See? We told you that the Huffington Post was about to enlist some new talent.

Former CNN anchor Willow Bay has signed on as an editor-at-large at as part of a recent expansion at the news-and-blogs site run by political commentator and one-time California gubernatorial candidate Arianna Huffington.

Bay, who is married to Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger, will oversee the site’s new lifestyle section, called Living Now, and will “help shape the site’s recent content expansion beyond its noted politics coverage, on the business, media and entertainment pages,” according to a statement.

Bay, a former model, currently hosts and produces a feature series called “Spotlight 25″ on Lifetime Television, a cable network partly owned by Disney.

Netflix Chief Financial Officer Barry McCarthy let slip a few morsels about what the online DVD rental company’s electronic movie delivery system could look like when it rolls out in 2008.

“It will not be a PC, it will be a free-standing device,” McCarthy said while musing about next-generation movie rental at the Goldman Sachs conference this week in Las Vegas.

Netflix’s solution appears to hew closely to the streaming model it now features on its Web site, based on McCarthy’s comments about how the company and competitors will bridge the gap between the Internet and the television.

“If you are in the download market, which we are not, then you need a hard drive,” McCarthy said. To stream video to a television, “you need a WiFi and a video chip and it can be relatively inexpensive,” he added, while noting that “consumers don’t want another device in their homes… that’s an impediment.”

“If we had a box or were embedded in a device that talked to Netflix’s Web site, it probably wouldn’t talk to Apple’s Web site or anybody else’s Web site,” he mused.

McCarthy also said Netflix saw little competition in their online rental space from download-to-own models like Apple Inc’s iTunes because “the consumer value proposition is thin.”

Pressure from traditional retailers will also keep online movie purchases more expensive than rental for now. 

“I get why there is no structural shift in pricing — Wal-Mart would go berserk and the studios are dependent on Wal-Mart for revenue from the sell-through market…So again, they are not going to blow themselves up by changing their pricing…In the long run if that business model fails they may shift to something else, but not at the moment.”

 Blockbuster Inc. on Wednesday reported a wider-than-expected loss in the first quarter as the No. 1 U.S. rental chain hikes spending to grab online rental subscribers from rival Netflix Inc. 
    Blockbuster and other in-store movie rental chains have been hurt by falling rental revenues over the past two years, leading Chairman and Chief Executive John Antioco to cut the company’s U.S. store base, divest  non-performing international assets and look to next-generation movie distribution systems for growth.
    Antioco announced recently that he is leaving Blockbuster after nearly a decade at its helm and says he plans to leave the company on track to dominate online rental before he goes.
    Here is an excerpt of Reuters post-earnings interview with Antioco:
    
    Q: Blockbuster and its store-based rival Movie Gallery Inc. have been closing stores for nearly two years now but in-store rental revenue fell 10 percent industrywide last quarter. When will the store base shrink enough to be the right size for demand?
    
    A: The problem is there are too many (stores). (The store base) has not compressed as much as overall revenue. We think the rate of store closings will have to increase and … I was kind of hoping that it would be in 2007 that capacity shrinkage would meet the overall revenue decline.
    Our number-one store competitor got a reprieve and was able to redo their bank deal and put off consolidation. I clearly see it at least in the first quarter of 2008.
    
    Q: It was surprising to see Blockbuster announce that it is opening a movie theater in Mexico after selling off of international and gaming businesses. Are there plans to expand into exhibition?
    
    A: It’s really a branding license and an operating agreement. Some investors in Mexico wanted to use Blockbuster branding in the theater. They thought it could create a branding difference and they wanted to rely on our retail operating expertise to operate the theater. Call it an experiment.
    
    Q: Last quarter you said that Total Access was costing Blockbuster about $2 per subscriber. Is that still the case?
    
    A: The way we get to that is you take the number of subscriber months, you then determine the total product costs of Total Access and add back the revenues that people are spending with us when they exchange movies and basically on average the debt cost is about $2 per subscriber.
    
    Q: You said that there were no plans to change prices on the program. What is the time frame on that?
    
    A: Specifically, we have no plans of changing the program. What we want to do is go into 2008 with as many subscribers as possible and continue through the course of 2007 to refine our model, sell subscribers more stuff and the focus is on that as opposed to raising prices immediately.
    The online rental market is projected to grow at 40 percent plus this year. It’s a land grab and we need to take advantage of…Total Access.
    
    Q: There were rumors that you were in talks to take over Movielink and you said today that you are still planning to have a movie downloading solution this year. What’s going on with that?
    
    A: That is a business we need to get into. We continue to look at and study what is the best way to enter that business — is it through acquisition, partnership or building a partnership for ourselves? The discussions around acquisition revolve around price and technology. Clearly we want to get into it before it starts ramping up at any kind of rate … I think by the end of this year we should enter the business.
    
    Q: Analyst have said that they aren’t concerned with Blockbuster’s spending on Total Access as long as the company turns a profit by the end of the year. What do you think about that? 
    
    A: I understand it and I think clearly we wouldn’t be growing this business if we didn’t think we could make a profit on it and I think (their) expectation are reasonable. The fourth quarter of the year is a huge growth quarter for the industry… by the time we hit that fourth quarter will obviously start to approach our goal for subscribers for the year and will start to take a look at that.
    
    Q: How is the movie title slate shaping up for the rest of the year?
    
    A: The second quarter is down, the third quarter is way up.
        
    Q: Have you thought about what you’re going to do after you leave Blockbuster at the end of the year?
 
    A: I don’t have any specific plans now. I’m just focusing on the business.

 Careful what you wish for.

That was Blockbuster Inc. Chief Executive John Antioco’s message to Hollywood studios as they feel compelled to experiment with DVD release dates.

They may not like the results.

Here’s what he said on Tuesday during the company’s conference call to discuss fourth quarter financial results:
 ”The big impact to studios is, what impact does it have on sales of key titles?” 

“We do not believe a wholesale flip of the (release) windows makes sense economically for the studios and we believe because of that, it won’t happen.”

“I have mixed emotions…on one hand, I say, ‘Bring it on‘ because I think we need to get the answer to this question, so you know, we’ll know. We don’t believe it’s in the best interest of the company to make that switch.”
    
In an interview with Reuters, Antioco said the move to shrink release windows was being fueled by a Comcast test being conducted in Pittsburgh and Denver.  “This is a test that is a long time in the making,” he said. “The studios had to do it. They had to answer the question. I continue to feel that when they get an answer to the question they are not going to like the answer.”

(Photo: Reuters)

    California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger broke into his native tongue during an impromptu display of multiculturalism in Los Angeles at a rally for the city’s bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games.
    Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa repeated his own remarks in Spanish for the cameras after noting that Los Angeles has the largest population of Mexicans outside Mexico.
    Not to be outdone, Austrian-born Schwarzenegger, who followed Villaraigosa to the podium, thanked “Burgermeister Villaraigosa” in German, to a round of laughter.
    But Schwarzenegger admitted there were few compatriots to hear. “We don’t have that many here so that’s a different ball game,” he said.

Netflix Inc. Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt said rival Blockbuster Inc. missed the point of online rental — that is, no more hiking to the video store — with its Total Access promotion.

Blockbuster touts Total Access as offering online customers something that Netflix will never have: stores, which allow them instant gratification for their movie cravings and another easy way to drop them off.

“It seems a bit of a retrograde step is that they can go back to the store — it’s backward looking,” Hunt said at the Reuters Media Summit in New York. “It’s the logical thing for Blockbuster to do and I guess we’ll see how that plays out.”

Susan Whiting, CEO of Nielsen Media, said Disney/ABC Networks could set a standard for how Internet advertising is measured and monetized, a hotly debated subject in the media industry.

The two companies worked together on advertising metrics for ABC prime time TV episodes that are available for free on abc.com but require viewers to click through ads.

Disney was out in front on putting free prime time content on the Web, and Whiting said the abc.com model could serve as a model for calculating Internet ad rates.

Link to full story from Reuters Media Summit

Check out the audio below

Blockbuster Chairman and Chief Executive John Antioco said on Tuesday that the company probably would join rival Netflix Inc. next year in announcing details of a movie downloading program.

The service might be launched in conjunction with a cable or satellite TV provider, he said at the Reuters Media Summit in New York.

Antioco said Blockbuster was considering a number of possibilities for delivering downloaded movies to customers televisions — even the dreaded set-top box.

Blockbuster Chairman and CEO John Antioco couldn’t resist taking a dig at prognostications by Reed Hastings, his opposite number at rival Netflix Inc, in the long-simmering battle between the two companies for online video subscribers. 

Antioco — who sent a kitchen sink to Netflix’s headquarters after Hastings told analysts last year that Blockbuster had “thrown everything at us but” that particular appliance — warned on Tuesday that Hastings had best abandon forecasts for Netflix to own the online market. 

In Antioco’s view, the size of the online DVD rental market is not much bigger than 20 million subscribers — the same number of subscribers Netflix says it will have by 2012. 

Antioco said Tuesday that not only is Blockbuster Online set to displace Netflix as the fastest growing online DVD rental service in the market, it plans to stop Netflix far short of its ultimate subscriber goals. 

“If Reed Hastings thinks he is going to be in it alone, I don’t think he is correct.” 

So there.