April2007

Archives:

Google TV Ads Trial...
Posted in Television, Long Tail, Internet, Advertising, News on April 10th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.

Google announced a partnership with EchoStar, a satellite TV platform with 13 million subscribers. Through this partnership, Google is to start selling TV ads. Keval Desai, Google’s director of product management for TV ads believes that a lot of principles of the Internet can be applied to the TV business, and their press release reflects this fact.

Google will, for example, aggregate their own statistics and metrics, providing advertisers with a much more timely and accurate report of viewership than actual rating systems. In the same way that Adwords, Google’s contextual advertising solution charges advertisers per click, Google TV ads will bill advertisers based on the segment of audience that watched the commercial. All this changes, meant to increase relevancy for advertisers and adjust campaign costs to actual audience are a pretty large step forward compared to actual practices and it’s not clear broadcasters in general might be interested in departing from much less precise approximations is use today.

Google TV Ads will bring more changes, or efficiencies as Google puts it, including a completely automated online process from campaign planning to content uploading, and the same auction system working right now for Adwords.

If Google can bring the Long Tail to TV advertising and with complementary ideas such as this one, it will be an exiting time for low budget advertisers as they’ll be able to reach customers in ways that right now where reserved only to the wealthiest businesses and brands.

Prom Queen debuts...
Posted in IPTV, News on April 10th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.

Former Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Michael Eisner launched last week the first project from his Internet Video Studio company, Vuguru. Called “Prom Queen”, the project is an scripted 80 episode, 90 seconds long, high school drama. It can be watched at the show’s webpage, MySpace, Ellegirl.com and YouTube.

Budgeted at $100.000 this is, as BusinessWeek puts it, one of the first moves media moguls make online, at least from a contents production point of view. Small production houses, indie filmmakers and big TV Networks will all be watching closely how the audiences react to Prom Queen and will probably use it as reference to bet or to wait on the Internet as the next broadcasting platform.

Links from last week...
Posted in IPTV, Television, Long Tail, Mobile, Advertising, News on April 10th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.

Profile of a Long-Tail, Remixed TV Network: Growing Goodness (Via Digg)

What can a long-tail, remixed, online TV network look like? GrowingGoodness.com, a network about organic food, is a great example. Growing Goodness started out collecting YouTube videos (via SplashCast) but built such a good website around those videos and selected them so well that the topical community is now submitting original footage.

Launch your own mobile network

Sonopia works with Verizon to handle calls and data transfer, and lets anyone from a rock band to a church group set up their own mobile network brand. In return, the mini carrier will receive 3-8% of revenues generated by the customers they sign up. Brands create their own calling plans, get a co-branded website and are able to send their members messages about the latest news or special events.

YouTube Not Built on Big Media’s Back?

So maybe YouTube really is about the long tail, the little guy, and the lonely girl.

Marketing in Second Life doesn’t work… here is why!

Last week, the Hamburg-based research firm Komjuniti published the first extensive survey of Resident attitudes toward real world marketing in Second Life. (…) The early results from Komjuniti, as it turns out, are not encouraging: 72% of their 200 respondents said they were disappointed with real world company activities in Second Life; just over 40% considered these efforts a one-off not likely to last.

Yuko Shimizu, (Illustrator)...
Posted in Visual, Art, Illustration on April 9th, 2007. By Ona Vinyamata.

Yuko’s images are elegant and dreamy; the scenes she paints yell concepts in an silent but rebellious way. We are inspired by the visible Japanese roots, the beautifully disturbing and brave (more…)

Apple & EMI drop DRM...
Posted in Music, News on April 3rd, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.

Yesterday Apple and EMI announced they will start selling DRM free music on iTunes. Non DRM music will cost $1.29/song, or 30 cents more expensive than music with DRM, that will still be available in iTunes. With the price increase there will also be a quality increase, as DRM free music will be sold encoded at a higher bitrate than DRM music.

Although DRM protected music from EMI will still be sold at iTunes, by default the user will find the non DRM tracks if available. Also, full albums will still be priced at $9.99, so the price increase is only for single tracks. This fact will probably make it easier for Apple to sell full albums instead than single songs which, if it works, will more easily attract other studios to the non DRM music alternative.

If this move by Apple and EMI becomes a success, subscription based services actually competing with iTunes such as Napster or Real will be in trouble, as they all require DRM. Also, this would make it easier for AAC (the codec Apple uses in iTunes) to become an standard together with MP3 and in detriment of Microsoft’s WMA. (All this ideas can be found in the comments at this GigaOm post).

As Seth Godin commented in his blog in reference to DRM when the Apple & EMI annoucement was only a rumor:

(…) the idea that you can lock up ideas because they are connected to a physical object is long gone.

Micro Persuasion TV Mashup...
Posted in IPTV, Television, News on April 3rd, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.

Every now and then Micro Persuasion’s Steve Rubel shares with us his vision of the TV of the future. Take for example his December of 2006 article on “How TV Will Become the Ultimate Open Content Platform“:

Since the dawn of the medium in the 1950s, big media has had a stranglehold over what you watch on your TV. However, that’s all about to change. A perfect storm is brewing. A-la-carte programming, branded entertainment and peer-created content are all coming to your TV in glorious high definition - all brought to you by the letters IPTV.

This is going to be one of the most important media trends over the next five years. The rapid pace of change will not only turn TV into an open content platform, but it will radically shift how advertising dollars are allocated and how the entire ad industry operates.

Rubel explains how a TV screen that can connect to any computer and to the Internet is able to show not only network programming contents, but a la carte TV (including indy content) and peer created content, side by side. The fact that to reach millions doesn’t require to go through traditional networks or to buy scarce spectrum space will, in time, deeply change the economics of TV contents.

Last week, a new article about tomorrow’s television was published in Micro Persuasion: “TV: The Next Great Development Platform“. Instead of contents, this time Rubel explores the idea that television might become the next piece of hardware where developers will want to be in, where the next “operating system” battle will be fought. Rubel predicts, this will bring TV to a renaissance:

The TV is undergoing a renaissance. In five year’s time, 50% of what the most coveted audiences watch on their sets will come off the Internet. However, it goes beyond the changes in video content. Television will run widgets and other connected software applications. These will be different from, yet complementary to what runs on a PC desktop or webtop. That’s just the beginning.

New & Old Media announce mobile developments...
Posted in IPTV, Mobile, News on April 3rd, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.

There had been rumors that Google might soon launch a “Google phone”. Last week Engadget explained how the so called Google phones would in fact be LG phones with Google software, not a Google hardware/software solution. Google is to introduce mobile versions of tools such as Google Mail, Google Maps and Blogger.

Google is also developing through YouTube a mobile version of their video website. This will launch as soon as next May for European countries. As explained at GigaOm, the website is to feature a selection of videos (not the whole Youtube cataloge), and it’s the first step to new features and (hopefully all) contents to come. Traditional also announced new offerings last week with the BBC making shows available on mobiles or MSNBC launching their “Multimedia on Mobile” platform.

Links for last week...
Posted in IPTV, Music, News on April 3rd, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.

Eisner: The web doesn’t change content

Technology doesn’t change entertainment, he said, it just presents temporary uncertainty about business models and distribution platforms and intellectual property protection.

SellABand Music Gaining Traction

2700 bands from all over the world have signed up, and four have already reached the $50,000 mark and have recorded albums

Hands on with YouTube’s remixing and real time chat tools
A hands-on article on YouTube’s beta features and projects. They all can be found in TestTube, where future YouTube features are available for experimentation.

Maybelle Imasa-Stukuls (Calligrapher)...
Posted in Visual, Typography on April 2nd, 2007. By Ona Vinyamata.

The current visual tendency of going back to simple and organic designs (inspired by Wabi-Sabi), also applies to text. We are re-discovering the strength of real handwritten typefaces, and Maybelle delights (more…)

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