Archive for February 11th, 2007
My absolute favorite game right now — a major time suck recently — is Ubisoft’s Rainbow 6 Las Vegas for the Xbox 360. The realism is nearly lifelike, and it pops on a HDTV screen in surround sound. Well, now Ubisoft is investing some serious coin into an effort to produce CGI movies, or movies with digital actors, which is basically an extension of what they’re already doing on the gaming front. Ubisoft will first focus on short films — the first will run 8 minutes and will be distributed online. “We’ll insert product placement in the short films so we can monetize them,” said Ubisoft CEO and co-founder Yves Guillemot. “Our goal is to work more closely with Hollywood studios and talent so we can eventually make movies at the same time we create the games.” Smart. Ubisoft also says it will start producing CGI TV shows soon, as well.
You can build your own character in Rainbow 6 Las Vegas with just about every conceivable detail, making up 15 million possibilities. Or you can snap a couple photos of your face and have it transplanted on your character.
February 11th, 2007
YouTube has inked a deal with Digital Music Group to post full episodes of I Spy, Gumby and other classic TV shows. Under the deal, Digital Music Group will share in revenue from ads surrounding the shows. Also, YouTube ultimately will use its long-awaited filtering technology to identify Digital Music Group’s songs that are being used without authorization in videos on the site. Then YouTube will give the company a revenue share of ads surrounding those clips. “This is the step that needs to happen for YouTube to start monetizing its audience,” said Tuhin Roy, chief strategy officer for Digital Music Group. The delay in the filtering technology, which has yet to roll out, is one of the reasons why talks broke down with Viacom. (WSJ sub. req.)
February 11th, 2007
Clear Channel station KFTY-TY in Santa Rosa, CA is going cold turkey after laying off most of its small news department. In the next few months, it hopes to get most of its news coverage submitted by the public. “Local content harvesting” is what KFTY exec Steve Spendlove calls it. “There will be a loss in local coverage, I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “But there are a lot of other places to get most of that information.” Just down the San Francisco Bay in San Jose, NBC station KNTV is trying a more measured approach to citizen journalism with “Moving Pictures,” a feature that involves giving digital still cameras to a dozen people to take their own photos, then following up with a TV interview to weave it all together. You can see the slide shows and the subsequent video on NBC11.com (screen shot below).
February 11th, 2007
An interesting nugget in a speech by George Kliavkoff, NBCU’s chief digital officer, about Deal or No Deal. As you may know, viewers can play along while watching by sending in a text message, which enters them in a contest. A winner is revealed at the end of the show. “Everyone who text-messages in the first 10 minutes of the show stays to the end of the show,” Kliavkoff says. But here’s the nugget: as many as 1.5 million text messages have been sent during a single episode. NBC gets a cut of the .99 cents per message charge, so that’s no small change.
February 11th, 2007
We reported a week ago that NYTimes.com will soon offer embeddable players, and now Beet.tv notices that the Wall Street Journal’s site is already doing it, thanks to a deal between Dow Jones and Brightcove. For example, that’s WSJ.com’s player below, featuring a story about CollegeHumor.com. Brightcove’s Jeremy Allaire explains how publishers like WSJ can change aspects of their video players when they’re embedded on external sites, such as skins and ad presentation parameters. Pretty slick. Again, you’d think TV sites would be doing this by now…
February 11th, 2007
