Cynopsis: DIGITAL
02/19/09
Good morning, it’s Thursday, February 19, 2009, and this is your first early morning digital briefing.
If there’s one thing smartphones have taught us it’s that you can never have enough speed in your network. Despite the severe economic downturn Verizon Wireless announced it is pushing full steam ahead with plans to launch a 4G network in 2010 with vendor partners LM Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent. Verizon announced it is currently in Long Term Evolution (LTE) field trials in the U.S., demonstrating download rates of 50-60 MB/second by utilizing the bandwidth acquired in the FCC 700 MHz spectrum auction. European trials are also underway in a joint venture with Vodafone.
~ MULTIPLATFORM CONTENT NEWS ~
Mobile content aggregator MobiTV announced a milestone, surpassing 6 million subscribers and adding 1 million subs alone from the beginning of Dec. as the proliferation of 3G-powered smartphones takes off. The company also added the iPhone to the list of 350 devices it supports. MobiTV’s content offerings include primetime shows from NBC and ABC and more than 40 channels of content, including ESPN, Disney, CNBC and MSNBC.
Disney-ABC’s Oscar.com unveiled a new original web series “Road to the Oscars,” featuring Bachelor and Bachelorette host Chris Harrison. The series, which will feature Oscar news, exclusive interviews and behind the scenes footage, consists of nine episodes with a new show premiering everyday through Monday, February 23. The site also launched its “Oscars Designer Challenge: Behind the Dress” competition hosted by “Project Runway” alum/ fashion designer Nick Verreos.
Forbes.com introduced a new section in its Technology Channel called Breakthroughs, exploring emerging ideas at the intersection of science and technology.
~ INNOVATORS & START-UPS ~
The customer is always right. Following vociferous protests from users, Facebook pulled an about face on its new terms of service agreement that reserved the rights to user-submitted content even after it was pulled from the site. “Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago,” stated a posting on the Facebook homepage. “Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.” To educate members further and solicit more comments, Facebook created a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities administrated by 4 senior level executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself.
NY-based web producer For Your Imagination announced a major marketing deal with Warner Bros. theatrical arm to promote the upcoming film adaption of the limited run comic The Watchmen. As part of the 6-figure deal FYI will integrate the movie into the storylines of a quartet of shows including Abigail’s Teen Diary, The Retributionists, HungrymanTV’s Phistophicles and the perfectly-themed Kyle Piccolo: Comic Shop Therapist. The deal even includes utilizing FYI’s interactive video player featured on AxisofComedy.tv to entice viewers to click on Easter Eggs and Watchman references as part of a fan contest.
A new interactive site dubbed Fashionology.com launched yesterday as a web extension to a hands-on shop in Beverly Hills that allows tweens to design and make their own clothing. Building on tools popularized by dress up sites, Fashionology uses animated avatars to allow young users to play around with designs, share and borrow ideas with others and order finished products.
Borrowing a concept popularized by Twitpic, UK-based video portal World TV launched a new embeddable Twitter client enabling users to embed video clips on the platform to share clips and promote their own work. The new functionality integrates with WorldTV’s tools for finding and sharing video clips from a range of supported sites including YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo and Blip.TV. World TV also announced a new partnership with India’s lifestyle channel ZoomTV to utilize its content management system to power an online version of the channel.
Online video discovery and search portal OVGuide.com received $5 million in venture capital funding from Baroda Ventures LLC and announced that it turned its first month of profit in January 2009. OV Guide utilized a combination of video search tools and editorial input to index and rank online video from thousands of sites such as South Park Studios, theWB.com, Fancast, ESPN, Funny or Die and Hulu.
~ DIGITAL ADVERTISING ~
Despite the well publicized failure of Bud.tv, sneaker maker Adidas is rolling out its own video portal this week to promote its brands the viral video way, per Adweek. The portal began with basketball page featuring celebrity endorsements from NBA stars such as Dwight Howard, but plans are to ramp up content to include hundreds of embeddable videos, photos and integrations with social networking sites. The portal is the brainchild of EVB, San Francisco.
~ TECHNOLOGY DEALS, MERGERS AND SKIRMISHES ~
The digital transition for the 421 stations that switched early on Tuesday seemed to go off without too many hitches, apart from some confusion from consumers about how to hook up their converter boxes or how to operate the boxes’ “scan” function to pull in signals. Call volume into DTV call centers, where agents are trained to walk consumers though the process, peaked at 20,673 calls on Monday, about 37% higher than normal according to the FCC. About 220 stations made the transition before Tuesday, for a total of 641 stations having made the transition by the end of Tuesday, or 36% of the full-power stations nationwide. Yet more than 5 million U.S. households or 4.4% of all homes are not ready for the upcoming transition to all-digital broadcasting, according to Nielsen. This is an improvement of more than 800,000 homes since Nielsen last reported readiness status at the beginning of February, but some communities such as the Albuquerque – Santa Fe market (in which nearly 12% of the homes are unprepared) still have a long way to go.
Hampered by the poor economy, Comcast lost 233,000 basic cable subscribers and added only 247,000 new digital subscribers despite a huge promotional push that called attention to the digital transition. The company also added a worse-than-expected 184,000 broadband subscribers to bring its broadband customer base to 14.9 million subscribers, a hair behind U.S. leader AT&T’s 15.1 million.
RealNetworks won a contract to power Verizon Wireless’ V Cast video streaming service previously serviced by Comcast’s thePlatform.
~ TRENDS, RESEARCH, ETC. ~
Nickelodeon‘s portfolio of sites claimed the top spot in comScore’s Family & Lifestyle category in Jan., posting a 13% gain in unique visitors (28.7 million) over a year ago. The group, which includes Nick.com; NickJr.com; The-N.com; Neopets; Shockwave; AddictingGames; ParentsConnect and NOGGIN.com; also ranked first in video streams among kids brands according to Nielsen’s VideoCensus. Nickelodeon Kids and Family Group was fifth among the top brands overall by video streams, behind only YouTube, Yahoo, Hulu and Fox Interactive Media. It delivered 204 million streams and 6.3 million unique video viewers.
Young, multicultural consumers are on the leading edge, embracing new media platforms; especially video-enabled handled devices, according to a new Horowitz Associates‘ Broadband Content and Services 2008 report. The study found that nearly nine in ten (86%) of 15 to 17 year-old Internet users have a handheld device, whether it is a cell phone (69%), an iPod or other MP3 player (66%), a PSP (31%) or a Smartphone (12%). One quarter (26%) of 15 to 17 year-old users pay for internet access on their cell phone, compared to 11% of 35 to 49 year-old users. Similarly, one quarter (24%) of 15 to 17 year-old Internet users watch video on their handheld devices on a monthly basis.
~ EXECUTIVE MOVES ~
Paul Levine has been appointed to lead interactive content and ad strategy at Current TV as President of New Media. He will be based in Current’s San Francisco headquarters and take on the role previously held by Joanna Drake Earl, who was recently upped to COO. Paul most recently served as VP/Marketing at AdBrite.
Titan Worldwide has promoted technology veteran Rob Marlow to the newly created position of SVP and Worldwide Chief Information Officer. Based in Titan’s New York headquarters, Rob will spearhead Titan’s digital inventory expansion as well as lead all aspects of internal information systems on a global scale, coordinate within various business units and interface with vendors.
McCann Worldgroup San Francisco has upped Marc Ruxin to EVP, Chief Innovation Officer, and named Alistair Duff, previously with McCann Worldgroup South Africa, as SVP, Group Planning Director.
Local media website hosting solution Broadcast Interactive Media announced that Christopher R. Kelly of Fortuna Investments has taken a minority equity stake in BIM and will join the company’s Advisory Board.
~ WEBSITE OF THE DAY ~
Hulu has begun to draw lines in the sand by officially pulling its NBC and News Corp. content from cross platform media center Boxee and from CBS’s newly-rebranded rival premium video portal TV.com, first noticed by CBS’ CNET. TV.com got off to a promising start in Jan. posting a 263% increase in unique viewers, 1261% increase in streams, and 4435% increase in minutes spent, according to Nielsen VideoCensus. But the site will continue to face an uphill battle to match the performance of Hulu, particularly with two less studios to draw content from. Boxee, which as been catching on quickly with the tech-savvy crowd as a convenient way to port online video content to the TV via an integration with Apple TV, will also suffer from the loss of Hulu content – the lure for many to sign up for the free service. For Hulu these “hard things,” in the words of CEO Jason Kilar, come with the territory given its major studio ownership. NBCU and Fox must protect its core products – primetime shows supported by primetime CPMs – and tools like Boxee, as cool as they are, pull the rug right out from under the current business model, given today’s minuscule online video ad revenues. One can only hope that such fights are temporary skirmishes, however. These companies have become immensely popular with their users because the deliver great experiences in elegant ways and that’s what viewers ultimately want.
Later — Wayne
Wayne Karrfalt for Cynopsis: Digital
02.19.09
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