firehose

Google said today that it has renewed its agreement with Vevo, the music video distributor, keeping its popular programming on YouTube and preventing it from falling into the hands of its rivals. Vevo draws 50.2 million users a month to YouTube, according to comScore, making it one of the company's most important partners. The news was first reported by Billboard.

As part of the deal, YouTube is investing in the company. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but Billboard pegged the size of the investment at between $40 million and $50 million. "We made an investment in Vevo," YouTube said in a statement to The Verge. "We are excited by their future prospects and to provide YouTube users with the best possible music experience."

Vevo had reportedly considered an exclusive partnership with Facebook

Vevo, which is owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and the Abu Dhabi Media Co., had reportedly considered entering into an exclusive partnership with Facebook following the end of its revenue-sharing deal with Google. Billboard reports that the company will use the new investment to expand internationally and create new music programming; Vevo did not respond to a request for comment.

The Google-Vevo contract expired in April but had been extended while the sides worked out new terms. The agreement, which was under negotiation for months, was signed weeks ago but Google did not confirm it until today.

Epic Games senior producer Chris Wynn will leave the company to work as the senior development director on the next title in BioWare's Mass Effect series.

Wynn made the announcement via his Twitter account today. Previously, Wynn worked as the lead producer of Gears of War 3 and a senior producer on Gears of War: Judgment. Prior to that, he spent more than five years as part of Electronic Arts working on various sports titles.

Little is currently known about the next Mass Effect title. The game will be powered by Frostbite and explore a new direction in the universe's story. BioWare has also said that the game will not be a direct sequel, though it's possible player choices from the series will be recognized.

Wynn's departure follows in the steps of several other high-ranking staff in the last year or so, including veteran designer Cliff Bleszinski and series producer Rod Fergusson.

Motorola's forthcoming Moto X phone will not be a Droid device on Verizon, multiple sources tell The Verge. The change marks a sharp inflection point in the tight relationship between the two companies: previous Motorola flagship phones like the Droid RAZR HD and Droid RAZR Maxx HD have all been Verizon exclusives in the US.

That's set to change with the Moto X, which Google-owned Motorola will begin advertising tomorrow in a series of full-page newspaper ads that breaks from the aggressive, techno-warfare aesthetic of the Droid marketing to promise "the first smartphone you can design yourself." Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside called the Moto X the company's "lead device" in May at the D11 conference, and confirmed that it's meant to compete with the iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy S4. Woodside also said the phone will be built in the United States and be "broadly distributed," adding that "the support the carriers have provided has been fantastic."

the Droid relationship is not over

But while Verizon will almost certainly carry the Moto X, the Droid relationship is not over: it appears Motorola will also be building a new line of Droid Ultra phones, which will be branded and sold separately from the Moto X. A Verizon landing page for the Ultra briefly appeared this morning, indicating that the new phone would be extremely thin and available in several colors.

Every indication is that Motorola is gearing up to announce these devices in the coming weeks; we'll let you know as we hear more.

This was a big day for Image Comics. At their annual Image Expo, the publisher announced several upcoming titles from top flight creators. Mixed in with all of those announcements, however, was rather significant news about its digital content: starting today, Image Comics is now selling DRM-free digital versions of all its digital comics on its newly relaunched website, making it the first major U.S. comics publisher to make such a move.

For all the recent and rapid growth of digital comics, one of the salient aspects of purchasing online comics has also been the crux of much discussion: customer ownership. When you “purchase” most digital versions of comics, you aren’t really purchasing them, but paying for the right to look at them. Some customers are fine with this setup and others find it problematic, but up until now it had been the digital sales model for every major comics publisher, whether they sell their digital comics through ComiXology or on their own site. As such, this announcement from Image represents a very significant moment in the digital comics landscape, and one that will reverberate through the entire industry.

The established, non-ownership digital model was adopted by publishers as a means to combat the rampant online piracy of comics. In an interview over at Wired, Image Comics publisher Eric Stephenson expressed his position on piracy concerns, while giving insight as to why the company chose to go in this direction:

“My stance on piracy is that piracy is bad for bad entertainment. There’s a pretty strong correlation with things that suck not being greatly pirated, while things that are successful have a higher piracy rate. If you put out a good comic book, even if somebody does download it illegally, if they enjoy it then the likelihood of them purchasing the book is pretty high. Obviously we don’t want everybody giving a copy to a hundred friends, but this argument has been around since home taping was supposedly killing music back in the ’70s, and that didn’t happen. And I don’t think it’s happening now.

Your mileage on which comics suck and which don’t may vary, but Stephenson’s point remains clear. Even if a reader has pirated a comic, if they enjoy it by and large they’ll still buy it.

For Image Comics Director of Business Development Ron Richards, the desire for fans to own their product trumped any concerns about piracy: “There’s something to be said for the ownership factor. If readers purchase a book on ComiXology, that may be their library [on the service] but from what I understand that could be revoked. And God forbid, if ComiXology goes under or their data center has an earthquake all their hard drives go away — then you’ve got nothing.”

This is a move that was obviously in the works for some time, but it wouldn’t be surprising if Stephenson and Richards felt further emboldened to pursue this route after the recent issues with the digital landscape. Shortly after Marvel announced a huge digital promotion in March, demand was such that ComiXology experienced a server crash, shutting down new comics sales as well as reader access to any comics they had already purchased. The following month, ComiXology now infamously chose not to submit an issue of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga to Apple’s iOS store due to sexual content, leaving Stephenson and Image to have to address the entire ordeal in the following days.

Image will still be offering its digital comics on ComiXology as well, leading one attendee at Image Expo to ask Richards directly about whether or not this means Image is now competing with ComiXology and other digital partners, to which Richards offered the following:

“Yes and no. I think the tech savvy comics fan who cares about things like DRM will come to us, and there will be a loss of sales in other marketplaces. But I think there are people who are loyal comiXology users who have built up a collection there, and they can continue to do that. We’re not ceasing any agreements or partnerships with comiXology or iVerse or Apple or Amazon. All that stuff will still be there. So the Kindle Fire owner who buys stuff from Amazon can still do that. This is for the person concerned with ownership who wants to go direct to the source.”

This was a decision not only driven by a desire to give readers the opportunity to own the comics they purchase digitally while reading them in the format they choose — customers can choose between PDFs, EPUBs, CBRs or CBZ file formats — but also as an acknowledgment of the growth of digital as part of the publisher’s overall profits. Image is expecting to see a 3% increase in 2013 in the digital share of its overall sales, from 12% to 15%.

Given Stephenson’s logic and, theories about piracy, many readers will now question why other publisher’s don’t make a similar change in their digital model, which could encourage them to eventually follow suit. Nonetheless, in an increasingly competitive industry, Image will have been first.

If you run a New York City-based business or happen to live in one of the five boroughs, you'll soon be able to secure your own domain ending in .nyc. The news was just announced via Mayor Bloomberg's official Twitter account, and a website has gone live with the full details. When the top-level domain starts taking registrations in "late 2013," New York will be the first city in the US with custom URLs of its own, according to officials. But why would you want a .nyc address to begin with? Registering a top-level domain is touted as a way to leverage "the power of the city’s name" for your business, organization, or personal website. "Powerful" as it may be, the city didn't face a fight in securing its desired top-level domain; in fact, it was the sole applicant.

Things get a bit murky when it comes to exactly who can own a top-level .nyc domain. According to the city's website, "New York City businesses and organizations with a NYC address, individuals with a primary residence in NYC, as well as those offering products or services to New Yorkers can register." That last subset — companies offering products or services to New Yorkers — could easily open the floodgates to any number of registrants. But the city plans to carry out this process carefully, granting priority to home-grown businesses so they may "secure their intellectual property." The registration process itself will be handled by traditional domain registrars, and as for pricing, the city is only saying rates will be "competitive with the market prices for other top-level domains." In other words, you'll likely be paying a good deal more than your typical GoDaddy URL.