While they might seem a tad laid back in this video, the founders of YouTube–Chad Hurley and Steve Chen–are definitely on the hot seat for sure this year.
While it is always nice to get a $1.6 billion payout for a company started only recently, as the explosive online video service did from Google, the future [...]

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“South Park” fans take note: I don’t think creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are digital idiots. But, I will admit it, I do sometimes wonder about Hollywood entertainment behemoths who own the content they and other talent make.

In my post yesterday about the deal “South Park” creators Stone and Parker (pictured here) made with [...]

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Let’s start with the fact that right now, I can pretty much get, say, the entire and relatively recent “Cartman Sucks” episode (in several pieces) from “South Park” on YouTube anytime.

Also, I might add that these parody videos posted below–a mashup of the ribald animated series and the Apple ads and another with “Harry Potter”–are chock full of jacked material!

Oh yes, I just grabbed this fine picture of the “South Park” character right off the Web without a problem.

I await Viacom owner Sumner Redstone’s wrath and expect his legions of lawyers to come raining down on me asap.

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I will admit it–I thought Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman would go over like a lead balloon with the D5 audience, given the media giant had just sued Google–the digital arena’s biggest power of late–for $1 billion for alleged copyright violations at its YouTube subsidiary.
While not everyone in the tech space is cheering for the search [...]

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Starting Monday, we’ll be posting all of the interviews from D5 in their entirety. I will be posting and commenting on each interview here in this blog, but the videos will also reside in our video player.
While we have already posted the joint interview of Microsoft’s Bill Gates-Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as a solo [...]

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How much do we love that YouTube wants to depose comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?
It’s all part of the three-ring circus that the copyright-infringement lawsuit between the Google-owned video-sharing unit and media giant Viacom, which owns Comedy Central, where “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” air, will likely become.
Viacom is [...]

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One billion dollars!
That’s what Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has asked for in the media giant’s legal war over copyright infringement with search behemoth Google.
So leave it to those clever minxes at Google to turn the whole thing into a new version of “Austin Powers,” casting Dauman as Dr. Evil and his son of the [...]

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Another week, another legal battle for YouTube.
This time, the National Music Publishers Association is adding its name to an existing lawsuit over whether the video-sharing site–big surprise–violated copyright laws. The group owns copyrights to lyrics and melodies for songs, rather than the songs themselves, which are mostly owned by record labels.
And while the four [...]

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