Money & Power
Vid-Biz: Nexage, Cinetic, Mandela Day
Nexage Raises $4 Million; service says it can make mobile video and ad uploads easier; pulls in $4 million of an anticipated $4.5 million of funding in the form of preferred stock. (VentureBeat)
Cinetic Curates FilmBuff; new VOD channel will feature 10-15 new and classic indie flicks each month, channel will initially be available in 10 million U.S. households. (Variety)
Mandela Day Concert to be Live-Streamed by Livestream; free concert to feature performances by Stevie Wonder, Will.I.Am, Josh Groban and more. (Mandela Day)
Movie Web Sites Gain Credibility, Power; sites like CHUD no longer at the kids’ press table, and studios are approaching more niche sites. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Kevin James’ Web Series to Debut on Monday; Crackle to roll out five episodes of the comedy Dusty Peacock starting next week. (MediaWeek)
Comcast Launching a Bunch of New Stations in the Bay Area; 80 new digital networks, 51 of which will be HD, coming 26 communities in the North and South Bay. (Multichannel News)
Vid-Biz: TiVo, Qik, FCC
Best Buy and TiVo Hook Up; retailer to heavily promote the DVR maker and bring TiVo tech to Best Buy’s Insignia line of devices; TiVo to develop version of its box that lets Best Buy advertise its products directly to the TV. (The New York Times)
Qik Gets $5.5 Million; round led by Quest Venture Partners and Camp Ventures. (VentureBeat)
FCC Steps into Verizon’s Spat with Cablevision; Verizon asks the feds for help since Cablevision won’t sell the Madison Square Garden network in HD to FiOS TV. (The Hollywood Reporter)
GoAnimate Launches Software as a Service Model; will allow any company to deploy GoAnimate’s animation tools, Cartoon Network using the platform for its Toon Creator. (emailed release)
Ad Buyers Flex Their Power Over TV Networks; the upfront negotiations haven’t even started yet as the recession, multi-platform deals and even Jay Leno complicate the ad buying process. (The Wrap)
ESPN Rolls Out Fancy New Home Run Tracking TV Technology; “Ball Track” uses Doppler radar to create a graphic that shows real-time distance the ball travels from the crack of the bat to where it stops. (Broadcasting & Cable)
YouTube’s Pitch to Hollywood
YouTube came to Los Angeles this week to seek out content partners, pitching them its 3-month-old redesign for premium content. “This was a big strategy change for us, one of the most significant ones to date,” said Jordan Hoffner, the site’s director of content partnerships, noting the site’s new “clean, well-lit” shows page was “the first navigation change in about two and a half years.” Hoffner emphasized online distribution of long-form content as a companion to television, but with fewer ads and the opportunity to get audience feedback.
But television content has not yet been particularly successful on YouTube. According to recent stats from TubeMogul, full-length shows average only 7,407.9 views per episode. Perhaps the TV content the site has secured isn’t high value enough; perhaps it should do more to promote the stuff it can actually run pre-rolls on. For whatever reason, few people look to YouTube to watch TV shows online.
Hoffner’s remarks were the keynote address at NATPE’s LATV Fest, where YouTube is a headline sponsor and also sponsored his speech itself. It’s clear YouTube has a pretty strong interest in reaching this audience.
When we asked Hoffner during the Q&A whether his expectations had been met for premium content viewing, he said, “Momentum is taking more time than we anticipated. But growth is not going down; it’s going up.” Hoffner said YouTube is working with programmers to add more content, promote it and refresh it, but that tweaking premium content presentation is limited by the fact that “the data set is not statistically significant yet.”
Vid-Biz: Pay TV, Streamlogics, OWLE
Study: DTV Switch to Boost Pay TV Subscriptions; analysis from Wells Fargo Securities says cable will get 475,000 new subs, satellite will get 137,000 and telcos will get 41,000. (MediaWeek)
Thomson Reuters Acquires Streamlogics; terms of the deal not disclosed; Streamlogics provides webcasting-based services to enterprise, government and pharmaceutical organizations. (The Business of Online Video)
OWLE Mount Augments iPhone Video; snap-on device provides better grip to reduce camera shake, a bigger lens and an outward-facing microphone. (CrunchGear)
“mememolly” Takes Over Rocketboom News Desk; the “right-handed vegetarian Scorpio” has the tenth most-subscribed YouTube channel in the UK. (Tubefilter)
VH-1 Takes Great Debate to the Masses; show that pits pop culture icons against each other will use out-of-home screens and social media sites to let viewers join in. (MediaWeek)
Roughly 10% of HD TV Owners Don’t Have HD Service; 46.3 percent of homes have HD sets, and 35.9 percent get HD programming. (TV by the Numbers)
DOCOMO Buys Into PacketVideo
NTT DOCOMO said tonight it has paid $45.5 million in cash for a 35 percent stake in mobile video company PacketVideo, a subsidiary of NextWave Wireless. The two companies have worked together for more than 10 years, with PacketVideo’s pvPlayer installed on more than 90 of DOCOMO’s handset models. They said the stake was intended to help bulk up DOCOMO’s music and video services in Japan.
San Diego-based PacketVideo claims it was the first company to ever put streaming video over a 2G mobile network way back in 1999, and says its software has shipped on 360 million devices to date. Earlier this year, it released a live TV app for the iPhone.
So What Will Become of The Pirate Bay?
You’d think before you announce a sale that alienates many of your most passionate users you’d figure out what your next steps were first. But no, that wouldn’t be The Pirate Bay way. Swedish software company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) said yesterday it’s in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, for 60 million Swedish kronor ($7.8 million).
We parsed through the salient points, but were still left quite confused about what exactly GGF would do with The Pirate Bay. What’s become obvious is that the folks behind TPB are selling its main asset — its user base — so they can stop being a legal target and abdicate responsibility for the site’s upkeep and liabilities. That 25 million-strong user base, however, which expects to use The Pirate Bay to freely track any and every sort of file on BitTorrent, is far from pleased. So what exactly is next for TPB? Here are some further (if contradictory) clues:
When It Comes to TV Content, Is YouTube Screwed?
Over the past year, YouTube has made a concerted effort to embrace premium content like TV shows to attract ad revenue. But according to a new report from Screen Digest analyst Arash Amel, the video-sharing giant faces an uphill battle as the Hollywood networks and studios gobble up most of the market for ad-supported TV programming online.
In his report “US Networks claim half of free online TV market,” Amel says that the broadcasting and cable business in the U.S. will shed $2 billion in ad revenue by 2013, dropping to $67 billion from $69 billion in 2008. While TV ad dollars go down, there will be an increase in ad revenue generated by TV programming on the web. Amel says that ad-supported, web-based TV programming generated $448 million in revenues in 2008, and the total ad revenues from online entertainment programming, sports, news and events will be more than $1.45 billion by 2013.
Vid-Biz: Brightcove, Move, Truveo
Brightcove CEO Says Company is Profitable, Cash-Flow Positive; Jeremy Allaire credits the revenue growth, in part, to traction in the enterprise and government verticals. (Business Insider)
What’s Going on With Move Networks? After keeping quiet for a couple of months, company plans to shift strategy to become a wholesale provider of IPTV video services that will be delivered over open broadband networks. (VideoNuze)
Truveo Relaunches in 17 Countries; video search engine goes with a more Google-like look, strikes deal with Univision. (paidContent)
Pirate Bay Founders Sent Court Summons Via Twitter; Dutch entertainment industry group used the micro-blogging service and Facebook because they didn’t know the exact locations of Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Netflix Adds Streaming Availability Dates; now users can see when a movie in their queue will be available to “Watch Instantly.” (Hacking Netflix)
Turner and PGA Re-Up Through 2019; Turner to continue to manage PGA.com, and to launch mobile and new media offerings. (Broadcasting & Cable)
MTV Streams The Maxx; cult comic cartoon from the 90s goes online. (The Beat)
Sponsor Gallery
Recent
GigaOM Network
- 5 Ideas Online Video Makers Should Steal From Trent Reznor [NewTeeVee]
- Spite Is Not a Business Strategy [GigaOM]
- Twitter for Business FAQ [WebWorkerDaily]
- Google Chrome OS: Distraction or Opportunity? [jkOnTheRun]
- AmazingMail’s Web-to-Print Engine for iPhone [TheAppleBlog]
- Solar Data Needs Standards, Too [Earth2Tech]
- List your LUG or Regional Meetings On Fossevents.org [OStatic]
© 2009 The GigaOM Network. Marketing consulting by ACS.
