This Just In

Acton, Mass. — SeaChange International laid off 30 employees, or 4% of its work force, in its quarter ended July 31 to reduce costs, the company disclosed during its earnings announcement Thursday.

The company, which provides video-on-demand software and hardware solutions, incurred $1.1 million of severance costs in connection with the headcount reduction. The layoffs were spread among manufacturing, service, general and administrative and engineering personnel, according to SeaChange, with the broadband segment’s VOD server group incurring the majority of the headcount reductions.

The company posted $44.2 million in revenue for the quarter ended July 31, down 3% compared with $45.8 million for the same period last year. Net loss for the quarter was $8 million, which included $6 million of one-time charges including severance-related costs, compared with net profit of $959,000 in the year-ago period.

In addition to severance costs, SeaChange recorded $4.6 million in charges related to capitalized software licenses, as well as $300,000 related to write-downs of selected fixed assets and inventory. The company expects the cost-cutting measures to save $1.5 million per quarter, beginning with its third fiscal quarter.

SeaChange CEO Bill Styslinger said in a statement that the cutbacks enhance “our ability to achieve sustainable profitability.”

Styslinger noted that VOD systems sales picked up in the quarter, with revenue more than doubling sequentially to $12.4 million in the quarter compared with $5.4 million in the prior three-month period.

Los Angeles — News Corp. and NBC Universal, five months after announcing their Internet-video joint venture, finally settled on a name for the company: Hulu. The companies said they will launch an invitation-only beta version of the site (www.hulu.com) in October.

Hulu initially will be open to a limited number of users, but will be expanded as the JV’s development team scales the site and addresses user feedback.

Previously referred to as NewSite, Hulu is supposed to offer “thousands of hours” of full-length broadcast and cable TV shows, as well as movies and other video clips.

Meanwhile, NBCU declined to renew its pact with Apple Computer to sell NBC shows through the computer company’s iTunes Store.

NBC wanted Apple to institute “better piracy controls” and allow NBC to bundle videos to increase revenue, according to a report in The New York Times citing an anonymous source.

But in a press release last Friday, Apple said it “declined to pay more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode, which would have resulted in the retail price to consumers increasing to $4.99 per episode from the current $1.99.”

Apple noted that ABC, CBS, Fox and The CW — along with more than 50 cable networks — are signed up to sell TV shows from their upcoming season on iTunes, at $1.99 per episode.

NBCU and News Corp. executives have indicated that the TV shows distributed by Hulu, which may include NBC’s Heroes and The Office, would be ad-supported and free for consumers to view.

NBCU CEO Jeff Zucker, in announcing the JV in March, said the company would possibly offer pay-to-download movies from Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox.

In gearing up to launch Hulu, News Corp. and NBCU have inked content-distribution deals with cable networks, including Oxygen, Fuel TV, Speed Channel, Sundance Channel and TV Guide Channel. The joint venture also has distribution deals with Comcast, AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo, which the companies claimed represents 98% of the monthly unique visitors on the Internet in the United States.

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar explained the genesis of the name in a note posted on the site: “Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building.”

New York — TNT has pulled the lifeline on Heartland, one of its new summer dramas, officials confirmed Friday.

The performance of the hour-long medical show, featuring Treat Williams, just didn’t compare to that of TNT’s veteran hot hit, The Closer, or the network’s second summer drama, Saving Grace.

When it premiered June 18, Heartland was scheduled Monday nights at 10 p.m., after The Closer, but wound up losing more than half that blockbuster’s lead-in audience. After two installments, Heartland was averaging a 2.9 rating and 3.5 million viewers, a steep drop from The Closer’s average of a 5.8 rating and 7.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Heartland’s performance worsened when TNT moved the show to 8 p.m. in July to put the debuting Saving Grace in the 10 p.m. time slot after The Closer.

During its nine-episode run, Heartland averaged a 2.5 rating, or 2.4 million households and 3 million viewers. Heartland was light in the key 18 to 49 demographic, averaging 828,000 viewers that age.

Atlanta — Samantha Mohr, the former chief meteorologist for KPIX-TV in San Francisco, has been hired as on-camera meteorologist at The Weather Channel. She can be seen with Dao Vu and Bill Keneely on Weekend View, airing 7-11 a.m. ET on weekend days.

At KPIX-TV, Mohr won an Emmy in 2004 for “Best Weathercast in Northern California,” which included a report on the San Francisco fog phenomenon. In 2003, she won the AP award for best weathercast in Northern California. She also held meteorologist jobs at KTVK in Phoenix (monsoon thunderstorms, dust storms) and KRIV-TV in Houston (tropical storms, Hurricane Gilbert).

A Columbus, Ga., native who earned a broadcast meteorology degree from the University of Saint Thomas in Houston, Mohr got interested in weather during her teen years after a tornado picked up a nearby stable and wrapped it around the pine trees in her backyard.

Washington — AmericanLife TV Network is joining the video-on-demand party, offering up 20 hours of programming per month to any of TVN Entertainment’s more than 100 cable affiliates free of charge.

The service launches Labor Day (Sept. 3).

Programs on the nostalgia-centric digital network’s new on-demand service fall into four categories:

“Classic TV” will feature such shows as Combat!, The Color Honeymooners and Mission: Impossible (in January).

“Caring and Sharing TV” features American Family, The Dr. Bob Show and specials such as A Journey to Darfur with George Clooney.

“Cooking and Living TV” features programming including This Food, That Wine, Embassy Chefs and Fixing Dinner.

And “Lifestyle TV” features Alive and Well, Flea Market Mania and Save Our House, Save Our Family.

A quarter of the programming will be refreshed each week.

“This exciting initiative with TVN will allow our viewers to watch the best TV shows Baby Boomers grew up loving at a time that is most convenient to them and at no additional cost,” network president Lawrence Meli said in a statement.

“We’re pleased with the response from our program distribution partners in allowing us to make these programs available, many for the first time, on America’s emerging VOD platform,” Meli said.

AmericanLife (whose previous names included Nostalgia Television and GoodLife TV Network) is available in about 10.5 million U.S. TV homes, and counts Time Warner Cable as its biggest affiliate.