Cynopsis: DIGITAL

08/28/09

Good morning, it’s Friday, August 28, 2009, and this is your first early morning digital briefing.
 
Following the deployment of Comcast’s Online On Demand trial, Time Warner Cable is putting together a TV Everywhere test of its own with a dozen programming partners to stream TV programs on the web to paying subscribers. Networks participating in the trial include SyFy (the first NBCU network to participate in such a test,) TNT, AMC, HBO, Discovery, CBS, WEtv and BBC America. Time Warner Cable’s trial will also involve a sample of about 5,000 homes in select U.S. markets.

A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE WESTDOC

 
As the company’s rivals scramble to level the playing field, Google introduced a new format for its public domain books – the same EPUB format Sony is now embracing. Starting this week users can download over one million public domain books from Google Books in the open source standard. The books may end up actually helping Sony’s cause, as Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader doesn’t natively support the XML-based EPUB format.
 
The Seattle Times is partnering with a number of local neighborhood blogs “staffed by professionals who share The Times’ journalistic values,” in a new interactive journalism project. Blogs including the West Seattle Blog, Next Door Media, Capitol Hill Seattle and the Rainier Valley Post will share tips and work together on stories that will appear on both the local blogs and SeattleTimes.com. Four other ventures are participating in the pilot project nationally, made possible by a grant from J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism: The Miami Herald, The Charlotte Observer, the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times and TucsonCitizen.com.
 

 
As the deadline to purchase file sharing site The Pirate Bay approaches, prospective buyer Global Gaming Factory X issued a market update claiming that a number of investors in the consortium it has cobbled together are not honoring their commitment to back the venture. Global Gaming CEO Hans Pandeya is trying to rescue the deal with a back up plan, asking current shareholders to offer 150 million shares of the company as security, per paidcontent.org.
 

 
Google plans to share the wealth and open up AdSense to other advertising networks, potentially providing the internet’s dominate ad network with access to display ads flowing through countless other channels, per ClickZ. Google will follow an auction model, with ad networks bidding to have their ads appear on AdSense partner sites.
 
Online media verification start-up DoubleVerify announced that Universal McCann will use its technology to increase the accountability and transparency of selected online campaigns launched on behalf of its clients.
 

 
A consortium of European television industry players launched new pan-European initiative aimed at harmonizing the broadcast and broadband delivery of news, information and entertainment via televisions and broadband-connected set-tops. The Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV or HbbTV initiative is based on elements of existing standards and web technologies including OIPF (Open IPTV Forum), CEA, DVB and W3C. The consortium includes broadcasters (Canal+, France Televisions, and TF1, German research institute Institut fur Rundfunktechnik) satellite operator SES ASTRA, and software and media solutions providers (ANT and OpenTV.)
 

 
Summer may mean lower TV ratings but online video viewing continued to rise this summer as video consumption reached another all-time high in July, according to ComScore. Measured U.S. video properties racked up a 8.9 billion views overall, with YouTube accounting for about 42% of the total as YouTube visitors watched an average of 74 videos each during the month. The average online video viewer watched a record 500 minutes of video, or 8.3 hours. Hulu also reached a personal best with 457 million total video views. The average Hulu viewer watched 12.0 videos, totaling 1 hour and 13 minutes of videos per viewer.
 
Top U.S. Online Video Content Properties* by Videos Viewed – July 2009
 
Property                   Videos             Share (%) of
                                (000)                 Videos
Total Internet         21,371,342              100.0
Google Sites            8,953,948                41.9
Viacom Digital            812,343                  3.8
Microsoft Sites           630,631                  3.0
Fox Interactive Media 558,500                  2.6
Hulu                          457,010                 2.1
Turner Network          390,848                1.8
Yahoo! Sites              374,746                 1.8
Disney Online             169,756                0.8
CBS Interactive           150,165               0.7
ABC Television            137,800               0.6
Source: comScore Video Metrix
 
Top U.S. Online Video Content Properties by Unique Viewers – July 2009
Source: comScore Video Metrix
Property                Unique Viewers (000)      Ave. Videos per Viewer
Total Internet                       158,384                        134.9
Google Sites                         120,852                         74.1
Microsoft Sites                       64,540                           9.8
Fox Interactive Media             51,830                         10.8
Yahoo! Sites                          47,363                           7.9
Viacom Digital                       42,415                         19.2
Hulu                                     38,132                         12.0
Turner Network                     35,676                         11.0
CBS Interactive                     30,736                           4.9
AOL LLC                                24,161                           5.2
FACEBOOK.COM                    20,517                           4.0
 
Although measurement remains a challenge and many brand marketers are still sitting on the sidelines, social media marketing has crossed over into the mass adoption stage, according to a broad survey of some 1,450 marketers from Equation Research:

• The adoption of social media is well past critical mass–with nearly two thirds of brand marketers (59%) currently implementing social media in their marketing plans
• Facebook, Twitter, online video and blogs are the 4 most popular social media tools. Yet none of these are being used in isolation–on average, there are 5 to 7 other social media tools being either actively used or dabbled with by marketers at the same time
• While traditional media channels account for the largest proportion of marketing spend; Online, Search and Social Media as a group are approximately a third of all current spend. For smaller companies this increased to over 40%
• Looking towards 2010, brand marketers forecast a shift in spend towards digital tactics, feeling the areas most likely to increase will be Social Media (60%), Online Advertising (53%), Search Engine Advertising (49%) and Email Marketing (41%)
• While current adoption of Mobile Marketing is low (only 11% of brand and agency marketers had it as a line item), there is interest in experimentation
• Online ad testing is the type of research most likely to increase in the near future, with a third of marketers planning to spend more in this area

 
iPhone users aren’t the only ones horsing around. For the first time ever, BlackBerry displaced Windows Mobile to become the dominant platform within the Handango smartphone content catalog, comprised of News, Media, Education, Travel, PIM and plenty of games. Games represented 25% of all apps sold in the Handango category, up 6% from 2008, and BlackBerry apps constituted 44% of all apps sold by Handango in the first half of 2009, up from its 31% share in 2008. During the first half of 2009, Handango says it added 550 content partners to its network with almost 7,000 new applications across all categories.
The top-five best-selling applications for BlackBerry January-June 2009 were:
  1. Ringtone Megaplex   
  2. Alltel TV  
  3. Aces Texas Hold’em – No Limit
  4. Aces Solitaire Pack  
  5. The Weather Channel
 

 
Following Sony’s price-cut of the PS3, Microsoft announced it too was lowering the price of two Xbox 360 models. Starting today, the Xbox 360 Elite, featuring broadband connectivity and a 120 gig hard drive, will retail for $300 – a $100 price cut. Meanwhile the mid-range Xbox 360 Pro model, in the process of being phased out, will drop from $300 to $250. The price of the Arcade model, which ships without a hard drive, will remain at $200.
 
Apple hopes to finally launch the iPhone in China as negotiations with state-owned carrier China Unicom appear to nearing a conclusion, per the WSJ. Asia has been one region the iPhone has not sold well, accounting for only 7% of overall sales, according to IDC. (For instance, it hasn’t exactly been a hit in Japan, where it’s double the size of most handsets.)
 
Comcast continues to roll out its Universal Caller ID service, adding the San Francisco Bay area and Monterey/Salinas to its footprint. Subscribers who take all three triple play services can utilize the service to view incoming caller info from their TV screens or computers.

A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE

 
One of the great things about live video blogging platform UStreamTV is that it’s a smorgasbord of content – you inevitably go looking for something then stumble upon something completely unexpected and, if you’re lucky, useful. I was catching up on a few of my favorite tech shows when I noticed Chad Ochocinco’s stream on Wednesday night. The Bengals’ larger than life wideout used UStream to announce a contest for his Twitter followers. To circumnavigate the NFL’s no-Tweeting-during-games edict, number 85 will fly out one follower each week to the Bengals’ games to learn a set of hand signals so that he can communicate to this faithful through Twitter without actually Tweeting himself. Why is this useful, you ask? Well, if like yours truly, you were thinking of drafting Chad for your fantasy football team, then you’ll likely want to rethink that decision. If the man is more focused on Tweet signals that the routes he’s supposed to be running, he’s not likely to have a good season.
 
Later — Wayne
 Wayne Karrfalt for Cynopsis: Digital
08.28.09

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