Cynopsis: DIGITAL
02/02/09
Good morning, it’s Monday, February 2, 2009, and this is your first early morning digital briefing.
Here we go again. The Senate passed a second bill unanimously late on Thursday to delay the nation’s switch to digital television until June after the first legislative effort failed to pass the House. This time the Senate modified the bill to make the delay voluntary, meaning that stations that are ready to make the switch can still go ahead as planned. The House is expected to pass this version and President Obama has already said he will sign it into law. Nielsen has estimated that more than 6.5 million homes aren’t yet digital ready. Meanwhile more than 3 million Americans are still awaiting coupons to help defray the costs of converter boxes after the coupon program ran out of money. Proposed legislation sets aside another $650 million for more coupons.
This year’s Superbowl marked a big first in advertising: back-to-back spots promoting PepsiCo’s SoBe soft drink and Paramount/DreamWorks’ upcoming release Monsters vs. Aliens were broadcast in 3D. The spots utilized technology provided by 3ality Digital, which produced the live concert film U2 3D as well as the broadcasts of the first NFL game on Dec. 4 and the BCS Championship game on Jan. 8th in participating theaters nationwide. PepsiCo actually leaked the SoBe commercial on YouTube prior to the game, which featured an encore performance of the rhythmic SoBe lizards. NBC is also jumping on the 3D bandwagon, airing an episode of Chuck tonight at 8 pm in 3D that guest stars former Steelers great Jerome Bettis. PepsiCo distributed more than 125 million pairs of the free glasses required to view the content in 3D via retail online and retail outlets.
In a move to try and make the news more palatable to younger users, Tribune Interactive began linking its 8 newspaper and 23 local TV sites to the Uncle Jay Explains The News podcast, a weekly video news roundup produced by Jay Gilbert, the afternoon drive DJ on WEBN-FM in Cincinnati. (It’s ostensibly for children, but Jay lays on the irony thick.) The popular podcast began as a telecast on a local Cincinnati TV station back in 1995 and has attracted a healthy following on YouTube and Facebook.
Lifetime Networks has completed an affiliation agreement with BendBroadband that includes the continued carriage of Lifetime and the launch of Lifetime Movie Network (LMN), Lifetime Real Women (LRW), Lifetime HD, Lifetime Movie Network HD and VOD.
Video sharing site Metacafe touted phenomenal growth in 2008 reporting a year-over-year increase of 54% in worldwide users to 44 million overall uniques, citing comScore Media Mertrix data. (That’s even faster than YouTube’s growth, according to comScore, which grew by 44.7% from a year ago.) Key initiatives for 2008 included teaming with content partners to enhance short form entertainment categories including TV clips, movie trailers, music videos and sports highlights; and expanding usage of its Wikicafe system, which entreats users and producers to improve video search functionality by a adding more tags and title descriptions to entries’ metadata.
One of Facebook‘s main focuses for the coming year will be the study of “sentiment behavior,” – studying patterns of behavior among users in order to improve the way the platform distributes news and information, according to the AllFacebook blog. Click here to view Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance at the Davos World Economic Forum.
Forbes released its third annual Web Celeb List, recognizing the world’s 25 biggest and brightest stars in the internet and technology space. Most have reached fame by blogging and/or podcasting. Gossip blogger Perez Hilton topped the list for the second year in a row, followed by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and Digg co-founder Kevin Rose. Here are Forbes’ top ten:
The Top 10 Web Celebs if 2008
- Perez Hilton
- Michael Arrington
- Kevin Rose
- Frank Warren
- Cory Doctorow
- Pete Cashmore
- Beppe Grillo
- Heather Armstrong
- Guy Kawasaki
- Jason Calacanis
- source: Forbes
Social media marketing firm Vitrue announced its inaugural ranking of the top social brands for 2008 that are commanding attention and engagement within social communities online. The “Vitrue 100” ranking analyzes online conversations on a variety of social networking, blogging, micro-blogging, photo and video sharing sites. Apple was the big winner as the iPhone earned the #1 spot as the most social brand, the Apple brand itself ranked #3, the iPod came in at #7 and the Mac legacy brand earned the #16 spot.
The Vitrue 100 – The Top Social Brands of 2008
- iPhone
- CNN
3. Apple
- Disney
- Xbox
- Starbucks
- iPod
- MTV
- Sony
- Dell
Source: Virtue
Outtages occur all the time online (they were almost daily occurrences there for a while on Twitter,) but one doesn’t expect Google to go down. The world’s leading search engine malfunctioned for nearly an hour on Saturday morning as users were fed false warnings such as “this site may harm your computer” and linked to websites that did not exist. In a blog post, Google explained that the glitches were caused by human error. The company maintains a list of harmful sites compiled with StopBadware.org and accidently expanded all search queries to revert to a flagged malicious site.
Another class action pricing lawsuit was filed against Netflix and Wal-Mart alleging that the two companies have partnered to limit competition against one another, per Video Business. The suit claims that Netflix raised its monthly subscription price from $14.99 to $17.99 after reaching a truce with Wal-Mart, which had been offering its own monthly plan undercutting Netflix by $2.
Nintendo reported a drop in profit due to the strong yen (net profit fell 18% to $2.35 billion for the first 9 months of the fiscal year) and issued a dire forecast for the future. The company predicted that the worldwide recession would slacken demand for its industry-leading Wii console and likely lead to its first profit drop in five years. For the fiscal year ending March, Nintendo now expects to sell 26.5 million Wiis for the fiscal year ending March 31, down from an October forecast of 27.5 million in October. The company’s share price dropped more than 12% on the news.
The British government unveiled plans to spend heavily on broadband infrastructure to insure that every home in Britain has a broadband connection by 2012. The plan is to create a national broadband service using both fixed-line and wireless technologies. The government also proposed new ways to support media industries by cracking down on online piracy.
The proliferation of smartphones such as the iPhone and BlackBerry Curve have become a boon for the mobile gaming arena boosting mobile game downloaders by 17% year-on-year in Nov. 2008, per comScore. The number of smartphones deployed in the U.S. increased from 734,000 to 2.8 million during that time, an increase of 291%. Accordingly all mobile content categories posted strong growth during the last month, most notably downloaded application usage and access to social networking.
Mobile Usage Benchmark Study – 3 month ave. ending Nov. 2008 (US Mobile Subs.)
Activity Audience (000s) Reach % (of all users) % change vs. last mo.
Sent/received photos or videos 63,736 27.7 5.6
Received SMS ads 54,922 23.9 8.2
Accessed news/info via browser 41,894 18.2 9.7
Used email 38,370 16.7 6.3
Listened to music 21,006 9.1 8.5
Accessed social networking sites 20,668 9.0 14.2
Played downloaded game 20,468 8.9 6.1
Purchased ringtones 19,556 8.5 -1.1
Accessed downloaded application 18,337 8.0 15.8
Watched Video 7,523 3.3 5.6
Source: comScore M:Metrics
One of the more popular activities at SuperBowl parties across the nation yesterday was no doubt comparing which iPhone apps you’ve been using with friends. Well now you can do this online. Social discovery and cataloguing site LivingSocial, which helps you share your favorite books, movies, albums, restaurants, etc. with friends, has introduced a new iPhone app sharing feature. It allows you to keep track of the apps you and you’re friends have tried, reviewed and rated. You can even add your own rating or directly purchase apps of interest directly from friends’ lists. Check it out. After all, there are so many apps and so little time …
Later — Wayne
Wayne Karrfalt for Cynopsis: Digital
02.02.09
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