http://www.iptvevangelist.com/ Covering Internet Television Technology iTV/IPTV, Trends and the User en Copyright 2009 Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:44:42 -0500 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss IPTVEvangelisthttp://feedburner.google.com YouTube and other technologies are working hand in glove with people in Iran who want nothing more then the right of self-determination I find compelled once again to evangelize about the very technologies we often write and speak about with such casual affair. ]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/06/the_revolution_is_brought_to_y.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/06/the_revolution_is_brought_to_y.html Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:44:42 -0500 By Adrian Smith It seems everyone is banging on about monetizing original content on the internet. Is it distribution or is it content? Well, as a former CEO of both a major film studio and a "legacy" internet company once said: "When we had great pictures to market content was king, when we didn't distribution was." Although the esteemed gentleman made a salient point it wasn't hip to the internet world of self-production/self-distribution. Well, yes and no. If you are a major studio with multimillion dollar budgeted productions and equally expensive marketing campaigns it's really down to capturing the zeitgeist. There is no excuse for not having a well made production (given the budgets) nor is there an excuse for shoddy marketing given the role call of MBAs (this isn't to say that excuses aren't made). ]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/05/no_honey_no_money_or_how_to_st.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/05/no_honey_no_money_or_how_to_st.html Tue, 12 May 2009 00:16:32 -0500 Image 2001, Searchers video promo, Times Square, NYC By Adrian Smith & Gilbert B. Hammer As reported in ValleyWag, Yahoo! has seen an exodus of their video engineers as by all appearances they are a black hole collapsing on itself. As two former Yahoo! veteran's we had more then a passing knowledge of video initiatives. Adrian was a Senior Producer working at Yahoo's Sunnyvale, CA headquarters and focused on marketing/corporate communications, and I was a manager for their Broadcast.com division in the New York City office and worked across several divisions delivering similar content. While we both produced many fine internal and external video projects such as the Giants of Advertising and content for their Buzz marketing group, the road is never the less littered with with failed attempts at monetizing on-line video. Names from the past included FinanceVision, Yahoo! Go, Yahoo!/Current TV, Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, Vision Sports and Jumpcut and have gone the way of a swallow carrying a coconut to quote Monty Python as if such a thing could happen. Reuters Citizen Journalist initiative and Tech Ticker are still on-line, but for how long?. How could a company make so many missteps? ]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/05/yahoo_was_never_serious_about.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/05/yahoo_was_never_serious_about.html Yahoo! Yahoo! Finance Yahoo! FinanceVision Yahoo! tech ticker Mon, 11 May 2009 23:54:58 -0500 Veotag, their technology and customer base have been sold to an Atlanta based company, Multicast Media, a company that has staked out corporate and faith-based verticals using their Vidego self-service platform. For Veotag the end came almost a year to the date from their last funding round of 1.2mil last May and while their statements spoke about customer satisfaction and ease of use with their self-publishing platform in the end they were not able to sustain the business model. A quote from their May 2008 funding round "Veotag is rapidly growing its customer base and establishing the technology as the de facto standard for audio and video publishing," said founder and president of Small Ventures USA Bill Perkins. "Customers are highly satisfied with the results they achieve with Veotag, and in particular with how Veotag eliminates the need for costly production services. Veotag's ease-of-use and commitment to customer satisfaction have positioned the company as the one to beat in media publishing." So what went wrong? Was it the economy, leadership choices, lack of customer traction, churn or other platform choices in the marketplace? Veotag which had a mix of business with some free UGC content may have been trying to follow Brightcoves move to win larger media outlets and shed smaller less profitable independent producers which BrightCove did last year when it dumped UGC and Indie producers trying to gain traction on-line. ]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/05/veotag_sold_to_multicast_media.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/05/veotag_sold_to_multicast_media.html Multicast Media Veotag Thu, 07 May 2009 12:15:41 -0500   Photo by John Cox Copyright 2009 Capitol Broadcasting Company WRAL-TV likes being first, this time the Capital Broadcasting Company has partnered with the city of Raleigh, NC. to offer DTV on the cities buses. Right now there is one equipped vehicle with four planned for this summer. "We are proud to be the pilot to offer mobile digital television to the riders of the Downtown Circulator," stated Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker. "We salute WRAL for being pioneers in mobile digital television as they were in high definition television. We look forward to the day when all of Raleigh's CAT buses will offer this means of information and relaxation." Mobility on buses is not new, at least to the rest of the world. Singapore has had WiFi available since late 2007 in partnership with Nokia Singapore.   WRAL-TV News Coverage Related ipTVe article from July 31, 2008: WRAL-TV MPH Related ipTVe article from August 2nd, 2008: Jay Adrick, VP of Broadcast Technology for Harris Broadcast ]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/04/raleight_nc_buses_go_mobile.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/04/raleight_nc_buses_go_mobile.html Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:46:32 -0500 The New York State recently extended a 350 million tax credit for the film industry to try and spur feature and series production in the state, see this news report on Facebook While feature projects and TV shows may not be attracted to New York State this year what about trying to leverage iTV projects? Certainly most people are familiar with Quarterlife and it's large budget for iTV (many would say too large) however, there is a lot of great programming and projects that could employ people at rates lower then the Quarterlife budget, should these be encouraged at the State level through incentives and or tax credits? April 12th, update. We sent New York State Senator Kruger who sits on the intersection of spending on this front some questions however, his office declined to reply.]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/04/ny_state_considers_350mil_prod.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/04/ny_state_considers_350mil_prod.html Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:13:54 -0500 Corporate slogans are so common that they often go unnoticed by the public as so much marketing noise. In the case of Time Warner Cable however, their decision today to implement tired pricing for "so called" heavy users of Internet bandwidth could make their slogan, "The Power of You" that much more poetic. Under the new plan user will pay between $29.95 to $54.90 a month, based on data consumption and desired connection speed. Customers will be charged $1 for each gigabyte (GB) over their plan's cap. Time Warner Cable offers four cap levels of 5, 10, 20, and 40 GB. "To put it mildly," says Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett, "the decision to limit data consumption can be expected to have profound implications for [consumer] behavior." The company discounts those claims and said that in the Beaumont Texas trials only 14% of users exceeded their cap and had to pay additional fees of about $19 per month. Some have suggested that the cell phone industry model applies here, namely users who go over their allotted minutes are charged extra per month. The problem is Internet providers have never charged users based on that business model and perhaps that will change as Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt said. "We made a mistake early on by not defining our business based on the consumption dimension." While Infrastructure is not free, there is a real concern that companies will use this argument as simply a marketing tool to collect more revenues from consumers. As iTV is in a nascent period with more video content on-line is now the time to be stunting the growth of the medium? In these depressed economic times people will vote with their wallets and it may become the power of us to dump you as our provider. ]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/time_warner_to_impliment_tired.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/time_warner_to_impliment_tired.html iTV Net Neutrality Time Warner Cable Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:38:00 -0500 With the economy upside down, people are turning to the age-old practice of bartering for goods and services. While there are many site geared for consumer goods, there is not a lot specific to production services for iTV production, gear and services. Some people are using Facebook or LinkedIn to connect with other media professionals and this media bartering group based in CA. is an example of a local group on Meetup. In gauging the temperature for such a connection point on this site, we'd like your input. Would you use a section where Indies and other non-corporate professionals could list their services and products for free. Companies wishing to list would pay a nominal amount. Let us know what you think... ]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/itv_production_and_services_ba.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/itv_production_and_services_ba.html Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:56:25 -0500 image c. iStockphoto If you want to have a "show me the money" conversation in Hollywood, mention two words: online video. The discussion will quickly turn to dogs on skateboards and other content that advertisers avoid. However, the story for professionally produced content is different. ABC's "Lost," for example, was seen by more than 1.4 million unique viewers in December, according to Nielsen. Transforming this growing traffic into a market rivaling traditional television may require decades. In the interim, the industry is working on more targeted programming and advertising. First the good news. The audience for online professional video is younger, wealthier and better educated than the broader TV audience. Advertisers crave these 18-49 year olds, lifting CPMs (cost-per-thousand impressions) for premium online video over $25, which is higher than television. Advertisers also like the ad recall rates of 21 percent for streaming video, more than double the recall for TV, according to the GfK Group. Moreover, digital consumption is additive for a loyal fan base. More than 70 percent of online viewers claim to be fans who were unable to view the original show. This high quality audience is also growing quickly. While still only a tiny fraction of the $60 billion U.S. television advertising market, research firm eMarketer estimates that spending for U.S. online video advertising will double from $587 million last year to $1.25 billion next year. By 2013, as much as 70 percent of that revenue will likely come from professional content (The Diffusion Group). That means more advertising will be available to support professional video content online, and a larger, more affluent demographic will be watching.]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/post.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/post.html Fri, 27 Mar 2009 06:03:10 -0500 Tivo and Blockbuster will announce today a joint distribution and marketing deal. I recall as late as last August when some analysts were talking as if we would all be dancing on Tivo's grave. Their prognostication (you see how well they can predict the future) was that while Tivo while experiencing consecutive quarters of growth it would continue to see a weak forecast due to customer churn and competition from other sources. While it's correct that MSO's are offering cheap DVR alternatives, Satellite and platforms like Roku for Netflix all draw profits away from Tivo, it is curious to see Blockbuster, the once monolithic symbol for DVD rentals will announce today they are partnering with Tivo to offer between 5,000 too 10,000 titles at any one time, mostly newer releases like "The Dark Knight" that will typically cost $3.99 to watch over a 24-hour period. In addition, Blockbuster will sell Tivo DVR's in their stores however, specific models and pricing were not discussed. The Blockbuster feature will be available for standalone users of the TiVo Series 2 and 3 units, TiVo HD and TiVo HD XL DVRs. Blockbuster On Demand will be accessible only to the approximately 800,000 TiVo owners who have broadband Internet connected directly to their TiVo boxes. The company already offers online rentals through the Movielink service it bought from a group of studios in 2007. "We are excited to be teaming with TiVo, the company that created the DVR, to make Blockbuster's entertainment content readily available to their millions of subscribers," Jim Keyes, chief executive of Blockbuster, said in a statement. "Ultimately, our vision is to work with TiVo so that their subscribers can access movies not only through our On Demand service but also from our stores and through our by-mail service as well." Considering Blockbuster is trading below one dollar, a level at which some companies had been delisted in the past, Tivo on the other hand is trading at about seven times that amount. The company still offers an unrivaled OS and UI which has provided the company with the agnostic means to attract players like Amazon and Blockbuster. That no one platform has yet cemented the lean back entertainment crowd, it should not be lost on analysts, who my friend now calls the idiots who just downgraded your stock that forecasting is more then looking at formulation trends and tables, it's about customer excitement and desire. ]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/tivos_dance_card_is_filling_up.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/tivos_dance_card_is_filling_up.html Blockbuster DVR Movies Tico Wed, 25 Mar 2009 06:03:12 -0500 By: Francesco Calonico The Italian TV market has the peculiarity that cable television never developed, due to regulatory approaches, while the analogue television market developed very strongly between two main players, RAI (the public broadcaster) and Mediaset Group, a private one. This two groups take more than 95% of the TV advertising market in Italy, which is about 5€ billions; other nation-wide broadcasters are Telecom Italia Media and MTV (with less the 3% of the market share) and hundred of local broadcasting stations. In this scenario, another player, a satellite one, emerged in the last 6 years: SKY; SKY is from News Corporation group and has reached 5 millions paying users at the end of 2008 in Italy, with advertising revenues in the order of some hundreds millions of euros. Since 2004, according to the European defined scenario, digital terrestrial television (DTT) has been introduced, with a plan to switch off analogue transmissions from 2012. Currently more that 5 millions DTT Set Top Boxes have been sold in Italy and all new sold TV set should be DTT enabled; http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/the_iptv_landscape_in_italy.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/the_iptv_landscape_in_italy.html Broadband Francesco Calonico Italian IPTV Telcos Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:58:26 -0500 image c. iStockphoto In bidding on an Indie feature as a DP, I experienced the harsh reality of the New York feature market, to wit DP's are not working much and I guess for that matter others in the craft may not be much either. Rental houses are slow, Producers have their pick of the litter when it comes to owner operators who can charge next to nothing for a Vari-cam package with all the bells and whistle's, this just so they are working. For those of us who do not own gear, well were screwed. This would have been my first feature and I've not needed to rent any gear in the past year or so. My friends at a small rental house said the market is flat and people are not renting except for little stuff, he used another word for stuff. This was echoed by another friend who sees a reduction of camera work, good that she has editing work to keep her busy. Yet, I speak to iTV CEO's all the time and they see sufficient amounts of work to keep their tools, development or platform company busy. Is this stability in that part of the market so media outlets can create content to go on-line? Well I doubt it. Quarterlife was several million an episode (and I'd suggest about 80% of that was wasted money for distributing on-line) and while it had a following, it failed to gain enough eyeballs to drive cpm and make it worthwhile for established media execs who've gorged on the fat of OTA and Cable revenues for years. If this is the case how are Indie producers going to make it under the current economic model forget about that we are in the deepest recession since the 1040's? Back to the feature, I was already planning out the a look in my mind (minimalist without too much camera movement, I love it when actors walk into focus, or when the shot makes it just due to great composition) for this 21-day project - it would have been great for my reel and the DP part of my ego. I guess I'll stick to 1's a 0's for the moment, at least there it seems I can find the dog food. ]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/dog_wants_to_eat_dog_but_there.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/dog_wants_to_eat_dog_but_there.html Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:29:00 -0500 This morning I spoke with Mike Glickenhaus, the President and CEO of VMIX, a company in the SaaS, software as a service space. VMIX, headquartered in San Diego recently opened a New York City office and Mike and I met last week before the Nor'easter to discuss his company, the iTV space and how VMIX has seen growth year over year since inception, the company forecasts profitability in Q4 of this year. Interview with Mike Glickenhaus]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/interview_with_mike_glickenhau.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/03/interview_with_mike_glickenhau.html Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:12:25 -0500 The folks over at Android Community have written about the possible migration of the SlingPlayer Mobile for the Android platform, currently with the T-Mobile G1 as the primary unit here in the U.S. Brian Jaquet, Director, Public Relations at Sling, told ipTVe "We're absolutely interested in the platform and are following it very closely." In addition, " We see it picking up momentum and obviously customers as more handsets come to market this year." So stay tuned for more news...]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/02/sling_for_android_1.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/02/sling_for_android_1.html Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:49:24 -0500 Richard Livesey © 2009 ipTVe I attended a Gotham Media Ventures conference on January 15th at the Harvard Club in New York City. The theme for the conference was The Future of News & Information with the goal to "Examine how entrepreneurs in new media are creating effective and profitable models in order to reach consumers directly and how traditional media companies are attempting to adapt to changing times. The Future of News will look at the successes, challenges, failures and changes in a field where the rules are changing daily." The comments of most note we those of Tom Bettag, former Executive Producer, Ted Koppel Unit, Discovery; ABC News "Nightline who inspired the cartoon above. To paraphrase Mr. Bettag put forth the idea that in order for a new economic model to take hold in news and entertainment it might require gathering all the old media guard in a room to shoot them. While his comments we humorous and drew considerable laughs in the audience there is a valid point, namely that executives who control news and entertainment programming have gotten use to a high fat diet from the financial success of OTA to appreciate a leaner yet opportunistic on-line platform to fully embrace it so that consumers can slice and dice it to pick and choose what content they want to view and in what order, as they see fit. © 2009 Pew Research Center Currently, OTA has noting to fear from iTV with 70% still getting their news from OTA verses 40% for iTV, this according to a recent Pew Research, News Interest Index from December of 2008 However, this trending data supports the cartoon and Mr. Bettag's point, namely that the 18-29 year old demo is driving the growth in on-line sourcing for their primary news consumption. While execution seems too severe, what is it going to take for an effective and profitable economic model to take hold for iTV news programming? Perhaps members of the former administration can oversee waterboarding... ]]> http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/01/of_digital_and_breakfast.html http://www.iptvevangelist.com/2009/01/of_digital_and_breakfast.html Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:34:57 -0500