Cynopsis: DIGITAL
05/23/08
Good morning, it’s Friday, May 23, 2008, and this is your first early morning digital briefing, live from Vidfest, the Vancouver International Digital Festival.
Digital talent and executive types converge this week in beautiful Vancouver for Vidfest, the fifth annual digital media/gaming/marketing confab designed to incubate new projects and inspire the faithful. The festival returned to the spring this year after holding the event last fall concurrently with the Vancouver International Film Festival. Last year’s events proved less than complementary, according to Vidfest Creative Director Kirstin Richter. Holding it now brings gamers (here for the Game Summit) and digital marketers (gathering for Convergence 2008) into close and hopefully collaborative proximity. By happy coincidence a major gaming and anime installation is also running at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where Vidfest held its opening party on Wednesday night. Yesterday microblogging and ARG’s (Alternative Reality Games) proved to be hot topics of conversation. The latter are increasingly being used as marketing tools by companies like 42 Entertainment to create immersive experiences for communities around brands or properties. Check out their latest movie related ARG – the Why So Serious? campaign for WB’s newest Batman flick, The Dark Knight.
Big news from the ABC camp. The network, which led the industry in making programs available for iTunes and developed one of the best HD-quality video players on the net, is at last loosening its hold on its content to allow users to embed clips of its shows on blogs and personal profiles. ABC.com’s newly-enhanced video player, coming this fall, will also feature:
- True full screen viewing
- Enhanced navigation and video search capabilities allowing users to search for series graphically, alphabetically, by genre or popularity
- Content recommendation functions
- Closed captioning
- Parental ratings information for all full episode content
This year’s American Idol finale not only excelled in eyeballs this year – 32 million viewers, up 3% from last year - but winner David Cook was able to parlay his win into a sales coup on the iTunes platform. He had the top 4 selling songs as of last night. (The no longer available for free Gossip Girl is still the top selling TV show.) Also a record 97.5 million viewer votes were cast. Imagine how many would vote if non-AT&T subscribers could text in their choices?
AOL continued its international expansion efforts yesterday launching new video portals in Canada, India and Taiwan with content from the four major U.S. broadcast networks and more than 20 major cable network. The Canadians should be happy – the most common video related complaint I’ve heard this week is that they can’t access Hulu from here.
Activision unveiled Guitar Hero Word Tour adding drums, bass and vocals to the mix. The new version of the smash game allows competing teams of 4 to play each other using tracks from bands such as Linkin Park and Van Halen or by uploading their own music via the Wii, PS2, PS3 or Xbox 360 console.
Red hot microblogging platform Twitter raised $15 million in series B funding, pegging its valuation at about $80 million according to Gigaom. The company has raised a little over $20 million so far.
Joost expects to finally release the beta version of a web-based viewing interface this summer, reports Silicon Alley Insider. Users have been reluctant to download the client-based application to their desktops.
Brightcove invested $4.9 million into a new Japanese joint venture with ad giant Dentsu, J-Stream, Inc., Transcosmos, Inc. and Cyber Communications, Inc.
Increasingly legit P2P video platform BitTorrent completed an integration with software company Orb Networks allowing users to stream their music, movies or other media to their PCs, phones and other devices. Download the app here.
Here are some important specs just released from AT&T for those waiting for the 3G iPhone. The 3G network, ready now in 275 markets and in 350 markets by year end, will be capable of speeds of up to 1.4 Mbps down and 800 Kbps upstream. Not bad! Agreements with other carriers will also allow AT&T to offer 3G roaming in 60 countries.
USA Network launched a Facebook app around its new show In Plain Site. Users take the role of a U.S. Marshall as the game dynamically pulls public information from a friend’s profile and delivers it into the game as “clues” to see how quickly the player can guess the friend’s identity.
The pressure cooker was turned up at Yahoo yesterday when Edward Kozel resigned from the company’s board and Yahoo pushed back its annual shareholders meeting, originally scheduled for June 3.
Electronic Arts agreed to acquire Hands-On Mobile Korea, a leading Korean mobile game developer and publisher, as part of EA Asia’s expansion plans. Hands-On Mobile Korea will become EA Mobile Korea upon completion of the deal. The company is best known for the RPG Heroes Lore.
Google co-founder Larry Page traveled to Washington, D.C. yesterday to lobby Congress to allow unlicensed mobile devices to share digital TV white space with local TV stations, reports B&C. The NAB has been spending heavily trying to convince legislators that white space devices would interfere with over the air digital signals.
Although it’s early days, signs of an (eventually) thriving mobile advertising market are on the horizon, according to Paul Burns, Director IPTV, Mobile, Broadband at Sympatico MSN at Vidfest’s parallel event, Convergence 2008. To defend his position he ticked off:
Ten (Encouraging) Trends in Mobile Media
1. Better devices
2. Faster networks speeds
3. Cheaper mobile data plans
4. Increased mobile web traffic
5. Advertiser demand is increasing
6. Mobile media is ramping up significantly
7. Mobile advertising is now possible via text, display or video
8. Carriers are open to new revenue models
9. Mobile data plans are beginning to be subsidized by advertising (via data credits)
10. International markets are showing the way
Source: Sympatico MSN
The Facebook craze may finally be waning as traffic to the social networking portal declined 10% during April, according to the latest metrics from Nielsen Online. Traffic to the second ranked U.S. social network fell from 24.9 to 22.4 million unique visitors last month while professionally-themed LinkedIn continued its growth spurt climbing from 7.8M uniques in March to 8.6M in April.
Top 10 Social Networking Sites for April 2008 (U.S., Home and Work)
Site Apr-08 UA (000) Apr-07 UA (000) YOY Growth
Myspace.com 58,754 57,003 3%
Facebook 22,482 14,403 56%
Classmates Online 14,514 12,913 12%
LinkedIn 8,695 1,886 361%
Windows Live Spaces 7,869 8,349 -6%
AOL Hometown 6,362 8,497 -25%
Reunion.com 6,041 5,020 20%
Club Penguin 3,806 4,073 -7%
Buzznet.com 3,229 1,585 104%
Imeem 2,856 1,491 92%
Source: Nielsen Online
Thomas S. Warner has been elevated to Corporate VP/Domestic Syndication at Litton Entertainment. The company also added Kimi Serrano as SVP/Syndication and Digital Platforms and Carol Hayes as Senior Account Executive.
Feeling the need to strengthen its connection with digitally savvy gen Yr’s, the McDonalds’ interactive marketing team launched the UGC-powered alternative reality game The Lost Ring that has taken on a life of its own. Interactive banners around the world ask consumers Are you in? Trailers tease the audience with pieces of the backstory, which involves a young heroine who wakes up in a parallel universe not knowing who or where she is. What does she do? She sets up a blog to connect with other lost souls and together they begin to piece together clues about “Esperant,” a long lost universal global language that has the power to unite the human race at the summer Olympic Games in Beijing. The beauty of the campaign is that users are doing all the heavy lifting. Fans have launched wikis, video channels and Esperanto translation sites in more than 100 countries. Cleverly, the McDonald’s brand is barely noticeable. The depth and execution of the project is amazing.
Later — Wayne
Wayne Karrfalt for Cynopsis: Digital
05.23.08
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