22 January, 2010
Today YouTube launched YouTube Music Discovery, basically a music video suggestion tool, although they call it a “Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool”.
There is a lot of ambition in a name like that, which I will get back to later, but it can best be described as a way to quickly turn YouTube into a video jukebox with an automatically generated, relevant playlist based on one artist. You select, say, Eminem and boom, there is a page with a playlist of 40 music video’s, 10 of which are Eminem clips and 30 of which are by “related” artists.
Taylor Swift, anyone?
On the YouTube disco page you can click one of the suggested artists, or you can enter an artists’ name yourself. Strange enough, the latter feature doesn’t work in a recent Read on…
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22 December, 2009
This week, at iHollywood’s Digital Living Room conference a Sony US marketing manager stated that company plans to build out an area on the PlayStation with it’s own, original TV programming. Meaning that with a connected Playstation 3, you don’t need a TV subscription to see the TV shows.
MTV your PS3
Sony already released the Vidzone Music Video application for PS3 this month, offering “your own personalized version of MTV” on the Playstation 3. This free app offers unlimited access to high quality music video streams, and the ability to build custom music video playlists, turning the PS3 into an MTV type station - but one that actually shows Music Videos ;)
From MTV to HBO
The ultimate goal is to transition from a Read on…
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18 May, 2009
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By many in the industry, Belgium is considered to be the Mecca of iDTV (interactive Digital TV), because of the penetration of digital TV in Belgian households, which is relatively much higher than in surrounding countries.
Many iDTV services like Video On Demand are really taking off in Belgium, and the users are getting used to finding some form of interactivity at the push of the red button on most major channels on their set-top boxes.
Because of this well-developed market characteristic, Microsoft Advertising recently ordered a report on the state of iDTV advertising in Belgium, from which Read on…
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1 October, 2008
Forget videotapes. A Digital Video Recorder (DVR), now is found in one out of four American households. These Windows Mediacenters, Tivo’s, Harddisk recorders, etc. are all recording hours on hours of TV shows. The number of US households with DVRs has essentially doubled in the past two years and, with a continued push from cable, satellite, and Telco TV providers, will likely double again over the next four years. Leichtman Research Group reports on the use of Digital Video Recorders.
Happiness is a spinning hard disk.
A whopping 87% of the DVR owners would recommend their DVR service to a friend. 81% rate their DVR 8-10 on a 10 point scale (with 45% rating the service as 10). And thirty percent actually owns more than one DVR. Great numbers, showing these devices to be the center of the viewing experience at home. Everyone is watching time-shifted (recorded) shows, causing serious concern with broadcasters and Read on…
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24 September, 2008
Internet geeks like fashion too. It’s just not about clothes, but about technology. Joost was really in fashion 18 months ago, when they launched a flashy full-screen video program that you had to download to see their “Internet TV” shows. Distribution would be helped by the peer-to-peer exchange of video data between users, theoretically offering great viewing quality. There would be social stuff. Almost everyone loved it and there was a run on beta invitations.
But a year later, people were being layed off as a new ex-Cisco hotshot was flown in to lead the company. He focused on getting the technical side of the Joost platform right, and hired more engineers. I’ll show you why that was wrong in a second. The result Read on…
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22 September, 2008
Microsoft has shown a new interactive television application developed in co-operation with the BBC for the Microsoft Mediaroom platform. Building on red button interactive television, the BBC iPlayer and the BBC web site, it offers access to web style material on the TV through an intuitive interface.
The concept demonstration of the BBC service suggests how news, sport and weather information could be presented on the TV set using the Microsoft Mediaroom platform. The result is more like a modern web experience than a traditional interactive television service, using the broadband connection to good effect. Mediaroom is currently being deployed in he United Kingdom by BT Vision, the interactive TV offering from British Telecom.
New generation
“These applications set Read on…
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16 June, 2008
Microsoft has announced a strategic partnership with Russian company VimpelCom to deliver their Mediaroom interactive television service to the Russian audience. The IPTV service, Corbina TV, will be operated by Corbina Telecom, a Vimpelcom subsidiary. It will be the first Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV service in Russian. VimpleCom has about 50 million subscribers in greater Russia. Corbina Telecom operates in 25 Russian regions, primarily as a DSL/fibre-optic voice and data provider. According to Dmitry Malov of Corbina Telecom “the Corbina Telecom fibre-optic network reaches almost every apartment building in Moscow and many other Russian cities”.
SteveB in the house
Microsoft has been Read on…
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12 May, 2008
Zattoo publishes a software program that allows people to watch TV content on a computer over a broadband connection, much like Joost, for instance. The service is free of charge, after downloading the Zattoo Player and registering. Zattoo is currently available in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. So far so good. Now here is the interesting part.
Live TV
Recently, Zattoo started online live streaming of BBC1, BBC2, Channel 4, Five and Read on…
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23 April, 2008
Accenture’s Global Broadcast Consumer Survey shows that consumers are growing increasingly disenchanted with their overall television experience, but are remaining loyal to their favorite programs.
Although television remains the predominant mass communications device worldwide, with 97 percent of respondents watching TV in a typical week, consumption patterns vary based on a number of factors including geography, age and socio-economic status. While 70 percent of consumers watch four or more television programs a week, 71 percent of them watch programs on four or more television channels.
Channel Hopping
This channel-hopping, concludes the report, demonstrates that Read on…
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3 April, 2008
TV increasingly has to compete for attention with new media, like internet video on demand, video games, people doing email on their laptops or even Twittering instead of watching TV. To protect its position, TV is bringing out the big guns; sex and large gameshows. This trend is worldwide, and oddly enough even TV about not having sex is part of the trend. This is revealed by recent research done on the most popular shows of over 2.000 TV stations in 82 countries by International Médias Consultants Associés (IMCA).
Amandine Cassi, one of the authors; “The 2007-2008 TV-season brought us the return of the gameshows, usually based on fate or the candidates’ psychological insight or EQ. Apart from that we’ve seen a lot of sex, some of it made a little more mainstream by adding a Read on…
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17 November, 2007
OK, I wrote a pretty cynical piece about Hulu, the NBC/News Corp online video service in august. Things weren’t looking very good for them at the end of the summer, but I signed up for the beta test anyway. It’s now half a year later, I have access to the closed beta and guess what? The Hulu beta is a pretty good service.
Content is king, then.
I guess in a world where YouTube is king it is easy to underestimate the Read on…
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9 October, 2007
BSkyB, the UK-based leading European operator of digital television, will no longer allocate new channel slots on its Sky platform. This will undoubtedly lead to bidding battles between companies wanting to gain access to the electronic programming guide(EPG).
Sky announced that it will “cease to take further applications for places in the EPG launch queue” and reconsiders launching the 100 or so TV and radio channels that are waiting. The company is also allocating EPG slots to a select number of channels in the current waiting list. Only those with an already agreed launch date are guaranteed a space.
“After a very careful consideration we have taken the Read on…
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26 September, 2007
KPN, the royal Dutch Telecom operator, has recently had research* done in the Netherlands to find out how many stations the average family actually watches. The Dutch audience is pretty spoiled by an abundance of free stations in the different basic cable TV offerings, a normal subscription package of around 15 euro/month typically contains around 27 TV stations.
Digital cable TV subscription offers double or even triple the amount of offered stations, different operators are engaging in a sort of competition who can offer more channels within the digital packages. And the consumer? He (or she) Read on…
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16 September, 2007
“It would be a beautiful combination” Patrick Tillieux, Operational Director of ProSiebensat.1 is bending over backwards to show his enthusiasm for a takeover of his TV concern by Google.
ProSiebenSat.1 is big, very big. They are the owners of 24 free TV channels, 24 subscription TV channels and 22 radio stations in 13 countries across Europe. SBS Broadcasting (Holland: Veronica, Net5, SBS6, Belgium: VT4, Vijftv) is part of this media empire. But, apparently, doing just TV and radio is not a long-term businessmodel anymore these days, even if you do it on a mammoth scale.
A new tune
“Building bridges between TV and internet is becoming very interesting“, says Tillieux. This might not sound like news to most of you, but it is a very Read on…
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7 September, 2007
Wow this week is busy - presentations in Madrid, Brussels and Hilversum and I’m struggling just a bit to keep up. So far so good though, I had good fun with the Crossmedia MBA today, we had a special “One day MBA” where people could check out snippets of the MBA content. Some nice people in the audience and some very interesting presentations by others. I can still learn a lot.
I did a 1 hour presentation myself, trying to give a Read on…
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23 August, 2007
At Ogilvy summercamp, a nice and informal event with interesting speakers, we had a great presentation by Jeroen de Backer from Telenet. I have published some details on this earlier, but have decided to pull back this article for now untill such time as where all the facts can be checked. I will re-publish in due time.
Sorry for any inconveniece!
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2 August, 2007
OK, back on track after a great holiday. Reading through all the feeds on my return I notice that all of a sudden it has become very mainstream to say that internet is eating up television as we know it. According to 85% of the bloggers in this field television is now officially dead, it just hasn’t toppled over and hit the ground yet. And 30 second spots? They are even more dead.
Broadcasters and the upfront
So I decided to check the horrible impact on the biggest TV advertising market, America. The broadcast upfront, a period where the big media agencies buy tv advertising slots in bulk at the start of a new season, has recently Read on…
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24 June, 2007
Digital tv is not as popular as it may seem to be in Holland. While KPN and UPC are publishing one ecstatic press release after another about the rapid growth of their digital TV user base, over 50% of these Dutch digital viewers still watches the analog cable signal. This is the outcome of research by TNS-Nipo about TV viewer preferences.
Isn’t Digital TV great?
The marketing stories about digital TV should be Read on…
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23 June, 2007
Since a couple of days the YouTube software update for the Apple TV is available. Installing this update is pretty easy, you can do it right from the menu. After accepting the download it installs and reboots automagically. You now have the option to select YouTube, and you’re all set to start playing YouTube clips on your TV.
What does it look like?
I’ll tell you if it’s fun in a bit, but let me set the stage here. You get the option to go to YouTube Read on…
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