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Cynopsis:
Weekender 03/15/07 Good afternoon. It's Thursday, March 15, 2007, and this is your Cynopsis: Weekender edition. Below are a handful of industry stories - with which you may agree or disagree. If you'd like to be heard - put together your own 350 word submission! Details below. After many requests, Cyn opsis Weekender College Edition is coming back! We did this once before in November 2005 and it was wonderfully successful, so we'll do it again on April 26, 2007. We will accept 350 word editorials from current college students all around the country and the world. The four most insightful, original, humorous and/or well-written pieces on any topic relating to TV will be included in a single edition of Weekender , and each winning editorial will be awarded the standard Weekender writing fee of $350. College Professors, moms and dads - encourage your students to participate, they might just win! Deadline: All entries must be sent via emailed no later than midnight on Friday, April 20th to me at , SUBJECT: Weekender College Edition. Be sure to include your name, age, college, college year, and major (if you know it), and how you can be contacted. Good luck! And on Monday Cynopsis will launch a brand new daily edition - Cyn opsis: Digital . The edition will focus on the business of digital and broadband as it relates to the television industry and beyond. It's for anyone interested in how digital is rapidly becoming a major force in our industry - and even for those who believe digital is something of a phase and will never fully materialize to compete with linear television. Any items you've become accustomed to seeing in this section of Cynopsis, will now be in Cyn Digital, as well as plenty of other news from the digital arena. This new daily will be written by Wayne Karrfalt, Editor of Cyn opsis: Digital , who can be reached and is happy to accept press releases at . Viacom Sues YouTube - But Will it Hurt the Traffic? By Daisy Whitney YouTube has dodged every bullet fired its way in the last year and a half. Now, the question is can Google-owned YouTube deflect the $1 billion bullet that Viacom is aiming at the country's biggest video-sharing site? On Tuesday, Viacom filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeking $1 billion in damages for copyright infringement and also an injunction to prohibit future unauthorized use of Viacom content. Viacom contends that nearly 160,000 unauthorized clips of its material have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times on YouTube. It's no surprise that media companies would become weary of the cat and mouse game that takedown notices and the ensuing removal of clips has become, said Richard Neff, lead technology partner at Los Angeles law firm Greenberg Glusker. Indeed, Viacom became quite tired of that little parry. After all, this week's lawsuit follows a Feb. 2 takedown notice when Viacom requested that YouTube remove 100,000 unauthorized clips of its content. YouTube complied and pulled down the videos. But then the industry learned an interesting thing - takedown notices don't affect traffic. In February, the month following the takedown, visits to Viacom-owned MTV.com and ComedyCentral.com grew by 49 percent and Nick.com by 28 percent in February compared to the year before, Viacom said in an earnings call earlier this month. At the same time, YouTube's traffic grew from 17 million unique visitors for the week ending Jan. 28 to as high as 19 million per week in the weeks following the takedown, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. "YouTube has become even more popular since we took down Viacom's material," said Google General Counsel Kent Walker in a statement on Tuesday. In addition, traffic to the broadcast network Web sites - ABC.com, NBC.com, Fox.com and CBS.com - also swelled last month. Finally, ABC.com has logged 60 million episode starts of its prime-time shows online, with a whopping 25 million of those since mid-January. So Viacom can take its clips down, but people keep coming - to YouTube, to Viacom's site, to broadcast network sites. "Broadly speaking it just reflects the growth and consumption of video online," said Greg Sterling, principal with Sterling Market Intelligence. Now we will see what impact the lawsuit has, or doesn't have, on traffic. Blu's Got Game by Marshal M. Rosenthal High-definition discs are here, but so is a return to the "Beta vs. VHS" war with two competing and non-compatible formats. Consumer fear of commit-ting to Blu-ray Disc or HD DVD does not bode well for content provider's hopes for ramping up sales of their movies and television shows with the same success as when DVD became the superior alternative to videocassette. But this race may have taken a video game turn, with Blu-ray galloping to the finish line, courtesy of Sony's Playstation 3. The game console has high-definition Blu-ray player capabilities, yet costs nearly half as much as any other Blu-ray player on the market to date. More than 2 million units have been shipped worldwide. While sales of HD DVD and Blu-ray discs have teetered back and forth over the last few months, Blu-ray Disc unit sales began to catch up follow-ing the Playstation 3's launch in late November. Most recently Blu-ray has forged ahead of HD DVD in cumulative sales, according to Nielsen Video-Scan, the consumer research firm for the VHS and DVD sell-through industry. The importance of the PS3 is not about gaming households, but rather the Playstation households in particular that are key to Blu-ray, says Steve Feldstein, SVP/Corporate and Marketing Communications, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. "It's really simple actually," he points out. "Every PS3 is a Blu-ray Disc player. It helps drive player house-hold penetration for the new format just as it did for DVD with the PS2." According to customer survey data (Sony Computer Entertainment of America), 90 percent of current PS3 users have watched a Blu-ray movie on their PS3, 80 percent indicated that they plan to purchase a Blu-ray movie and 72 percent that they plan to rent a Blu-ray movie in the near future. "We believe that Blu-ray is technologically superior and has plenty of room growth as new and innovative ways of enjoying packaged entertainment are developed," says Feldstein, adding that "it is, in essence, future-proof." Who'd have thought that Blu-ray Disc's "secret weapon" to possibly winning the format war might come from the button-pressing gamepads of millions of game users? The Who's Peter Townshend and the Big and Small of TV by Hank Bordowitz Several years back, I worked with Peter Townshend on a concert Webcast of his ever-morphing "Lifehouse" project. Given the medium, I asked him what he thought of people watching a concert at their computers. "One day," he predicted, "you will be in a virtual seat at virtual concerts all around the world. Your choice will be, do I sit at home and experience the concert as though I'm there with other people or do I really go? …We feared this with video. And what has it done? The video and the DVD revolutions reinvigorated cinema going." Another upshot of the revolution, especially the digital side, is the amazing variety of choices of just how we view video. I watch movies on my iPod, certainly not how the directors intended. Yet content will find its way to even smaller screens. On a recent episode of /24/ one of the characters watched the news on her cell phone. As reported in Cynopsis, a cell phone with a TV tuner introduced at CES last January offers broadcasters a potential revenue stream of over $20 million for the retransmission of their programs. Conversely, some things weren't made for the big screen. When Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera started out, they made cartoons for the big screen, but when they went out on their own they made "limited animation" geared for TV. Similarly, TV shows might letter box their images, but not for projection 40 foot wide cinema screens. However, that's happening as well. In Texas, women gather at local theaters on Thursday nights to watch /Grey's Anatomy/ in movie theaters. Theaters support the free showings (to avoid network intellectual property issues) via the concession stand. Some cineplexes had to put these events in their larger theaters as they've grown in popularity. And it's not only women. On Tuesdays, the fanboys get their dose of /Heroes/ on the large screen. "Why do we want to gather, anyway?" Townshend asked rhetorically. "We want to gather because when we're together, something different happens than when we're on our own…We value our communal experience… We have different choices. " Choices indeed – from the private intimacy of a phone screen to Thursdays with Dr. McDreamy. Pass the popcorn. Slicing, Dicing and Engaging on the Multicultural Frontier By Louis Chunovic How do you leverage brands and build audiences in the broadband-enabled cultural bouillabaisse that is America today? Or, as the moderator of the multicultural-media panel at last week's annual Horowitz Associates Forum in Manhattan put it: How do you promote a show or brand across three screens (TV, computer and phone), four major ethnic groups (Caucasian, African-American, Asian and Hispanic), six psychographic groups [see below] and at least two languages? One way is to encourage engagement, the industry's buzzword du jour. At Telemundo, for example, said Borja Perez, the network's VP, market development (digital media), viewers are being encouraged to develop "their own secondary novelas" online, based on character interactions and plot points in such telenovelas as the romantic swashbuckler, Zorro, La Espada y La Rosa. Another way is to slice and dice your appeals to the multicultural audience, said several panelists, and not to assume one message will resonate with all segments. Hispanic viewers are hardly monolithic, with different Spanish-speaking national groups having divergent interests, and with older Hispanic-Americans often preferring Spanish-language programming while their American-raised offspring might prefer English. A broadband appeal to older Hispanics, for example, would tout video as a way to keep in touch with distant family, while an appeal to younger Hispanics might emphasize gaming. "We have to understand which group responds to which message," said Bob Watson, VP, programming and new business development, Time Warner Cable, NYC. All the various digital components of a campaign have to "throw to each other and also thrive off of each other," said Matthew Barnhill, SVP, market research, BET Networks. That means, for example, that a recent BET awards show was supported not only on the internet and with VOD, but also with mobile-device offerings that allowed subscribers to receive information about specific individual favorite performers. "All of our promos … talked about the other elements," he said. In the multicultural, multimedia world, testing, surveying and segmenting become, if anything, even more important. The marketplace "has not settled on the true currency for negotiating the web space," said Barnhill, pointing to contradictory data from competing providers. Additionally, web metrics don't yet segment enough, according to Barnhill. For example, "you can't get African-Americans 18 to 34," he said. The bottom line, perhaps, is that multicultural is the "new mainstream," as Sandra Weber, VP, multicultural market development, Turner Entertainment Networks, put it. At TEN's linear networks, and increasingly in its digital spaces, "segmentation of ethnic groups is always key" to strategic decisions, she said. The broadband psychographic groups Horowitz identifies in its latest survey include Web Moms, Sports Gotta Have Its, Non-Tech Utilitarians, the Broadband Workforce, Mavens and Mavericks, and the Connected Multiculturals. The panel was moderated by Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, EiC, Multichannel News.
* WEEK'S RECAP *
Friday, March 9, 2007
SUBMISSIONS / AD SALES/ SUBSCRIBE & UNSUBSCRIBE Cynopsis Ad Sales - Mark Bohn - 203-583-1224 / Article submissions for Cynopsis: Weekender are welcome, provided they are no longer than a maximum of 350 words. News articles used are paid at the rate of $1/word. Not all submissions are used. Editorials (also 350 word max) may be submitted but are not paid, and not all are used. Send submissions to Cynopsis at . The Weekender edition is published every Thursday and includes a few items to ponder over the weekend, as well as the highlights from the week. It is delivered to the entire Cynopsis subscriber list, unless you specifically request to be unsubscribed. To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your email subscription, go to the Cynopsis website, www.cynopsis.com and click on the subscribe tab. Emails to the Editor: subject E-Mails to the Editor Copyright Cynthia Turner 2006 Later -- Cyn 03/15/07 What's On This Weekend: Saturday: 8-11p, March 17, 2007 ABC: Celebrity A-List Bloopers, Movie: Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde CBS: NCAA Basketball Championship Second Round FOX: Cops, Cops, America's Most Wanted ION: Movie: Starman [7], Movie: Double Dragon MNT: Anna Nicole Smith: A Centerfold Exposed, Countdown to the Battleground NBC: Dateline [r], Law & Order [r], Law & Order: CI [r] PBS: Local Programming TELE: Vas o No Vas [7], Seguro Y Urgente, Cinemundo del Sabado/Estreno UNIV: Sabado Gigante Sunday: 7-11p, March 18, 2007 ABC: AFC, EM: Home Edition, Desperate Housewives, Brothers and Sisters CBS: 60 Minutes, Amazing Race 11, Cold Case, Without a Trace CW: Pussy Cat Dolls, 7th Heaven, America's Next Top Model [r] FOX: The War at Home, The War at Home, The Simpsons, The Winner, Family Guy, The Winner [f ] ION: Kung Fu, Movie: Dog Day Afternoon, Kojak NBC: Dateline, Grease: You're the One That I Want, Deal or No Deal PBS: Local Programming, Nature TELE: Cine Millonario/Estreno, Cine Millonario/Estreno UNIV: La Hora Pico , Bailando por la Boda de mis Sueños  |
