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Yahoo snags exclusive rights to Saturday Night Live's archives starting September 1st (update: clips only)
Yahoo may have failed in its bid to acquire Hulu last year, but CEO Marissa Mayer announced it's snagged rights to show something the streaming site has been known for: Saturday Night Live. The deal with Broadway Video will give Yahoo exclusive online access to archived SNL content from 1975 through 2013 including show clips, "select" musical performances, behind the scenes and dress rehearsal clips. Yahoo will also have non-exclusive access to show current season Saturday Night Live clips in the US and a license to distribute library show clips internationally. Beginning September 1st, those archived clips will be pulled from other internet video platforms (presumably Hulu and Netflix -- update, see below) for one year. The press release (included after the break) indicates Broadway and Yahoo will celebrate the partnership at Yahoo!'s Digital Content NewFront event on the 29th. We'll see if there's more to learn about Yahoo's ever-evolving media strategy then. Update: The devil is in the details, and it appears that while Yahoo does have exclusive access to the SNL "clips" archive, that is not the same as full episodes. While that may seem arbitrary to the layman, what it means in effect is that later this year you'll still be able to stream full episodes of SNL on other online services -- just not clips.
Apple Pro covers SNL Season 1 and Broadway Video
Apple's Pro ezine has posted a nice piece by Joe Cellini on the production of Saturday Night Live: The Complete First Season (available on DVD and in iTS) by Broadway Video. The definitive DVD set includes the original 24 "Not Ready For Prime Time Players" episodes from way back in 1975. Why the long delay? Music clearances, which took a full 32 years to finish, leaving BV only six weeks to complete the DVD set in time for the holiday buying season.Enter XSan. In the process of converting to high-def production, the SNL team built out a ginormous XServe RAID storage network, including a complete 30-year archive of all the standard-def shows stored in 10-bit uncompressed format. Gosh, that's... (quick calculation in AJA Data Rate) about 150 GB per 90-minute show, 30 seasons of 24 shows each: over 100 terabytes of funny, not even counting the HD shows from the past two seasons. With the first season already digitized, the DVD production was dramatically faster than it would have been otherwise, and according to BV, they "did the entire process using Macs running Final Cut Pro, Shake, Final Touch, and DVD Studio Pro, all SAN-based." Cheeseburger cheeseburger!
