Cynopsis: DIGITAL

10/16/09

Good morning, it’s Friday, October 16, 2009, and this is your first early morning digital briefing.

Since the day it was released, the iPhone has created a micro-economy by enabling developers large and small to reach consumers directly by selling apps and ads against their offerings. Apple just expanded that economy considerably by allowing developers to add direct in-app purchasing to free apps – enabling them to sell content, subscriptions and digital services directly on the platform. (Until now the option was only available to paid apps, which has hampered the popularity of applications trying to charge for additional content.) The move should be a boon for the purchase of virtual goods such as weapons for gamers or dresses for dress-up apps; games account for more than 20% of the 85,000+ apps available on the platform. “This announcement changes the landscape of the App Store as we know it,” said Colin Smith, co-founder and vice president of Freeverse.
 

 
Google will launch its online bookstore “Google Edition” during the first half of next year with some 500,000 offerings, according to Reuters. Users will be able to buy e-books that can be read on a variety of e-book readers. Google’s revenue split with publishers is attractive; the company is keeping just 37% for direct-to-consumer sales and 10% for sales facilitated through other online retailers including Amazon.com. (Publishers keep 63% for direct sales and 45% for retailer-based sales.)
 
Major League Baseball Advanced Media continues to roll up some impressive stats, generating 350,000 live streams during each game of the playoffs so far, including 36,000 streams to iPhone and iPod Touch users, per paidcontent.org. MLBAM has sold about 1.5 million subscriptions overall this year – 1.1 million for live audio & video and some 420,000 apps.
 

 
In a push to promote its various last-ten-feet integrations, Netflix signed a deal with B-Movie kingpin Roger Corman to co-produce a series of horror themed webisodes scheduled to debut two days before Halloween. Splatter, co-produced by his wife Julie (Box Car Bertha) and directed by Joe Dante (Gremlins), is a revenge tale of an aging rocker Johnny Splatter.
 
PBS and NPR are inviting more than 300 community organizers, bloggers, technology developers and public media staffers to the first national PublicMediaCamp – an initiative to strengthen the relationship between public broadcasters and their communities through the development of collaborative projects, both online and offline. The national kickoff event will be held in Washington, D.C. over the weekend, followed by local events hosted by participating stations.
 

 
The online ad market may have turned the corner. Google reported a better-than-expected 27% increase in Q3 profit yesterday as net income rose to $1.64 billion, up from $1.29 billion a year ago. The consensus is that the bad economy actually boosted Google’s fortunes as advertisers turned to low cost search-based advertising to promote their products. Google’s share of the U.S. searches remained virtually flat in Sept., as the company retained a 64.9% of the market, according to ComScore.
 
Google also announced it is extending its popular Promoted Videos program to the Adwords platform. Promoted Videos were launched last year to enable publishers to bid for prime placements of their YouTube videos. The company later expanded the program to other areas including search and the Google AdSense network, boosting clicks by 500% since Jan., according to Google.
 
Note from Cyn:  We’ve been hearing the buzz for years on Advanced Advertising & iTV, and we’re wondering if it’s really beginning to happen, and where that will take us in the future.  We’re trying to get to the center of the conversation and hear all sides, and would like your help to do that.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a brand, an agency, television distributor or programmer – if you have a free moment, or need a distraction, we would appreciate your thoughts on this newest ad trend, by going here and anonymously answering the questions on a short survey on the topic.  We’ll share the info with you at our CTAM Luncheon in Denver later on this month.  Thanks for your participation!

 
The Interactive Advertising Bureau is calling on the FTC to withdraw the new rules it released governing gifts, payola and other benefits that bloggers receive from marketers. In an open letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg expresses concern that the rules would muzzle online media, while exempting offline media from equivalent scrutiny or penalty. The guidelines include revisions that require bloggers who receive free products to review to disclose that they received those products for free or be subject to civil enforcement penalties.
 
Samsung concluded additional integration deals with Amazon and Blockbuster, making content from Amazon’s Video On Demand service and movies from Blockbuster On Demand available directly on select Samsung sets via downloadable widget.
 

 
Online measurement service Trendrr has added to its new premium service, introducing a real-time Twitter Sentiment Analysis tool and a real-time Trend Search stand alone site tracking all graphs created by Trendrr users in the past year. Twitter Sentiment is determined by identifying the presence of key words indicative of feelings and using Bayesian probability to categorize each tweet as positive, negative or neutral. The following graph tracks overall sentiment on the platform over the past week.
 
ABC ranked as the top broadcast network website during the first month of the new fall season in terms of unique viewers, according to Nielsen, increasing its audience by 2.3 million viewers over the previous month. (What a difference new episodes make.) New SciFi drama FlashForward, which was already picked up for a full season, proved to be the most popular program on the site or any broadcast site, according to ABC, attracting 1.5 million uniques.
 
Broadcast Network Websites – Unique Viewers – Sept.’09
Name                                        Unique Viewers
ABC.com                                      5.5 million
CBS Television                              4.8 million
3 NBC.com                                   3.7 million
Cwtv.com                                     1.8 million
Fox Broadcasting                          1.7 million
Source: Nielsen Online, note: Hulu not included
 

 
Entering an already crowded category, TVGuide.com launched a new listings and entertainment news app for the iPhone, built with developer Roundbox. TV Guide Mobile provides zip code and cable provider-based listings and features customization features allowing you to save your favorite shows and networks.
 
Digital media publisher Glo has released an interactive Bible bringing the good book to life with over 2,300 high-res photos, 7,500 articles 463 virtual tours, 3 1/2 hours of HD video and 689 works of art. There’s even a soft rock soundtrack and an upbeat narrator. The Glo Bible was released for sale for Windows yesterday, with Windows Mobile, Mac and iPhone versions on the way.
 
CBS Mobile launched a new free app for the iPhone featuring breaking news, video and instant Twitter updates from CBS Reporters stationed around the world. The app features geotargeted weather info from AccuWeather and sources clips from various CBS news programs including CBS Evening News, CBS Early Show, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours. The app, developed with Treemo Labs and powered by Transpera, also allows users to share stories via Twitter, Digg and Delicious.
 
Dancing With The Stars fans can now keep up with the show through a new iPhone/iPod Touch app, now available for free on the App Store. Features include instant voting updates, photo galleries, dance primers and the interactive iJudge feature, mimicking DWTS’ scoring paddles.
 

 
Buffalo, NY-based ISP Technology provider Synacor upped Ted May to the position of SVP/Strategy and Business Affairs. He reports to Tim Peterman, COO.

A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE FROM CYNOPSIS MEDIA EVENTS

 
Blogger news clipping service Redlasso has returned from the grave backed with some legitimate licensing deals with local broadcast station groups including Fox Television Stations, Meredith, Journal, Gray Television, and Barrington Broadcasting. (The site went black last year after CBS, NBCU and Fox sued the company for unauthorized use of its clips.) Redlasso caught on among bloggers because of its ease of use and the interface hasn’t changed much; search for clips based on embedded metadata among several thematic categories: news, sports, politics, entertainment and finance. Redlasso founder Kevin O’Kane says the company is working on signing additional licensing deals and hiring its own sales staff to wrap additional inventory around licensed clips. Now that the company is going through the proper channels, it makes much more sense for stations to license their content to Redlasso and make money from their syndicated news clips than to sue – you can never have too many syndication channels. The company still enjoys brand name recognition and is well positioned to be the most popular video clip distribution point for amateur news hounds.
 

A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE FROM THE WALTER KAITZ FOUNDATION

Those words from Muhammad Ali capture the sense of purpose that has made diversity part of the business DNA for the 2009 Walter Kaitz Foundation Diversity Champions. Congratulations to Comcast Corp. and Turner Broadcasting System. Please join us at cable’s pre-eminent fundraising event to honor them, and to unite behind our industry’s commitment to diversity. With your support, we’re all champions.

Later — Wayne
 Wayne Karrfalt for Cynopsis: Digital
10.16.09

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