Cynopsis: DIGITAL
02.14.13

Happy Valentine’s Day. Good morning. It’s Thursday, February 14, 2013, and this is your first early morning digital briefing.

CBS and Amazon have expanded their content licensing agreement to bring classic CBS and Showtime shows to Prime Instant Video. TV series available for the first time on Amazon’s video streaming service include America’s Next Top Model, Everybody Loves Raymond, Jericho, The L Word, Undercover Boss, and United States of Tara. Earlier this week, CBS and Amazon announced a deal through which new episodes of the network’s upcoming summer series, Under the Dome, will be available on Prime Instant Video four days after they air on TV. These deals, along with Amazon’s agreement with PBS to exclusively offer Downton Abbey, is setting Prime Instant Video up quite nicely to compete with the Netflix juggernaut.

In advance of the Third Annual Streamy Awards this Sunday night, dick clark productions and Tubefilter have unveiled the winners of several categories that won’t be individually awarded during the 6p live stream. Instead, they will be featured in a special on-camera presentation during the awards show. Among the pre-announced winners:

• Best Branded Entertainment Series: Leap Year
• Best Live Event: Red Bull Stratos
• Best Interactive Program: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries
• Best Guest Appearance: Ken Jeong, Burning Love
• Best Direction: Stewart Hendler, H+ The Digital Series

My Damn Channel has unveiled two new comedy series that are currently in production for MSN Entertainment. The Mark Malkoff Challenge will feature the comedian as he attempts “unusual feats of bravery” on the streets of NYC. The second series, Life: A Gamer’s Guide, features two friends and professional gamers who will demonstrate how “gaming techniques can apply to everyday life.” MSN has picked up both series for an initial slate of 13 episodes each. The Mark Malkoff Challenge will premiere on MSN Entertainment’s Comedy and Downtime channels, and Life: A Gamer’s Guide will premiere on its Comedy and Nerdcore channels. Both series will also be available on the My Damn Channel Comedy Network. “By announcing this deal with Microsoft – that will include licensing My Damn Channel originals to MSN as well as the production of new, original comedy – we’re expanding our list of premium partners,” said My Damn Channel Founder/CEO Rob Barnett.

IGN Entertainment is expanding to the Roku streaming platform with a new app that offers access to the company’s video game-related content, including original series, video reviews, game help videos, and live streaming coverage of events like the IGN Pro League and E3 conferences. The Roku app/channel joins IGN products for iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, YouTube, and Xbox Live. It will be available for free to all Roku users in the US, Canada, the UK, and Ireland.

House of Cards is the most popular TV title available for streaming on Netflix, according to Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos. Speaking at AllThingsD’s D: Dive Into Media conference this week, Sarandos refused to give actual numbers as to how the show is performing on the subscription streaming service, citing the fact that Netflix doesn’t have any commercials.

Amazon’s LoveFilm has expanded its deal with BBC Worldwide to bring more British TV shows to the streaming service. New content includes the first series of the Idris Elba-starring drama Luther; Ricky Gervais’ critically acclaimed comedies The Office and Extras; sci-fi drama Primeval; and crime drama Jonathan Creek; as well as reality shows like Top Gear. The streaming service will also host the five original children’s TV pilots and six original comedy pilots greenlit by Amazon Studios. Subscribers in the UK and Germany will be able to participate in the “viewer response period,” which will help determine which of the 11 shows Amazon Studios will put into full-season production.

A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE FROM THE STREAMY AWARDS

Location-based mobile ad network Verve Mobile has raised $14 million in a Series C financing round led by Nokia Growth Partners. New investor Qualcomm Ventures and Series B lead investor BlueRun Ventures also participated in the round. The start-up says it will use the new funds to further develop and expand its proprietary mobile ad and publishing products, as well as to grow its marketing and sales capabilities.

Ericsson plans to launch a new “unified” content delivery network (CDN) solution at Mobile World Congress. The company says this new solution, Ericsson Media Delivery Network, is designed to unite the delivery of managed and unmanaged video content over fixed and mobile networks. The solution’s features include the ability to deliver on-demand and linear content; cache over-the-top (OTT) content in order for content providers to offer better video quality; and optimize traffic over multiple CDNs via a single CDN selection technology.

While worldwide mobile phone sales declined 1.7% from 2011 to 2012 (totaling 1.75 billion units), smartphone sales continued to witness strong growth, according to Gartner. In Q4 2012 alone, worldwide smartphone sales broke records with 207.7 million units sold, up 38.3% from Q4 2011. Looking ahead, Gartner expects smartphone sales to reach close to 1 billion units in 2013, driving overall mobile phone sales to an estimated 1.9 billion units. In terms of smartphone operating systems (OS), the Android/iOS duopoly continues unabated. Android captured 69.7% of the worldwide smartphone OS market in Q4 2012, up from 51.3% in Q4 2011. Apple’s iOS, which ranked second, saw its market share drop from 23.6% in Q4 2011 to 20.9% in Q4 2012.
Why it Matters: That’s still a commanding number when you consider that third-place BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion) only accounted for 3.5% of the smartphone OS market in Q4 2012. Microsoft saw a slight increase in its OS market share, jumping from 1.8% in Q4 2011 to 3.0% in Q4 2012.

Global content brands could have generated an additional $2.16 billion in 2012 revenue if they had improved the viewer experience, according to video stream optimization company Conviva. In 2012, roughly 60% of all video streams experienced “quality degradations.” These include 20.6% of streams that were impacted by buffering; 19.5% of streams that were impacted by slow video start-up time; and 40% of streams that were impacted by low-resolution pictures due to low bitrates. This directly influences viewer desire to engage with content, as they’re becoming less tolerant of poor video quality, according to Conviva. Today, a 1% increase in the amount of time spent buffering during VOD content leads to an eight-minute loss in viewing time. In 2011, that same 1% increase led to a three-minute loss in viewing time.
Why it Matters: The company says if content companies don’t invest more in higher video quality, they could miss out on as much as $20 billion in revenue through 2017.

Danny Fishman, most recently the President of the Digital Broadcasting Group, is joining the Believe Entertainment Group (BE) as Partner. BE is the NY-based digital studio behind The LeBrons, an animated series featuring the NBA superstar that was distributed on YouTube and on LeBron James’ official website and social media accounts. Last year, the company announced plans to launch EpicEDM, a new original video series about electronic dance music (EDM) artists that would live entirely on Twitter.

Kid Glove, a multiplatform entertainment company focusing on children’s programming, is expanding to Brazil with new offices in Sao Paulo. The new office will serve to bring Brazilian producers and animators together and to create partnerships throughout the global entertainment industry. Brenda Wooding, Founder and President of Kid Glove, will head the new operations in Sao Paulo.

A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE

Nokia Music and the Sundance Channel have launched a new documentary project called New American Noise, which explores new underground music and artists today in six US cities — New York, LA, New Orleans, Portland, Detroit, and Atlanta. Each city is paired with a documentary short that highlights diverse different genres, from the indie scene in Portland to alternative rap culture in New York City. Words can’t do this project justice, but it’s really cool.

A CYNOPSIS MESSAGE

Later – Sahil
Sahil Patel, Associate Editor for Cynopsis Digital
02.14.13

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