UK High Court: ISPs Mus...

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) finally got its will today. According to a ruling by Britain’s High Court, UK Internet providers must now block access to Swedish file-sharing site The Pirate Bay . The BBC reports that the BPI had asked British ISPs to voluntarily block access to the site in November 2011. At that time, though, the ISPs said they wouldn’t do so unless ordered by a court. That court order has now arrived. Five UK ISPs (Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media) have already announced that they will comply with this order. BT asked the court for more time to consider its position. According to the BPI’s chief executive Geoff Taylor, “the High Court has confirmed that The Pirate Bay infringes copyright on a massive scale. Its operators line their pockets by commercially exploiting music and other creative works without paying a penny to the people who created them.” A number of studies, though, have questioned this line of reasoning and instead found that sites like The Pirate Bay actually have a positive impact on overall music sales. A spokesperson for Virgin Media told the BBC that it will comply with the ruling, but that the company also ” strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives, such as our agreement with Spotify, to give consumers access to great content at the right price.” Todays ruling is not a first for Europe. Courts in the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark and Italy already issued similar rulings over the last few years.

Spain Gets Its Own Netf...

Spain is getting its own version of Netflix, thanks to a company called Youzee , which exits its private beta period today. Like Netflix, Youzee offers streaming movies and TV on-demand, but it also features titles for rent, too. The company has agreements with a number of distributors, including BBC, Sony, Disney, Fox International Channels, TVE, Telemundo and more. To kick off its launch, Youzee is offering new users to try out the service for free. New users can watch up to 10 hours from Youzee’s catalog for free, without entering in their credit card information. Another option invites users to try out Youzee for 30 days for free, if they’re willing to hand over their payment data in advance. Both offers provide access to the entire catalog, and will include the ability to stream from desktop, tablet or mobile. After the free trial ends, Youzee’s subscription service is 6.99 euros monthly to continue watching, plus the option to rent out of catalog content for 2.99 or 4.99 (HD). In terms of content, while the company may have deals in place with several distributors, clicking on them from the drop-down box provided sometimes leads you to an empty section – so, clearly access to content is not on par with U.S.-based Netflix, for example. The service also includes social sharing options built-in, which let its users post to Facebook and Twitter. Also revealed today is the Youzee iPhone application, which will become available in the App Store in a couple of weeks and will feature a remote control. Youzee’s Paula Pérez-Gándaras also tells us that an app for Samsung’s Smart TV’s has also been developed and will arrive in the “upcoming weeks.” Youzee was founded by Carlos Cruz and Fernando Évole . It’s backed by Spanish venture capital and employs a team of 46. Based in Madrid, Youzee describes itself as a startup with “an international outlook,” and the company previously told us that it plans to develop the model in other European countries in the future. The service launched into private beta in December 2011, and now counts nearly 50,000 users, according to the  ticker  on its website.

Shufflr Brings Its Soci...

A startup called Althea Systems wants to reinvent the way we find videos online. Its app Shufflr is already available on desktops , the Web, iPhone, and Android, and today it’s launching on the iPad. Shufflr co-founder Rajnish (he goes by a single name) isn’t shy about his larger ambition. In the same way that companies like Facebook are reorganizing the web around social identity and connections, Rajnish wants to build a new form of video discovery that’s organized around people — one that could eventually surpass television. Yes, it’s a crazy goal, and while I’m not sure Shufflr will be quite that popular, I was impressed by the product that Rajnish showed me earlier this week. Rajnish says that one way to think of Shufflr is as a cross between Flipboard and Pandora — like Flipboard, it pulls content from your social networks and organizes them into a slick layout, and like Pandora, it recommends content based on your personal interests. Shufflr’s main feature is something called The Daily Fix, which is a stream of recommended videos based on data such as your social work activity, your location, and what’s trending. When we brought up my Daily Fix, it was a fun mix of tech news, politics, music videos, and random, amusing content — some from my friends, some from people I know, and some from celebrities. Each video is shown with the commentary of whoever shared it on Facebook or Twitter. And even if you sign up for Shufflr today, you can go back and see what it would have recommended for you one day or one week or one month ago. There are other ways to explore videos in the app. Using the Flip Side function, you can look exclusively at videos shared in your social stream, at videos shared by celebrities in certain topics like tech, or at content from a specific channel like BBC. Shufflr already has 2.8 million registered users Rajnish says, and the average session time for an iPhone or Android user is between 10 and 12 minutes. With the iPad, he’s hoping to see that number go up dramatically. You can download the app here .

Shufflr Brings Its Soci...

A startup called Althea Systems wants to reinvent the way we find videos online. Its app Shufflr is already available on desktops , the Web, iPhone, and Android, and today it’s launching on the iPad. Shufflr co-founder Rajnish (he goes by a single name) isn’t shy about his larger ambition. In the same way that companies like Facebook are reorganizing the web around social identity and connections, Rajnish wants to build a new form of video discovery that’s organized around people — one that could eventually surpass television. Yes, it’s a crazy goal, and while I’m not sure Shufflr will be quite that popular, I was impressed by the product that Rajnish showed me earlier this week. Rajnish says that one way to think of Shufflr is as a cross between Flipboard and Pandora — like Flipboard, it pulls content from your social networks and organizes them into a slick layout, and like Pandora, it recommends content based on your personal interests. Shufflr’s main feature is something called The Daily Fix, which is a stream of recommended videos based on data such as your social work activity, your location, and what’s trending. When we brought up my Daily Fix, it was a fun mix of tech news, politics, music videos, and random, amusing content — some from my friends, some from people I know, and some from celebrities. Each video is shown with the commentary of whoever shared it on Facebook or Twitter. And even if you sign up for Shufflr today, you can go back and see what it would have recommended for you one day or one week or one month ago. There are other ways to explore videos in the app. Using the Flip Side function, you can look exclusively at videos shared in your social stream, at videos shared by celebrities in certain topics like tech, or at content from a specific channel like BBC. Shufflr already has 2.8 million registered users Rajnish says, and the average session time for an iPhone or Android user is between 10 and 12 minutes. With the iPad, he’s hoping to see that number go up dramatically. You can download the app here .

Pulse Adds 20 Titles Fr...

In the landgrab among reading apps that aggregate content to make it more accessible on tablets and smartphones, one of the early movers, Pulse , is today announcing a deal with magazine publisher Bonnier that will give its offering a significant boost. Bonnier is adding 20 titles from its special-interest magazine portfolio to the Pulse reading stream, including titles like Field and Stream, Parenting, Saveur, Scuba Diving, Skiing and Sound + Vision. Pulse, which already had some 300 content partners on its platform, says the Bonnier deal is its biggest yet. The news comes weeks after rival platform Flipboard expanded in another sense, adding several features to make its newsreading app more Chinese-friendly. The deal between Pulse and Bonnier comes out of an existing, successful relationship between the two around a single hit: back in July 2011 Pulse and Bonnier signed a deal to include one of Bonnier’s biggest titles, Popular Science, in its stream. Within six months, Pulse says subscriptions for Popular Science went through the roof, from 60,000 to more than three million as of January 2012. The two aren’t giving out more current numbers but say that “millions” of stories from the magazine have been read to date, and it is one of the most popular magazines on Pulse at the moment. Whether the more niche titles featured in this latest deal will prove to have as much of a bang for Bonnier’s buck remains to be seen. To date, Pulse has signed on more than 300 partners to its platform, with the content ranging from general interest news providers like the BBC and Businessweek to more specific subjects, such as golf (and, naturally, the best in tech news from TechCrunch). Scale may not be the priority now, but it will be longer term for the business. Akshay Kothari, the founder and CEO of Pulse, once told me that the company does have plans to monetize content on the app — you can imagine in-stream, preroll and post-roll advertising that is targeted to a users’ reading preferences — but that this will come only when usage grows more. The same goes here: “Bonnier and Pulse do plan to monetize this once we build a significant audience,” he said. What’s notable about Bonnier’s Pulse push is that its giving users another way of accessing that magazine content on smartphones, a platform that the publisher does not seem to have emphasized as much in its app strategy. At the moment, Bonnier lists 28 iPhone apps compared to 66 for the iPad . Readers who want articles and no bells and whistles can also bypass the fact that the apps for titles like Popular Science are free to download but cost money to read, whereas the Pulse version of the magazine is, for now, free. Kothari says that this deal is not exclusive to Pulse, although it is the first time it has moved to make so many of its titles available on a news app. But it wouldn’t be a surprise if the content found its way to Flipboard and other aggregators soon, too. On a wider scale, this is not the first move we’ve seen from Bonnier to extend its digital footprint: the publisher earlier in the year signed a deal with AOL (TechCrunch’s owner) to share content and ad sales across Bonnier’s Parenting.com sites and properties within AOL that touch the same subject: those include Huffington Post Parents, the AOL Family channel and AOL.com itself. The full list of Bonnier titles in Pulse now: