If you think mobile social video is a no-go in the U.S., you might consider Itsmy.com, which claims 2.5 million users of its personal broadcasting service worldwide, with half of them American.

The site ((http://m.itsmy.com on
your mobile phone) lets anyone with a video-enabled mobile phone create
their own mobile “TV show” for free and share it with other friends,
family or love prospects.

The company’s fixed Internet site is bare-bones and unapologetically devoid of uploading capabilities.

“We are convinced that we don’t need an Internet site for our users,” says Sabine Irrgang, COO of Munich-based GoFresh, which owns Itsmy.com. “Many are not interested, or they don’t even have a computer.”       MORE

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MobiTV unveiled Mobi4Biz at the CTIA conference in San Francisco this week, the first in a planned series of TV channel mashups that will allow the mobile television company to repurpose mainstream TV for specific vertical markets. The new “channel of channels” — set to launch initially in late October exclusively on AT&T’s forthcoming BlackBerry Bold – will include video-on-demand, customizable stock tickers, andbreaking news from Fox Business, CNBC, Bloomberg and TheStreet.com.  MORE

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Nokia is rolling out a new “all-you-can-eat” music service this week in the U.K. that’s a prototype for a service it plans to roll out worldwide.  “Comes with Music”, currently marketed only by U.K. retailer Carphone Warehouse,  lets users download as much music for one year on their Nokia phones as they want –and port it to their computers –, but there’s  a catch: they can’t move the music from their devices or their computers. If they want to add more songs after the year, they have to buy a new device.

Nokia will cover the royalties it’s paying to three of the four major labels by adding a surcharge to the phones, according to officials at the CTIA wireless show in San Francisco. They insisted the service is not an experiment, but a prelude to what will soon be offered in the U.S. They didn’t specify a time frame.

Any expansion of the service could be problematic for Nokia’s relationship with wireless carriers, who are rolling out their own competitive music services.

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It’s a measure of how Real Networks’ fortunes have changed in Hollywood that it would be willing to introduce a product today almost certain to attract the legal wrath of the biggest studios.

RealDVD, a $30 software program, allows users to download an exact copy of a DVD directly to their hard drives. While the company insists its program is completely legal, the jury is literally still out on whether copying DVDs is legal. The studios literally sued  321 Studios, which marketed its own DVD-copying software, out of existence; and the DVD Copy Control Association is appealing a ruling in favor of Kaleidescape, a Silicon Valley startup that enables servers to rip and stream DVDs.

Real Networks is evidently calculating that its Rhapsody music service, which depends upon record companies to sell their copyrighted material, won’t be hurt by hot-headed movie studios concerned about piracy of their copyrighted material. Nothing like irony in Hollywood.

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We are in the process of relaunching iHollywood News using Wordpress, so please expect some rough edges over the next few weeks as we transition from our old provider. For the moment, you will find all posts at www.ihollywoodforum.com/news, but I hope to move back to news.ihollywoodforum.com in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, you will likely find some broken links in Google searches and other irregularities, so please bear with us as we make the change! If you notice any problems during our “beta”, please feel free to comment here, or email me at michael@ihollywoodforum.com.

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To most entertainment executives, Google’s introduction of “Chrome” this week probably seems too inside baseball to care about. But actually, it’s all related to something that keeps studio heads up at night:  control  of distribution.

That’s one way to look at all the consolidation in Hollywood over the last 20 years: Sony       bought Columbia and TriStar because it wanted “content” for its electronics. Disney bought ABC because Michael Eisner worried the TV networks could squeeze any fees they wanted for his TV shows and movies. Winning Paramount gave Sumner Redstone films to fill his National Amusements theater chain and pipe to Viacom’s cable channels.

Google is clearly concerned that Microsoft could make Internet Explorer unfriendly to Google applications. This is not paranoia. Much of Microsoft’s explosive growth came from its leveraging its monopoly in computer operating systems to decimate smaller rivals. Netscape was done away with by making IE the first thing that showed up on every new computer desktop. Microsoft Word worked better with Windows than Wordperfect.

So Google wants to make sure it has secured its own route from the consumer’s desktop to the Internet. And from the mobile phone to the Internet as well, when Android is introduced toward the end of this year.

An interesting twist: Google is making the code for Chrome available to anybody, including its competitors. Not exactly akin to giving away the copyrights to all your movies, but its certainly a shift from the monopolistic ways of Microsoft.

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