Here are the most interesting articles that came across this week…
Report: NBC wanted a cut of iPod revenue
The content industry has long had a beef with Apple's fixed pricing structure on iTunes. They would prefer to charge more for newer hit shows and less for older programs, but Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been firm on the $1.99 pricing for television shows on iTunes. Now, NBC and Zucker certainly have the right to decide what they want to charge for their content. And it's very early days for online video sales, so you can see how negotiations might have broken down over the pricing.
But seriously, you guys asked Apple for a cut of iPod revenue? Justifying it by claiming that they are making tons of money off your content?
I'm not even sure where to begin. First off, in earlier comments reported by Variety Zucker said that NBC took in only $15 million in revenue through iTunes during the last year of its deal. I'm not exactly sure when that began or ended, but in 2006 NBC Universal did $16 billion in revenue, according to parent company General Electric's annual report. So even if you tripled the amount of money NBC was taking in from iTunes sales a year, that would have only amounted to 0.3 percent of NBC Universal's revenue for the year. By comparison, NBC Universal's theme park business did $100 million in revenue.
http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9806737-37.html
MySpace Joins Google
MySpace and Bebo, two of the world’s largest social networking sites, on Thursday joined a Google-led alliance that is promoting a common set of standards for software developers to write programs for social networks.
The alliance now presents a powerful counterweight to Facebook, which, after opening up its site to developers last spring, has persuaded thousands of them to create programs for its users. The addition of MySpace, the world’s largest social network with 110 million active members, and Bebo, the No. 1 site in
“OpenSocial is going to be become the de facto standard for developers right out of the gate,” said Chris DeWolfe, chief executive of MySpace, in a press conference at Google’s headquarters in
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/technology/02google.html
Strike looms as
A federal mediator called the meeting between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television producers at an undisclosed location.
The writers' contract expired October 31, and they plan to strike at 12:01 a.m. Monday (3:01 a.m. ET) if a deal cannot be reached.
The first picket lines would be seen at
The writers want more money from the sale of DVDs and a share of revenue generated by the sale of TV shows and films over the Internet.
The studios say the demands are unreasonable and would hamper attempts to experiment with new media.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/11/04/hollywood.labor.ap/index.html
I, Robot: The Man Behind the Google Phone
Mr. Rubin is one of the primary architects behind another product that also smacks of potential über-coolness — the Google Phone. As Google’s “director of mobile platforms,” Mr. Rubin oversees dozens of engineers who are developing the software at the company’s sprawling campus here. The software embodies the promise of extending Google’s reach at a time when cellphones allow consumers to increasingly untether themselves from their desktop computers, as well as the threat that greater digital mobility poses to Google’s domination of Internet search.
The Google Phone — which, according to several reports, will be made by Google partners and will be available by the middle of 2008 — is likely to provide a stark contrast to the approaches of both Apple and Microsoft to the growing market for smartphones. Google, according to several people with direct knowledge of its efforts, will give away its software to hand-set makers and then use the Google Phone’s openness as an invitation for software developers and content distributors to design applications for it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/technology/04google.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Student’s Ad Gets a Remake, and Makes the Big Time
A television commercial for the new iPod Touch from Apple, scheduled to begin running on Sunday, is being created by the longtime Apple agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day. It is based on a commercial that an 18-year-old English student — an Apple devotee named Nick Haley, who says he got his first Macintosh when he was 3 — created on his own one day last month.
His spot offers a fast-paced tour of the abilities of the iPod Touch, set to a song titled “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” by a Brazilian band, CSS.
Mr. Haley said he was inspired to make the commercial by a lyric in the song, “My music is where I’d like you to touch.”
He based the visual elements on video clips about the iPod Touch and other new products, which can be watched on the Apple Web site (apple.com). He uploaded his commercial to YouTube, where it received four stars out of a possible five and comments that ranged from “That’s awesome,” followed by 16 exclamation points, to “Makes me want to buy one and hack it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/business/media/26appleweb.html?_r=1&oref=login
A new Yahoo?
Two of their executives engaged in what I argued was continuing portalspeak. “Yahoo’s where the activities are,” said one, who talked about “properties.” Another bragged about owning consumers because they do their email there and talked about Yahoo’s continuing “aspiration to be the starting point for consumers and advertisers.” That is the definition of a portal.
But then John Linwood, a vp of engineering, talked about opening up Yahoo as a platform. The other day, Yahoo boss Jerry Yang talked about this, too, but I was concerned that he was still looking at this as a media and portal model, trying still to get people to come to Yahoo rather than following Google’s open and distributed model. But Linwood said that, indeed, they plan to provide tools and content that developers can use to build new businesses away from Yahoo. Then he also talked about putting controls on that.
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2007/10/31/a-new-yahoo/
William Spencer: From YouTube to MTV
The next time I hear yet another person whine about YouTube being only for home videos of cats flushing toilets and kids skateboarding, I’ll know how to respond. William Spencer, a kid from
It’s the best example we’ve heard yet of a YouTube-to-TV success story; a guy gets picked up to do exactly what he does on YouTube — no changing his act, no guest roles on an existing show, no hosting a online clip show — on a major cable network. The deal was brokered by talent agency ICM, we’re told, which took Spencer as a client after finding him on YouTube.
http://newteevee.com/2007/11/02/william-spencer-from-youtube-to-mtv/
NewTeeVee Pick: The Guild
When Cartman and friends jumped into World of Warcraft for an episode of South Park last year, it garnered huge buzz, even winning an Emmy. A WoW-themed truck commercial uploaded to YouTube earlier this month has already attracted an amazing 1.6 million views and counting. So clearly there’s a huge potential audience for MMORPG-themed videos. Given that Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, and other fantasy RPGs boast a total player base of nearly 20 million worldwide, this should come as no surprise. And yet other than a few one-off examples, TV networks have been reluctant to develop crossover content for online gamers.
Felicia Day had this problem when she wrote The Guild, originally intended as a half-hour TV pilot about a mismatched team of online fantasy gamers who squabble (and flirt) via voice chat. An established professional actress (she had a recurring role on Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Day is also a hardcore gamer. “Actors don’t have a lot of control over what they get hired for,” she told me. “So I decided to do something that was mine, that made me laugh.” Unsurprisingly, when she showed it around
http://newteevee.com/2007/10/31/the-guild/#more-2411
Hulu Debuts to Meet Foes and Find Friends
So what should we think of Hulu? It’s not really a media company. It’s more a technology company with crazy parents and an unwieldy amount of cash.
Kilar, true to his roots in the tech industry at Amazon.com (AMZN), likes most of all to talk about the web site’s clarity and lack of clutter. Indeed, the service’s most innovative feature allows users to email and embed anything from a full episode or movie, as mentioned above, to a single shot or scene, via a nice little slider interface (click on the thumbnail at left for a screenshot).
But Hulu can’t avoid the trappings of big media. The company is tied up in a contradictory situation, where it’s chartered to have web-wide distribution while trying to maintain tight control over the user experience wherever it goes. Kilar declined to comment on NBC content being pulled from YouTube in advance of the Hulu launch. “It’s up to NBC how they manage their intellectual property,” he said.
http://newteevee.com/2007/10/28/hulu-launches/#more-2374
Q&A With CW Entertainment Chief Dawn Ostroff
The currency for measuring success, at least according to advertisers, has long been about how many people tune in to the original broadcast. Is the definition of a hit changing?
We're living through this sort of sea change. I think that everyone is starting to realize it, because we're really able to put numbers to how many people are actually watching a show live, watching it seven days later, streaming it and downloading it on iTunes now. And the numbers are more significant than they've ever been before.
http://www.forbes.com/home/media/2007/11/01/television-cw-ostroff-biz-media-cx_lr_1101ostroff.html
She’s Famous (and So Can You)
It’s routine to dismiss these people, to sniff from the sideline about the depths to which the culture has sunk. Misses Hilton and Tequila may represent, respectively, leisure-class and working-class variants of the same feminine caricature, a real-time Betty Boop. And yet each, in her own way, has divined truths about the marketplace that academics and industry are still laboring fully to comprehend. Each has understood the wacko populism of the cybersphere and pitched her ambitions to capitalize on what Joshua Gamson, the author of “Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America” calls “a shift from top-down manufactured celebrity to a kind of lateral, hyper-democratic celebrity.”
“Because of new technologies, we get to see now what happens when people have the option of making up their own celebrity,” Mr. Gamson said. “We’ve gone from ‘Oh, my God, they’re so much better than I am,’ to ‘Oh, my God, they’re so good at making themselves up.’”
We’ve gone from dazed idolatry to another and more familiar form of identification. Fame, when not concocted by
Facebook is the "It" Company of 2007
Facebook's strategy is already part Microsoft and part Google. Like Microsoft, Zuckerberg and his team are trying to build a communications platform (in Facebook's case, a socially based one) upon which other functions can be layered. Like Google, Facebook is dedicated to serving its users first, adhering to a deeply felt philosophy of openness--its own version of "Don't be evil." Like both of those once-cherished and now, in some quarters, tarnished icons, Facebook must walk a tightrope. Zuckerberg has taken his time exploiting the full financial potential of the site. Ads are minimal; outside developers pay no fees to put their applications on the site. That patience was criticized not long ago as inexperience and naïveté. But as Facebook's run has accelerated, the chatter has changed: It may be that the kid actually knows what he's doing.
Facebook's strategy is not just about Microsoft and Google. It is also an outgrowth of Zuckerberg's own experience. In fact, the new open-apps policy at Facebook is nothing less than a re-creation of the environment Zuckerberg and his CTO D'Angelo operated in--and exploited--as high school kids, when they created their first market-worthy application: a plug-in for an MP3 player that would learn your music listening habits and automatically create a playlist for you. They gave the app away for free on the Internet. Major companies such as AOL and Microsoft came calling, offering some combination of money and jobs. (The two opted for college instead.) "We had a bunch of ideas to build a developer's environment based on social connections," Zuckerberg says.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/120/facebook-is-the-it-company-of-2007.html
Consumers Staying Tuned to TV's, But Some Pick Online
The Nielsen Company reported that television tuning during the 2006-2007 television year (9/18/06-9/23/07) remained at the record levels set the previous year, while the number of homes with Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) more than doubled.
According to the Nielsen report:
- The total average time a household had a TV set tuned during the 2006-2007 television year was 8 hours and 14 minutes per day
- The average amount of television watched by individual viewers during the 2006-07 television year dipped by 1 minute per day to 4 hours and 34 minutes
- The number of households with Digital Video Recorders today stands at 20.5% of Nielsen's National People Meter sample, up from 17.2% in May 2007. When Nielsen began including households with DVRs in its samples in January 2006, DVR penetration was estimated to be appro! ximately 8% of households
http://www.centerformediaresearch.com/cfmr_brief.cfm?fnl=071102
Nintendo To Move Beyond Gaming
According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, Nintendo is moving away from gaming and towards products aiming to provide more service-related functions. While Nintendo has not come out with exactly what they will be offering, their new business strategy focuses on more casual gamers and even non-gamers. They did, however, reveal that they will be adding features to their popular DS portable that would be useful in spots like amusement parks and train stations (used with a wireless connection) as well as a “television-programming feature for the Japanese market… to check television listings, run searches by keyword and genre, and highlight each family member’s favorite programs.”
http://www.psfk.com/2007/10/nintendo-to-move-beyond-gaming.html
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