Please note that the name of the Weekly has been changed to reflect the updated group name.
Here are the most interesting articles that came across this week…
Michael Eisner 2.0 Will See You Now
Can a 65-year-old former Old Media lion recast himself as an online power player? He can if he’s got 40 years of entertainment contacts, collected more than $1 billion from cashed-in Disney options, and, most important, still has the hunger to prove wrong the critics who hounded him out of his job in 2005. It didn’t take long for Eisner to back a bona fide Internet hit: the teen angst drama Prom Queen. Premiering last April, the Web series is made up of 80, two-minute-long episodes that Eisner loaded with advertisements and product placements.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_36/b4048046.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_businessweek+exclusives
TV takes step into ‘Afterworld’
Nonetheless, “Afterworld” is off to a promising start. Some of the episodes premiered this year on Budweiser’s dedicated video site, bud.tv, and on YouTube, where it became a viral hit, drawing more than 1 million views.
“What we’re trying to do is create a unique form of entertainment as well as an original business model,” said Stan Rogow, former executive producer of Disney Channel’s hit show “Lizzie McGuire” and one of the principals in Electric Farm Entertainment.
Rogow launched the digital studio this year. One of his partners is Jeff Sagansky, former head of CBS Entertainment and former co-president of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Another is veteran writer Brent Friedman, whose credits include the “Dark Skies” TV series and the popular video game “Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars.”
The partners aim to get in on the ground floor of the new ways entertainment is being delivered and consumed.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-afterworld23aug23,1,3193077.story?track=rss&ctrack=1&cset=true
One In Five US Homes Have DVR, Just Not Tivo
One has to feel bad for TiVo: they came up with the idea for digital video recorder. Michael Lewis, the best selling author of New New Thing even wrote a long piece about the company. And yet they are not the big winner, despite having one of the better devices on the market, that is booming market according to the findings of a survey conducted by Leichtman Research Group (LRG.)
LRG says that one in every five households in the United States now have a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) – up from about one in every thirteen households just two years ago. Of course most of the DVR owners didn’t really pay for it, and instead got it as “part of a package” from their cable companies or satellite television companies.
http://newteevee.com/2007/08/20/one-in-five-us-homes-have-dvr-just-not-tivo/
Now Playing on YouTube: Ads
Embedded Advertising On Aug. 21, Google announced plans to show ads within thousands of YouTube videos, breaking with the current practice of placing ads on a page where videos are featured, but never inserting them immediately before, during, or after the clip plays on screen. The new ads will primarily appear as translucent animations or graphics overlaid on the lower section of professionally produced videos, such as those from media companies like Warner Music Group (WMG). In some cases, Google will also place ads on clips created by amateurs. “This is the first time that we are inserting an ad within the video experience itself,” says Eileen Naughton, Google’s director of media platforms.
Google will charge advertisers each time an ad is shown, sharing part of the revenue with the maker of the video, including the chosen few individuals whose homemade videos are deemed worthy. Google began a revenue-sharing program with users back in May. It plans to append ads to more user-generated videos that have been vetted for copyrighted material.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2007/tc20070821_678981.htm?chan=topnews_top%20news%20index_businessweek%20exclusives
Surprise Surprise…TV Viewing Is Declining
While the findings shouldn’t come as a surprise to our readers, it is important to point out that the video market is going through a shift similar to what happened in the mobile world when kids started replacing their landline phones with mobiles because of the portability. As more and more people want their video portable, a comparable change is occurring in the video world. Saul Berman, who focuses on entertainment strategy and change at IBM, noted:
“The Internet is becoming consumers’ primary entertainment source. The TV is increasingly taking a back seat to the cell phone and the personal computer among consumers age 18 to 34. Just as the ‘Kool Kids’ and ‘Gadgetiers’(1) have replaced traditional landlines with mobile communications, cable and satellite TV subscriptions risk a similar fate of being replaced as the primary source of content access.”
http://newteevee.com/2007/08/22/surprise-surprise-tv-viewing-is-declining/
Just Ahead: The Web As A Virtual World
In this future scenario, you could go mall shopping with a gang of friends during a lunch break, even while you remain miles apart. In reality, you’d all be pinned to your work terminals, but on that screen you would be transported to a digital replica of the shopping center. As you walk by a sale at a virtual jeans store, Web cameras in the real store let you see how crowded it actually is, in case a popular item is selling out. Your avatar, set to your body’s measurements, tries on the jeans and spins around to show them to your pals. You might buy the pants online or visit the physical store later. Either way, you’d have had a fun afternoon without leaving your cubicle.
Such an advance in technology will require overcoming massive hurdles. The computer interface to take 3D imagery and interaction beyond the confines of Second Life or other virtual simulations will have to be intuitive to users. That would entail breakthroughs on the order of those that took Web pages from static documents to dynamic pages updated in real time and navigated via hyperlinks. “It feels like the early days of the Internet,” says Steve Prentice, a vice-president at Gartner Research. Gartner estimates that by 2011, 80% of Internet users and major companies will have avatars, or digital replicas of themselves, for online work and play.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_33/b4046064.htm?chan=search
Girl Power
At 17 going on 37 (at least), Ashley is very much an Internet professional. In the less than two years since Whateverlife took off, she has dropped out of high school, bought a house, helped launch artists such as Lily Allen, and rejected offers to buy her young company. Although Ashley was flattered to be offered $1.5 million and a car of her choice—as long as the price tag wasn’t more than $100,000—she responded, in effect, Whatever. :) “I don’t even have my license yet,” she says.
Ashley is evidence of the meritocracy on the Internet that allows even companies run by neophyte entrepreneurs to compete, regardless of funding, location, size, or experience—and she’s a reminder that ingenuity is ageless. She has taken in more than $1 million, thanks to a now-familiar Web-friendly business model. Her MySpace page layouts are available for the bargain price of...nothing. They’re free for the taking. Her only significant source of revenue so far is advertising.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/118/girl-power.html
Online Video is Still Too Expensive
There are a number of ways to deliver digital video content, and delivering that content online is the most expensive of them all. How expensive? Dan Rayburn recently took a look at CDN pricing, and while it is on the downswing, it’s still pretty expensive. For example, a customer who buys 100 terabytes at $0.15 a gigabyte would have to pay around five dollars in bandwidth to serve 1000 views of a three minute video. That means they’d have to get at least five dollars in CPM (cost per thousand) advertising just to break even, and that doesn’t include storage costs.
http://newteevee.com/2007/08/26/online-video-is-still-too-expensive/
Mobile Meltdown
The company also spent heavily on content. Amp’d had its own mobile outdoor broadcasting trucks to simulcast extreme-sports events on its handsets and its own in-house recording studio to produce its own concerts. It also licensed a lot of content from MTV Networks, UFC, Playboy Enterprises, major record labels, and video-game companies. (Of the licensors mentioned in Stone’s bankruptcy affidavit, Playboy and Live Nation declined to comment, and UFC and MTV didn’t respond to repeated requests.)
All these costs meant that Amp’d needed customers, and quickly. After a sluggish start—The Wall Street Journal reported in June 2006 that Amp’d had attracted fewer than 10,000 subscribers in its first five months—the company picked up the pace. By September, Amp’d issued a subscriber forecast of more than 100,000 customers by the end of the year, a goal that it met. In hindsight, given the high number of nonpaying clients cited in the bankruptcy, it’s natural to wonder whether Amp’d was overzealous in its customer-acquisition efforts.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/118/mobile-meltdown.html
TV explodes: The chain reaction hits critical mass
Some more findings from the U.S. IBM survey:
* “Content” is now, at last defined as conversation as well. Use of content services: 45% social networks; 29% user-generated sites; 24% music services; 24% premium video content for TV (not sure what that means); 18% online newspaper. Ouch.
* 58% have already watched online video and 20% more are interested.
* DVRs are good for TV: 33% watch more TV as a result (58% the same)
* 74% contributed to a social network; 93% contributed to a user content site. Who says that forums are only for nuts, blogs for early adopters, and photo services for geeks? Everybody’s making content. Why do they do it? Feel part of a community, 31%; recognition from peers, 28%. Conversation.
* How is content marketed today? Peers. Primary reason for viewing content on a user site: 46% said the recommendation of a friend.
* But here’s the fly in my future-of-advertising ointment. Asked which ads “most affect your imopression of a product or company,” TV commercials on major networks got the lion’s share.
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2007/08/22/tv-explodes-the-chain-reaction-hits-critical-mass/
Facebook Gets Personal With Ad Targeting Plan
The new service would let advertisers visit a Web site to choose a much wider array of characteristics for the users who should see their ads—based not only on age, gender and location, but also on details such as favorite activities and preferred music, people familiar with the matter say. Facebook would use its technology to point the ads to the selected groups of people without exposing their personal information to the advertisers.
These ads would show up differently than the banner ads and boxed flyers that appear on the borders of Facebook pages, say people familiar with the plan. Instead, they would be interspersed with items on the “news feed,” which is a running list of short updates on the activities of a user’s Facebook friends. In addition, the ads would show up on Facebook pages that feature services provided by other companies, one person says.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118783296519606151-email.html
Move Over Mickey: A New Franchise at Disney
It was also a satisfying one for the Disney Channel and its parent, the Walt Disney Company. Despite lukewarm reviews, the film’s debut drew 17.2 million viewers, according to preliminary ratings estimates from the channel. If those estimates hold up, it would make the debut of “High School Musical 2” the No. 1 television program of the week, on cable or network, as well as the most watched show of any kind in basic cable history.
The success of “High School Musical 2” is an indication of Disney’s long-term efforts to reposition its cable channel to appeal to the underserved 9-to-14 age group and to rope in youngsters for whom Mickey Mouse seems too babyish. For the time being at least, the movie has made a trio of fictional high school students named Troy, Gabriella and Sharpay as recognizably Disney as that 79-year-old mouse.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/business/media/20disney.html?ex=1345262400&en=0f72f51c416e92db&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Cable’s summer of love
Ad-supported cable nets—a group that includes most basic cable outlets with a few exceptions like Disney Channel—collectively are averaging a 52.4 share in the demo this summer, compared with broadcast’s 24.2 share.
Several cable programs have set record highs this summer—most recently exemplified by the Disney Channel original movie “High School Musical 2,” which averaged 17.2 million total viewers in its premiere Friday to become the most-watched basic cable telecast ever—while broadcast shows are slipping.
“This has been a record-setting and perhaps precedent-setting summer in many ways for the television business ... and a landmark summer for ad-supported cable in many ways,” TBS Inc. chief research officer Jack Wakshlag said.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i1ba86288080adf3a94113ce13f73a25c
