Archive for September 6th, 2006
Touchstone, Miramax and Lionsgate are on board, but Warner Bros. and Universal have not signed on to sell movie downloads on iTunes. The new service is expected to debut next week as Apple has scheduled a press event under the title “It’s Showtime” for the 12th. The studio split is centered on pricing, of course, and early reports say the movies will be priced at $14.99 a download. Also, as previously reported, Amazon is expected to debut its movie store at any moment, with three movie studios on board.
September 6th, 2006
There’s been some rather convincing criticism of Digg that suggests a consistent handful of heavy users has teamed up to vote their stories to the home page, and as a result, reaping the benefits of a ton of traffic. The evidence is so convincing that Digg founder Kevin Rose has agreed to change the algorithm that determines how much and how quickly a story moves up and down the list. “This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story,” Kevin explains. “Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.” Fascinating stuff, and worth watching as the lessons learned at Digg need not be repeated as user-managed sites become more mainstream.
September 6th, 2006
On Sept. 13, WNBC will flip the switch to start producing 28 hours a week of news and local programming in high def, a first for the New York market. Only the studio cams and the chopper will gathering in HD, but WNBC says it will soon add high-def field cameras. WNBC is one of about a dozen stations that have converted to local HD production.
September 6th, 2006
Not many details here, but PaidContent quotes CBS Digital’s Larry Kramer as saying traffic doubled to CBSNews.com on Tuesday. Kramer also said the streaming glitches were due in part to the crush of visitors, as expected. Meanwhile, Couric said in tonight’s newscast that she had received 20,000 suggestions for a new sign-off line.
September 6th, 2006
Redmond, WA
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In a unique partnership, WCBS has partnered with The Weather Channel — long considered a competitor of sorts to local TV news. WCBS will use TWC’s forecasting resources, and TWC meteorologists will occasionally appear on air from major weather events. In return, WCBS is co-branding its coverage, and TWC can use the CBS station’s Doppler radar and coverage staff. As far as I can tell, there’s no online component to the partnership.
September 6th, 2006
Because “The CBS Evening News with Bob Schieffer” had become “The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric,” some TiVos decided not to record it last night. (Thanks, Chris!)
September 6th, 2006
In reading the press release on the Motionbox story below, I read a quote from the company’s CEO that is worth highlighting. “For 99% of people, online video is about sharing moments, not creating professional video presentations,” said Chris O’Brien. This is a very simple point that eludes many mainstream media people who still don’t understand why user video sites have devoured the online video market with a bunch of “stupid videos.” YouTube and MySpace and Google Video and the like are popular because they empower people to easily share their best video moments with their friends and family for free. Take YouTube, for example, which receives 65,000 videos a day. That’s 1,950,000 a month. Only a few of those clips “pop” on a mass media scale and see a ton of traffic. The rest are viewed just a handful of times by friends and family and other interested parties, which as an aggregate is a ton of traffic. The long tail of video. And these “stupid videos,” if they involve your friends and family, are a hell of a lot more relevant than 99% of the stuff on TV these days. So while mainstream media still shakes its head and can’t understand why people would think user-created video is more relevant than the high art they produce, well, they’re destined to fail in the long run. All in all, I think this is the greatest missed opportunity for television companies in recent memory.
September 6th, 2006
You may remember our earlier post about Motionbox, a user-created video solution that’s powering a section on WCAU’s NBC10.com (and potentially more NBC O&O sites in the near future). The company has announced it closed $4.2 million in Series A funding from Canaan Partners, SAS Investors and ITOCHU Corporation of Japan. “Motionbox’s technology solves a major problem—how to make personal video more user-friendly and easier to share, particularly for the ‘rest of us’ folks who aren’t very tech savvy,” said SAS Investors’ Josh Grotstein. “They are also uniquely positioned to work with partners across all media.” Which to me is the biggest selling point.
September 6th, 2006
At a time when most local broadcasters are curbing or even considering dumping their sports segments altogether, the Roanoke Times has decided to get into the game by launching a sports show online. Before you TV folks go trashing its production values, remember the web is about unique content that you can’t find anywhere else. TimesCast Sports focuses primarily on local Virginia college teams. No doubt the subject matter will change with the seasons. And yes, they are running pre-roll ads at the top of each webcast. The future of sports broadcasting is local or better yet, niche.
September 6th, 2006
Another sign of broadband’s move into the mainstream came Tuesday at MSNBC.com. According to MSNBC, the site did a record-breaking seven million video streams in one day, on the strength of the Steve Irwin death story. One video with Matt Lauer interviewing friends of Steve Irwin pumped out two million streams alone. That’s astonishing. The story is big - but not Hurricane Katrina or 9/11 big. So this shows, in just the last several months, how much people have come to expect video from the web. Hard news did well, too - the Brian Williams interview of President Bush helped pull in 700,000 additional views of the Nightly News online.
September 6th, 2006
MTV is headed to the heartland to test out ad insertion technologies for on-demand programming, partnering with Sunflower Broadband in Lawrence, KS. Each time a subscriber accesses on-demand programming from Comedy Central an ad for the upcoming release of MTV Film’s Jackass: Number Two will be shown. MTV plans on serving up multiple variations of the ad, which is slated to run through the month of October.
September 6th, 2006
By partnering with dozens of news organizations, including the New York Times, Google News has launched a paid archive search service. To start, Google is just directing traffic to each publisher’s site and isn’t taking a cut of revenue. But it’s likely Google will soon merge the search service with Checkout, the company’s new online payment platform. The new partnerships are among the first media-friendly moves we’ve seen from Google, and I imagine publishers of all shapes and sizes will get involved.
September 6th, 2006
Just about every media company has launched a broadband entertainment portal, and now advertisers are getting into the action, too. Anheuser-Busch’s upcoming Bud.TV will feature comedy, sports, news, short films and other video programming from Wild West Picture Show Productions, TriggerStreet.com and LivePlanet, to name a few. “We’re always looking for new opportunities to connect with adult consumers on a more personal level,” said August Busch IV, president, Anheuser-Busch. Press release…
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Last night’s relaunch of CBS Evening News averaged a 9.1 rating/17 share, the highest ratings for the newscast since Feb. 23, 1998, which was broadcast during CBS’ coverage of the Winter Games in Nagano. Last night, ABC averaged 5.7/11 and NBC had a 5.3/10. Of course the question is, now that viewers have sampled, how many will be back?
September 6th, 2006
