Archive for September 25th, 2006
Wanna catch this week’s Laguna Beach a day early? Well, log into Virtual Laguna Beach (the kids call it VLB), find a date and attend the winter formal at a Spanish Villa. Then at 9 p.m. ET, cozy up with your date in front of a big-screen TV to watch Laguna Beach. “(It’s the) first time a television show premieres in its entirety in a virtual world,” reads the MTV press release. And who’s providing the tunes for the dance? MTV’s digital music service, Urge, of course. (Thanks, Eric!)
September 25th, 2006
Orlando
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Atlanta
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St. Louis
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NBC Nightly News has ended the two-week winning streak posted by CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, according to preliminary ratings. Meanwhile, CBS News President Sean McManus has reiterated that the focus of his network’s new-look newscast is on “long-term developments, not the short term.”
September 25th, 2006
The family members of three people who were killed on Sam Donaldson’s New Mexico ranch are suing the makers of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, blaming the game for compelling the teen accused in the killings to pull the trigger. The $600 million suit claims Cody Posey played the “virtual reality murder simulator” obsessively and learned “how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer.” Not that I think it’s a good idea for teens to play GTA until their fingers bleed, but what about the claims that his father had abused him for years? Hmmm.
September 25th, 2006
The IAB and Pricewaterhouse Cooper have released online advertising stats for the first half of the year. While all online advertising is up 37 percent over the same period in 2005, search is up 40 percent and classifieds grew 20 percent. Despite the fact that Yahoo warned that ad growth could be slowing, the Online Publishers Association said its members expect growth of 28 percent in Q3 with no signs of slowing down. Meanwhile, eMarketer expects ad spending to grow 26.8 percent over 2006, down slightly from last year’s 30.3 percent growth. By 2008, eMarketer expects online will overtake radio for the first time as a percentage of total ad spend.
September 25th, 2006
Called RealTime, it allows you to select from a suggested list (or enter your own) of content feeds, ranging from partner news content to blogs, that display in a thin bar along the bottom of the screen. You can also set it to alert you when a new item is posted in a given blog. It’s certainly not a new concept, but I’ll download it and give it a try.
September 25th, 2006
Less than a month ago, ABC announced that it would allow local stations to stream ABC’s primetime shows with local ad positions. Now ABC News is announcing it will make its player available to over 200 ABC affiliate websites this fall. The player will feature clips of World News and Good Morning America, with additional video highlights from across all ABC News broadcasts. And coming soon, affiliates can integrate their own content into the player. There’s no mention of advertising, but I imagine it will be a similar set-up as the the primetime streaming program. Of all the network groups, ABC seems to be making the fastest headway with integrating affiliates into a cohesive video strategy. Press release…
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The new .mobi domains open up for general sale on Tuesday after companies were given the opportunity to lock in their trademarks. The new domain names — marketed to be the .com of mobile accessed content — are backed by Microsoft, Nokia and Vodaphone. But just like .tv, do we really need .mobi? Verizon says it doesn’t see any “business need,” but the company registered verizon.mobi to make sure nobody else takes it. “What we would not want to happen is for this name to be an infringer’s paradise,” said Sarah Deutsch, associate general counsel for Verizon. “Most of the new domain names have been failures and the vast majority of valuable real estate still rests in .com.” I agree, and it’s frustrating that domain registration has become a defensive move. Plus, most .com sites are now optimized for mobile, so why push people to another domain name?
September 25th, 2006
The new Nintendo gaming system Wii is hitting store shelves in November, and it will have news and weather channels built in. They use Wii’s funky little remote control, which is basically a cross between a laser pointer and a mouse (as TVs get bigger, this technology should be part of every remote control.) Check out the video demo for the weather channel here, which features a grab-and-spin globe and a zoomable map — cool, eh? And it reinforces the point that these gaming platforms are actually media centers with a broadening range of uses. (Thanks, Dave!)
September 25th, 2006
Clickz’s Eric Picard says ABC’s recent announcement that it will start selling video ads based on flat rates instead of CPMs is a bad idea. “ABC is much better off selling impressions in a world where audience scarcity doesn’t exist,” he writes. (But keep in mind, this is for a site that has scale. Local sites with few video views may be better off sticking with a flat rate sponsorship model.)
September 25th, 2006
