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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12 December, 2009
Google News was the first step, here is the next; real, solid-bodied content on Google. The just-launched “Living Stories” service from Google Labs shows a new way of integrating newspaper content into a Google page.
Gimme more
This time, instead of taking a snippet and sharing none of the generated revenue with the owner of the content, there is a different model. With consent of the publisher, Google takes more Read on…
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6 November, 2009
This fall, Sunday is the most expensive night of the week on American network television for advertisers, according to data collected by Ad Age.
Top 3
The top 3 shows that brought in the most money on average for a 30 second TV advertisement are, in order, NBC’s Sunday Night Football, Grey’s Anatomy, and Desperate Housewives.
Making less
Unsurprisingly, with the increasing Read on…
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20 October, 2009
Jay Leno recently congratulated the New York Times for being in business for 158 years. The punch line, of course, was that he had read about the milestone on the Internet. According to US September 2009 studies by ARAnet and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press television remains Americans’ primary source of news. However, online gained 20% in the last year, while the traditional channels lost between 10% and 18% versus last year.
Next year
While fewer respondents selected TV as their biggest news source compared with last year, TV is Read on…
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7 October, 2009
The Association of Online Publishers in the UK hosted its’ Content, Convergence and Creativity Summit today. Being creative content persons, they lovingly call it the AOP 3C Summit 2009.
Of course, there was a session about paid content. Now it is important to realize that most of the large online publishers are really traditional media companies that make severe losses on their activities. They have a huge cost base and they are either getting less public funding or less money from advertisers. Going online seemed to be the solution to make up for those losses a couple of years back, but now they find that their losses can’t be compensated by the proceeds from online advertising alone.
Financial Times
Therefore the Financial Times’s Rob Grimshaw and BBC’s Luke Bradley-Jones stated with infallible logic that Read on…
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17 May, 2009
Hulu - the American site for complete movies and TV episodes - continues its explosive growth trajectory, increasing a whopping 490% in total streams year-over-year, according to new data from Nielsen VideoCensus.
That translates to 373.3 million streams in April — up from 63.2 million last April — which solidifies Hulu’s status as the fastest -growing premium video brand online.
According to Nielsen Online, the success of Hulu — originally a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.– proves that in the future, the Web will not be as dominated by short video clips as it is today.
Hulu, along with pure-play providers like Veoh and the TV networks, have spent the Read on…
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17 April, 2009
An hour ago the verdict in the case of The Pirate Bay Four was announced. The four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter, Fredrik, Gottfrid and Carl: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000. An hour after the official verdict the Pirate Bay gave a press conference, some highlights of which can be found here below.
Illegal downloads
The Pirate Bay Four operated the Swedish Bittorrent site “The Pirate Bay”. The court has considered its verdict for some weeks, before releasing the verdict (available here) today. The prosecution claimed that Read on…
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1 April, 2009
Surprisingly today, after years of hostility & police raids, the Pirate Bay has announced they have settled their differences with US media conglomerate Warner Bros. The largest BitTorrent tracker has sold out to Hollywood and the two have agreed a deal.
The deal, worth over $13 billion (10 billion euros) came about after the recent performance at the Pirate Bay trial gave strong indications that the judgment would go against Warner Bros. For the Hollywood movie studio, it seems that acquiring The Pirate Bay was the only option left.
In the press release, both groups gave Read on…
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22 March, 2009
The American online music service SpiralFrog that was free to use, missed a critical lily pad this week and has shut down as a result of its debts. The Ad-funded US service signed deals with EMI and Universal some time ago but failed to secure deals with Sony or Warner.
Spiralfrog closed its operation yesterday, unable to pay back a ten million dollar loan in convertible notes. The DRM-protected music service allowed fans to download and play tracks to their computers with a video advert appearing before each play.
Ad-funded model under pressure
Spiralfrog is the second ad-funded music service to Read on…
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8 February, 2009
Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, is answering questions from readers on the New York Times website.
Of course, the most asked question, in one form or another, is: “How much longer can actual newspapers survive?”
I think Bill’s answer is interesting so here is his (only slightly edited) reply:
Ah, our existential question. Like everyone else who labors in the journalism business, or just loves it, I worry about our future, discuss it constantly with colleagues, and participate in some aspects of charting it. I’m an incurable optimist about the future of good journalism, and of The New York Times in particular. I’ve laid out my basic reasons for optimism on many occasions, and they still seem to hold water: Read on…
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3 January, 2009
The American year-end music sales figures released by Nielsen SoundScan show that while more music is consumed than ever, actual music sales have never been lower than in 2008. There was an increased number of paid downloads, but that failed to make up for the dive in the sale of compact discs.
Physical album sales fell 20 percent, while digital album sales rose 32 percent. The record of 65.8 million digital albums sold, still slowed down by DRM, could not compensate the loss of CD sales, and as a result total album sales were down 8.5 percent from 2007, for a new all-time low record. Again.
Singles drop revenue
Digital track sales were up 27 percent versus 2007, with over a billion units sold. This, also, is a bad trend Read on…
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21 December, 2008
Here is my prediction for 2009: The major record labels will leave YouTube and start their own video sharing/streaming site. Why? Just take a look at these two messages: Universal Music seeing “Tens of Millions” from YouTube (December 18th 2008) and Warner Music Group disappears from YouTube (December 20th 2008).
So, that looks weird. Why would Warner leave, if there is so much money to be made? The answer is, they’re not. YouTube is kicking them out. Warner has been trying to come to terms with YouTube on a renewal of the contract that was announced as a “landmark video distribution and revenue partnership” in 2006, but failed to do so. As a consequence, YouTube is removing the Warner clips. But that’s just the beginning.
Something changed
Here is my theory: In 2006, Google was so afraid to lose the Read on…
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15 October, 2008
YouTube has started to offer full-length television shows from the CBS archive in a bid to boost advertising revenues. Titles will be limited to a few shows that are already available on the CBS web site today, including old episodes of Star Trek and Beverly Hills 902010. High urgency content, as it were :)
However, this could be the start of something bigger, as YouTube says it is talking to other networks to offer more programs online. Right now the CBS shows are accessible only within the United States, or worldwide to people that are smart enough to use
Hotspotshield.
Long form, new player.
YouTube has added a 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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2 September, 2008
Things are tough if you run a record label these days. Apple owns somewhere between 85 and 95% of the total market for selling music online - but it is not paying much to the record labels. The label’s margins are just cents per download, while Apple sits firmly in the top 10 best-selling retailers online, having sold more than 5 billion songs in iTunes. “The iTunes Store became the largest music retailer in the U.S. based on the amount of music sold during January and February 2008,” according to Apple. That is not just the largest download store, but iTunes is the largest music seller in the USA. Selling a database of 8 million tracks that are “owned” by the labels, but of which they see little return from Apple. That’s total dependence.
Self-release
And then there is the threatening trend that artists Read on…
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7 August, 2008
Time Warner, the world’s largest media company, just announced their plans to become purely focused on content. Time Warner will sell its America Online (AOL) unit, the online access business. This is the second drastic measure after Time Warner’s decision to let broadband and cable TV distribution service Time Warner Cable go. Basically, Time-Warner is just stepping out of the distribution business completely. Time Warner stock went up 5% on the news.
Hey, didn’t AOL own Time Warner?
Well, they used Read on…
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5 May, 2008
It was a week ago today. The outskirts of a medium sized university town not far from where I live, just past midnight. Most homes were quiet, some bedroom lights showed that their inhabitants were still awake, and I was walking down the street towards a long line of men. It was raining. The men were standing outside, in the rain, waiting. The line went round the block. It was so long I decided to get a midnight snack first, and return later. The line would be there for a while yet.
The biggest entertainment release of 2008
Finally, close to 01.00 AM, the tired Read on…
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22 April, 2008
“The early signs are very promising.” said Jason Kilar, the chief executive of Hulu, at the recent NAB convention in Las Vegas. Just a month after the public launch of Hulu’s ambitious online video website. I’m thinking he’s on to something.
Wholu?
Hulu is a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Read on…
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31 March, 2008
After Warner Bros. Paramount recently became the second studio to declare their ambitions to become a video game publisher. Last week in Variety Magazine, two vice presidents of Paramount discussed the company’s move into the interactive entertainment business: “We are entering into deals now where we will be publishing games this year. There’s going to be a slate where in some cases we’re publishing, in some cases we’re co-publishing, or in others we’re funding development and another publisher buys it. It’s important for us to have a flexible model.”
So why are studio’s moving into games?
First of all, the studios are Read on…
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