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As Yahoo Compares Itself to TV, Content Acquisitions on the Way
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz trumpeted the comeback of display advertising on the company’s fourth-quarter call with analysts today by saying: “Frankly, our competition is television.” Yahoo’s display revenue grew 26 percent on a sequential basis, to $503 million, down just 1 percent from the same three-month period a year ago. Bartz said larger advertisers are now getting back in the mix, ready to spend significant money — often out of what used to be their TV budgets.
That “makes video really important,” said Bartz, adding that along with social features, Yahoo expects to integrate video across all of its properties this year. “Social and video should not exist in a silo,” she said. Bartz pointed to the success of Yahoo’s TV recap show “Primetime in No Time” (see NewTeeVee coverage) which saw a high of 12 million daily streams on one occasion in November — larger than the “24″ season premiere on television, she pointed out. Bartz also highlighted a deal for more original content production with IAC’s new programming venture, Electus, led by Ben Silverman. Continue reading on GigaOM.
The Pent-up Demand for Social TV
We wrote in October: “Watch television and talk about it with your friends: Social TV is a simple concept. But trying early implementations of such projects makes it clear that this is more complicated than we might have thought.”
Ridealong-style social TV products are just emerging and often feel awkward — for instance, you may have to get all your friends to sign up for an entirely new service, say, or avoid any mention of spoilers from earlier airings of a show. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t want to use online tools to socialize with their friends remotely over the latest episode. And they don’t need new tools to do so.
A New York Times story by Ashlee Vance headlined “Watching TV Together, Miles Apart” this weekend spoke anecdotally about groups of friends using video Skype to talk about TV. As even better proof that social TV is something people want to do, the piece is currently the Times’ most-emailed technology story. Next up, reports Vance, Hulu is working a social TV product too. But nearly a year later, the canonical example of social TV is still the CNN live video and Facebook status integration for the Obama Inauguration.
UGC Buys Out the Critics: Flixster Acquires Rotten Tomatoes
UPDATED
In a bit of an unconventional deal, startup Flixster is acquiring Rotten Tomatoes, the authoritative online movie review aggregator, from News Corp. The acquisition gives News Corp., via its subsidiary IGN Entertainment, a minority stake in Flixster, which operates movie trivia and fan review applications on social networks and mobile devices.
The combined company will continue to operate separately branded properties for user-generated and professional movie reviews. Together, they have 30 million monthly uniques, 2.3 billion user reviews, 500,000 critic reviews, as well as movie information and social games, according to a press release.
The first reports of the deal came last month from Kara Swisher at BoomTown, who said at the time that News Corp. was considering buying Flixster. Update: Swisher points out that she later reported the deal would be a combined independent company, as was indeed the result.
Prior to the deal, Flixster had $7 million in funding from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pinnacle Ventures and Reid Hoffman.
The Fox vs. Time Warner Spat Takes a Turn for the Insane
We’re not just counting down to the ball dropping tonight, but also Fox channels disappearing off some Time Warner Cable users’ TVs, if the two companies can’t agree on fees for broadcast channels appearing on cable.
So it’s come to this: Time Warner has posted a 3-minute web video explaining how to connect your PC to your TV so you can watch Internet video on sites like Hulu and Fancast. Yes, you heard that right, a CABLE COMPANY is giving step-by-step directions to show users how they can make it irrelevant. Of course, it’s all in the name of blasting Fox for giving away content online for free while expecting TWC to pay for it. But meanwhile, TWC is showing users the very cables with which they can cut the cord.
Thanks very much to Peter Kafka at MediaMemo for screengrabbing the video and putting it up in an embeddable format:
Envivio Adds $1M for Video Encoding
Video encoding provider Envivio has raised $1 million worth of debt in a convertible note filed today with the SEC. The South San Francisco, Calif.-based company, which was one of the first allowed onto Apple’s new HTTP streaming platform, had last raised funding in 2008, when it took $25 million from a large group of investors including Harbourvest, Atlantic Bridge and Samsung Ventures. Envivio fits nicely in the middle of the industry shift towards adaptive bitrate streaming (sub. req.). As the company seems to be doing well, this is a bit of an oddball raise, but spokespeople have not yet responded to our request for comment.
YouTube Considers Autoplay and Timed Playlists
What are some potential future features of YouTube? From a New York Times story today:
- An automatically playing stream of clips customized to a user, instead of today’s list of suggested videos, which a user must click to play. “The idea is to push more videos at users in the hope of allowing them to abandon the keyboard and increasingly experience YouTube from the couch.”
- “An ‘I’m feeling bored’ button next to the search box, echoing Google’s famous ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button.”
- A way for users to tell YouTube how long they want to be entertained so that the site could make a custom playlist of that length.
The ideas mentioned above are caveated as potential test features being brainstormed, but the rest of the Times story will be familiar to NewTeeVee readers, covering director of product management Hunter Walk and his team’s efforts to get users to spend more time on the site. It’s an interesting but not new topic; I interviewed Walk about the YouTube user experience at our NewTeeVee Live conference last month, where he announced an upgrade to 1080p stream support (see video from the session embedded blow). And The Wall Street Journal had an extremely similar story this summer, with the example of a user becoming fatigued from watching tons of Van Halen videos and needing to be diverted to related or even serendipitously different content (instead, the Times story uses the very different example of Shaquille O’Neal fatigue).
Viacom Withdraws Videos Its Employees Uploaded From YouTube Lawsuit
Viacom has been allowed to withdraw some 250 of the more than 60,000 video clips it’s suing YouTube over for copyright infringement, including around 100 that were uploaded to YouTube by Viacom employees or agents, reports MediaPost based on a recently released court filing.
The move makes the Google-owned YouTube look good by showing that it takes more than just glancing at a clip to screen if it infringes copyright because it was an unauthorized upload. That’s exactly how YouTube is trying to defend itself for hosting the tens of thousands of Daily Show and other copyrighted Viacom clips back when the lawsuit was filed in 2007. Viacom claims that YouTube should know when clips are infringing and remove them, but the withdrawn clips show that even Viacom itself doesn’t always know when clips are infringing. A Google lawyer wrote in a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton,
“Perhaps better than any other evidence, this series of events belies Viacom’s assertion that ‘knowing that a clip is infringing is easy given the readily identifiable nature of Viacom’s movies and television programs.”
Totlol Creator Learns the Hard Way He Can’t Build a Business on YouTube
Updated with a statement from YouTube: Over the past two years, developer Ron Ilan built a site called Totlol that features a moderated selection of YouTube videos appropriate for kids. He hoped to build a business on it — and actually started charging membership fees earlier this year to avoid shutting the site down for lack of money. This week Ilan is crying foul, saying YouTube prevented him from his preferred business model, advertising, by changing its terms of service. What makes Ilan really mad is that he spoke with multiple people from YouTube about Totlol around the time of the ToS change, and none of them mentioned to him that his business was effectively kaput.
Ilan wrote an extensive and dramatic post about his relationship with YouTube, calling out members of its product and developer relations teams by name. When asked to condense his complaint over email, Ilan replied: Read more of this story
Local TV Industry Revenues Down 22% for the Year
How bad are things in the U.S. TV industry? Pretty bad. 2009 revenues for local TV stations are expected to show a decrease of 22.4 percent from 2008 to $15.6 billion, according to a recent report by BIA/Kelsey. That’s even worse than the 17 percent drop the firm had expected halfway through the year.
Revenues this low haven’t been seen in more than 10 years, and they’re expected to continue through at least 2013 — but the downhill trend should start to slowly reverse itself next year, with a 3 percent rise to $16.1 billion in 2010 TV revenue.
And while you might think that a downward spiral in traditional TV might mean more opportunity on the Internet, BIA/Kelsey doesn’t necessarily see it that way. Television stations made about $500 million in Internet revenue in 2009, which is about the same as last year, according to the report. That number isn’t set to cross $1 billion until 2013.
BIA/Kelsey isn’t looking at the full picture of the online television business, however. For the purposes of its report, the firm defines the television industry as U.S. TV stations, so revenue from Internet video made by everyone else wasn’t included.
P.S. Thanks to Robert Seidman for pointing out the report only includes local TV stations. I updated the post accordingly.
Hulu’s New Embed Policy Can Only Hurt It
| Backstory: Hulu and Embeds |
|---|
| Before Hulu even had a name or its current management team, it had distribution partners: AOL, MSN, MySpace, Yahoo. |
| All along, one of Hulu’s most distinctive and friendly features has been that all its content is embeddable. |
| Since everything was embeddable even when Hulu was in private beta, a few enterprising folks recreated the site out in the open for public viewing. Hulu shut them down. |
| Hulu’s official partners use its embeds; they don’t re-host the content in their own video players. |
| Hulu content was removed from TV.com when the CBS-owned site was relaunched as a TV aggregator. |
Two-year-old Hulu, which has quickly become Americans’ preferred method of consuming TV online, is now blocking startups from embedding its video library. But while Hulu is now (mostly) unfriendly to startup video aggregators, it’s still sharing its videos with its corporate parents’ friends: the big web portals and MSOs. Put together, the retroactive and inconsistent nature of a recent spate of nastygrams shows the site is feeling insecure.
Over the weekend, Hulu demanded that a newly launched video discovery startup called Rippol stop embedding all its shows. Hulu told Rippol that it can link to its full library, but not embed the videos. Rippol tells us it will comply, and replace the Hulu embeds where it can from network sites like NBC.com and Fox.com.
Rippol competitor Yidio also tells us Hulu commanded it to stop embedding, and video search site CastTV says it has also recently changed to make users click through to watch Hulu. Meanwhile, video guide Clicker declined to comment, but we’ve seen that over the last two months it’s swapped out Hulu embeds for TV network embeds as well.
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