Professional streaming media firm ViewCast Corp. has promoted John C. Hammock to president and chief executive officer and named him to the Board of Directors, effective immediately.

Open source file sharing project ownCloud has formed a commercial entity founded by Markus Rex and Frank Karlitschek to compete with Dropbox and Box. Rex, former executive with SUSE/Novell, will serve as chief executive officer.

Content discovery platform Outbrain has closed a $35 million Series D round of funding led by Index Ventures with participation from existing investors Carmel Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. This more than doubles the company’s total financing to $64 million.

PayPal, the online payments arm of eBay, plans to challenge Groupon and DC-based LivingSocial with a new deals service expected to launch in early 2012, Bloomberg reported.

Following Hulu’s success with the British sci-fi series "Misfits," the streaming service and BBC Worldwide America today announced a deal to bring BBC3’s "Mongrels" to the United States exclusively through Hulu and Hulu Plus.

AOL’s Huffington Post Media Group and El Pais today confirmed the first quarter 2012 launch of El Huffington Post, an international Spanish-language version of The Huffington Post.

SnagFilms, which makes a curated library of sponsor-supported movies available for on-demand streaming, can now be used via new apps on most Android phones and tablets.

FreeCast.com has developed a service that enables users watch web-based television from within Facebook. It’s an extension of the main FreeCast service, which locates, aggregates and categorizes about 1.5 million new videos a day from multiple sources.

Yahoo has found something to laugh about. It announced that a new Yahoo Comedy Channel will kick off Feb. 23 with an exclusive and free live broadcast of the webcast special "CrazyStupidPolitics: Bill Maher Live from Silicon Valley," a free live stream from his performance in San Jose, California.