They called it the “Battle Royale” of media and entertainment. This year’s CES pitted Internet video upstarts like Hulu, Roku, and Boxee in a cage match against industry stalwarts such as Comcast and Time Warner. At stake: the hearts and minds of millions.

It was spun as a victor-versus-vanquished battle. It was either going to be Internet video’s David hoisting aloft the head of the Goliath that is cable TV, or cable mowing down Hulu and the others like so much other Internet roadkill.

At first glance, it appears that David is a stone’s throw from victory. The ever-crucial 18- to 24-year-old viewer, who spends $11 billion a year on entertainment, no longer watches TV as we know it. They are Cable’s Lost Generation. However, it turns out that they may not be as lost as we think.  

You-Be-The-Terrorist Videogame Sales Reach $600 Million In 5 Days | SAI

In one week, Activision and Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has raked in more cash than any form of entertainment for sale. It sold around 9.4 million copies of the first-person shooter game in five days and made $600 million.

via Here’s Proof Originality Doesn’t Pay in Hollyw’d | The Wrap

Some enterprising Wikipedia contributor decided to pull together a list of the 50 films with the highest worldwide gross of the decade so far. One has to go all the way down to No. 15 on the list, Disney/Pixar’s “Finding Nemo,” before finding one created from original material — in other words, not a sequel, remake or adaptation of existing material or characters (such as Batman or Harry Potter).

via Andy Plesser: YouTube Integrated with Huffington Post, NPR, Politico and SF Chronicle

YouTube has introduced a solution for media sites to moderate and post video uploads from visitors. The Huffington Post, NPR, Politico and the San Francisco Chronicle are the first media companies to use the system which is called YouTube Direct. The system allows registered YouTube users to upload videos directly to a media site. These videos are also seen on the member’s personal YouTube channel.  

It’s Diller-Day in terms of a quarterly IAC earnings. His creative collective with Ben Silverman (formerly of NBC and Reveille is “Electus” - cool ‘Digitas’ type newco name), updates from Dreamworks Animation, Hulu, Circle of 8 on Myspace, 3D TV penetration, TV Everywhere … and the trailer premiere of “The Green Zone” (Matt Damon’s more authentic Jason Bourne war-thriller film), will be interesting to see how it avoids the stop-loss effect of Gulf war films. AND we’re planning thetenspot.com launch in December - looking for user-generated logos - send to logos@newmedici.com!

via IAC Reports 3Q Profit But Ad Revenue Down | Huffington Post

Counting one-time events such as a large gain on a stock sale and the sale of Match’s European operations, IAC earned $21.7 million, or 16 cents per share, on $337 million in revenue. In the same period a year ago it lost $14.8 million, or 11 cents per share. IAC did not give a substantive update on its new media venture with former NBC Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman, other than to say it will be called “Electus.” The venture was announced in July and will let advertisers have a say in the development process for TV shows and Web videos.  

MySpace’s “loss of face” to Facebook, a rough and tumble economy and a pivotal change of company seats, i.e., Peter Chernin, at News Corp (and MySpace’s own COO and senior technical team’s exodus) has contributed to a major executive facelift of MySpace. While their track record of change with Jeff Berman as President of Sales and Marketing and pitch towards being framed as a “social portal” has helped, the inability to keep up with Facebook’s growth rate and product innovation has forced change at MySpace. With the forthcoming announcement (today) by new CDO Jon Miller of former Facebook COO, Owen Van Natta, to the CEO spot, Fox and Murdoch are betting on social competitiveness to regain position. After the jump, we’ll look at Van Natta, and outside choice, Jason Calacanis’ recommendations.  

Another week, another innovator breakout list. BusinessWeek, via partnership with Boston Consulting Group, put together a list of 25 companies that could be the bigco innovators in 10 years, i.e., the Apples, Googles and Toyotas of tomorrow. Many of these companies already command good to great revenues for 2008 (included), with some having been around the block and back. In the midst: Alibaba.com, Future plc, Grameen Bank, Hulu, Mint.com and a few you wouldn’t expect. List after the jump…  

Is DVD on the downturn? During a recent lunch with one of my favorite studio digital media chiefs, we discussed the future of home entertainment - DVDs, Blu-Ray, Netflix, hulu, On Demand, digital downloads, you get the basic idea. We mused what the return would be in the next year or two when more of the consumer world is looking for at-home (”digital home”) entertainment, and not tuned into buying packaged DVDs or renting from brick-and-mortars like Blockbuster. Do people actually still buy and rent this way still, you ask? Yes, but they’re moving towards the $4 on-demand, 24-hour window rental - which is 1/4 what studios are used to based on the current retail environment. So how do they survive?  

It’s been a interesting week for Fox/NBC’s Hulu. (Per Wikipedia, Hulu offers commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies from NBC, Fox and many other networks and studios.) A week ago, Hulu removed its content from both TV.com and open-source media center, Boxee, thereby removing one of the only ways to watch Hulu content on your television. As Fred Wilson explains on his blog post entitled “Why Hulu Should Embrace Boxee”:  

While browsing Hulu recently, I discovered that the site had “enhanced” versions of episodes of one of my favorite shows, Battlestar Galactica. After clicking on the episode to find out what it was, I was extremely excited to discover that it was basically an episode of Battlestar Galactica, along with running commentary by Ron Moore – the show’s creator. Now Ron’s been doing commentary on episodes pretty much ever since BSG started. It started out as just a podcast, which I could either listen to without seeing the video in front of me, or I could put onto my IPod, go home and run BSG from my DVR and listen to commentary at the same time.