Amazon takes on YouTube

TechCrunch reports that this week Amazon launched Amazon Video Direct. This service allows creators to upload their own videos to Amazon’s Prime Video and generate royalties based on the hours streamed. Creators must fill out tax information and link a bank account, plus create pages for their series and provide artwork for display. They can choose to include shows in Amazon Prime, streamed free with ads, rented, sold or any combination.

Amazon video is available in Japan, the UK, Austria, Germany and the US. Variety reports Amazon will pay creators 50% of retail, 55% of ad-supported free streaming and 15 cents per hour streamed in on Prime in the US, 6 cents per hours streamed elsewhere, capped at $75,000. The top 100 titles get paid a monthly bonus.

It seems like Amazon is looking to take on the big players in the user generated content services like YouTube.

YouTube Unplugged

Bloomberg reports its sources tell it YouTube is planning another subscription based streaming service called Unplugged that would include network and cable channels.

YouTube has supposedly been working on the product since 2012 and plans to launch in 2017 at around $35 a month with add-ons available. YouTube is in talks with such companies as: Comcast, NBCUniversal, Viacom, Twenty-First Century Fox, and CBS, although it has yet to strike any deals.

Latest Ant-Man spot uses fictional interview to fill in backstory

What an interesting way to promote the upcoming Ant-Man movie. Marvel has created a YouTube channel that posts videos from the fictional news channel WHIH featuring interviews with the characters form the movie. Look forward to watching the movie this weekend.

The video features an interview between Everhart (from the first Iron Man movie) and Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), and it fills in a little bit of Lang's criminal backstory that's alluded to in Ant-Man. Be sure to pay attention to the ticker tape along the bottom of the news broadcast for more MCU-related Easter eggs.