Archive for April 12th, 2007
The video site Veoh is debuting a new feature that will allow you to select a video from work and have it download in DVD quality to your computer at home. So when you arrive home for the night, it’s ready to go. “We believe that Home Delivery represents the next step in the evolution of internet television: First we rented videos; then we had them delivered by mail; now Veoh users can push videos directly to their hard-drives from anywhere in the world with an internet connection,” said Dmitry Shapiro, CEO of Veoh Networks. Hmmm, wouldn’t it be nice if Apple TV/iTunes did this? Press release…
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The Wall Street Journal reports that McClatchy will abandon its national online ad partnership with Tribune and Gannett to join 12 other newspaper groups in a deal with Yahoo. The partnership is in the “final stages of negotiating,” yet McClatchy would remain a member of CareerBuilder with Tribune and Gannett. A source told the Journal that the ability to use Yahoo’s Panama ad-serving technology is what helped persuade McClatchy to make the change. (Paid sub. req.)
April 12th, 2007
Hearst Magazines plans to launch its first standalone, non-magazine-affiliated website called TheDailyGreen.com on April 22nd. The site will offer a community for echo-friendly discussion as well as tips and reporting on how to do your part to reduce your environmental footprint. If it’s success, I imagine it will have no trouble attracting ad dollars, as the buzz and spending surrounding global warming is just heating up, so to speak.
April 12th, 2007
Steve Safran, Stephen Warley and I are shipping out to Las Vegas this weekend for NAB-RTNDA, television’s largest convention. Stay tuned to Lost Remote early next week for plentiful coverage. If you’re attending, drop by our panel session at 2 p.m. on Tuesday followed by the annual Lost Remote meetup from 4-6 p.m. at the little bar in the walkway between the Hilton convention area and the casino floor.
Also: We were the first to blog NAB-RTNDA, and now we’ll be the first to Twitter it. Sign up to Lost Remote’s Twitter account and we’ll be sending out SMS/IM alerts with news and random observations from the convention. I’ll post them on the home page, too.
April 12th, 2007
USA
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Last week ABC decided to cancel Six Degrees, and today it announced it will post the final five episodes on ABC.com. The first unaired episode will appear April 27.
April 12th, 2007
CBS has announced it is canceling Don Imus’s “Imus in the Morning” radio show immediately, over the comments he made about the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson had met with CBS Corp. Chairman Les Moonves to ask for Imus’s firing. This comes after MSNBC pulled the simulcast of his show off their air, and after advertisers had pulled their spots from his show. From the AP:
Losing Imus will be a financial hit to CBS Radio, which also suffered when Howard Stern departed for satellite radio. The program earns about $15 million in annual revenue for CBS… In a memo to staff members, Moonves said the firing “is about a lot more than Imus.”
“He has flourished in a culture that permits a certain level of objectionable expression that hurts and demeans a wide range of people,” Moonves said. “In taking him off the air, I believe we take an important and necessary step not just in solving a unique problem, but in changing that culture, which extends far beyond the walls of our company.”
On Thursday, Imus’s annual Radiothon raised $1 million for charity. It was scheduled to be a two-day fundraiser, but it turned out to be his last show. Meantime, the speculation is already beginning about whether satellite radio will offer Imus a home.
NOTE: I will be on the radio Friday morning in Richmond, VA, discussing the Imus story. I’ll be on Newsradio 1140 AM WRVA with Jimmy Barrett at 7:05am ET. You can listen live online. What I will add to this story, I have no idea. UPDATE: Finished interview. Jimmy was great, as always. I sounded like another silly media analyst, as I predicted.
April 12th, 2007
This guy in San Francisco has rigged himself up with a live webcam (photos), and he wears it wherever he goes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Well, except when he has sex, which is what happened last night. This was a tragic letdown for Justin.tv fans everywhere, and it’s getting a fair amount of attention today. Anyway, sex aside, it’s one of the coolest things I’ve witnessed on the internet, and the connectivity is amazing. He just walked into an elevator and signal was solid. Hmmm, this is going to “blow up” as the kids say these days. Someone just told him that Jay Leno might be interested in booking him on the show, and I bet he’s going to generate a ton of press over the next several days. Only drawback: Justin.tv is getting to be so popular, that his video server is beginning to choke on all the traffic. Screen grab…
April 12th, 2007
Internet Broadcasting has launched 29 new mobile sites for local TV stations powered by technology from Crisp Wireless. The new WAP sites include “prominent advertising banners, sponsorships, and microsites.” Press release with more details…
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PaidContent is reporting that Yahoo is near a deal to acquire the sports site Rivals.com. “The price could reach around $100 million, which some we’ve spoken to say is overpriced, and that’s why the traditional sports media buyers are sitting out on this one,” reports Rafat Ali.
April 12th, 2007
CBS will distribute selected primetime shows as well as CBS Evening News to a new host of online distribution partners: MSN, AOL, Joost, CNET (TV.com), Comcast (Comcast.net and Fancast), Bebo, Brightcove, Sling Media, Veoh and Netvibes. It’s part of a new CBS initiative dubbed the CBS Interactive Audience Network. All content will be free and ad-supported, and the Wall Street Journal reports distributors will get a 10 percent cut of the revenue. “Today marks an important step in our strategy to distribute content broadly across the online interactive landscape on an open, non-exclusive basis,” said Leslie Moonves, President and CEO, CBS. And that’s not all: the WSJ reports that CBS is in discussions with the News Corp-NBCU video venture, as well.
So in essense, you’ll soon be able to watch CBS shows just about everywhere online. Lost Remote reader Jeff sent us a note earlier this morning about his experiences with Joost, and his comments carry even more weight when you consider the new CBS distribution deals: “This demonstrates that for local TV, the license no longer is an exclusive franchise to print money. And for cable MSOs, this should further drive home that maybe they should have an alternative business plan to just provide a lot of bandwidth to the consumer and let them have at it.” It’s a new world, folks.
Press release with a lot more details on the CBS announcement below…
Read the full post April 12th, 2007
A new study by Nielsen/Netratings discovered that peak times for network sites correspond with the networks’ primetime programming. For NBC.com, 8-11 p.m. accounts for 40 percent of time spent on the site for the day. For ABC.com, it’s 30 percent. This isn’t all that surprising given the growing amount of TV-web integration (lots of web teasing in primetime) as well as the increase in popularity of watching full-length shows online.
April 12th, 2007
