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Are You Buying on Black Friday?
Thanksgiving is great for celebrating family and gluttony, but it’s also the last impediment between you and Black Friday, the day stores reel you in with low low LOW prices! But with the economy in the dumps, seems like everyone is making a prediction as to how much you’ll spend and what you’ll buy. Here’s just a sampling:
- comScore forecasts flat holiday online spending at $29.2 billion and total holiday spending at $131.3 billion
- eMarketer predicts $30.3 billion in online spending and a total of $136.8 billion
- Six in 10 U.S. shoppers plan on cutting back in at least one category of communications and media entertainment, according to a new survey by Oliver Wyman, a unit of Marsh & McLennan Companies, but the company sees HDTV sales growing 3 percent
- Nielsen forecasts holiday sales of $98 billion, but its survey found that 35 percent of respondents plan to spend less this year
- The NPD Group found that many people who were planning to buy 40-inch or bigger flat panel TVs have changed their mind because of the bad economy
- An ABI Research survey found that 18 percent of respondents were planning on purchasing an HDTV this holiday season
But those are just projections. We want to know how the economy is impacting your holiday shopping.
The Wall Street Journal writes that Black Friday discounts on HDTVs will extend through the end of the year — will you be picking up a new television? And would the arrival of a $150 Blu-ray player get you to switch to the high-definition format? Or are you ditching DVDs altogether to buy a set-top box from the likes of Apple, Netflix or Blockbuster? Tell us what you’re buying and give us your tips on how to find the best bargains for video products this holiday season.
StatShot: BitTorrent Loves Batman
The Dark Knight continues to cast its vengeful shadow over BitTorrent, according to TorrentFreak, staying on as the most popular pirated movie. Other than that — there was only one new addition to the top 10 list: Elegy, a smaller film starring Ben Kingsley that came out earlier this year.
| Rank | Last Week | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | The Dark Knight |
| 2 | 3 | Tropic Thunder |
| 3 | 2 | Traitor |
| 4 | 6 | Max Payne |
| 5 | 4 | WALL-E |
| 6 | … | Elegy |
| 7 | 5 | Step Brothers |
| 8 | 9 | Taken |
| 9 | 8 | The Chronicles of Narnia: Price Caspian |
| 10 | 10 | Burn After Reading |
TiVo Subscriber Numbers Keep Tanking
TiVo released its third quarter results today, and while the company reported a profit (thank you, EchoStar for that $105 million patent violation payment) the DVR maker lost 163,000 subscribers, dragging its total number of subscribers down to 3.46 million — the lowest it’s been since the spring of 2005.
TV by the Numbers has been tracking TiVo’s subscriber freefall and has a comprehensive and pretty chart (well, pretty if you’re not a TiVo employee or shareholder). Bill Gorman over there writes:
TiVo may have a valuable intellectual property portfolio, but its hardware selling business is over. For the most recent quarter, it sold fewer than 500 TiVo DVRs a day.
TiVo reported net income of $100.6 million ($0.98 a share). Last year at this time, the company reported a net loss of $8.3 million ($0.08 per share). Revenue for this latest quarter slipped to $64.5 million from $75.5 million with non-hardware revenue from its service and technology groups dropping 11 percent to $51.7 million.
And the company doesn’t expect its fortunes to change much this quarter. TiVo said the down economy will put the kibosh on sales this holiday season. TiVo made it known through a regulatory filing last week that it was laying off staff and taking a $1 million pretax charge for severance charges and outplacement.
Video Ad Spending Growth to Drop Dramatically
Online video advertising is a shiny new toy in the marketer’s box of tricks. As such, people think its use will only increase and it will be more recession proof than traditional or other forms of online advertising. But eMarketer released a report today saying that growth in online video ad spending will drop dramatically in the coming year, falling to 44.9 percent in 2009 from 81 percent in 2008. That translates into online video ads reaching $850 million in 2009 from $587 million in 2008.
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While the growth percentages are still in the double digits, not as much is spent on video compared with other forms of advertising (search ads are already a $10.6 billion market and rich media ads are $1.88 billion), which means small changes have big impacts. The total market for online video ad spending will reach $4.6 billion in 2013. In August, eMarketer chopped its estimate for 2008 U.S. video ad revenue in half to $505 million and at that time had predicted that by 2013 those revenues would reach $5.8 billion. Read more of this story
Vid-Biz: Magnify.net, AT&T, Jathia
Magnify.net Raises $750K; Innovation Ventures led this Series A1 round for the video publishing company. (Silicon Alley Insider)
AT&T’s Viral Series Not So Viral; Lost in America stars iJustine, but is not attracting lots of eyeballs. (Advertising Age)
Open-Source Movie Lets Fans in on the Action; footage from Jathia’s Wager will be uploaded and fans can edit together their own version of the movie. (io9)
Universal Music Group Hooks Up With Meebo; agreement will deliver ad-supported videos from UMG acts like Kanye West and Ludacris to the online chat platform. (release)
Hulu Adds to HD Gallery; episodes of The Office, 30 Rock and Heroes now streaming in high-definition on the site. (Broadcasting & Cable)
Dori Media Group Taps Kaltura; open-source white-label video service to power Novebox.com, a new social network dedicated to telenovelas. (emailed release)
NBA Gets Its Games Jacked
Jacked, the online real-time stats service that complements your TV sports viewing, has partnered with the NBA to provide the Jacked Sportstop to the league’s teams.
Jacked is meant to offer a two-screen experience for sports. So for example, a fan watching a Washington Wizards game on oldteevee will be able to sit down with their laptop as well and log on to the Wizards’ web site to receive a real-time stream of data such as stats, play visualizations, photos, and even chat option to talk with other fans.
The Jacked service will not appear at NBA.com, but instead will run on individual team sites and through Jacked.com. Ten teams have signed on to use Jacked, and another 15 have contracts in negotiations (the remaining five teams have not reached the contract stage yet).
Blockbuster Set-Top Box Takes on Netflix
Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI, BBI.B) is taking Netflix head-on and announced today the availability of its new set-top box that will deliver video content directly to TVs.
The BLOCKBUSTER ONDEMAND service will use 2Wire’s MediaPoint set top box, and will offer rentals a la carte — including new releases like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Smart — as opposed to a subscription model like Netflix.
Available now at Blockbuster.com (and at select real world locations), the box will cost $99. Well, in Blockbuster marketing-speak, the box is free, but you have to pay for 25 rentals in advance to get it. After the initial 25, rentals start at $1.99 each. The service supports HD (full technical details after the jump), and movies will cost $3.99 to rent regardless of whether they are in standard or high definition.
ZunaVision Elegantly Inserts Ads Anywhere
I’m not sure whether to heap praise on startup ZunaVision, or be terrified of it. The company, which just incorporated two days ago, has developed a technology that lets you insert and blend ads (almost) seamlessly onto the surface of objects within a video and could be a marketer’s dream. But it also means that even dogs riding skateboards could soon be covered in logos.
Developed by two Stanford graduate students, Ashutosh Saxena and Siddharth Batra, along with Assistant Professor Andrew Ng, ZunaVision’s technology allows users to embed images within a video. Batra calls it “post post production.” But unlike clunky overlay ads, the software knows where these placements are within the video and will adjust for things like foreground and background, lighting conditions and motion. The embedded video provides an good demonstration of the technology.
For instance, you could put a logo on the wall of a building and the software will automatically adjust the tone of the image to match the lighting conditions around it (i.e. whether it’s in the shade or direct light), as well as allow people in the foreground to walk in front of the image. If the camera moves, the image stays on with the wall in the same space and will maintain the proper perspective.
Microsoft Locks Up The Guild
Felicia Day, creator of web series The Guild, said during her talk at NewTeeVee Live that she had some major sponsorship on news on the way. Looks like it’s a bit more than just that: The Hollywood Reporter writes that Microsoft has nabbed the exclusive rights to the second season of the series and will show it across the Xbox, MSN and Zune platforms.
Sprint will sponsor all 12 episodes of the season across the three Microsoft outlets and will have commercials attached as well as product placements within the show.
Day told us earlier this month that she rejected about 25 offers to sponsor the geek-friendly comedy, saying, “For me, an important part of the show is that I retain the rights to the show.” Her deal with the Redmond giant lets her keep the intellectual property rights to The Guild while collecting an up-front fee. This means that should The Guild follow in the footsteps of Sanctuary (another series where the creator held on to the IP) and move to TV, Microsoft won’t participate in any revenues generated from that.
Warner Premiere and Bryan Singer Do H+
Warner Premiere, a digital content production division at Warner Bros., will team up with director Bryan Singer’s (The Usual Suspects) production company, Bad Hat Harry Productions, to create the new live-action sci-fi series H+.
The Hollywood Reporter writes that John Cabrera and Cosimo De Tommaso will executive produce and write the show. Singer will not be serving as director, however, so the production will be searching for one of those, as well as a cast.
H+ reportedly revolves around people who hardwire their brains to the Internet and the aftermath of a cyber terrorist attack that wipes many of them out.
Up to this point, Warner Premiere has focused on motion comics, such as Batman: Mad Love, Watchmen and Peanuts. Its slate is expected to be more balanced with live-action series going forward.
Warner will have to leverage Singer’s name, as it has chosen a crowded genre to get into. Sci-fi series are all the digital rage these days. NBC has Gemini Division, Disney’s Stage 9 will be releasing Trenches and 60Frames is doing Ark, to name just a few.
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