After spending 10 days looking mostly at the inside of my eyelids, I’m hoping to get back to to work this week. But first, here’s a few items from while I was out sick:
Roo, the troubled online video service provider, is moving on from its Wurld Media debacle. After buying peer-to-peer provider Wurld for $4.3 million a year ago, seeing its executives face multiple lawsuits, and laying off its workforce, Roo last week announcedtwo deals with other P2P vendors. Roo will integrate and resell Abacast for live-streaming video and Pando for video on demand. It’s the kicker on a story that involved a lot more drama than technology.
Andy Plesser at Beet.tv reports Vator.tv has raised “a second seed round of just over $1 million.” Vator encourages entrepreneurs to submit video pitches and also creates some original content.
Russian mobile content provider Playfon has bought mobile video- and photo-sharing community site Wappy.to for about $5 million, according to the Quintura blog. We haven’t been able to verify the deal. Update: Here’s the press release and some coverage, both in Russian.
Oh also, just saw that Rafat Ali at paidContent is reporting that Kevin Swint, who had lead digital media at Wal-Mart, has left to head international movies and TV at Apple. Wal-Mart recently closed its digital movie service, while Apple just expanded its own.
There have also been a ton of great video memes while I’ve been down and out — check out the “what we’re watching” bar at the top of the page for a sampler.
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