Search Results
Vid-Biz: Hulu Premium, KickApps, Project Canvas
Disney: “No Decisions Have Been Made” on Hulu Premium; Disney EVP Kevin Mayer says “no decisions have been made” about what kind of pay models and services Hulu is going to use, or when those will roll out. (MediaMemo)
KickApps Lands NBC for Social Video Sites; the companies struck a licensing deal that enables all of NBCU’s entertainment properties to use KickApps’ social software solution, expanding a prior relationship that focused primarily on NBC’s local media properties. (VideoNuze)
TV Makers, Retailers Voice Project Canvas Concerns; The Digital TV Group, which represents more than 100 companies including Samsung, Sony, Pace and Dixons, has expressed concern that Project Canvas is failing in its core promise to create an open, industry-wide technology standard for the service. (paidContent:UK)
Comcast To Launch Xfinity Rebranding Campaign; starting next week, Comcast will begin rolling out the new Xfinity brand — Xfinity TV, Xfinity Internet and Xfinity Voice — to customers in 11 markets. (Multichannel News)
FreeWheel Signs Up MLB As Its Newest Customer; the video ad firm now serves almost 2 billion video ads per month, doubling its volume since November 2009, and has added Major League Baseball Advanced Media to its customer roster. (VideoNuze)
YouTube Could Get Hit With Italian Broadcaster Rules; under a new decree, video sites like Google’s YouTube could be required to get government permission to host copyrighted video content, and they would also be required to get broadcasting licenses. (paidContent:UK)
EPIX Lands Cable Deal With Charter Communications; the movie and entertainment streaming network that works across your TV and computer landed its fourth cable deal, following up on other deals struck with Cox Communications and Mediacom Communications. (TechCrunch)
Battle of the Digital Media Players; Davis Freeburg takes a look at a few of the most popular software media players (and video destinations) to determine which one may be best for consumers. (Zatz Not Funny!)
Prop 8’s Latest Court Battle to Get YouTube Broadcast
Next week, a lawsuit challenging 2008’s Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in the state of California, goes to trial in San Francisco court, and yesterday, a key preliminary issue of the case was resolved in an unprecedented and very Silicon Valley fashion. After being presented with requests from the prosecution that cameras be allowed to broadcast the trial live, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco ruled that the trial would be filmed for public consumption — not, however, for television broadcast, but for distribution on YouTube.
The delayed online broadcast of Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger et al will be the first of a recently-approved pilot program for airing footage from non-jury civil trials, and true to the nature of compromise, neither side of the dispute is happy about the decision. Read more of this story
Web Series Branding Opps to Be Auctioned Off, Starting at $50,000
Product placement has been key to the production of many web series recently, but it’s about to hit a new level. Brand In Entertainment, a Los Angeles firm specializing in partnering brands with content, will be holding its first-ever auction Jan. 20 at Christie’s in New York for companies interested in inserting their brands into a number of major media properties, including the upcoming Keanu Reeves movie Henry’s Crime and the Showtime series Weeds.
And included in the stable of content being offered are new seasons of five web series: Streamy-nominated post-apocalyptic drama After Judgment, Beverly Hills 90210 producer Charles Rosin’s Showbizzle, “broadband motion picture” Who Shot Mamba, Wall Street comedy series Hedge Fund, and The Fine Brothers’ My Profile Story (only the pilot of which was produced by Atom.com). (Blake Calhoun’s Pink was originally one of the web series to be included, but its deal with production company Generate prevents it from seeking third-party sponsorship deals. According to a Generate rep, Pink and Blake Calhoun
are not contractually prohibited from seeking third-party deals, but
the show was prematurely submitted for the auction and withdrawn per
Generate’s request)
The minimum bid at the auction will be $50,000, to be advanced in $20,000 increments, which may seem trivial to a brand getting a shot at Keanu drinking its beer or wearing its apparel, but is a significant amount of money in the web series world, where complete series are often produced on a professional level with much less of a budget. Read more of this story
12 Second Cocktails Hits the (Sweet) Spot
- Editor rating:
When you think about it, most how-to cocktail-mixing videos waste a lot of time. They start out by telling you what glassware you’ll need, as well well what equipment, liquors and mixers. But it’s a video. I don’t need somebody to tell me I’ll need a martini glass; I can see it right there. Nor do I need a host to hold up a bottle of vermouth to the camera. Just say, “Add an ounce of vermouth,” and I’m set.
Each 12 Second Cocktails vid, on the other hand, is essentially a recipe come to life. As the cocktail is being made, you don’t even see the bartender’s face – just a couple of skilled hands mixing, a confident voice narrating, some quick cuts and sped-up film so it’s not the Watch the Cocktail Shaker show, and bam – drink’s ready.
“Well, OK then,” you say. “What’s so great here that I can’t get from just reading the recipe?” The answer lies in this confession: Each episode of 12 Second Cocktails is actually about 30 seconds long. The first half consists of a mixing demo, while the second half details a related tip from the bartender. In one episode, for example, first you get a demo of a Manhattan — garnished with a maraschino cherry, then you get a tip that brandied cherries are actually easy to make and a tastier addition to your drink. The Negroni lesson is followed by the inside scoop that sweet vermouth needs to be kept chilled. And so on. The end result is that after each episode, you feel like you’ve gone to mini-bartending school, which makes the series a perfect fit for Hungry Nation, whose target demo is non-pro foodies who like to know their stuff.
Sure, the show lacks any bells or whistles. While a few episodes take place in an actual bar, many are hosted from what looks like someone’s apartment kitchen. But that’s part of the charm. After an episode of 12 Second Cocktails, you feel like you can break out one of these drinks at your next party, tossing it off with, “Here’s a little tip a bartender friend of mine showed me.” And with a lot of drinks and a lot of “bartender friends” to choose from, you should have enough new mixological tricks up your sleeve to make your guests very happy.
CNN.com Lays Off Web Newscast Staff
Just as I got off the stage at NewTeeVee Live with CNN Worldwide VP of Digital Marketing and Development Andy Mitchell, I saw a report that CNN is cutting back on its web video newscasts. The company laid off its four CNN.com Live anchors as well as “several production staffers,” according WebNewser.
CNN.com Live launched as a free service in 2007 to replace the paid web service CNN Pipeline, which failed to gather many subscribers. Up till today, it had its own staff of anchors completely separate from the cable TV channel.
I followed up with Mitchell in the green room to ask about the layoffs, and he said that CNN is in no way pulling away from online video. However, linear, anchor-led broadcasts are more appropriate for television than for the web. He emphasized that CNN.com is all about web video, citing its recent redesign.
Mitchell said CNN expects to expand its coverage of major live events, which is exactly what we’d just been talking about onstage. A memo obtained by WebNewser said CNN expects to hire seven original video production staff by the end of the year.
When I interviewed him along with Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg this afternoon, Mitchell said to expect a major collaboration between the two companies next year around an event they hope will rival the success of the Obama inauguration, which had 1.3 million simultaneous viewers at peak and 25 million total streams on CNN.com’s live feed accompanied by Facebook status messages. He and Zuckerberg declined to provide further details about the project.
NewTeeVee Live: How Obama, CNN and Facebook Brought Change to Social TV
CNN and Facebook’s live coverage of the Obama inauguration was hailed by many, including our own Liz Gannes, as the future of social TV. CNN Worldwide VP of Digital Marketing and Development Andy Mitchell joined Randi Zuckerberg from Facebook’s marketing arm onstage at NewTeeVee Live in San Francisco today to share a little bit of the backstory of this cooperation.
The two tried to add social context to live news events during the months leading up to the election with an idea called “debating the debates.” Facebook had just launched its Facebook Connect platform, and both companies tried to have users watch the debates and exchange arguments online, signaling their allegiance for either candidate with a badge on their Facebook profile. Except that it didn’t work. Facebook Connect wasn’t ready to scale.
Then, the day after the election, Zuckerberg was approached by two engineers who told her about their election night experience. They had watched Obama win state after state via a live-stream in one window on their computer screens, and monitored their Facebook status updates in another window right next to it. The folks at Facebook immediately fell in love with the idea and sent a screenshot over to CNN. “We thought: Why isn’t everybody doing is? Let’s make it happen,” recalled Mitchell.
MySpace Puts Real-Life BFFs to the Test
- Editor rating:
MySpace’s solution to overcoming that problem? College Humor’s Jake Hurwitz, the snarky, self-effacing 24-year-old host of BFF, a weekly series challenging self-declared best friends to prove just how friendly they are. The show’s BFFs are judged not by their history as friends, but their knowledge of trivia and how well they know each other — it’s not even an attempt to update The Newlywed Game. But the game changes when it’s between friends, not spouses, since, after all, friendship is a much different beast than a relationship.
While Married on Myspace definitely had elements of game-show-ery, BFF’s style is much less reality and much more straight-up “answer questions and win stuff.” Read more of this story
NewTeeVee Live: What Would You Ask YouTube, Facebook, CNN and Ryan Higa?
As we rev our engines for next week’s NewTeeVee Live conference on Nov. 12 in San Francisco, Chris and I and our other moderators’ minds are turning to what exactly we’ll talk about with the folks we’re interviewing. Over the next few days, we wanted to give you a chance to let us know what you’d ask.
Here’s the first batch, my own line-up of fireside chat subjects:
First up is Ryan Higa, the No. 1 most-subscribed YouTube user of all time. Higa is authentically creative, a home-grown video talent. He can’t help but be making a buck off his work with the number of views he hauls in. What do you want to know about Higa, his career and his real opinion of “Fred”?
Next I have an interview with Hunter Walk, director of product management at YouTube. Everyone in the NewTeeVee audience, both in person and virtually, is a YouTube constituent — a watcher or creator or both. We’re planning to hit up Walk with questions about where the leading video site is headed, how it’s fitting into the new social media ecosystem, and what it’s doing to get web content into the living room. What else do you want to know?
After that I’ll be talking jointly with Andy Mitchell of CNN and Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook. The two partnered to produce the seminal Social TV event: CNN.com’s live stream of Barack Obama’s Inauguration. Well, it’s been 10 months; where are we now? How can we harness social context to push forward both the web and television?
Please let me know in the comments or on email (liz at gigaom) what you want to hear about. Or if you don’t want to share the glory of your awesome question, go ahead and buy a ticket to NewTeeVee Live yourself where you can ask it live, as well as meet these fine folks in the flesh.
Redbox to Speak at NewTeeVee Live
We’re excited to announce that Redbox senior vice president, marketing and customer experience Gary Cohen will be speaking at our fast-approaching NewTeeVee Live Conference on Nov. 12 in San Francisco.
The DVD-dispensing kiosk company has been a video entertainment disruptor with its aggressively priced $1-a-night movie rentals available in more than 15,000 locations across the country. But more than just putting movie rentals in supermarkets and convenience stores, Redbox is catalyzing change in how Hollywood distributes movies. We’ll be talking with Cohen about how Redbox has managed its meteoric growth, its role in the evolving home entertainment landscape and what’s next for the company.
Here’s a quick bio of Cohen from Redbox’s web site:
As senior vice president of marketing and customer experience at redbox, Gary Cohen guides feature design and development while heading the company’s marketing efforts, which include expansion and branding strategies.
Before joining redbox in 2009, Cohen was a founding member and managing director of Six Degrees Capital Management, an asset management company focused on alternative investments.
In addition to Redbox, our NewTeeVee Live conference is jam-packed with other video influencers from Netflix, Comcast, CBS Interactive, Microsoft Xbox, the NFL, Adobe, CNN, Facebook, Roku, Boxee and much more, all on one stage in one day. Whether you are new or old media, NewTeeVee Live is the industry event you need to attend. Get your tickets today!
Vid-Biz: Sling, CIMM, Family Guy
EchoStar: Sling Brings TV Everywhere; new ad campaign from the satellite company aimed at cable MSOs claims simplicity for distributing content. (Multichannel News)
CIMM Lauches Web Site; the Nielsen rival debuts cimm-us.org and prepping to release RFPs this week. (Broadcasting & Cable)
Microsoft Drops Family Guy Sponsorship; Window 7 will no longer be sponsoring an episode of the cartoon after the company realized the show is pretty… off-color. (MediaMemo)
AT&T Sponsors Vevo; telco enters into a branding and marketing agreement with the upcoming music video site. (paidContent)
In-Stat: Disney’s Keychest Will Beat Others to Market; though the research firm says mouse house’s digital content access service will take time to catch on with consumers. (Video Business)
Blinkx Launches Music Video Search Tool; Blinkx Music has indexed more than 33,000 hours of music vids from roughly 10,000 artists. (CNET)
Popular
Recent
Network
- The Bannen Way Hits 8.4M Streams Since its Crackle Debut [NewTeeVee]
- The Tangled Web: PA Semi, Processors, and Magic [TheAppleBlog]
- OpenOffice.org by the Numbers [OStatic]
- Q&A: Stewart Butterfield on the Launch of Glitch [GigaOM]
- Coworking Stories: Manchester’s MadLab [WebWorkerDaily]
- The Best & Worst Biofuel Startups [Earth2Tech]
© 2010 The GigaOM Network. Marketing consulting by ACS.
