The Comedy Lineup Expands on Netflix

When you’re Aziz Ansari, people come up to you pretty frequently and say they enjoyed your stand-up specials. The first one had its premiere on Comedy Central in 2010; the second had its debut as a $5 Internet download in 2012. And when you’re Mr. Ansari, you can’t help noticing what people say next.

Aziz Ansari’s “Buried Alive” begins on Netflix this fall.

“They always mention that they watched it on Netflix,” said Mr. Ansari, the 30-year-old comedian best known as a creator of the MTV sketch-comedy series “Human Giant” and a star of the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation.”

Until now, Netflix has given Mr. Ansari’s fans one more chance to hear his jokes, months or years after the telling. For his third stand-up special, Mr. Ansari is moving Netflix to the front of the line. His show “Buried Alive,” based on his tour of the same name, will make its Netflix debut on Nov. 1. It will be the biggest stand-up special distributed by Netflix to date, in much the same way that “House of Cards” was that streaming service’s first high-profile original drama.

There’s more comedy coming, the company says, as it opens another front of competition with HBO. In announcing the expansion into comedy specials and feature documentaries last month, the Netflix chief executive, Reed Hastings, said that the service had “become a big destination for fans of these much loved and often underdistributed genres.”

Mr. Ansari’s conversations with his fans bolster Mr. Hastings’s assertion. Netflix “seems like it’s the closest delivery service of media we have that actually matches up to our preferences and expectations,” he said in a telephone interview during a break from “Parks and Recreation” production. (Lately he has been binge-viewing the ABC drama “Scandal” through Netflix.)

Mr. Ansari said he was amused when a fan asked him on Twitter: “When are you going to put out another stand-up special on Netflix? I need more free stand-up.” Netflix, of course, costs $8 a month. “It’s so convenient, you don’t even think about the fact that you’re paying for it,” Mr. Ansari said.

Netflix’s forays into licensing the first-run rights to television shows, much as a TV network does, are predicated on the belief that people are more likely to keep paying if the service has exclusive programming. In June, the service presented a comedy special by John Hodgman, and last week it presented the premiere of one by Mike Birbiglia, who wrote positively on Twitter of Netflix’s international reach: “I signed a crazy contract that I think included other planets.”

Netflix has comedy specials by Marc Maron and Kathleen Madigan in the works. Mr. Ansari’s show is unlike those before it, a Netflix spokeswoman said, because the company intends to put a significant promotional campaign behind “Buried Alive,” billing it as original programming on par with “Arrested Development” or “Orange Is the New Black.”

“We’ve been working to make Netflix a great home for comedians to do their best work and to support their live performance careers, and having Aziz debut his new show with us is a validation of that strategy,” Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer for Netflix, said in an e-mail.

Mr. Ansari’s special was taped in Philadelphia in April. He said the material was “a lot more mature” than that in his previous specials, focusing on the differences between the friends his age who are getting married and having children, and himself, a commitment-phobic comedian. “All that stuff seems very far away for me,” he said. His first book, announced last week by the Penguin Press,  will tackle similar themes about single life, but with new material.

Mr. Ansari plans to release “Buried Alive” as a $5 download, but only after the Netflix premiere. The straight-to-fans strategy, pioneered by Louis C. K. in 2011, was successful for Mr. Ansari last year, he said, but its downside was obvious: “You’re kind of preaching to the choir.”

He added, as modestly as possible, “I have a pretty big choir.” But with the new special, he said, “my goal is to get people that don’t know my stuff already, and maybe expand my audience.”

That’s where Netflix comes in. The service has more than 30 million subscribers in the United States, and its algorithms for recommending shows keep improving. Mr. Ansari said that when he was at home using Netflix, his own shows are recommended to him all the time.

Unlike, say, passive viewers of Comedy Central, though, Netflix watchers requires at least a bit of action, which is a potential drawback for some. On Sunday Mr. Birbiglia told his Twitter followers that “apparently the only way to find” his Netflix special “is if you type in my last name.”

Mr. Ansari’s “Buried Alive” was filmed and edited before Netflix entered the picture. He said he bumped into Mr. Sarandos at an event in New York, and he commented on the popularity of Mr. Ansari’s past specials. That conversation led to the distribution deal. (Neither side would comment on the financial terms.)

“It’s an interesting time for someone to be releasing content,” Mr. Ansari said. “No one’s quite figured out things. You can do all types of things. At this moment, it really seems like Netflix is the way to go.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 29, 2013, on page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: The Comedy Lineup Expands on Netflix.

The TV Watch: Keith Olbermann’s Show Has Its Debut on ESPN2

Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Don't have an account yet?
Create an account »

Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more »

Bruce Dunning, CBS Correspondent, Dies at 73

Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Don't have an account yet?
Create an account »

Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more »

Times Site Is Disrupted in Attack by Hackers

The New York Times Web site was unavailable to readers on Tuesday afternoon after an online attack on the company’s domain name registrar. The attack also forced employees of The Times to take care in sending e-mails.

The hacking was just the latest of a major media organization, with The Financial Times and The Washington Post also having their operations disrupted within the last few months. It was also the second time this month that the Web site of The New York Times was unavailable for several hours.

Marc Frons, chief information officer for The New York Times Company, issued a statement at 4:20 p.m. on Tuesday warning employees that the disruption â€" which appeared to be affecting the Web site well into the evening â€" was “the result of a malicious external attack.” He advised employees to “be careful when sending e-mail communications until this situation is resolved.”

In an interview, Mr. Frons said the attack was carried out by a group known as “the Syrian Electronic Army, or someone trying very hard to be them.” The group attacked the company’s domain name registrar, Melbourne IT. The Web site first went down after 3 p.m.; once service was restored, the hackers quickly disrupted the site again. Shortly after 6 p.m., Mr. Frons said that “we believe that we are on the road to fixing the problem.”

The Syrian Electronic Army is a group of hackers who support President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Matt Johansen, head of the Threat Research Center at White Hat Security, posted on Twitter that he was directed to a Syrian Web domain when he tried to view The Times’s Web site.

Until now, The Times has been spared from being hacked by the S.E.A., but on Aug. 15, the group attacked The Washington Post’s Web site through a third-party service provided by a company called Outbrain. At the time, the S.E.A. also tried to hack CNN.

Just a day earlier, The Times’s Web site was down for several hours. The Times cited technical problems and said there was no indication the site had been hacked.

The S.E.A. first emerged in May 2011, during the first Syrian uprisings, when it started attacking a wide array of media outlets and nonprofits and spamming popular Facebook pages like President Obama’s and Oprah Winfrey’s with pro-Assad comments. Their goal, they said, was to offer a pro-government counternarrative to media coverage of Syria.

The group, which also disrupted The Financial Times in May, has consistently denied ties to the government and has said it does not target Syrian dissidents, but security researchers and Syrian rebels say they are not convinced. They say the group is the outward-facing campaign of a much quieter surveillance campaign focused on Syrian dissidents and are quick to point out that Mr. Assad once referred to the S.E.A. as “a real army in a virtual reality.”

In a post on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon, the S.E.A. also said it had hacked the administrative contact information for Twitter’s domain name registry records. According to Whois.com, the S.E.A. was listed on the entries for Twitter’s administrative name, technical name and e-mail address.

Twitter said that at 4:49 p.m., the domain name records for one image server, twimg.com, were modified, affecting the viewing of images and photos for some users. By 6:29 p.m. the company said, it had regained control, although as of early evening, some users were still reporting problems receiving images.

The social networking company, based in San Francisco, said no user information had been affected.

Mr. Frons said the attacks on Twitter and The New York Times required significantly more skill than the string of S.E.A. attacks on media outlets earlier this year, when the group attacked Twitter accounts for dozens of outlets including The Associated Press. Those attacks caused the stock market to plunge after the group planted false tales of explosions at the White House.

“In terms of the sophistication of the attack, this is a big deal,” Mr. Frons said. “It’s sort of like breaking into the local savings and loan versus breaking into Fort Knox. A domain registrar should have extremely tight security because they are holding the security to hundreds if not thousands of Web sites.”

Vindu Goel contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 28, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Times Site Is Disrupted In Attack By Hackers.

Fandango Acquires a Rival in Movie Tickets

LOS ANGELES â€" Fandango, the fast-growing online seller of movie tickets, has swallowed a rival company that runs Hollywood Movie Money, a popular gift-certificate system that studios use to promote DVD and Blu-ray releases.

Fandango’s acquisition of the company, Quantum Loyalty Solutions, catapults the online ticket seller deep into a backwater of the movie business, but a lucrative backwater nonetheless, said Paul Yanover, Fandango’s president.

“It’s a great accelerator for us,” he said.

Studios pay Quantum a fee to handle the distribution and redemption of promotional (usually, free) tickets to movies, which are often used to bolster sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs. One recent offer: Buy “Monsters Inc.” on Blu-ray and get free tickets to “Monsters University.”

Fandango, which makes money by charging a processing fee for online ticket sales and by selling advertising on its Web site, has long worked to build a voucher business and has made some inroads. But Quantum has been a strong competitor, relying on longstanding relationships with studios and theater owners to resist Fandango’s push into its territory.

Quantum has a theater network that includes 36,897 screens. Fandango, which is part of NBC Universal, handles ticketing for about 21,000 screens.