It’s Official: The Internet is Catching Up

11/30/2005 - 10:30 AM >> Death of TV, Tech & Society, Tech Trends

Since Reuters is the only news source we trust, we were shocked, shocked we tell you, to read this:

Within the industry, rival cable channels will catch up to their broadcast rivals, securing an estimated $22.3 billion in advertising dollars by 2009 compared with $22.5 billion for the networks. The Internet will be close behind at $17.2 billion.

We really wish we had known that the internet was doing so well a bit earlier. Curse you Reuters for withholding this precious data from us!

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Are You Ready for Discontinuous Change?

11/28/2005 - 05:54 PM >> Death of TV, Future Formats, Tech Trends

Public Relations expert Richard Edelman has some interesting thoughts on the massive change facing his industry:

* Every dollar coming out of print advertising revenue for newspapers is replaced by only 33 cents online, according to Citigroup analyst William Bird. Print advertising accounts for approximately 66% of total revenue for newspapers. This money is ebbing away to web competitors like Monster.com or Yahoo.

* The largest 50 Web companies are attracting 96% of the ad spending on line, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, with the majority going to AOL, Google, MSN and Yahoo. The hottest genre of Web advertising is 15 second commercials that run before on line videos on sites such as WebMD.

* An estimated 9.5 million homes in the US now have TiVo or another digital video recorder. According to a study by CBS, 64% of DVR users skip all ads and an additional 26% skip through most ads. The number of homes with DVRs is expected to triple in the next five years.

These are only a highlight of many interesting stats that he lists but we’re not so sure his advice to PR-folk is very useful. [via Ito]

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Europeans expected to flock to TV over Internet - Yahoo! News

11/23/2005 - 04:42 AM >> Broadband, Death of TV, Tech Trends

From the why are we always behind department:

About 8.7 million Europeans will be watching television over the Internet by 2009, or 9.4 percent of a market currently dominated by cable and satellite operators, according to a forecast issued on Monday.

...

“It will emerge faster in Europe and Asia than in the United States,” Schmitt added, saying similar initiatives by U.S. telecommunications companies are only just getting underway.

Tell us something we don’t know. On the other hand, being slow and retarded has its benefits: it makes our job of prognosticating pretty simple. All we need to see the future is to catch a flight to London or Tokyo. No more need to spend money on expensive crystal balls (we take no credit for the assumed drop in crystal ball manufacturer’s stock prices).

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Announcement #2437: CBS in talks with Google on video search

11/22/2005 - 04:59 PM >> Convergence, Death of TV, Future Formats

Yet another announcement for the day:

“We’re talking to them about a whole slew of things including video-on-demand, including video search,” Moonves told Reuters in an interview regarding Google, ahead of Reuters’s Media and Advertising Summit next week.

Now these guys are just grasping at straws. “We’re talking to them about a whole slew of things” is Hollywood code-speak for “we have no fucking clue what’s going on but I want to make sure I’m not fired first.”

You think that these PR people would realize that a short 3-day Thanksgiving week is not exactly the time to do all these earth-shattering TV-Internet alliance announcements. By next week we’ll have all forgotten about it and they’ll have to whip up a whole new campaign for our attention.

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The Press Conference is Real

11/22/2005 - 03:56 PM >> Copyfight, Future Formats, Hack the Planet

Nothing major was announced (although we are impressed that Hollywood bureaucrats actually trekked all the way to the AFI campus). The main gist of the conference was:

Cohen said BitTorrent.com will remove links that direct users to pirated content owned by MPAA companies from its search engine.

Yes, that’s all it was. They are going to remove illegal links from their search engine. You can all go home now, no revolutionary new technology is being released. Nothing to see here.

The rest of the press release is available after the jump.

Read More...

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Anyone over at AFI today?

11/22/2005 - 01:43 PM >> Copyfight, Death of TV, Future Formats

We first reported back in early August that there were negotiations between the MPAA and BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen:

“Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman and BitTorrent Founder and CEO Bram Cohen will hold a press conference on Tuesday, November 22th, 2005 at the American Film Institute.”

Didn’t we tell you there would be a lot of announcements? This is getting seriously weird.

Update: While this “press conference” is getting serious attention over at sites like Digg, we have been unable to track down the alleged press release on the MPAA site (in fact, the only BitTorrent press releases seem to be negative ones). Someone has to be at AFI today, fill us in.

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NBC’s Zucker Speaks on the Future of Network Television

11/22/2005 - 04:48 AM >> Broadband, Death of TV, Future Formats

Where do we even begin?

The television chief focused his lecture on new methods of distributing programming, such as downloading shows onto an iPod or buying individual episodes through DIRECTV.

Technological advances are already paying off for NBC, Zucker said.

Ratings for “NBC Nightly News” improved over the last two weeks after the television company started offering daily newscasts on its Web site.

But Zucker said he is wary of some of these advances, especially the blog craze and its effect on TV.

“We pay too much attention to blogs,” he said. “It is absurd how much attention they receive.”

Zucker said NBC’s primetime lineup is spiralling down, and it will take two to three years to rebound from the current slump.

Zucker is in for a rude awakening when this “three year slump” turns into a permanent downward spiral. This must be how he has managed to keep his job: by convincing others that this is just a temporary blip. Of course, the timing is perfect because when these three years are over, it will be time for the massive overhaul that is the transition to digital broadcasting. Then he can buy himself another 3-5 years simply by blaming everything on the digital transition. Frankly, if we were investors we’d be telling Jeff that there is no time like the present to put down the crack pipe. Why wait three years?

Zucker misunderstands why blogs get so much attention: it’s not the content. The revolution that it provides is that anyone, anywhere can instantly publish. It may not be nice and shiny like TV yet, but it can get there. TV on the other hand is still out of everyone’s reach.

Although the online version of nightline is cute, we wonder just how many people are actually watching it. Perhaps the day that more people watch nightline on the net that tune in via broadcast TV will send Jeff the memo he needs to read.

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Fox to Offer Movies Online Via Movielink - Yahoo! News

11/21/2005 - 11:41 AM >> Broadband, Death of TV, Future Formats

From Associated Press:

Movielink, a joint venture of five Hollywood studios to offer movies over the Internet, has signed a deal with Twentieth Century Fox, allowing it to offer movies from all major studios for the first time.

It is very interesting to us how CinemaNow and Movielink, the red-headed and forgotten tech children of Hollywood have suddenly become hot commodities since the Disney-iTunes deal. It seems that all the studios have decided to open the floodgates and get their content online, profit models be damned!

Look forward to lots of deals and announcements in the next weeks as the latest round of lets-copy-everyone-else-in-town makes the rounds.

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Quote of the Day

11/17/2005 - 01:24 PM >> Death of TV, Future Formats, Tech Trends

From “The End of TV (As You Know It)”:

The video-on-demand (VOD) phenomenon isn’t confined to cable-system menus and iTunes downloads. The entire Internet is, in a sense, media on demand, says Tobaccowala. “That has changed how consumers feel toward all media, training them to feel puzzled and even cheated when they can’t get what they want when they want it.”

It gets even better because they actually break down how much money people can make off of iTunes versus network TV ad rates:

That’s why the networks are dipping their most profitable toes into unknown waters, making some of their top-rated shows available in new ways. A deal ABC struck last month to have episodes of its hit Desperate Housewives available for download on Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL ) video iPods for $1.99 shows how the networks are cautiously experimenting. The series about the wacky women of Wisteria Lane generates $11.3 million in ad revenue per episode, according to Forrester Research Inc. (FORR ). That translates to an estimated 45 cents per viewer per episode. By contrast, ABC is expected to earn $1.20 per download of an episode after Apple has taken its cut. Even if 20% of the show’s audience shifts its viewing from traditional TV to iPod and ad revenue falls accordingly, ABC would still net $1.8 million more per episode than if Housewives weren’t available on demand.

If this is true, it is quite impressive.

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AOL, Warner to Bring Old TV Shows Online

11/14/2005 - 10:39 AM >> Broadband, Death of TV, Future Formats

Warner and AOL are starting a new interactive TV channel called In2TV:

In2TV plans to offer more than 100 TV series and at least 300 episodes per month in the first year, the companies said.

The shows will be delivered through AOL Video on Demand, AOL Video Search and AOL Television. At the time of launch, the programs will be available exclusively on AOL and will not be in syndication on TV, AOL official said.

Warner has been doing very well lately and it looks like it is parlaying this confidence into bold post-broadcast moves.

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