Time Warner pushes movies, TV content out through Usenet video specialist Guba

6/27/2006 3:15:49 PM, by Anders Bylund

Time Warner is leaving no stone unturned in its experiments in online video sales. After last month's BitTorrent distribution announcement, the studio has now followed up with another nontraditional video reseller known as Guba. Time Warner has released an initial batch of about 200 TV episodes and feature movies, including The Matrix, Good Night, and Good Luck, Babylon 5, and The Flintstones. The selection is expected to grow over time.

For many years, Guba.com has provided a simple way to access videos from Usenet discussion groups. For US$15 a month, the service used to let you categorize, organize, and transcode Usenet videos for your viewing pleasure. If you're thinking about viewing pleasure of the more adult variety, that branch of the operation was spun off into sister site Skin Video last year. What remains under the Guba banner is pretty clean, and the staff is scrubbing it daily to keep it that way.

The separation of standard and adult fare created a much more family-friendly main site, and was most likely a big reason why Guba is able to land major mainstream distribution pacts now. Guba CEO Tom McInerney says that deft negotiations and technical know-how did the rest of the heavy lifting:

"We treated the studios with respect, we listened and were responsive to their needs. Our proprietary technology gave the studios confidence that we could protect their copyrighted material and that our user-generated content could



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