CYNOPSISDIGITAL
01.06.16

Good morning. It’s Wednesday January 6, 2016, and this is your first early morning digital briefing.

 
First TBS jumped on the eSports bandwagon. Turns out Activision Blizzard was next in line. The gaming giant, known for titles such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, has acquired most of the business assets of Major League Gaming. MLG, known for creating and streaming competitive gaming events, will continue to operate the platforms MLG.tv, MLG Pro Circuit, and the popular online gaming tournament system GameBattles. Activision Blizzard spent $46 million on the purchase. Not one to ground expectations, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick had this to say about the acquisition: “Our acquisition of Major League Gaming’s business furthers our plans to create the ESPN of e-Sports.”
 
DreamWorks works the dreams, and Netflix reaps the benefits. The companies are doubling down on their partnership: Thanks to a new multiyear deal, the streaming giant will now be the global home (outside of China) to several new DreamWorks Animation-produced original series, including Trollhunter, a children’s series from Guillermo del Toro, and Voltron: Defender of the Universe, a reimagining of the ‘80s series of the same name. Netflix plans to launch those and other DreamWorks produced series as early as this year. Meanwhile, the deal also grants Netflix the rights to current DreamWorks Animation originals that are in play in Netflix markets, and extends Netflix’s second window rights to several other series. As if that weren’t enough, the deal grants Netflix the streaming rights to the entire DreamWorks Animation feature film library.

 
According to a report from Digiday, Snapchat is working to design an API (application programming interface) that will make it easier for partners to buy ads. Digiday’s sources say that Snapchat has been reaching out to multiple ad tech companies and agencies, asking them what they would need from the new ad technology platform. The system could potentially be ready for testing by as early as this spring.     
 
Think of it as rabbit ears for the digital generation. Just in time for CES, the DVR-maker Nuvyyo is set to announce that its Tablo DVR app is gaining Apple TV support. The Tablo DVR device has been around for a while; it uses an over-the-air antenna to record broadcast programs and stream them to digital devices. And that means free recorded network programming, cable subscription or no. (Well, “free” once you’ve paid $200 for the device.) Tablo apps already exist for Chromecast, Roku, Fire TV, and Android TV. Tablo has also announced a new app for LG’s webOS smart TVs.
 
Tolstoy can finally tweet his “War and Peace” sequel. According to a report from Re/Code, Twitter is currently testing a new 10,000-character limit for tweets, a slight increase over the current 140-character limit. (It is, however, the same character limit that Twitter uses for its Direct Messages product.) For now, Twitter insiders are calling the new product Beyond 140. On users’ timelines, tweets would continue to display only 140 characters. But clicking a call-to-action button would allow users to view the remainder of a tweet. Twitter declined to publicly comment on the report.
 
 

 
It seems that Go90 is still hungry for new content. Verizon’s streaming service will now be home to The Dunk League, a new reality series from sports-oriented multi-channel network Whistle Sports.  The series, which pits high-flying slam-dunk artists against each other in a competition for a cash grand prize, debuts today.
 
GroupM subsidiary Medialets has partnered with analytics company Millward Brown Digital. Medialets, the only Media Rating Council-accredited mobile ad server, will now integrate its ad trafficking platform with MBD’s network. “Medialets can do full view-through attribution and full click-through attribution in mobile,” explained Medialets CEO Richy Glassberg in a phone conversation with Cynopsis Digital. “We can identify a device, and we can then share that information with our partners. In the case of Millward Brown, if we’re the ad server, we can then share with them, in a privacy-friendly way, that a device saw an ad. And we can pass that to the panel that Milward Brown runs, and make mobile brand studies easier for marketers.”
 
Internet-based TV provider FilmOn TV Networks announced the launch of the Om Nom Channel, devoted to programming based on Cut the Rope, a game series from mobile game developer Zeptolab. It’s available on FilmOn.com.  
 
 

 
Twitter is taking a stab at interactive advertising, according to a new blog post. The company’s new conversational ads, now available for beta testing, allow marketers to tweet out advertisements that come equipped with a call-to-action button. Users can then change the original marketing copy into a more personalized message.  (If you want to turn “What’s your favorite @Starbucks beverage?” into “I loves me some #caramelFrapuccinos,” have at it.) As Twitter points out in its post, the new feature is meant to help marketers convert paid engagement into organic engagement, without having to pay extra for the latter.

 A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE

What does it mean to win a Sports Media Award?
Here are just some of the benefits: Crystal award trophy, recognition at an awards breakfast on April 21 in New York, editorial coverage in Cynopsis Sports eNewsletter, editorial coverage on Cynopsis.com, award logo to use for marketing on your site, and most importantly, winning a Sports Media Award positions your program & your people as industry leaders.

 
Ever wanted to know what it feels like to have your trusted colleagues abandon you on a barren planet? You’re in luck! At CES 2016, Twentieth Century Fox will debut The Martian VR Experience, a 20-minute virtual reality journey to the Red Planet, designed to let users face challenges similar to those faced by Matt Damon’s character in 2015’s The Martian. The experience will be reserved for journos at CES, but later this year, it will debut on the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and the Playstation VR.
 
Last year, HTC and Valve surprised more than a few people when they delayed the release of their Vive VR headset, which was supposed to launch by late 2015. But apparently there were just to many enhancements to work on – and thanks to some CES demos, we know what they were. Most prominently, the company has added a forward-facing camera to the headset, which can integrate views of a user’s surroundings into virtual reality experiences. (Among other things, the feature might just prevent you from walking into a wall.) The two companies have promised to give away 7,000 units of the Vive Pre, a pre-release prototype, to developers and creatives this month.

 
JW Player, the maker of the video player of the same name, has had a pretty good run lately. The company announced that it has doubled revenue and added over 4,500 new software-as-a-service customers over the last year, reached over one billion unique viewers in a single month, and raised $20 million in Series D funding. That brings its total financing to $45.6 million.

 
Social media analytics company ListenFirst Media aimed its Television Interest (TVI) Rating (TM) at the entirety of 2015.  A standardized measurement of the most buzzed-about TV programs on linear TV and streaming services, TVI is a complement to ListenFirst’s other syndicated data products (such as the ListenFirst Digital Audience Rating – TV). The metrics included in the rating are the purest form of showing interest digitally, since they’re organic actions that are largely unaffected by paid media. Programs that surface on the TVI leaderboards are the most hashtagged on Facebook, Google+, and Tumblr, as well as most searched for on Wikipedia (used as a proxy for organic search volume). Here are last year’s streaming leaders:

Streaming Series (1/1/2015 – 12/31/2015)
 
 
 
Source: ListenFirst. The TVI Rating aggregates metrics that measure organically generated activity by fans of the TV show. The metric includes total volume of official hashtag mentions on Facebook, Google+, and Tumblr, along with Wikipedia page views (as a proxy for organic search volume) for a show as a percentage of the total volume of the same activities for all shows.
 
 

 
Smosh will debut Part Timers, its new original web series, on its YouTube channel January 11. The series takes place at a Chuck E. Cheese-like establishment. And judging by the show’s new trailer, Pork E. Pines is a far less pleasant place to be than its real-life counterpart. You can check the trailer out here.

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