The Broadband Revolution

What's up Pando!

2006-01-01T14:02:00.000-05:00

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Enjoy the shade

2005-08-16T11:55:00.000-05:00

Here's my first attempt at a Pando-enabled video blog --
Lazy Afternoon at Pando HQ.

To download this 168MB video, you'll first need to install Pando. Pando is a tiny desktop application that lets people send and receive any size file or folder. You can even boost your existing email service's attachment capacity to 1GB just with this 1.5MB plug-in. Best of all, its free. This "little app with a lot of muscle" has a really slick and simple interface that allows you to easily drag and drop even entire folders of pictures and videos to send to anyone with an email address. The magic sauce is in some pretty advanced next generation p2p technology, but the real value for us common folk is in totally obliterating 2Mb email attachment limits. What was that about anyway? I mean, have you seen the pipes that connected you to this web page? Email providers have bumped storage capacity to gigabytes, but email attachments are still at 10Mb at best. The reason; cost. Enter Pando - unlimited email attachments and file transfers that completely bypass email servers and leverage the grossly underutilized investment you've already made in your PC's bandwidth and storage. Bout time.

We're still in a closed "friends and family" beta testing phase but if you email me at yaron@pando.com I'll send you the app to test.

Online Video: The Sequel

2004-12-29T11:45:00.000-05:00

DECEMBER 29, 2004
By Heather Green, BusinessWeek Online

Video blogs are proliferating, thanks to improved distribution technology, and mainstream companies are taking notice

THE NEXT WAVE. Welcome to the latest Net phenomenon: video blogs, or what some folks call vlogs. Thousands of ordinary (and some downright nutty) people have begun posting a cornucopia of video fare online, from self-indulgent art clips and earnest citizen journalism to sly political commentary (see BW Online, 12/29/04, "Let a Million Videos Bloom Online"). Experimentation is the rule, and eccentrics outnumber serious practitioners.

But amid the chaos, glimpses of a commercial future are starting to emerge, including a revival of online video distribution, using vlogs to sell ads, and corporate sites designed to reach out to customers and suppliers. "Text doesn't get across all I want to communicate," says Lenn Pryor, who runs Channel 9, a vlog that Microsoft (MSFT ) set up in April to communicate more effectively with software developers.

Online video had a brief heyday during the late '90s, when the likes of Pop.com and Digital Entertainment Network started indie-flick sites with the aim of developing online movie distribution. Those dreams mostly ended with the popping of the Net bubble. But thanks to the blog craze and the proliferation of high-speed broadband, new pioneers are emerging. "Video on the Internet has been there for a while," says Steve Rubel, whose blog, Micro Persuasion, talks about publishing trends. "What vlogging is doing is making it easier to share and find."

LOG AND LOAD. That development is due in large part to the spread of better distribution technology. Broadband is now in more than 40% of online U.S. households, meaning roughly 31 million people can now stream video easily. Another boost has come from the widespread adoption of blogging software known as really simple syndication, or RSS, which lets people customize content. With RSS, users can choose the types of video they want to see and have it sent automatically to their PCs. At the same time, cheaper digital video gear and better copyright protection is convincing more folks to put their work online.

The vlog phenomenon has stirred up a wave of creativity at grassroots groups and companies alike. Online video sites, such as Undergroundfilm, are adding blogging sections. Ourmedia, an online showcase for digital content, is expected to launch early this month. It will provide free storage and blogging room for creative types such as New York indie musician Sam Bisbee, whose music video will be available for free. "You see video bubbling up all over the Web," says J.D. Lasica, who runs Ourmedia. "My thought was to gather it all in one place."

The proliferation of video is prompting commercial entities to take a second look. On Dec. 16, Yahoo! (YHOO ) launched an online search service that uses RSS tools developed with Ourmedia and indie site AtomFilms to collect videos from around the Web. Blogs that sell ads, such as consumer-electronics news site Engadget, are adding video product reviews. And Microsoft's Channel 9, which attracts 900,000 viewers a month, dishes up interviews and demos to stay in close contact with its key software-developer community.

THE RIGHT VIEWERS. For some indie filmmakers who weathered the video drought online, the Internet is finally starting to live up to its early promise. Peter John Ross posted short films on a handful of online video sites before they imploded in 2000. But he kept plugging away, using his own site and other survivors to promote his videos. "It's amazing how people will find your work," says Ross. The right kind of people, too: Ross recently got financial backing for his first full-length film.

Let a Million Videos Bloom Online

2004-12-29T06:46:00.000-05:00

DECEMBER 29, 2004
BusinessWeek Online
NEWS ANALYSIS By Heather Green

The grassroots movement to post "vlogs" makes amazing viewing, and the growing audience may give them an increasing impactFollowing in the footsteps of text blogs, video blogs are starting to take off on the Internet. This new form of grassroots digital media is being shepherded along by groups of film makers and video buffs who started pooling publishing tips and linking to each other in earnest this year. The results are astonishing, downright funny, and sometimes puzzling. However you describe it, the new video blogs, or what some call vlogs, are compelling in the creativity they're unleashing and the changes they could bring to the media status quo (see BW Online, 12/29/04, "Online Video: The Sequel").

EVOLVING CONNECTIONS. In Boston, Steve Garfield is practicing his own brand of citizen journalism. His video reports at stevegarfield.blogs.com/videoblog are as local as they come, ranging from coverage of this summer's Democratic National Convention to a video of a downed power line on his street. At human-dog.com, run by Chris Weagel, a St. Clair Shores (Mich.) video producer, visitors can watch a spare, silent film showing an anonymous person removing a John Kerry yard sign from its metal posts after the Presidential election and taping an upside-down flag in its place. Ryan Hodson, a 25-year-old film editor, specializes in videos that mingle the absurd with oddly touching insights. In one clip, she tours her house. In the kitchen, the camera focuses on a pot on a stove as Hodson describes the night her roommate tried to cook Dinty Moore Stew without -- as the camera pans up to recreate -- pouring the food out of the can. In another video, she created split-screen montages of her brother racing bicycles, showing him crashing, and then out ahead of the pack. The trio are among the pioneers spearheading a fast-evolving grassroots movement. It's an amazing process to watch as creative pockets begin to interact around the country. Garfield, Hodson, and Weagel are all part of a Yahoo! community group dedicated to video blogging that was formed in June by Jay Dedman, a New Yorker who works at a public-access TV station.

OTHER PLAYERS. In turn, that Yahoo group began working in late summer with Ourmedia, a new site backed by a who's who of bloggers and grassroots media advocates. Intended to be a showplace for digital content, Ourmedia is being given free storage space by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library backed by the entrepreneur Brewster Kahle. Ourmedia is also tapping into the publishing and copyright licensing tools developed by Creative Commons, another grassroots nonprofit founded by Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford Law School professor and one of America's best known commentators on intellectual-property issues. The links among the various groups don't stop there. Yahoo (YHOO ), which unveiled a video search service earlier this month, is working with Ourmedia, Creative Commons, and commercial sites such as indie-film service AtomFilms to develop a video version of Really Simple Syndication, or RSS. Using RSS, Web surfers would choose the types of videos they want to see and have them sent automatically to their computers. The technology also allows independent video makers to submit their films to Yahoo's search engine automatically. Separately, startup Kontiki, which has helped the likes of CNET (CNET ) set up online video services, is also creating a free service that plans to aggregate online videos together using RSS.

CULT FOLLOWING. So what does this virtual frenzy add up to? There are hints of what the renewed interest in online video, spurred by vlogging, could mean for aspiring directors. By taking advantage of the technology popularized by video bloggers, more indie filmmakers will likely reach a wider audience. Creating such an audience will likely spawn new business models. The biggest impact could be the creation of on-demand services, a sort of alternative TiVo (TIVO ) online. If video RSS takes off, it would present just one more diversion from the established media. And like text blogs, it would be a diversion that evolves outside of the control of big media. Other outgrowths, including video blogs that make money through selling ads or DVDs, are likely in time. Some isolated examples already exist of homegrown works that were initially shown online before being turned into commercial DVDs. The most famous example is Broken Saints, a 24-part animated fantasy series that attracted a cult-like following during its run online from 2001 to 2003.

CROSS-PROMOTIONS. Artists may end up getting enough of a following to allow them to get on TV. Already, an alternative show called ZeD that airs at 11:30 p.m. on the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. often features videos submitted through its Web site. Though the movement is in its early stages, it's easy to imagine that video blogs could have as big an impact as text blogs. Indeed, they're already doing what has been the real strength of traditional blogging -- promoting one another's work. And even if the vast majority of the videos remain a novelty, the explosion of experimentation is a welcome sight.

Viewpoint Snaps Up Unicast

2004-12-03T13:18:00.000-05:00

By Ross Fadner
Staff Writer
Friday, December 03, 2004

Viewpoint, Inc., a technology vendor and rich media content provider, yesterday announced it would acquire Unicast Communications, a rich media ad serving company, for $7.4 million. The deal is expected to be complete at the beginning of the new year.

The move--likened by one pundit to an NYU film student buying MGM--initially surprised many industry observers, mainly because the two companies seem to have different business models. But, said industry analysts, the disparities between the companies might actually benefit them both.

Viewpoint is principally a technology firm that owns a platform that competes with Microsoft's Windows Media Player. Viewpoint uses its platform to create rich media content for its clients. Much of the company's ad revenue comes from its visual search engine, the "Viewpoint Toolbar," completely unrelated to rich media. Ad serving itself only constitutes a small part of Viewpoint's business model.

Unicast, on the other hand, has an established presence as one of the major independent rich media ad vendors; competitors include PointRoll and Eyeblaster. Unicast brings to the table established relationships with several advertisers and top agencies--particularly traditional agencies, which are fond of Unicast's TV-like interstitial format.

Therefore, with this deal, Viewpoint will gain access to Unicast's prestige and established advertisers, while Unicast will have access to Viewpoint's resources.

Viewpoint CEO Jay Amato said the deal gives Viewpoint more video products than anyone else in the marketplace, and positions it for rapid growth. "The whole is much greater than the sum of its parts," he said. The company's advertising products now include rich media ad serving via in-page, in-stream, in-banner, and via intersitial. Viewpoint will also continue to create rich media content for brand clients like GE, Xerox, HP, Honda, and Toyota.

Amato said Viewpoint will integrate its sales force into Unicast's sales force, since the rich media provider's sales team is the larger of the two. "There is no waste with this deal--we need all the people we have."

Allie Savarino, Unicast's senior vice president, global marketing and partner services, said the combined distribution of both companies gives Viewpoint near 100 percent Internet audience penetration on over 1700 sites worldwide. Notably, Viewpoint brings its relationships with America Online and Yahoo! to the table, while Unicast adds MSN.

Some say it would be a mistake to view the deal as heralding a wave of mergers.

"This is not rich media consolidation," said JupiterResearch Associate Analyst Nate Elliott. He said that rich media consolidation isn't really possible anymore, because the major rich media providers--all small independent firms--offer similar services and think they're in a position to corner the market. Essentially, Elliott said, rich media companies have too much overlap to merge with each other, and none of them are in a position to buy.

Rishad Tobaccowala, president of Starcom MediaVest Group IP, said the crux of the problem is that not enough money is being invested in rich media. Without investment dollars, he said, no real leaders are able to emerge, which is why the current situation revolves around small players.

Tobaccowala called the Unicast acquisition more "complementary" than a mark of consolidation. He added that marketers are hoping for consolidation because it makes the process of buying rich media far easier. Advertisers currently need to familiarize themselves with the proprietary platforms of several small rich media startups--a process that Tobaccowala said can be confusing and time-consuming.

Jim Nail, principal analyst for Forrester Research, added that marketers have long complained about there being too many vendors and formats. He agreed the acquisition complements both companies, but also thinks that any move toward one set of tools and one technology platform is a plus for marketers. "Viewpoint is a very elegant technology," he said, adding that the combined services will give clients "a single palette" for creating rich media content for their own Web sites as well as for advertising purposes.

Video to Drive "Significant" Growth in 2005 Online Ad Market

2004-11-19T13:44:00.000-05:00

ClickZ News
By Rob McGann November 19, 2004

As many as 70 percent of advertisers and agencies plan to increase online ad spending in 2005, with a specific interest in ramping up their use of online video, according to an informal survey conducted by Unicast, an online video ad vendor.

The findings are based on a year-end survey Unicast conducted with a small sample of agency and advertiser customers. It found within the next 12 months, 88 percent of respondents believe online video will become as important as other online tools like Flash and search in their online campaigns. The remaining 12 percent expect it to become "more important" than other online vehicles.

The 70 percent of respondents planning to increase their online advertising budgets next year plan to do so by an average of almost 50 percent.

"This is a verification of advertiser and agency interest in video on the Internet as being strong enough to compel them to reallocate and reconsider their annual budgets to a larger proportion next year," said Unicast SVP Allie Savarino.

While bullish online video's future as an advertising tool next year, survey participants identified areas that still need improvement, including reliable metrics on the efficacy of online video to reach potential customers, and the ability to optimize online video advertising performance.

Portals Yahoo! and MSN have recently aggressively promoted video and other rich media ad options.

Startup Launching Web-To-TV Video Service

2004-08-29T08:24:00.000-05:00

August 29, 2004
By May Wong, AP Technology Writer
Startup Akimbo Systems to Launch Internet Video-On-Demand Service for Television Sets

SAN MATEO, Calif. (AP) -- The promise of Internet-based video has long been hamstrung by copyright and piracy worries, slow dial-up connections, technical challenges and consumer disdain for watching blotchy videos on their home computers. But a Silicon Valley startup is tackling those obstacles, hoping to become the first major provider of cinema straight from the Internet to the living room boob tube.

"Twenty years from now, everyone's going to be getting all their video mostly from the Internet," says Steve Shannon, founder of Akimbo Systems Inc. "You see it happening with music. You see it happening with phone service. Video is next."

With new video and copy-protection technologies, and the rapid expansion of high-speed broadband connections, the time may be ripe. Akimbo hopes to tap the vast vault of programming floating on the Internet, repackage it in DVD-quality, and bring it to a set-top box so viewers can easily choose what they want to watch from their sofa -- not from their desktop.

The San Mateo-based startup, which delayed its launch date from the summer to October after it hit technical snags, appears poised to be the first to deliver an Internet-to-TV video-on-demand service. Akimbo is targeting an audience that craves more than the programming on conventional TV and cable networks.

But it's unclear whether even the most dedicated video junkies will be willing to buy another set-top box and pay an additional monthly subscription fee. Akimbo also faces steep competition from larger rivals in the potentially lucrative market.

SBC Communications Inc. and EchoStar Communications Corp. have teamed up to launch an online movie-on-demand service next year. Digital video recording pioneer TiVo Inc. is also working on a product that will connect Web content to the TV screen.

Video content piped into homes through the Internet does not face the spectrum constraints of broadcast television. Expanding the video catalog -- "scalability" in industry jargon -- is relatively easy by adding more computer servers for storage.

The typical cost of transporting video data over the Internet has dropped from $30 per gigabyte in 2001 to less than $1 per gigabyte today, said Shannon, a former marketing executive at ReplayTV, another pioneer in digital video recording.

"It'll be the nirvana of video on demand," Shannon said. "And the only architecture that can bring that is the Internet."

But will consumers, many of whom already have tall stacks of electronic boxes by their TVs, open their wallets? Akimbo subscribers must first buy a $229 Akimbo Player set-top box, then pay a basic monthly service fee of $10.

"You're competing against a lot of consumer electronic gadgets out there and many consumers are paying almost triple-digit monthly fees for video entertainment, so how much more are consumers going to pay for entertainment in the living room?" asked Sean Badding, an industry analyst at The Carmel Group market research firm.

The company may charge more for premium services, and some shows will carry a pay-per-download fee -- as much as $5 for rare films, or $1 to $2 for a kid's show, Shannon said.

"If you give people content that they're passionate about and that they can't get anywhere else, they'll be willing to pay for it," said Josh Goldman, Akimbo's chief executive.

Programming that users select will be downloaded via a broadband Internet connection onto the Akimbo Player's 80-gigabyte hard drive, which Akimbo says will hold about 200 hours of video. But instant gratification doesn't apply: Download time roughly equals the length of the video, and the download must finish before viewing starts.

Copy-protection mechanisms in the Microsoft Windows Media 9 video format should prevent users from being able to copy shows or play them on PCs or other devices.

At launch, Akimbo promises to have a library of more than 20,000 hours of video from 50 content providers, including independent films and shorts from iFilms and AmazeFilms; foreign language shows from the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Middle East; and a smorgasbord of specialty sports events ranging from boxing to sailboarding.

Adult-oriented entertainment, including Canada's Naked News and Danni's Hard Drive, a sexually explicit Web site, will be available. Parental controls will be included to limit children's access to selected content.

The plan is to offer mainstream content later. Analysts say Akimbo is shrewd to begin with relatively esoteric programming not yet available on cable or major networks.

"That's their competitive edge," Badding said. "They don't want to go head-on right now with cable operators with mainstream content because then they'll be dead."

Some venture capitalists believe the market is ready. Akimbo, which announced its service in February after 1 1/2 years of secret development, recently scored a second round of funding of $12 million, led by the powerful venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Although Hollywood is warming to Internet-based video, offerings such as CinemaNow, MovieLink or Starz Encore are limited.

Without a product like Akimbo's, video on the Internet can be streamed from a computer to a television. But consumers must have either a PC near the TV or some kind of media adapter and a home computer network -- not to mention technical know-how, drastically reducing the potential number of users.

CinemaNow, an Internet video-on-demand service eager for a new source of customers, will provide its content on Akimbo's service. Only 10 percent to 20 percent of CinemaNow's users go through the trouble of linking their computer network and televisions, said Bruce Eisen, CinemaNow's executive vice president.

"It's not easy to marry the TV with a PC," Eisen said, "but Akimbo takes content off the Internet and puts it on the TV in an easy-to-use fashion."

MSN Quietly Launches New Broadband Video Advertising Platform

2004-08-19T09:24:00.000-05:00

By Ross Fadner, MediaDailyNews
Thursday, August 19, 2004

Without the usual PR fanfare that typically surrounds an advertising product launch from a major Internet service provider, MSN this week quietly stepped its MSN Video product out of beta and onto the market for the consideration of prospective broadband video advertisers.

Now officially called MSN Video 2, the broadband video advertising platform became available "for general sale to a broader set of clients late last week," according to Eric Hadley, director of marketing and advertising for MSN. He said advertiser demand has been considerable, and there is now "substantially more inventory available."

Currently, most of MSN's video content is available at the MSN Video section of MSN.com, but other media categories like MSN Entertainment, Fox Sports, MSN Autos, and MSN Money are adopting the MSN Video Player. "The idea is to sell [MSN Video] across the entire network," Hadley said, noting that MSN wanted to provide its advertisers with a contextually relevant video platform.

Hadley said that ads on MSN Video 2 will appear "somewhat like TV ads," except that only one 7-12-second video ad will appear for each piece of content. Hadley added that while consumers don't necessarily need a broadband connection to view MSN video, the video capabilities are limited for narrowband users.

MSN began testing the advertising-supported streaming video service about 10 months ago. To date, video providers have included media partner NBC, the Discovery Channel, The Weather Channel, The Food Channel, Showtime, and most recently, Fox Sports and Major League Baseball. Its advertising partners have thus far included Procter & Gamble, Revlon, Gateway, and Discover Card, among others.

MSN has opted to keep the lid on MSN Video 2 thus far because it plans to feature the new service when it pitches its Fall advertising package in several weeks. Hadley said several "new interesting features" will be announced at that time for MSN Video, as well as additional advertising partners. The MSN ad package will encompass a seven-city road show, in which the company will unveil new ad products for its search, content, and video services.

In the past, online video has been a tough sell for many major Internet companies, but some say this is because failed services like Yahoo! Platinum launched before the broadband market was as strong as it is today. According to Wednesday's Nielsen//NetRatings data, broadband penetration in July finally surpassed that of narrowband, with 63 million--51 percent of online Americans--accessing the Internet through broadband versus 61.3 million via narrowband.

MSN developed the first version of MSN Video in collaboration with Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG) and MSNBC.com. SMG, one of the world's largest brand communications groups, helped develop the media-buying components of MSN Video.

"MSN came to us with a great concept and high motivation to make it real," stated Rishad Tobaccowala, president of SMG's Internet practice. "Our objective was to help shape the next generation of advertising-supported video delivery, as well as get immediate traction in the marketplace." He added that "advertisers can't afford to be cut off from the growing number of consumers who now spend less time in front of the TV and more time online via broadband."

Must-download TV

2004-08-11T12:45:00.000-05:00

The latest developments in TV-show-trading technology mean you don't need TiVo to watch what you want, when you want.

By Farhad Manjoo
Salon.com
Aug. 11, 2004

When the Federal Communications Commission gave its blessing on Aug. 4 to a new TiVo service that Hollywood has opposed, the decision was widely hailed as a triumph for techies. The news was both unexpected and unlikely -- these days, government officials rarely move against the wishes of giant media companies.

TiVo's upcoming service, called TivoToGo, will allow users to send recorded TV shows across the Internet to PCs or to other TiVo machines, a functionality that TiVo says customers have long demanded. Although TiVo has imposed a host of restrictions on the system, media firms told the FCC that TivoToGo would cause immense harm to their bottom line. The FCC didn't buy it, and geeks were ecstatic: "Three words.... There is a GOD!" wrote one Slashdot reader in a typical note of glee.

The closer one looks, however, the less divine the FCC's approval of TiVo begins to appear. For one thing, the new TiVo service seems pretty hard to fall in love with. It's strapped down by a surfeit of copy-protection mechanisms that many people will probably find tedious if not odious. For instance, the service will allow users to transfer shows only to a small number of machines registered on a single customer account; technically, says James Burger, an attorney for TiVo, the system is meant to let users move shows from one of their TiVo systems only to another (say from a summer home to a winter home), and not even to friends or family.

TiVo was required to lock down its system and to seek the government's approval in order to comply with the "broadcast flag" rule, which the FCC adopted last year. The rule is designed to prevent the widespread trading of television shows as we enter the age of high-definition digital television. Hollywood's nightmare scenario is that high-def TV will become "Napsterized," with shows available online to anyone, anytime, for free -- which may sound, to some TV fans, less like a nightmare than a heavenly dream.

And, indeed, despite Hollywood's efforts, it's a dream that in many ways is coming true. While the government and Hollywood fret over ways to keep high-definition television off the Internet, copies of standard-definition TV shows are now heavily traded online. Once an underground activity plagued by hard-to-use tools and shows of less-than-stellar picture quality, the systems for finding and downloading TV are steadily becoming easier to use, and the current watchability of the shows is nothing to scoff at.

In recent months, a host of developers and TV enthusiasts have been working on ways to improve online trading -- they're building sophisticated networks to record and encode and distribute shows, and they're improving peer-to-peer transfer systems to make downloading easier. The hottest new improvement is made possible by the merging of two Internet innovations, the peer-to-peer protocol BitTorrent and RSS, the popular Web syndication standard. Together, these systems enable a computer to automatically find and download a user's favorite shows -- something like having a TV station designed just for you.

To be sure, the shows being traded online don't have anywhere near the quality of high-definition television broadcasts, and those HD shows are what the FCC's broadcast flag rule is meant to protect. Critics of Hollywood are skeptical of its claim that digital television will one day become a hot commodity online -- at full resolution, a typical one-hour digital show requires 14 gigabytes of hard-disk space (more than three times the size of a DVD), and days to transfer at today's broadband speeds.

But even if the shows currently online aren't of HD quality, many people will probably find them good enough -- if you have a big monitor on your machine, or if you connect it to a standard-size television, most of the shows you find will look decent. And anyway, in TV, unlike the movies, picture quality isn't paramount. At least, it's not as important as freedom, the right to do whatever you want with your set, to watch what you want when you want, which is what online TV trading allows, and what the future high-definition, broadcast-flag-protected world will not.

Indeed, the most troubling thing about the FCC's broadcast flag rule is that it seems designed to stamp out the idea that we're free to do what we want with TV. As many critics of media firms have pointed out, there's something deeply unsettling about the fact that TiVo, a firm that completely remade the way we watch TV, needed the government's permission to release a new technology. You don't have to be a techno-libertarian to find this state of affairs troubling. Sure, this time the FCC allowed TiVo to innovate -- but the decision could easily have gone the other way. In the future, what other technologies might the government deem too dangerous to be invented?

Trading TV shows online is, of course, illegal. Television shows are copyrighted, and unless the copyright owner has granted permission, it's as illegal to download a TV show as it is to download a song or a proprietary operating system or a video game. Violations of this law carry heavy penalties -- we've all heard about the kids who lost their life savings for swapping songs using services like Kazaa and Morpheus.

But what about the ethics of trading online? Regardless of the legality, is there anything unethical about downloading a television show from the Internet? Is it wrong?

This is a harder case to make. When you download a song that you could otherwise have found only on a CD in a store, it's reasonable to say that you've gotten something for nothing -- what most people would call stealing. But broadcast television is free, and many of us already pay for a basic set of television shows through some kind of cable or satellite package.

We're also already used to recording and trading TV; who hasn't taped an episode of "Friends" for a friend, or borrowed a copy of "American Idol" from a co-worker? If you download an episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" rather than ask your brother to record it, are you really doing anything that bad?

"It's hard to identify what the harm is," says Mike Godwin, an attorney at Public Knowledge, a digital-rights group that opposed the broadcast flag rule. "Let's say you're a fan of the FX show 'Nip/Tuck,' and you wanted to see it on Tuesday night, but you were out and you didn't set your TiVo. So you say, 'Let me hunt it down online.' People do that all the time. People who are fans of the show probably already have FX -- they're paying for it. Now, you could say that the harm is in that the distributed version is usually made available without the commercials -- but if you have a TiVo, you aren't watching the commercials anyway."

Godwin concedes that downloading premium-channel shows such as "The Sopranos" or "Six Feet Under" might be a bit harder to justify for people who aren't subscribers to those services. But even this is something of a stretch, since nobody considers it wrong to ask an HBO-blessed colleague to feed you your weekly diet of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," or to invite over a half dozen friends for a "Sopranos" party. (HBO, though, came down on bars and restaurants that publicly screened its shows.)

The mass distribution of premium shows might worry Hollywood, but the main fear of media companies is bigger than that. Media firms make money from TV by keeping it scarce. Even considering the hundreds of channels now on TV, there are only a finite number of slots available, and there are hundreds of thousands of episodes of new and old television programs that might fill those slots. TV companies choose which shows to play when, and, because you've got no other choice but to watch what's on, you watch -- even if you might not particularly enjoy what's on. But would you continue to watch what the TV companies chose if you could find something you actually wanted to watch? Hollywood fears that you would not.

As the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood's main industry group, said in a statement responding to the FCC's approval of TivoToGo, "Technologies that enable redistribution of copyrighted TV programming beyond the local TV market disrupt local advertiser-supported broadcasting and harm TV syndication markets -- essential elements supporting the U.S. local broadcasting system." As Hollywood sees it, in other words, TV depends on your powerlessness over it.

It's this powerlessness that rankles Mark Sailes, a 20-year-old computer science undergraduate at the University of Leeds in the U.K., who is working on a number of systems to make TV trading easier. Like students all over the world, Sailes has two abiding interests -- tinkering with computers and watching television. His taste in TV, too, is rather typical. For the most part, he says he likes popular American shows. The trouble is, new American programs aren't immediately broadcast in the United Kingdom; it can take years for the latest episodes to skip across the pond, which clearly is too excruciating a wait for dedicated fans who need to know what happens in the end with Ross and Rachel.

So what's an enterprising European "Stargate" fan to do? In a world made small by a ubiquitous computer network, the answer is obvious -- download the latest American shows. But BitTorrent, the best tool to download extremely large files, works differently from something like Kazaa, in that it has no built-in search capability. Pointers to BitTorrent files are posted on the Web or traded on discussion groups or in chat rooms, and you've got to know where to look to find them. For a long while, finding good-quality shows online was difficult, Sailes says -- and once you found a file of a TV show, how would know whether it was any good, worth spending hours to download?

So in order to bring a kind of professionalism to TV trading, Sailes and his friends set up a worldwide network of distributors. Members of the group are responsible for recording shows, encoding them into portable formats, uploading them using BitTorrent, and then posting the shows' details on the IRC channel #BT, where Sailes and his crew hang out, and on Sailes' own Web site. (Sailes asked Salon not post his site's URL, not so much because he fears prosecution, he said, but because he didn't really want to deal with the extra unnecessary publicity; it's possible to find the #BT crew's torrents, though, on SuprNova, the biggest and most popular torrent site.)

But a few months ago, Sailes says, he and his friends began noticing another bottleneck in TV trading. "It became apparent that hundreds of people were coming into our IRC channel just to ask when new shows would be available, just spending a whole lot of time doing nothing but waiting for the new show," Sailes says. This is due to another idiosyncrasy of BitTorrent. The system works best when lots of people are downloading the same file at the same time, and getting a TV show requires a knack for timing -- you've got to find a show while it's new, within the first few days of its being posted online, before everyone who wants it has downloaded it and the file has faded away. Instead of having the people come to IRC to ask about new shows, Sailes wondered, wouldn't it be great if the #BT crew could somehow notify all the interested traders when a new show was ready?

The situation faced by TV show downloaders is not very different from the problem faced by consumers of most content on the Web -- how do you know when your favorite Web site has changed, and how do you know when to check back in to a blog that's only occasionally updated? In the blogosphere, the answer for most people is RSS. So why couldn't that work for TV shows? Sailes wondered. People's computers could automatically check the RSS feed for updates, and when a desired show was found in the feed, the machine would automatically download the program, without the user's input. "We saw that we could quite easily get this done," Sailes said.

Sailes didn't exactly come up with this idea on his own. Net visionaries have long been pondering the marriage of BitTorrent and RSS, and many people have built systems to bring about this union.

But Sailes didn't think that anyone had gotten it just right, and this spring he and a roommate set out to build a stand-alone RSS reader meant specifically for TV trading. What they came up with is Buttress, an open-source Java application that, while still very much a work in progress, looks extremely promising. Using the system is easy: You give the program a few RSS feeds to monitor (here are some to get you started), and you give it some keywords of shows you'd like to download -- "sopranos," "buffy," that kind of thing. The program periodically scans the feeds, and if it sees your keyword, it launches your BitTorrent app and downloads the show. Because this happens in the background, while you're sleeping or at work or out of town, it's painless -- you don't need to look around for the show, or to wait while it downloads, or to worry about whether you recorded it, etc. All you've got to do is trust that someone, somewhere, has put the show online -- and when you check back on your machine, you'll see that you've got it and it's ready to watch.

Buttress is not the only such application. There is a plug-in for the popular BitTorrent client Azureus that's also useful, and there's an app for Linux systems. All of these are open-source programs, and developers are working mightily on improvements. Sailes says that by the fall TV season, there will be a very stable version of Buttress available, one that "shouldn't be a problem for anyone to use."

Although there are no firm numbers, TV trading still appears to be relatively uncommon. Sailes estimates that there were more than 50,000 downloads of the last episode of "Friends," but compared to the millions of people who watched it on TV, that's not much. It's clear that trading is not hurting Hollywood. "The last time I checked, the sales of DVDs of television shows were huge -- way larger than anyone had ever expected," says Fred von Lohmann, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It doesn't seem to me that the Internet trading is harming the market in any substantial way."

And the best way for Hollywood to curb trading, von Lohmann says, would be to quickly offer high-definition digital television. Because of their quality, high-def shows would be much more difficult to trade, and the better quality would give people a reason to tune in to their televisions. But Hollywood's not doing this; instead of quickly moving to HD, the industry has been pushing for a regulatory lockdown of HD technology, a complicated scheme that will do nothing to stem the trading of shows online.

And it's conceivable that the trading of standard-definition shows online may even slow the adoption of digital TV. After all, who will want a digital TV device locked down by copy protection when people can stick with standard TV and experience the sheer joy of doing what they want. With online TV trading, you'll never miss a show ever again, and you can find shows from all over the world, and you can even catch some old-school programs. As the blogger Jason Kottke has termed it, you can now "roll your own reruns."

"Of course, they just want to restrict choice," Sailes says of the media companies who would lock down TV. "It's up to us to get the best out of what they give us."

Forget the bloggers, it's the vloggers showing the way on the internet

2004-08-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

by Gerard Seenan
Saturday August 7, 2004
The Guardian

When Luuk Bouwman finished college he did what so many graduates do and decided to spend a year travelling. He packed his rucksack with clothes and a video camera and jumped on a plane to Peru. Machu Picchu beckoned. But when Mr Bouwman got on to the Inca trail and then further into rural Peru, he took a more unusual route.

He slipped into the now ubiquitous - even, he says, in Peruvian one-horse towns - internet cafe, got out his digital video camera and began uploading the tales of his travels on to his website back in the Netherlands. Then, each week, the rest of the world was free to watch his travel diary.

Mr Bouwman is the vanguard of the latest internet trend: video logging or vlogging. One step up from the now familiar internet blogger, vloggers upload personal video clips of everything from the US Democratic convention to what they had for their tea, via rants about tax rises and conspiracy theories.

"When I went there were very few video logs on the web and most of them were very introverted," says Mr Bouwman. "I wanted to take this video web log concept and go as far away from technology as possible. So I took it right into the Amazon."

Mr Bouwman was at an advantage to the average person who wants to take up vlogging: he had just graduated from film school.

His website (tropisms.org) has evolved into one of the slickest vlogging sites on the internet. It is a way for him and other young documentary makers to self-publish their work. "I get up to 500 unique visitors a day, nothing compared to TV, but a full cinema still," he says.

But not all vlogging is so slick. In its most basic form, vlogging does not require very hi-tech equipment: a digital video camera, a high-speed connection and a host are all that is needed. It is still not an easy pursuit, but the gradual simplification of the technology is bringing an increasing number of people into vlogging - and politicising it.

Click on demandmedia.net and you'll find a video of a Manchester anti-war demonstration posted by Anonymous Hero. It's the sort of rally by school and university students too small to make it on to the national media, but here it is being thrown open to a global audience.

"I set up the site because I saw a need for a portal for independent, grassroots video that wanted to affect social change," says Alan Bushnell, who runs Demand Media. But, though Mr Bushnell says he is receiving more submissions, he admits there are obvious limitations with vlogging.

"People are taught to write from childhood, however there is no analogous experience of learning to produce video," he says.

Steve Garfield, a video producer from Boston, Massachusetts, has no problems with the medium. He uses his website to be a "citizen journalist", which he describes as "anyone who decides to tell a story and share it".

Mr Garfield posts about two vlogs a week, on everything from beer and local human interest stories to an off-beat daily report from the recent Democratic convention. There are still only a few hundred vlogging sites on the web - compared with literally thousands of blogging sites - but Mr Garfield predicts that more internet users will get involved in vlogging once the technological barriers come down.

"As tools come out that make it easier, more people will start creating video blogs," he says. "The barriers to entry now are the number of steps it takes to get a video published on the web. You've got to shoot the video, digitise it, edit it, compress it for web delivery, upload it to a host and post it to your blog."

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Aisling Kelliher is working on a research project that uses new technology which allows vlogs to be created using the new generation mobile phones.

"At the moment a lot of people who video log are in schools or institutions where the cost is not an issue and they have access to the technology," she says.

"I have done three or four experiments with giving people cell phones they could use to create a video log. We got things like a video log of someone recovering in hospital. It was very moving. It's a great way to get people to begin to play around with video."

But as the technology simplifies and the cost of vlogging goes the way of all new technology and tumbles, the obvious question looms large: why would anyone want to create video log that, at best, a few hundred people are going to see?

"It's a form of self-publicity, of course, anything put out from home pages is self promotion in some form," says Mark Griffiths, a psychologist at Nottingham Trent University who specialises in the psychology of the internet.

"It may be that they are trying to get an argument out, it may just be a cathartic experience. You are never going to get a single answer. Life can be humdrum and it's a way for people to put themselves in touch with the bigger questions and issues."

From Detroit to Ethiopia, all eyes on the future

www.tropisms.org
What started as a personal video log has grown into a collective vlog with a small group of filmmakers. One of the sleekest sites on the net, it includes current vlogs from Chernobyl and Ethiopia

www.SteveGarfield.com
Boston-based video producer who wants to show that eventually anyone will be able to create original video on the net. Highlights include a quirky look at the recent Democratic convention in Detroit

www.demandmedia.net
Eschews the video-diary vlog concept for video logs that are concerned with social change. Gives a voice to groups and individuals who would never otherwise be heard, but may be a little too right-on for some tastes

www.vidblogs.com
Billed as the ultimate public voyeur experiment, the site is full of short films of up to six minutes of ordinary lives.

www.human-dog.com
Detroit-based site with a mission to produce non-traditional video. Highlight is a series of interviews about the American draft during the Vietnam war

Audience Growth, Repurposing TV Ads to Drive Online Video Spending

2004-07-30T07:30:00.000-05:00

By Ross Fadner
Staff Writer, MediaDailyNews
Friday, July 30, 2004

The rapid growth of broadband penetration is expanding the potential for delivering rich media and streaming video applications to consumers, creating new opportunities for advertising online. But the real growth in broadband video advertising is not likely to occur until big brand advertisers begin using their offline media budgets to repurpose TV commercials online, predicted JupiterResearch analyst, Nate Elliott.

Aside from a growing audience, Elliott noted that by earmarking part of their TV ad budgets toward repurposing TV spots online, marketers will drive further growth and enhance awareness for the video platform. The prospect of integrating offline and online planning units, he said, will also help drive broadband video advertising.

Elliott singled out proprietary formats as a deterrent to the widespread deployment of video advertising. Proprietary formats, he noted, inhibit video advertising because sites aren't able to accommodate every technology provider's platform.

Elliott said when interactive agencies use formats like EyeBlaster instead of "open" formats they end up limiting the number of sites that can accept their clients' video ads. "It's just video. You don't need something special [to run it]," he said. "You could easily use standard tools that are cheap and easy for advertisers and publishers."

However, according to new JupiterResearch data, the No. 1 deterrent for advertisers who buy rich and streaming media, is still audience size. Thirty-eight percent of marketers said they don't buy video inventory because the audience is too small, 27 percent say the price is too high, 21 percent say they are too unfamiliar with the format, 19 percent say the publisher offering isn't attractive enough, and 14 percent cite poor picture quality.

According to Elliott, the contention that the video audience is too small is something of a misnomer. JupiterResearch data shows that nearly a quarter of the U.S. Internet audience (24 percent) has access to video, a number that will escalate to 42 percent by 2009.

Elliott noted that several high-traffic Web sites that offer streaming video technologies enjoy a sizable number of impressions. Both ESPN.com and MSN receive over 30 million video streams per month, which he noted doesn't exactly translate to "Friends" or "ER"-caliber numbers, "but it's Oprah," he said.

Overall, Elliott said that Web publishers aim too low by not selling streaming and rich media spots in exchange for premium content. According to a Jupiter 2003 consumer survey, 14 percent of consumers said they would be willing to pay to avoid ads online, 66 percent were unwilling, and 27 percent were undecided.

"This means," Elliott said, "that when consumers do pay, they're not paying to get rid of ads, they're paying for content." In other words, as long as the content is good, consumers don't care about whether you put ads in front of them, and publishers would be smart to take note of that.

Web's video progress is slow motion

2004-07-26T08:29:00.000-05:00

By Paul Andrews, Seattle Times, July 26, 2004

The Internet has done wonders for electronic publishing, accelerating adoption of e-mail, Web sites, blogs, photographs and other digital content. In the process, entirely new marketplaces have emerged, creating opportunities for businesses and consumers alike.

But there's one form of publishing where the Net is still in its figurative Dark Ages; where posting is problematic, resolution is poor and speeds are painfully slow. I'm talking about video. The Net seems to carry a subtle bias against it.

On the production side, video is bursting with innovation. Digital camcorders are almost as small and light as digital cameras (some of which offer limited video capability as well). The better camcorders contain near-professional features and output.

Editing tools, led by iMovie on the Macintosh, have moved forward from crude beginnings as well. And you can easily transfer your video to a DVD (or even VHS) for playing on a TV or computer.

But if you want to post the video on the Web, as you would with, say, a blog entry or photos of your vacation; well, you're asking for trouble.

The problem is that video consumes a lot of bandwidth. A typical 3- to 5-minute clip can run 10 to 20 megabytes in low-resolution form. You can't send it as an attachment, because most Internet service providers put a cap of 5MB on e-mail size (many are moving to 10MB, still not enough).

Some ISPs permit you to post a video on the personal Web site they toss in with your monthly subscription. But the display is usually pretty poor, and in any case ISP storage limits you to a clip or two at a time.

Web logs aren't much better. Most don't do video at all. My TypePad blog permits me to post multiple clips because I pay extra for storage. But TypePad downloads video at a painful 30 kilobits per second, less than dial-up speed.

That means it takes several minutes for the video to display in streaming form, or to get copied to the downloader's hard drive.

Then there's the format problem. You might save your video in Apple's .mov format, which works fine if you have Apple's Quicktime program. Not all servers or video players support Quicktime formats, however.

MPEG is the "vanilla" video format; like ".txt" or ".jpeg" for text or photos — but the new MPEG 4 format, which offers a bigger and better image, isn't yet widely supported by ISP servers.

If you want to post multiple videos on the Web the way you'd post anything else, you have to pay for the privilege. The cheapest hosting service I found costs nearly $1,200 a year, a figure that tests the budget of many amateurs and casual Web users.

True, bandwidth requirements for video can be substantial, especially for a popular site.

So the ISP premium can be expected, even if it seems out of proportion with the rest of Web content.

Still, the video industry could find ways to promote Web video and reduce cost, as it has with other forms of publishing.

To showcase their products, camcorder makers could toss in Web space, for instance, as could software vendors. Even Apple, for all the popularity of iMovie, does little to encourage video posting via its .mac service.

It may be that the elephant in the doorway; Hollywood; is helping to discourage video on the Web because of privacy concerns. But movie downloads are spreading irrespective of industry threats.

As with music, it would make more sense for the entertainment sector to figure out a strategy to capitalize on, rather than discourage, digital video sharing.

Video has boundless potential that so far has met more obstacles than facilitators.

Films 'fuel online file-sharing'

2004-07-15T18:18:00.000-05:00

BBC News, July 15

File-sharing is booming, with people downloading millions of files despite efforts by the entertainment industry to stop the practice, say experts.

Films and other files larger than 100MB are becoming the most requested downloads on networks around the world, said UK net analysts CacheLogic.

It measures peer-to-peer traffic on the networks of internet service providers

It estimates that at least 10 million people are logged on to a peer-to-peer (P2P) network at any time.

Alive and well

"Video has overtaken music," CacheLogic founder and chief technology officer Andrew Parker told BBC News Online.

The firm has come up with its picture of file-sharing by inspecting activity deep in the network rather than just at the ports.

It found that file-sharing is very much alive and well, despite claims from the music industry that it is declining.

P2P is the largest consumer of data on ISP's networks, significantly outweighing web traffic and every year costing an estimated £332 million globally, according to CacheLogic.

In the sphere of music, traditionally assumed to account for the vast majority of file-sharing, it is no longer about the big guns such as Kazaa, which has declined in popularity since being targeted by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).

File-swappers have moved their attention to other peer-to-peer software, such as Bittorrent.

While the FastTrack network (which carries Kazaa ) still accounts for 24% of all P2P traffic, the lesser known Bittorrent and eDonkey together account for 72% of file-sharing, according to CacheLogic's report.

The idea that P2P is all about MP3 files is a myth, said CacheLogic.

It found that the majority of the traffic comes from files over 100MB in size, suggesting that net users are as likely to download larger movie, software and game files as they are the smaller MP3s.

On the release of one major Hollywood blockbuster, 30% of the P2P traffic at one ISP came from a single 600MB file.

"The growth is away from music. There is a new chairman coming to the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and he will probably be very aggressive," said a spokesman for CacheLogic.

Painful experience

The MPAA recently suggested that one in four net users downloaded movies and it has warned that the extent of film piracy online looks set to increase as people switch to broadband.

According to research firm Jupiter, 15% of European P2P users download one full length movie each month. In Spain, the number jumps to 38%.

"There will be a ramping up of activity from the MPAA but there will also be lessons learnt from the RIAA's approach and I don't expect anything so heavy-handed as that," said Jupiter Research analyst Mark Mulligan.

He is not convinced that video downloads will take over from music at any time soon.

"I would be very surprised if movie downloads were the dominant form of file-sharing. This is largely because downloading is quite a painful experience for anyone with less than one megabit of bandwidth," he said.

It is also a question of convenience. Music files, being so much smaller, are easier to store on hard drives.

Music downloading is becoming an ingrained cultural norm for young people, who see it as an easy way of building up their collection.

"There is a whole generation of file-sharers growing up with no concept of music as a paid-for commodity," he said.

"Having said that, file-sharing remains a challenge to music, movie and TV industries alike," he added.

Killer app

Blame for the peer-to-peer problem, which is weighing down the networks of internet service providers, is often put at the feet of a few heavy users.

But over one month, a single one of CacheLogic's measurement tools, observed 3.5 million unique IP addresses.

"Peer-to-peer is the killer application of broadband," said Mr Parker.

"It has global use, never sleeps and has no geographical barriers."

Free software is often distributed via peer to peer networks and content providers, including the BBC, are considering using P2P protocols to distribute content.

MSNBC.com sees video ads surging

2004-07-13T10:48:00.000-05:00

By Bambi Francisco, CBS.MarketWatch.com
July 13, 2004

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- At some point, more video may be watched via the Internet than on TV.

That may sound farfetched -- for now. But, at the very least, online publications are seeing rising demand for the streamed content they put online.

In fact, MSNBC.com, jointly owned by GE's NBC and Microsoft's (MSFT: news, chart, profile) MSN, believes advertising on its video clips will be a significant contributor to sales over the next 12 months.

"We see video as being a major component in the coming fiscal year [2005] as opposed to not having played a big role [in fiscal 2004]," said Charlie Tillinghast, MSNBC.com's general manager and publisher, in an interview with CBS.MarketWatch.

Online video advertisements made up 3 percent of MSNBC.com's sales in its fiscal year 2004, said Tillinghast. Video ads are expected to rise to 8 percent by fiscal 2005, which captures the 12 months ending June 2005.

But it could be even more, he suggested.

"The limiting factor is inventory, not demand," he said. "Unlike a typical Web page with two or three ads, there is only one streaming ad for every two video clips. So you need a large number of streams to create significant inventory.

"Video ads are particularly interesting for MSNBC.com because they tap into broadcast advertising budgets, not just Internet budgets."

Tillinghast said customers are even trying to place larger orders to place ads on video.

"People want to come in and buy $1 million [worth of ads] in one shot," he said. "It's a sold-out situation for the video."

Unlike popular paid-search advertisements, video ads lend themselves to brand awareness. And, in fact, it's branding ads that drive and account for 95 percent of MSNBC.com's revenue.

To be sure, MSNBC.com's video inventory was sold out as early as a year ago. The difference is that inventory was less a year ago.

Today, MSNBC.com's video is being distributed on MSN, and -- even with the larger audience increasing the number of times the video clips are seen -- the online media company cannot satisfy demand.

As demand for video ads and brand-awareness campaigns shift increasingly to the Web, the question becomes: When do the online media companies, like Yahoo (YHOO: news, chart, profile), become media companies generating original content? See Net Sense: Will Yahoo be the 5th network?

MSNBC.com, which employs 60 people on its editorial side, produces a daily average of between 30 and 40 video clips, which run anywhere from one minute to three.

With the MSN deal, which began earlier this year, MSNBC.com was able to create more inventory to sell video advertising, said Tillinghast.

To this end, the pricing is strong, he said. Video ads reach an audience that's unable to advertisers who place campaigns on TV. "The type of people watching streaming are not watching network TV," he said. "They like watching video."

The cost per thousand impressions for video ads runs about $30. That price has held for some time, and Tillinghast doesn't see CPMs going up. He does, however, see volume rising.

Video, Software Downloads Overtake Music

2004-07-09T10:45:00.000-05:00

By Associated Press, July 9, 2004, 11:15 AM EDT

PARIS -- Music is no longer the download of choice for Internet file swappers, according to a new study on online file sharing.

For the first time last year, music swapping on the Internet was outpaced by the copying of movies and other non-audio files, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to be published Monday.

Across the OECD's 30 industrialized member countries, music accounted for 48.6 percent of files shared online, compared with 62.5 percent in 2002, according to excerpts of the report seen by The Associated Press.

Video accounted for 27 percent, up from 25.2 percent, the study will say.

The findings will do little to reassure movie studios, which are worried that they will be the next victims of the ever speedier Internet connections and compression technologies on offer to consumers.

Online piracy through sites like Kazaa, Grokster and Morpheus -- which let computer users connect directly to one another to exchange files -- has already been blamed for a five-year decline in CD sales that has hurt music labels.

European countries are leading the way in movie downloading, the OECD report shows, with video accounting for 35.4 percent of files swapped by German users of Kazaa, compared to 23.7 percent by U.S. users.

Web surfers based in Italy, Belgium, France, Norway, Britain, Finland and Poland also downloaded a higher percentage of movies than those in the United States.

A separate global study published Thursday by the Motion Pictures Association found that about one in four Internet users had already downloaded a movie. Most said they would pirate more if they took less time to download.

The OECD report does not give separate numbers for pirated downloads and those that do not infringe copyright. Despite a growing number of paid-for services like Apple's music site iTunes, however, experts say the vast majority of file swaps are still unauthorized.

The biggest growth in downloading last year was in "other files" -- neither music nor film -- which almost doubled their share to about a quarter of all downloads. The category includes software and pornography, but the report gives no breakdown between the two.

Study: Broadband market to triple by 2008

2004-07-08T10:49:00.000-05:00

CNET News.com, July 8, 2004
By Dinesh C. Sharma

The worldwide base for broadband technology is expected to reach 325 million subscribers by 2008, up from about 100 million at the end of last year, according to new research from the Yankee Group.

Of this 325 million, about 200 million subscribers will be using DSL (digital subscriber line) service, up significantly from the 85 million people expected to be using that technology by the end of 2004, the study found.

DSL growth will largely be fueled by the Asia-Pacific region, according to the Yankee Group. DSL is expected to add between 25 million and 30 million subscribers per year, while rival cable modem technology will account for around 8 million new subscribers annually.

The competition between cable and DSL is getting fiercer as the market grows. The Yankee Group expects steeper year-over-year growth for satellite, broadband wireless and other technologies as well.

In North America, though, cable service will maintain its lead, growing from 34 million at the end of last year to about 75 million in 2008. Satellite is expected to experience strong growth, also. By 2008, it's expected to have more than 12 million subscribers, or 4 percent of the market.

Meanwhile, a recent report from the Federal Communications Commission put the number of broadband lines in the United States at 28.3 million at the end of 2003.

Calling the U.S. cable modem market an anomaly, Yankee Group analysts said cable operators in the United States have optimized their networks and are offering speeds twice as fast as DSL. This is prompting DSL players to slash prices to counter a superior product and make up for lagging market share.

"Broadband access continues to be one of the largest and most profitable areas of telecommunications around the world," Lindsay Schroth, a senior analyst at Yankee Group, said in a statement. "Despite the downturn in telecom spending in the past few years, providers are expanding access networks and attracting new broadband subscribers with a variety of access technologies."

BBC's next big idea is 'unmissable' TV

2004-07-03T23:03:00.000-05:00

The Scotland, July 4, 2004
By MURDO MACLEOD

DELETE as appropriate to create a painfully familiar sentence: I don’t suppose anyone taped The Office/Sex and the City/EastEnders last night; I was too busy/distracted by the kids/drunk to remember.

That sickening feeling of missing an essential moment in television history will become a thing of the past if BBC boasts of a viewing ‘revolution’ are realised.

The corporation is testing a new system that will make an entire week’s-worth of output available at the click of a mouse.

Television addicts will be able to download any programmes they missed in the previous seven days and keep them for up to a week before they electronically self-destruct, all for free.

The service is being seen as the UK’s first version of television-on-demand, where viewers can choose what they want to see and when rather than being restricted to programme schedules.

The system, which is called Interactive Media Player (iMP), will require viewers to download software which lets them play BBC shows in high resolution on their monitor, attached television, handheld computer or mobile phone.

The iMP software will reduce the risk of piracy by protecting against copying and wiping the file clean a week after it is downloaded.

The system significantly differs from the Sky Plus service, which allows viewers to select programmes they want to record up to a week in advance. That service digitally records programmes when they are broadcast. The BBC plan is to release viewers from the schedulers altogether and allow the downloading of any programme after it has been shown.

As well as giving a second chance to anyone who missed a favourite show, it also means viewers can catch up on programmes they didn’t plan to watch, but which become the hot topic around the office water cooler.

One disadvantage of the system is that even with a standard broadband connection it could take up to four hours to download a 40-minute programme of high enough quality to watch on a television screen.

But many viewers will choose to download overnight and with the increasing availability of high-speed broadband, the time could be reduced to an hour.

It is also hoped viewers will have the option of watching programmes - albeit in lower resolution - as they are downloaded, a technique known as ‘streaming video’.

A spokeswoman for the BBC said: "It is still at the testing stage, but it will revolutionise TV viewing. You will able to watch the programmes when you want. And because you will be able to watch the shows on handheld computers or some of the more advanced mobile phones, you could even take the programmes with you on your commute and watch them on the train or the bus."

The system will also be programmable in advance, meaning that a viewer could set their computer to download regular programmes - such as soaps or dramas - rather than forcing them to check the time each week and trust to the old-fashioned video recorder.

The downloads will also be counted towards viewing figures, meaning that the BBC will be able to argue that more people are accessing their productions, thus boosting the argument for the licence fee.

The BBC spokeswoman was unable to say when the system would be made available as it was still being tested and would be evaluated later this year. So far the BBC has produced no estimate as to what the scheme will cost to develop.

Internet TV: Don't Touch That Mouse!

2004-07-01T12:28:00.000-05:00

New York Times, July 1, 2004
By TIM GNATEK

SIR MIX-A-LOT'S salacious 1992 hit "Baby Got Back" blasted from the house stereo system at 7 Bamboo, a karaoke bar here, on a Friday night. Two bar regulars momentarily turned rap stars, billed as Toqer and Woody, gyrated on the corner stage and praised big behinds as the audience joined in with off-key wails.

It was great entertainment for the regulars at the 'Boo, as well as for 14 others who were watching the performance online from as far as St. Louis, Uruguay and Australia and as near as the next town.

Shortly after Toqer and Woody finished the song, Woody's cellphone rang. "That was my friend," said Woody, who is Woodrow Mosqueda away from the karaoke stage. "He just saw us online and he's on his way here!"

The medium was a Web-based television station called ToqerTV, an enterprise that makes Toqer, also known as Robert Cortese, the establishment's 31-year-old karaoke jockey and Webmaster, immensely proud.

"I am a modern-day Marconi," Mr. Cortese said as he tended to his computer beside the stage. "People may mock it, but 10 years from now, all our content is going to be delivered like this."

Mr. Cortese, whose pompadour is distinctly more 50's greaser than rapper, developed the station himself, solicited the bar's permission to stream the show on the Internet, created a Web site and chat room and even started selling merchandise in support of what he considers the first all-karaoke television station.

Its content may be unique, but its approach is not. ToqerTV is one of over 100 independent television stations streaming over the Internet, covering almost every imaginable interest.

Increased broadband access and enhanced streaming technologies have boosted Internet video from the blocky slide shows of the past to presentations that can begin to rival conventional television. Programming has expanded, too. With the adoption of popular media players like RealPlayer and Windows Media Player, avid video hunters can download and watch movies, sports programs and television news.

With the Winamp media player (www.winamp.com), many of the independent stations can be seen as well. Although Winamp's company, Nullsoft, was acquired by America Online in 1999, the group has maintained a close allegiance with a core group of users who take advantage of its free and powerful media tools - the perfect mix for such low-budget operations.

Earlier versions of Winamp helped to popularize the MP3 music format, and thousands have used its Shoutcast server technology to build their own online radio stations. Nullsoft Video seems to be quickly following in popularity.

AOL has done some of its own programming on the player, airing high-quality videos of performers like Bjork and Radiohead, and also putting together select video clip submissions in a special "public access" channel.

A vast majority of the stations, however, are the work of individual programmers who serve their own video clips amassed, legally or not, on their hard drives. Japanese animation is very popular, as are the latest episodes of "The Simpsons," "South Park" and "Invader Zim."

Others turn to yesteryear for inspiration. Webranger Nostalgia Broadcasting (www.webranger.net) runs five channels of classic movies and television programming.

Airing vintage material is an old hobby for the station's creator, Kevin VandeWettering, 41, who broadcasts from his home in Hillsboro, Ore. "I've been doing an old-time radio site since they invented the Internet," he said.

Mr. VandeWettering switched to video as soon as the technology became available. "I like vintage film," he said. "And I like to share."

The old films he runs span the genres: everything from Abbott and Costello and "The Lone Ranger'' to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "The Mark of the Hawk" with Sidney Poitier. He trolls through online auction sites and a nearby Goodwill store for material published without copyright notice, or whose copyrights have expired.

He has never run into legal problems, he said, and he intends to keep things that way. "It's challenging to find out what I'm not going to get sued over," he said.

That challenge does not apply to stations like ToqerTV, whose programs are entirely original.

Winamp TV carries many personal Webcam stations, garage-band music videos and "frag movies" - video taken mid-action from first-person shooter games. (Watching them is much like watching an older brother hog a video game, to a fist-pumping soundtrack.)

One of the biggest independently produced successes on the Internet takes the frag movie concept to hilarious ends. The series "Red vs. Blue" places dialogue over video snatched from the multiplayer shooter game Halo to create short sitcoms.

"Red vs. Blue" began as a free weekly download at the show's Web site (www.redvsblue.com). The creator of the series, Mike Burns, lost count at over 750,000 weekly viewers. "I would have thought that everyone who wanted to see it had seen it," said Mr. Burns, 31, who works by day at a computer help desk and does most of the show's programming on his days off. "But after we started on Winamp TV, we're getting e-mails from new viewers all the time."

For Mr. Burns and his small group of collaborators, Internet programming provides a fresh audience for their creative efforts. "There are very few people doing this on a regular basis," he said. "It's like when cinema was new."

As fans download and discover the programming on Winamp TV, the audience grows. AOL counts 18 million installations of the video-enabled Winamp 5 player, although the player's traffic counter usually lists a number closer to 2,500 active viewers. One avid Winamp TV watcher, Dave Childers, 39, of Mobile, Ala., spends five hours a day tuning to online broadcasts. "I don't watch regular television much anymore," he said.

Mr. Childers's favorite channels are Korean music show OhMyTrance (www .ohmytrance.com), and Rant TV (www .ranttv.com), which runs documentaries of dumpster diving and radical political talk along with instructions on how to hot-rod a sports car illegally. Mr. Childers is partial to Rant TV's Sean Kennedy, the host of an uncensored fringe talk show, who appears in a kung fu uniform. "You would never see that on network TV," he said. "They'd haul the guy off."

Alex Blum, America Online's vice president for broadband services, cautions that Winamp television is an advanced tool for technically minded enthusiasts. "At this point, it's kind of an experiment," he said. "We put some tools out there, but it's not easy. The jury's still out on whether this is a mass-market thing."

Tom Wolzien, an analyst with Bernstein Investment Research and Management, said that the success of such programming depends on how well independent broadcasters can keep up with viewer demand, given the cost of the servers and Internet connections required. "The real issue is, where is the server located?" Mr. Wolzien said. "How do you get it from your garage to the Web?"

Once that hurdle has been overcome, he said, anything is possible. "If you think of the stuff that's come out of 'Saturday Night Live,' " he said, "a lot of it has just been two guys sitting on a couch."

Broadband Expansion Fuels Rebirth in Online Advertising Market

2004-06-20T00:51:00.000-05:00

June 20, 2004
TelevisionWeek.com
By Daisy Whitney

Some cable networks are prepping for an increase in ad dollars from a source that was unlikely just a year ago-the Internet.

With economic recovery under way and an online ad rebirth spurred by the growth in broadband penetration over the past year, Scripps Networks and ESPN are among the big cable content players that have seen advertising increase for their broadband properties during the upfront. In addition, both networks, along with Foxnews.com and others, are putting the infrastructure in place to accommodate further growth during the next year.

While broadband video dollars could fill a shot glass compared with the kegful of broadcast and cable ads, the money is growing. Ad agencies are redefining their internal divisions to align broadband video buying more closely with traditional TV buying in anticipation of a bigger broadband market in next year's upfront.

ESPN.com earmarked one-third of the ad inventory for its online video property ESPN Motion to package with larger buys across the ESPN networks for the first time during this upfront. More than half of that had already been sold as of June 10, said Riley McDonough, VP, sales, for ESPN.com.

Revenues from ESPN Motion inventory should triple over the next year, because ad inventory will triple, he said. Currently, ESPN Motion delivers about 1 million ad views per day in its 40 to 60 daily video clips, a fivefold increase over last year.

ESPN Motion has grown its ad base as well over the past year, from about 10 to 12 advertisers to 30, including Coors, Budweiser, Miller and Gatorade as well as movie studios and soft-drink companies.

Mr. McDonough emphasized that the ESPN Motion ads aren't "value-add," which has become something of a dirty word in the online ad business. "We haven't offered any of our dot-com budget as added value for several years now, and the ESPN Motion is our most sought-after and most valuable inventory we have to sell [compared with sponsorships and banners]," he said.

In fact, the ESPN Motion inventory is priced comparably with such premium programming on ESPN as "SportsCenter" in terms of cost per thousand, he said.

Scripps also has seen increased advertiser interest during the upfront for its four networks' Web properties. Upfront ad revenues are 10 times greater than a year ago, said Jeff Meyer, senior VP, interactive sales. However, the growth comes from what was a small base last year. In addition, Scripps more than doubled its inventory when it began delivering its content on MSN earlier this year.
Surge in Advertisers

Nevertheless, this year's upfront should yield about 15 to 20 broadband advertisers, up from one-General Motors-in 2003, Mr. Meyer said. Upfront broadband inventory is sold out, but other inventory will be held back to be sold throughout the year, he said.

But Web users also need to know that compelling content and the ads in it are available to watch, so Scripps is currently testing a three-pronged promotional strategy to drive online users to its broadband video. In May the HGTV.com Web site featured broadband-exclusive video that tied in to a kitchen-and-bath special the cable network plans to air later this month.

The video-centric packages are promoted on the home page and in on-air promos, and were slated to be highlighted in a newsletter for registered users June 17.

In addition, Foxnews.com overhauled its Web site last week to give more prominence to its video clips. Every page, including the home page, now includes video clips. As a result, Fox expects to double its online advertising revenue in the next 12 months and to add at least 1 million page views to its base of about 5.2 million page views per month, said Bert Solivan, general manager for the site.

While the broadband component of the 2004 upfront hasn't closed yet, revenue should increase 15 percent to 20 percent, said David Cohen, senior VP and interactive media director at Universal McCann.

The dollar shift is coming from a variety of media budgets, including broadcast, print, point of sales and sampling, Mr. Cohen said. Packaged goods, entertainment and pharmaceuticals are increasing, he said.
Breakthrough a Year Away

But 2005 will be the year when broadband plays a more significant role in the upfront, Mr. Cohen and other interactive buyers said.

That's because many of the kinks in broadband advertising need to be ironed out, such as measurement standards. For instance, at which point does an advertiser get charged: after the first second or after 50 percent of an ad has been viewed?

The Interactive Advertising Bureau said it is working on devising standards for a number of these issues. Internet advertising generated $2.3 billion in the first quarter of this year, a 39 percent increase over last year and its highest quarterly total ever.

Adam Gerber, senior VP and group director for strategy and innovation at MediaVest, said most of the shift in ad dollars to broadband this year comes from TV budgets. Over time, most agencies will have one video budget that includes both TV and the Web, he said.

There's no question that interest in broadband video advertising is high, but the upfront activity did not materialize to the degree anticipated, said Alan Schanzer, managing partner of The Digital Edge, the digital media arm of Mediaedge:cia. More dollars will shift online as TV and interactive buyers at agencies work more closely together. "I think we'll see a more successful [broadband] upfront next year in terms of integration between online and offline advertising and with agencies realigning themselves internally," he said. He added that more compelling broadband content will also grow the market.

Mr. McDonough said ESPN plans to experiment later this year with original programming online, such as vignettes, animation or a preview show for sports fantasy leaguers. Ads will also evolve to take full advantage of interactivity.

Predicting the Shape of TV Over IP

2004-06-18T12:51:00.000-05:00

TV over broadband is coming, but it could manifest itself in any of several different forms, with significant consequences for ISPs large and small.

Internet.com, June 18, 2004
by Gerry Blackwell

Whether it's downloading or streaming or traditional broadcasting, television service has not yet arrived in people's homes. Before it does, ISPs—even small independents—are trying to suss out how they can get a piece of the action, or at least avoid being left in the dust or out on a limb.

In the first in this occasional series on video over the Net, we talk to two small ISPs who are carefully watching the brave new world of broadband video unfold—and taking some baby steps.

Fletcher's quiver of services

Fletcher Kittredge is CEO of Great Works Internet in Biddeford, Maine, one of the oldest ISPs in the country. As reported here earlier this year, Kittredge made his first move by investing in ADSL2+ network gear from Lucent (see GWI's Big Lucent Buy).It supports data speeds up to 27 Mbps, which is not much more than he figures it will take to do video properly.

Kittredge won't make any other moves towards offering or supporting video over broadband on his network for a while. He's waiting for the dust to settle on a religious war he sees unfolding.
"The jury is still out—but is going to report soon," he says, "on whether one of two models for TV over Internet will prevail."

In one, broadcasters—including, possibly, ISPs—will use the Internet as a transport medium to offer content direct to customers using TV set-top-boxes. Viewers will tune in to conventional television channels. They'll just be delivered over the Internet instead of traditional networks.

The other is the one we've seen emerging for some years—content providers posting content on the Internet that can be streamed on demand to a PC or specially-equipped TVs, or downloaded and stored on a hard drive for display later.

Which way will it go? "It's really uncertain," Kittredge says. "If you're an ISP looking at this, now is not the time to make a big bet on it. Not yet. But it's going to be really big in 2005."

That said, Kittredge thinks he knows what's going to happen. "My gut—and this is religious—is that I think the TiVo model will win. It can be the equivalent of VoIP. People will be able to get video so much cheaper by going this way that it's really going to take the cable companies off at the knees."

There is mounting evidence that Kittredge is right. TiVo, the influential maker of a popular personal video recorder (PVR) product and service that currently works with satellite and cable TV, announced a new service that will allow users to download full-length feature films and other content from the Net to their PVRs for later viewing.

The company hasn't announced launch dates or prices, but says the Internet download capability will be built into all of its next-generation PVRs.

TiVo is not alone. In fact, the timing of its announcement at the beginning of June may have been designed to steal RealNetworks' thunder. The streaming video software and services company has just announced a movies-over-the-Internet service with partner Starz Encore Group LLC, a cable/satellite network. It's available now.

Other companies are exploring the same approach, including Netflix, a DVD-rentals-over-the-Internet subscription service, and Blockbuster, the very vulnerable video rental industry giant.

Microsoft has demonstrated its similar IPTV technology and is currently running small trials in Switzerland and Canada. Akimbo has an Internet PVR product on the market and its web site lists over 30 existing TV over Internet sites where users can download content—though it's mostly egregiously awful content.

If Kittredge is right, it's good news and bad for ISPs. The good news is that they won't have to compete in the dog-eat-dog world of cable television, where knowing how and being able to negotiate for content is crucial, and where little guys don't stand much of a chance.

"In cable television now there's a real drive for scale," Kittredge says. "The bigger you are, the better the deal you're going to get. If you have 10,000 subscribers, you'll get one deal with Disney. If you've got 100,000, it will be somewhat better. If you've got 10 million subscribers, you'll get a great deal from Disney."

It also means ISPs won't have to invest heavily in video servers, streaming technology, and other infrastructure to get into the TV-over-the-Internet game. This is good news because, "in the ISP business right now, you want to spend as little on capital costs as you can because everything is changing so rapidly,"

More consumers will tune in to Internet TV services

2004-06-17T01:14:00.000-05:00

DALLAS, TX -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 06/17/2004 --Parks Associates released a forecast today predicting significant growth in Internet-based video services over the next four years, with users exceeding 15 million by the end of 2008. The firm will present this data, part of its ongoing research of multimedia platforms and services, at its upcoming one-day workshop Digital Entertainment in the Networked Home on July 15, 2004, at The Fairmont in San Jose, CA.

“Regarding on-demand video services, several key pieces of the puzzle are now in place,” said Puja Rathi, an analyst at Parks Associates. “Broadband penetration is sufficiently high, and with the launch of service providers like MovieLink and Starz! Ticket, movies are legally available in on-demand environments. The only missing piece is a wireless connection between TVs and PCs, and this should be available within the next 12 months, thanks to new products coming to market.”

Also at the workshop, Parks Associates’ analysts will present industry analysis and consumer research regarding other markets, including broadband, gaming, music, and media servers, within the digital home value chain. Additionally, Parks Associates will be publishing a report on video-on-demand services, Video-on-Demand and PVR: Analysis & Forecasts, in July 2004. For more information on this workshop or any of Parks’ research, visit www.parksassociates.com or call 972-490-1113.

Big Three Move On Broadband Video Sales

2004-06-16T01:11:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, June 16, 2004
MediaDailyNews
By Tobi Elkin, Executive Editor

The broadcast upfronts are winding down, but the mission of online sellers, particularly the three biggest-Time Warner's America Online, Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Yahoo!-pitching broadband video offerings, is just beginning. All three are bringing broadband video into the marketplace and have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to do integrated deals in conjunction with marketers' upfront broadcast media buys.

While no player has stepped forward to trumpet the results thus far, all continue to evangelize broadband video and to sell it into the media marketplace. MSN launched its broadband video gambit in January when it introduced the MSN Video Service with a roster of advertisers that included Revlon and Procter & Gamble. Several of the launch advertisers re-upped with MSN.

Yahoo!'s Launch music service is a popular and frequently cited destination of marketers. It's also a popular venue for broadband video advertising. Launch streamed 200 million music videos in May to free and for-pay consumers. Overall, Yahoo! counted 5.8 million fee-paying customers as of March 31 who subscribe to services such as hosting, extra mail storage, LAUNCHcast Plus and others. "Stream-over stream or in-stream video in the Launch product is a place where [broadband advertising] makes a lot of sense, they have lots of content and the user is expecting to see sight, sound and motion," said Sean Finnegan, Midwest Director, OMD Digital, a unit of Omnicom Group.

Yahoo! partners with Eyewonder and Klipmart, among other video technology providers. "We are fairly agnostic about video being included in cutting-edge ad units," said Mark McLaughlin, Yahoo!'s group category development officer for entertainment, music and sports.

What Yahoo! and others are pitching is pre-roll or a single streaming ad, usually a :15 or :30, that plays prior to video content. "It is as close to a cut and paste of a TV commercial as you could imagine," McLaughlin says. The Launch video player offers three windows-a video window, a content window and a persistent banner which lasts until the end of each music video, about 3-4 minutes. Yahoo! allows only one commercial per ad pod, "Meaning, even if someone buys two :15s, we would not play two :15s in a row before a music video," McLaughlin explains.

AOL, through its AOL Media Networks unit, offers pre-roll in 15-second increments as well, in addition to in-banner advertising which is essentially a video ad running within a banner. AOL has never offered this before. AOL intends to distribute broadband video advertising as widely as possible across its network, i.e., across its AOL, AOL.com, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), Netscape, Compuserve and ICQ properties, according to Kevin Conroy, EVP and COO, AOL for Broadband. The goal is to make broadband video easier to buy and place, and to offer advertisers ad tracking services. Among AOL's sweet spots for broadband video-News, Sports, Music and Movies, according to Tom Bosco, AOL's director of broadband sales.

Embedded video within a content page is another popular option for advertisers. 250. On "The embedded unit allows an Internet buyer to think about Yahoo!'s network and to overlay video. We think that that's going to be very popular with media buyers," McLaughlin notes. Yahoo! is vetting its broadband video offerings to interactive media agencies and broadcast TV buying groups. "When we have the opportunity to talk to TV people we are showing examples of both units and where we're making progress with TV people, is usually when it's an agency where internally, they're closely integrated with Internet media units," McLaughlin explains.

While some interactive agency strategists say this year's upfronts didn't net as many integrated deals as they'd hoped, some progress was made. "Less video was sold through the upfront than we had expected, it's still partially a timing issue, but a lot of good groundwork was laid for next year," said Alan Schanzer, managing director, The Digital Edge, a unit of WPP Group's Mediaedge:cia.

"We have seen over the past year, as broadband has really scaled more and more, the use of television or video assets in our advertising, but this upfront, in a small way, is the first time we're really seeing the exploration of the TV budgets to support these ad units," Yahoo!'s McLaughlin said. "The shops most likely to place TV dollars with Yahoo! to run video advertising are the earliest adopters, and they are generally the places where there are Internet-experienced buyers who are easily accessible to the TV buyers," he added.

ShadowTV To Relaunch Consumer Product, Sell Advertising

2004-06-15T13:42:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, June 15, 2004
MediaDailyNews
By Ross Fadner

ShadowTV is banking on the fact that consumers' migration to broadband will set the precedent for media consumption in the future that is increasingly personalized and on-demand. While the broadcast networks and cable operators have their feet firmly planted on the set-top box, ShadowTV President Joachim Kim believes his company's product will further drive change in media habits.

Currently, ShadowTV provides video clips of TV programming for businesses and consumers. It does so through a searchable database made possible by the closed-caption transcripts of each television program. Currently, NBC is ShadowTV's only major broadcasting licensee for consumers, although Kim notes that ShadowTV is currently in talks with other networks and cable operators.

Despite Kim's hope of luring consumers to his Web-based product, the majority of ShadowTV's business lies in the business-to-business (B2B) sector. "Our primary business serves PR [public relations] agencies, advertisers, and advertising agencies," he says, noting that these companies use ShadowTV as "an auditing service."

Advertisers and PR agencies are able to use ShadowTV to search for their brand to see how their advertisements played, at what time, in what slot, and at what frequency, in addition to seeing if it was mentioned in the news. "To some extent," Kim says, advertisers use the product "to see how their media buyers are performing."

"We work with all major advertising agencies," he adds, mentioning "the three biggest groups" without specifying names. They are: Interpublic Group of Cos., Omnicom Group, and WPP Group. Of ShadowTV's agency business, Kim says 80 percent belongs to big agencies, and the remaining 20 percent belongs to small- to medium-sized enterprises. Of its advertising business, Kim says that roughly 60-75 percent belongs to agencies, and the remaining 25-40 percent belongs to brand marketers.

"Right now our focus and main interest is the B2B side," he says, but notes that consumers will be the focus of the "relaunch" of ShadowTV's consumer product, which currently is tentatively scheduled for September 1. This will feature more content and more browser subscription variations.

Kim says that advertising, while not a part of the initial service, "will play a key role" in the ShadowTV consumer business model--especially "once consumers understand the role advertising plays in the reduction of fees," he says, hinting that the price of ShadowTV will be offset by advertising support in the near future.

ShadowTV expects to roll out an ad model in January 2005. Kim says that the platforms to be sold are currently under discussion, although paid search and video-based advertising are certainties. Regarding the re-purposing of TV ads, Kim says he is uncertain as to whether Internet users will have the patience for a 30-second TV spot, but 15-second spots are "definitely viable." Kim says ShadowTV will also look into offering advertisers audience segments.

ShadowTV runs on a seat model at about $500 per person for businesses with full access to reports and analytics. For consumers, ShadowTV offers basic and premium subscriptions similar to cable TV models. Basic service is between $19.95 and $29.95.

ShadowTV is similar to RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) in that RSS feeders filter news content by desired category, but Kim notes that ShadowTV offers more granular targeting than RSS; RSS feeders can't be searched--yet.

"I think [Web-based TV] is the future," says Kim, and he says that the convergence of the Web and television is not a matter of "if," but a matter of "when." He notes that technology is not the main deterrent to progress: "It's about the alignment of content providers, market demand, and industry acceptance."

Streaming Media Advertising and Subscription Revenue Forecast at $625 Mil. in '04

2004-06-15T13:08:00.000-05:00

MONTEREY, Calif. --(Business Wire)-- June 15, 2004 -- Subscription and stream-based advertising revenue is forecast to reach $625 million in 2004, and expected to top $864 million in 2005, according to a new report issued by market analysis firm AccuStream iMedia Research.

The report, Streaming Advertising and Subscription: A Complete Market Analysis 2003-2005, forecasts that stream-based advertising (audio and video) will make up 37% of total streaming media revenue in '04, up from 28% in 2003.

With broadband penetration increasing, and those users consuming more of the Internet -- including audio and video -- advertising have been following those audiences online and creating more demand for streaming media inventory.

On the supply side, sites are incorporating a variety of traditional and newly launched ad unit formats and delivery approaches, including pre-roll ads, ads running inside subscription streams, Java video ads that are not tied directly to a requested stream and between-the-page ad units.

The streaming advertising market picked up momentum during the second half of 2003 and advertiser demand carried over into 2004. Upfront sales indicators suggest an even more robust market in the fall of '04 and for full year 2005.

"What's happened over the past two years, is that agencies, rep firms, solutions providers and content sites have determined that as streaming media has grown in reach, it can in fact be supported by advertising. And, broadcast media budgets are targets everyone is aiming for," commented Paul A. Palumbo, research director at AccuStream.

"Brand advertisers want the impact of video messaging delivered to high-speed users. And, in 2004 more branded content moved out from behind subscription services, inventory is increasing and CPMs are holding firm."

"On the Internet radio side, rep firms now pitch inventory using the same reach and listener metrics as on-air radio. With everyone speaking the same language, there is a better chance to attract national advertisers."

As for subscription, streaming and download music services are forecast to make up 39% of the $384 million dollar market in '04, followed by platform services such as SuperPass, and professional sports league content at 24%.

AccuStream iMedia Research (http://www.accustreamresearch.com) publishes monthly streaming media reports, and annual market reports with extensive data, trend comparisons and expert analysis.

YES Network to Debut “YES Vision” – Full-Screen, TV-Quality Video for Yankees and Nets Fans Online

2004-06-14T21:37:00.000-05:00

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 14, 2004--YES Network (Yankees Entertainment & Sports), the #1 Regional Sports Network in the tri-state area from sign-on to sign-off, today announced plans to launch YES Vision(TM) on www.yesnetwork.com, a broadband video application bringing fans exclusive programming and game-related content in high-quality video.

Powered by Wavexpress' WX(TM) technology, YES Vision(TM) will launch Wednesday, June 23, 2004, and will be available as a free service for yesnetwork.com users. Fans with a PC and a broadband Internet connection can activate the YES Vision(TM) channel by logging onto http://www.yesnetwork.com. Once activated, programming will be received automatically and subscribers can access YES Vision(TM) by either returning to www.yesnetwork.com, or clicking a system tray icon to view the service when they are offline.

What's on YES Vision(TM):

YES Vision(TM) keeps fans informed, giving them on-demand access to featured programming, including:

-- Exclusive YES Network Shows

-- Pre- and Post-Game Interviews

-- Player Video Diaries

-- Press Conferences

-- YES Network Promotions

YES Vision(TM) will also feature programming highlights and exclusive additional footage from shows including CenterStage, YES Network Magazine, This Week in Football, New York Football Sunday, Kids On Deck and Yankees Hot Stove.

"We are excited to expand our Internet capabilities with the addition of our own dedicated video channel", said Fred Harner, Director, Internet Operations for YES Network. "YES Vision(TM) is a uniquely powerful platform that will allow us to entertain our online sports fans with a high energy, video-driven experience.

"We are delighted to provide YES Network with the video delivery, account management and advertising tools that will allow them to truly engage with their online audience," said Michael Sprague, president of Wavexpress. Wavexpress is majority-owned by Wave Systems Corp. (NASDAQ: WAVX), a leader in trusted computing.

New Service by TiVo Will Build Bridges From Internet to the TV

2004-06-09T09:37:00.000-05:00

June 9, 2004
New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

The Internet, in jumping past the personal computer and into the living room television set, is starting to give viewers the possibility of bypassing traditional cable and satellite services.

TiVo, the maker of a popular digital video recorder, plans to announce a new set of Internet-based services today that will further blur the line between programming delivered over traditional cable and satellite channels and content from the Internet. It is just one of a growing group of large and small companies that are looking at high-speed Internet to deliver video content to the living room.

The new TiVo technology, which will become a standard feature in its video recorders, will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder. Although the current TiVo service allows users to watch broadcast, cable or satellite programs at any time, the new technology will make it possible for them to mix content from the Internet with those programs.

"This is the fourth electronic video service, and it is an alternative to cable, satellite and broadcast television," said Tom Wolzien, an analyst at Bernstein Investment Research and Management. Those traditional services, Mr. Wolzien said, "have been the monster gatekeepers, but this is a way for content providers to get past them."

In the new world of Internet-connected television, viewers will not have to worry about when a show is scheduled or from where it comes.

"We're fully committed to developing an entertainment experience you can't get over normal broadcast television," said Michael Ramsay, chairman and chief executive of TiVo. "This is what we think the future of television is."

A timetable for introducing the video service has not been set, nor has its price.

TiVo sustained a big blow Tuesday when DirecTV, the satellite television provider and the biggest source of new subscribers for the TiVo service, said it had sold its entire equity stake of 3.4 million shares in TiVo. Shares of TiVo dropped more than 14 percent to close at $6.41.

There is some speculation in the industry that DirecTV is moving toward developing its own digital video recorder. Several analysts suggested TiVo is moving toward Internet downloading as a way to insulate itself against potential competition from DirecTV.

Last year TiVo, which has 1.6 million subscribers who use its digital video recorder with cable or DirecTV, acquired Strangeberry, a small Silicon Valley start-up that had developed a new technology to view Internet video streams. TiVo is now developing that technology and plans to integrate it into the TiVo system next year. Video distributors like Netflix, RealNetworks and Blockbuster are also starting to explore the possibility of delivering feature-length movies via the Internet to users for viewing later.

"We're no longer in a world where innovation is stopped because somebody is the only game in town," said Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, a Seattle-based company that now streams audio and video to computer users through the Internet.

The idea of downloading and storing video for conventional television viewing has until now been pioneered by a small group of technology companies like Akimbo, a maker of an Internet digital video recorder that is based in San Mateo, Calif.

Because most Internet connections do not yet reliably support data speeds needed to view television-quality video as it is streamed, a number of the Internet video services require that programs first be downloaded and stored on a hard drive before viewing.

Now, as broadband Internet becomes widely available in homes and new wireless video networks make it simpler to move video data and streams inside the home, bigger players are starting to emerge.

For example, Microsoft demonstrated a service called IPTV at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this year. The company believes that it is possible to deliver television to rival today's cable programming by using commonly available standard telephone lines, as part of what are called digital subscriber line, or D.S.L., services. It is running two small trials of the technology in Canada and Switzerland, and sees a broad potential.

"We sort of expect that TV will shift to where everyone will watch what they want when they want," said Peter T. Barrett, chief technology officer for Microsoft TV.

Web-based Video Advertising Is Red Hot

2004-05-26T23:26:00.000-05:00

May 27, 2004,
iMedia Connection
By Rebecca Weeks, Contributor

The news from AD:TECH is that TV audiences are migrating to interactive broadcast and broadband.

Eager to learn the keys to success for converting TV viewers into Web-based video viewers, marketing executives packed like sardines into the AD:TECH San Francisco Conference session focused on leveraging interactive broadcast and broadband in today’s complicated media environment.

TV advertising has indeed provided reach and emotion, but interactive video advertising promises those two benefits plus another: metrics. All forms of Web-based video advertising, such as streaming, embedded, viral video distribution, desktop push and long-form video, are murdering the traditional 30-second spot and demanding that “time-spent” become the new ad measurement.

The state of the industry shows a positive trend in acceptance of broadband advertising -- to be exact, 39 percent of all Internet-connected households claim to use broadband. But challenges still loom for the industry’s growth. Clients seek “interactivity beyond the click-through” -- using the Internet for interactivity other than simply allowing consumers to click straight through to a particular site. Agencies, who feel an enormous amount of pressure on creatives to make advertising work harder and to be more effective, complain that they still have to bring clients up to speed on broadband’s advantages.

“When we educate clients about broadband video, we convince them first that it is similar to TV and then second that it offers more benefits than TV, such as powerful interactivity,” says Karim Sanajabi, Carat Interactive’s EVP Creative Technology.

Several panelists described their broadband solutions, how their products are being embraced in the marketplace and the attractiveness of their customers.

Personalization and positioning build TV audiences online

ESPN didn’t want people to miss out on its favorite sports highlights, so it introduced ESPN Motion, which provides free online video with no streaming or buffering built into the pages of ESPN.com. It offers four content packages a day and has a wealth of programming assets in its arsenal. Approximately 85 percent of its user base has a broadband connection, with at-work users comprising the largest segment. This group is especially hard to reach other than through the Internet.

The division is introducing personalization through two ways: user-initiated personalization (a user wants mainly football and baseball content) and implicit personalization (ESPN Motion tracks where a user spends the majority of his time). Convenience and customization is provided by allowing customers to manage their own playlists and on their own time. By monitoring how customers use the site, the company’s executives have realized that motion content could exist in tandem with static content, such as headlines, as long as it would not compete. The far right of the screen was determined to be the most ideal location for movable content.

“Users may not realize that we’re personalizing the content, but it’s financially rewarding for the company’s revenue stream,” says Ed Davis, ESPN Motion’s director and general manager. “Our site’s impressions will increase because we’re sending inventory to customers that they are far more likely to interact with and appreciate.”

ESPN Motion has positioned itself as a service that tells stories of major events. For example, this past season it offered customers :30 vignettes of a certain football player just seconds after he was drafted. Mixing original programming, such as a Fantasy show, into the site informs consumers that Motion is not just “Sportscenter” placed online.

Since ESPN Motion’s target market is made up of Web-savvy sports fanatics, its marketing team can feel confident in offering downloads and advanced products to its users without intimidating them. On Davis' agenda is continuing to enhance the user experience in order to improve the retention rate. In two weeks this will include, among other things, offering Fantasy game subscribers a “send to a friend” function attached to certain video clips. This is an attempt to leverage viral marketing’s strength in driving usage of the site.

The division not only uses development resources from both the Disney Internet Group and ESPN.com, but also collectively brainstorms with other Walt Disney unit marketing departments about which mediums to use to achieve its goals.

Davis says his team has no plan to license Motion in the near future because 100 percent of its time is allocated to improving the product versus building the customer service needed to manage the licensing process. The company is, however, spending a bit of time chopping down 30-second ads into 15-second ads and reviewing new advertising opportunities like sponsored content. He described interest in one potential application that would involve pausing a video for a brief ad or sports trivia quiz since these offerings lend themselves well to the online medium.

Broadband video is viral and “sticky”

CEO Mika Salmi was right on when he predicted his company would be “the pioneer in video advertising.” Drawing both viewers and marketers to its full-screen Internet video service, AtomFilms in 2003 served 33 million video ads that had a 9 percent average click-through rate. At the Sundance Film Festival this year, AtomFilms and Maven Networks, a broadband media software company, debuted a Hi-Def, free and advertising-supported service that enables enhanced online viewing of independent films. The Hi-Def service, which delivers three films a week to a user’s desktop, also boasts an extremely high click-through rate.

For 20th Century Fox’s request to build an interactive video Web site for “Master and Commander,” Maven Networks developed a handful of videos that included a trailer, behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with the director and crew. The wide selection was effective in driving “stickiness”: Browsers spent on average 15 to 20 minutes viewing video content on the site.

To satisfy another client request, this time from Virgin, Maven Networks built a viral video campaign for Ben Harper’s CD release. When the video is opened, users are prompted for the names of five friends and promised an MP3 video in return for supplying them. The campaign increased Virgin’s email database by three times and supported on-going relationship-building with customers.

So there’s proof that video ads are being embraced, but what about ads embedded in video content? As one example, MSN Video has developed an advertising marketplace around the emerging rich media platform.

Let consumers control, condense and combine

Microsoft developed MSN Video as a “bridge product” to solve clients’ need for video that acts like TV but takes advantage of IP. With goals to provide actualization, fresh reach, targeting and a solution to clutter, brands like P&G, McDonald’s, Pfizer, Revlon and Disney have been lining up at the door. MSN Video touts the demographic desirability of the broadband audience: The tech-savvy young and middle-aged adults that make up the heaviest users of streaming media are the higher-income earners that advertisers seek. But this demo also makes more demands.

“Consumers want to control, condense and combine their viewings, so we allow them to do that” says Todd Herman, MSN’s streaming media evangelist. “Already MSN Video has seen a 40 percent consumer adoption rate.”

Herman believes concurrency is advertising’s biggest change to date. MSN Video relies on an advertising model that includes 15-second video spots and stationary ads that provide links to an advertiser's Web site and other information. However, only one minute of spots is allowed for every 30 minutes of content.

Its team hasn’t had time yet to explore creative possibilities since the product was just recently launched in January. As an end-to-end communication, MSN Video will be used on Microsoft’s Portable Media Center PC.

Net advertising on a road revisited

2004-05-25T22:49:00.000-05:00

May 25, 2004, 12:25 PM PDT
CNET News.com
By Stefanie Olsen

SAN FRANCISCO -- Now that publishers are making money from Web advertising again, they're placing new bets on old technology to make even more.

Video and consumer tracking are pegged as two catalysts for upcoming growth in the Internet ad industry and are among the most talked about trends at Ad:Tech, the triannual industry conference held here this week. Web publishing and ad executives are looking to these methods to build on a resurgence in online advertising and capture a larger portion of major advertisers' budgets.

"We're constantly looking for the next big thing and reinventing ways to effectively reach the consumers," said Jason Heller, chief executive of Mass Transit Interactive, an ad agency.

Industry trade group Interactive Advertising Bureau reported on Monday record sales of $2.3 billion for online ads in the first three months of 2004, up 40 percent from the same period last year. That tally recorded the highest sales for a three-month period since the IAB began monitoring the industry in 1996.

Ad:Tech even reported record attendance for its conference this year, with as many as 4,000 attendees and exhibitors.

Much of the growth is thanks to the thriving paid-search market, which is expected to account for between $2.4 billion and $4 billion of ad sales this year. While many of the attendees and exhibitors are abuzz about search, many others are already looking to the next wave of progress.

So-called behaviorally targeted advertising is a method of compiling data on Web visitors, such as their surfing history, gender, age and personal preferences, to later target them with tailored ads. The form of advertising was hyped during the Internet heyday as the promise of a one-to-one medium, but failed to deliver because of technology limitations and privacy concerns.

Now many companies are striking deals to offer behavioral advertising with the hopes of charging advertisers higher prices for better targeting. Profiling company Tacoda Systems signed a deal with U.S. News and World Reports to monitor visitors and deliver tailored ads. Online ad network 24/7 Real Media partnered with paid search company Kanoodle to combine personalized ads, targeting people with text links. Online ad network Burst Media signed a deal with Tacoda to analyze Web surfers across its network of sites and deliver relevant ads.

"The dominant theme in online advertising is targeting qualified audiences," Burst CEO Jarvis Coffin said. "First it was about targeting people in context of a page (via search technology). Now it's about targeting people by their behaviors."

Advertisers are signing up, too. Randy Kilgore, vice president of advertising for The Wall Street Journal's online leg, said in a panel Monday that between 30 percent and 40 percent of its advertisers request information on the site's fairly new behavioral targeting services. The Wall Street Journal Online uses Revenue Science to compile data on visitors and their reading preferences. It then uses that information to display relevant ads on its site.

Still, ad executives urged the industry to avoid irrational exuberance and respect privacy concerns.

"These are powerful weapons" said Tacoda CEO Dave Morgan, referring to collections of data on Web surfers' behaviors. "We'll see people abusing this kind of technology. We have to avoid the flavor-of-the-month hype."

Another predominant theme at Ad:Tech is broadband video and rich-media advertising, which was similarly heralded during the Internet boom days. But download speeds for graphically rich ads were stifled by the low number of people with high-speed connections.

Hooked on high speed
Many Web publishers and marketers are touting new subscriber numbers for broadband Internet connections as impetus for progress made in graphically rich ads like video and TV commercials online. Online marketers are hoping that rich-media ads will appeal to major-brand advertisers enough to allot more of their TV and offline budgets for the Web.

RealNetworks, Maven Networks and Unicast Communications are all promoting new opportunities for rich media and video ads. Another technology company, Viewpoint, is experimenting with 3D video-streaming objects that can fly over a Web page.

Todd Herman, streaming-media evangelist at MSNBC's site, said Microsoft has made some headway with its MSN video service, which allows advertisers to play a 15-second commercial before visitors reach news clips or music videos. He said that this year, three of the country's leading brand advertisers--McDonald's, Pfizer and Procter & Gamble--have signed on to advertise with the service, in a sign of growing acceptance by mainstream marketers.

Video advertising and other rich media could help buoy sales online, because they typically have higher price tags than standard banners. Herman said video ads can fetch between $35 and $65 per thousand people who view the ads. That's compared with rates as low as $1 to $5 for standard banners.

"Advertisers are doing it this time for the right reasons," Herman said. "They're buying (video ads), because there's less clutter on the page. People (can't skip) them, and they provide interactivity."

"This is a bridge to TV money," Herman added.

Online Reemerges As Fastest-Growing Ad Medium

2004-05-25T07:50:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, May 25, 2004
MediaPost
By Joe Mandese, Editor

Online ad spending expanded at six times the rate of the overall advertising economy during the first quarter of 2004, proving that it has reemerged as the fastest-growing segment of the media economy. During the quarter, advertisers invested nearly $2.3 billion on Internet advertising--an increase of 39 percent over the first quarter of 2003, and the greatest rate of expansion for the medium since the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers began tracking online ad spending in 1996.

By comparison, the overall marketplace for ad-supported media is projected to grow only 6.5 percent during the first quarter, according to estimates from ad tracking firm TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. The TNS estimates are based on a forecast released in January 2004. TNS has not yet released its final estimates for first-quarter 2004, but another ad tracker, Nielsen Monitor-Plus, is expected to release its first-quarter estimates next week.

While the first quarter was expected to be the weakest of 2004 in terms of overall ad spending growth, the IAB data indicates that the Internet is expanding at its fastest rates of growth since the original dot.com boom. In fact, first-quarter 2004's $2.3 billion total is actually $177 million more than the medium's previous peak of $2.123 billion in the fourth quarter of 2000.

Internet Takes A Bigger Share Of Overall Ad Market

         Internet   Total* 
           Ad $      Ad $ 
          Growth    Growth 
Q1 '04     +39%     +6.5%** 
Q4 '03     +38%     +4.2% 
Q3 '03     +24%     +7.3% 
Q2 '03     +14%     +8.6% 
Q1 '03      +7%     +4.9%

Source: Interactive Advertising Bureau's and PricewaterhouseCoopers' Internet Advertising Revenue Report; TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. *Local newspapers, network TV, consumer magazines, spot TV, cable TV, B-to-B magazines, local radio, Internet, national TV syndication, national newspapers, outdoor, national spot radio, Spanish- language network TV, Sunday magazines, free-standing inserts, network radio, local magazines. **Forecast.

Reporter's Notebook: Ad:Tech San Francisco

2004-05-25T07:36:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, May 25, 2004
MediaDailyNews
By Tobi Elkin, Executive Editor

SAN FRANCISCO -- Online publishers and portals want to beg, borrow or steal media dollars from marketers' TV and other offline media budgets, but exactly how they do so? Broadband video advertising is at least one strategy, according to publishers, portals and technology providers attending the Ad:Tech trade show here.

Their rationale: If the eyeballs are online, so should the dollars should be. Just how to aggregate TV audiences online was the topic du jour on Monday during the conference session "Leveraging Interactive Broadcast and Broadband."

Chas Edwards, vice president-business development, CNET Networks, said consumers find TV commercials online less intrusive than when the same spots are viewed on TV. He cited Yankelovich research showing that 64 percent of consumers find TV ads extremely annoying and 77 percent of TiVo users skip commercials. Edwards said CNET would eventually replace most of its graphics with video.

ESPN Motion Director and General Manager Ed Davis, and AtomShockwave CEO Mika Salmi both said their video products were designed to be downloadable in order to maintain control over the quality of the video delivery. Davis said a new feature on ESPN Motion would enable users to send video clips to friends who haven't downloaded Motion. Despite the fact that the application must be downloaded versus the company streaming it, ESPN's Motion product has been popular with advertisers and users. ESPN.com is selling Motion inventory during the broadcast network and cable upfronts. In fact, one-third of the ad inventory on ESPN.com is earmarked for Motion, according to Riley McDonough, VP-advertising, ESPN.com.

Microsoft's MSN, by contrast, is in no hurry to sell MSN Video Service inventory. "We are now preparing our sales force for general sales [of the MSN Video Service] but our business is not guided by the broadcast TV upfront," says Stephen Moss, general manager, advertising and sales, MSN. Moss, who's been heading the east and central regions for MSN ad sales, has recently segued to a larger role, managing national field sales.

Moss says MSN took a conservative approach to selling the video service which launched in January, "This wasn't about seeing how many advertisers we could sign on as quickly as possible; our goal is to manage the process well." Disney Travel and Sprint PCS have recently begun appearing on the service and MSN's streaming video evangelist Todd Herman says "6 or 7 new advertisers will start to appear" on the service in coming weeks and months. MSN's deal with Fox Sports, the portal's deal with ESPN expires June 30, is also likely to spawn new advertisers for the Video Service.

The rise of consumer control, a la TiVo and the Web, is fueling online creativity, according to participants on a panel called "Leveraging Interactive Broadcast and Broadband, Impact of Brand Exposure Duration." Karim Sanajabi, executive vice president, Carat Interactive, showed attendees a campaign the agency launched for Adidas. The "Impossible is Nothing" campaign featured video ads that ran on MSN and Yahoo!. Sanajabi said the effort generated 5 million views and lifted brand awareness by 6 percent. Carat's campaign promoting MTV's Sunday Stew yielded a cost-per-thousand of $3.17 and generated a 50 percent increase in viewership.

Maven Networks CEO Hilmi Ozguc showed an Internet video campaign promoting the film "Master and Commander" which generated a 26 percent click-through for ticket purchases. Maven technology powered downloads of the movie trailer and behind-the-scenes footage. A campaign to promote Virgin Music artist Ben Harper offered a "send to a friend" feature whereby senders could get a free, previously unreleased single to download. Ozguc says the online promotion helped triple Virgin's fan database for the artist.

Broadband Penetration Over 50% By July

2004-05-18T09:09:00.000-05:00

Research Brief - May 18, 2004

According to Comcast, overall broadband grew by 0.82% in March, with 45.97% of Internet- enabled U.S. households enjoying a high-speed connection. 54.03% of US home users dial into the Internet with "narrowband" connections of 56Kbps or less.

Canada's broadband lead over the US shrank by 9.2%. While US broadband penetration grew by 12.2% over the past year, Canadian broadband penetration grew by just 3% from 64% to 67% over the same time period.
Nielsen//NetRatings and Ipsos-Reid data show trends in connection speeds to the Internet for users in the United States and Canada:

As of March 2004, most users in the US connect to the Internet using dial-up modems of 56Kbps or less.
• 44.42% use 56Kbps modems,
• 6.88% use 28/33.3Kbps, and
• 2.73% use 14.4Kbps modems.
• 54.03% of home users in total in the US connect to the Internet at 56Kbps or less

Broadband penetration in US homes increased by 0.82% in March.
• As of March 2004 broadband penetration was at 45.97%, up from 45.15% in February
• The average increase in broadband was 0.76% per month from October 1999 to February 2004.
• Broadband share in the US should exceed 50% by July of 2004.

Most workers in the US use a high-speed line such as a T1 connection, and share bandwidth between computers connected to an Ethernet network.
• As of March of 2004, of those connected to the Internet, 78.8% of US users at work enjoy a high-speed connection, up from 77.2% in February.
• 21.2% connect from work at 56Kbps or less.

Since March 2003, US broadband penetration has grown by 12.2% from 33.8% to 46%, while Canadian broadband penetration has grown just 3%, from 64% to 67%. Canadian broadband penetration may be reaching a saturation point like Korea did when it reached 70% broadband penetration.

Unicast Brings Full-Screen 'Interactive TV Advertising' to Web

2004-05-17T17:12:00.000-05:00

Monday May 17
PRESS RELEASE

Video Commercial Will Blend Unlimited Interactive Functionality With Full-Screen Broadcast Quality Video; Will Integrate Advertisers' Branding and Direct Marketing Initiatives - Leading Agencies Embrace Format; Will Launch Client Campaigns in June

NEW YORK, May 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Unicast, a pioneer in the online advertising solutions industry, today announced it will roll out a second version of the Video Commercial® just four months after the format's debut. The newest version more closely unites robust Flash interactivity with full-screen, broadcast-quality video and will be available to the market in mid-June. The Video Commercial with companion interactivity is the first broadcast-quality (vs. broadband quality) online ad format that allows for side-by-side unlimited interactive experiences with advertisers' television/video assets.

The Video Commercial with companion interactivity significantly extends the interactive capabilities of the Video Commercial by allowing for side-by-side interactive elements during and after the video presentation. In contrast, the first version of the Video Commercial -- the Video Commercial with an interactive trailer -- emphasizes advertisers' video assets and then introduces dynamic interactivity in the form of a Flash trailer at the end of the spot. For full demonstrations on both versions of the Video Commercial, visit www.unicast.com.

Currently, a host of leading agencies such as Avenue A, Ogilvy Interactive, and RPA are developing campaigns for advertisers using this latest version of the Video Commercial. Campaigns are expected to go live in mid-June, concurrent to the general market release of the new Video Commercial unit. Affirming Web publishers' widespread support of the Video Commercial format, ads will be viewable on major Web sites such as ABCNews.com, About.com, AccuWeather, AtomFilms.com, BusinessWeek Online, Discovery iMedia, EA.com, ESPN.com, Forbes.com, FoxSports, iVillage, Lycos, MSN, SportsLine, and Tribune Interactive to name a few.

"Unicast's Video Commercial is a key tool in helping our clients grow their online investments, because it allows them to use creative they believe in and trust online," said Edmund Purcell, management supervisor, RPA. "The latest version of the Video Commercial, which integrates side-by-side broadcast-quality video and full Flash interactivity, presents our clients with even further flexibility and opportunity for their online campaigns."

Last January, Unicast introduced the original Video Commercial in a six-week beta program in which five major advertisers bought 100 million impressions across 15 leading Web sites. Additionally, these advertisers contracted with a research firm [Dynamic Logic] to study the effectiveness of the campaigns. The final results based on these five advertiser studies showed that, on average, the Video Commercial campaigns outperformed Dynamic Logic's Video/Audio MarketNorms®* by up to 59% and the Rich Media MarketNorms by 5-11 times. In addition, aggregated responses from almost 3000 exposed consumers showed that the vast majority "felt like they were watching a TV commercial" and "found the ads entertaining."

"Unicast has built its business on consistently providing ad formats that incorporate its advanced technology so advertisers and their agencies can take full advantage of the Web's unique interactive capabilities," said Richard Hopple, Unicast Chairman and CEO. "The Video Commercial with companion interactivity extends this tradition by ushering in the first generation of truly 'interactive' Television advertising. Never before has a single ad unit been able to unite advertisers' brand and direct response objectives in so compelling a manner."

About Unicast's Video Commercial

The Video Commercial is a fully interactive, 2MB, 15 to 30-second ad unit, which plays pure digital video at a rate of 30 frames per second -- up to eight times faster than traditional broadband video. The Video Commercial is delivered via Unicast's patented, pre-cached (non-streaming) delivery method, so that ads play perfectly/without delay for every consumer all of the time regardless of bandwidth, Internet connections or the Web site they are on. Video Commercials exhibit television-quality, allowing advertisers to build fully interactive ad campaigns that leverage their valuable offline creative assets, and providing Web publishers with a demanded ad unit, which advertisers will equate with traditional media.

Broadband Beats AOL

2004-05-17T11:32:00.000-05:00

Monday, May 17, 2004
By Staff, iMedia Connection

The number of broadband subscribers in the United States has beaten the number of America Online subscribers and its affiliates.

The shift occurred in the last quarter, which experienced a jump in high-speed Internet users. By the end of March, more than 26.9 million people were subscribing to subscribers in the United States, compared with 25.8 million people using AOL or its affiliates such as CompuServe and Netscape.

The 20 largest cable and DSL providers in the United States added more than 2.34 million subscribers in 2004, the largest increase ever, says Leichtman Research Group, Inc., bringing the total number of high-speed Internet subscribers to 26.9 million

Push me, pull you

2004-05-14T18:38:00.000-05:00

May 14, 2004
InfoWorld
By Jon Udell

Forget the old rules for how Internet content arrives. It’s all about end-user control

I first wrote the title of this column for another column published in 1996. "Using e-mail, I can push data to your computer," I wrote. "Using the Web, you can pull data from mine." Statements such as that sounded reasonable but turned out to be as paradoxical as Dr. Dolittle's two-headed llama. My push-pull rhetoric had been inspired by PointCast, the application that Wired would feature in an infamous cover story on push technology six months later. When this month's Wired revisited the topic in relation to RSS syndication, the push-me-pull-you beast was no less perplexing than it was eight years ago. Maybe it really is just a mythical creature.

With 20/20 hindsight, I don't think that "Push!" was the idea that leapt to mind when I first used PointCast. As I recall, my immediate reaction was: "a rich Internet application!" -- or rather, since that phrase did not yet exist, "a non-browser-based app that uses Web protocols!"

PointCast was never really a push application and neither is e-mail. There are programs that listen on TCP ports waiting to receive data -- mail, Web, and FTP servers belong in this category -- but they're special cases. Client machines guarded by NATs and firewalls almost never accept unsolicited inbound traffic. What PointCast did was what RSS and e-mail readers do today: subscribe to well-known addresses and poll them for new information.

Don't publishers and e-mail authors push the information to those well-known addresses? Sure. But so do Web publishers by pushing pages to their sites. Suppose I want to be notified of such updates. In all respects but one, there's no meaningful distinction between an e-mail reader that polls hourly for a digest of changes and an RSS reader that polls hourly for the same digest. The lone exception has nothing to do with push vs. pull and everything to do with the locus of control. You can subscribe me to a (poorly managed) e-mail list without my permission, but you cannot subscribe me to an RSS feed without my permission.

Recently I spoke with Dave Lewis, vice president of deliverability management and ISP relations at Digital Impact. His company's motto: "Making e-mail marketing more effective is our single-minded passion." In one of his online essays, entitled "How to Keep B-to-B E-mail From Getting Caught in Filters," his first rule is "Get permission."

I argued that RSS does away with the need for marketers to ask our permission, for us to grant it, for marketers to play by the rules when we revoke it, and for us to trust that marketers will play by the rules. With e-mail marketing, control resides with the sender and permission is a "best practice." With RSS, control resides with the recipient and permission is an inherent property of the medium.

I feel Dave's pain. E-mail direct marketers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They believe e-mail is necessary because it's an "intrusive" medium, yet they are forced to neuter e-mail's intrusiveness by complying with the opt-in gold standard. Unfortunately, there's no middle ground. With RSS recipients can have, and increasingly will demand, control of the channel.

Dave and I agreed on one point. "You'd be crazy not to communicate with your customers in their medium of choice," he said. My preference is RSS. Trust me with control of the channel, and I'll be more likely to trust you with my business.

Pushing the Blog Boundary

2004-05-13T18:21:00.000-05:00

May 13, 2004
By Glyn Moody

A few weeks ago I wrote - a little unfairly, perhaps - that blogs were "little more than personal Web pages". Of course, one of the reasons some blogs are interesting is that they can be much more than that, providing an alternative kind of online journalism that is often better informed and far more topical than traditional publications. Moreover, the usefulness of such blogs is increased enormously when news items are syndicated - made available as a feed that can be accessed on a regular basis and displayed automatically on a subscriber's machine. By aggregating many syndicated feeds it is possible to create a powerful form of constantly-updated, personalised information.

Like the basic blog format, syndication is not new. Its roots go back to one of the most discredited ideas of the early dot-com days: push technology. Instead of visiting a Web site, information was sent - pushed - to clients as a "Webcast". Unfortunately, the result was something horribly close to television, complete with intrusive advertising. Worse, the model employed by push pioneers like Pointcast meant that corporate intranets were soon clogged with the constant and redundant transmissions of multimedia content.

Both Microsoft and its main rival at the time, Netscape, flirted with the push idea, albeit in a technically more sensible form using XML. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4 supported Channel Definition Format (CDF), while Netscape created RDF Site Summary, or RSS. As push fell out of fashion, Netscape lost interest in RSS, but it was picked up by UserLand, which had been working on something similar. Although some progress was made in defining an official standard, today's RSS 2.0 is largely the work of Dave Winer at UserLand.

RSS is now thriving , with major news outlets such as the BBC, Reuters and The New York Times all providing RSS feeds, and many RSS newsreaders and aggregators available. But the close control exerted by Winer over the standard has drawn some criticism. This has been addressed to some extent by the transfer of ownership of RSS 2.0 to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where Winer is a fellow, the creation of an advisory board, and a change in the licence employed.

More problematic, though, is the road map for RSS, which states that the standard is "for all practical purposes, frozen at version 2.0.1". This is a reflection of the fact that Winer believes that a fixed, basic format is better than a shifting, more complex one: according to him, RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication".

Others disagree, including many leading lights in the blog world. They have banded together to work on a new syndication standard originally called "Echo", now "Atom", that explicitly aims to move beyond RSS. Atom is open source, and there is a working group that hopes to submit Atom to the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) as a proposed standard (a draft is already available, as is a range of software supporting Atom).

Happily, this two-track approach is unlikely to lead to yet another formats war: Atom has widespread support from companies, including Blogger, which is owned by Google, and from top names of the blogosphere - even Dave Winer, although he naturally wants RSS 2.0 to be supported too. Moreover, it is relatively straightforward to convert between the two XML applications - FeedBurner will even do it for you.

Atom is important because it offers a way to take the syndication idea much further than its current incarnation. A hint of what might be possible can be found in the idea of combining syndication with BitTorrent - a kind of P2P version of FTP that can serve up large files to many users whatever the bandwidth of the originating site - to provide efficient, automatic downloads. Maybe Pointcast's time has finally come.

Streaming Video Will Steal Dollars from TV

2004-05-12T22:52:00.000-05:00

Media Daily News -- Wednesday, May 12, 2004
By Ross Fadner

As ad budgets for streaming campaigns on the Internet increase, marketers' spending on TV and print will decrease--sooner rather than later, according to marketers, publishers, and digital media research professionals who gathered Tuesday at the Streaming Media East conference in New York City.

Conference attendees discussed streaming media's coming of age and the effect it will have on the way marketing dollars are allocated in the not-too-distant future. "So far, we've largely stolen from print budgets," noted Karim Sanjabi, executive vice president of creative and technology, Carat Interactive.

Hal Trencher, national sales director, sports and broadband, Yahoo!, acknowledged that "streaming broadband is only just pulling up its chair [to the media table]," but Trencher claimed that even now, "streaming is not an afterthought at all."

Added Trencher: "I think there's clearly a movement being initiated by agencies and clients to look for broadband advertising to work with traditional ad mediums [in ad campaigns]. It's just starting. It will scale as we scale."

Trencher added that money will come "first and foremost" from network TV budgets. "It's the responsibility of Yahoo! and other publishers to host these ads and show quantifiably that [broadband video] does work," he said. There is plenty of room to "tap into the $9-$10 billion television market," especially as younger generations continue to spend more time online, he stressed.

While most agreed with this assessment, Steven McBride, managing partner of interactive agency VisualMax, pointed out that according to JupiterResearch, only about 3 percent of the marketing budget is currently allocated to streaming [media]. McBride noted that low budget allocations for streaming media can be attributed, in some cases, to cost and limited publisher support of the technology.

EarthQuake Media chairman and CEO Robert Davidman added that the onus is on marketing professionals to facilitate the process of integrating streaming technologies into the marketing vernacular by eliminating the idea of traditional versus online marketing. "The mistake a lot of marketers make is they silo [different media]," he said.

VisualMax's McBride added that cross-media campaigns are becoming increasingly more prevalent. "There are no longer many web-only efforts or standalone TV campaigns," he said.

However, each of the panelists noted that in terms of streaming ads, cross-media campaigns should not simply mean the repurposing of television commercials online. "It's like taking a magazine ad and slapping it on a billboard," said Carat's Sanjabi of repurposed TV ads. He said that marketers need to take advantage of the added features afforded by broadband technologies like feedback and interactivity. Sanjabi mentioned the recent Jerry Seinfeld-Superman webisodes for American Express by Digitas and Ogilvy & Mather, and Crispin, Porter + Bogusky's, engaging subservientchicken.com site for Burger King as two good examples.

Each panelist said feedback is a crucial element to the future growth of streaming video as an ad medium. Dynamic Logic marketing director Christina Goodman highlighted a recent Dynamic Logic study on interstitials that revealed how audio and video significantly increase purchasing intent, and annoy consumers less than television commercials. EarthQuake's Davidman added that feedback has shown that people accept and enjoy good creative.

Yahoo!'s Trencher noted that feedback is crucial in guiding publishers. For example, on the Yahoo! Sports Fantasy pages, consumers were annoyed by Unicast interstitials--they said the online units detracted from their experience. As a result, Trencher said Yahoo! learned that interstitials were inappropriate for that particular category, so it stopped running them.

The End of the Beginning

2004-05-10T11:27:00.000-05:00

Monday, May 10, 2004
By Tony Quin, IQ television group

Broadband's next speed boost will tilt Web's power balance from producers to consumers.

It is easy to forget that the Internet is still a baby. Even though it’s been around in one form or another for as long as twenty years, it really only started to affect the way we live and do business in the mid ‘90s. What we’ve seen so far is just a toddler banging into walls, burning little fingers and learning, usually the hard way, about the way things are.

The dotcom bust, of course, was a big lesson, and our little guy has settled down a bit since then. But despite the school of hard knocks he hasn’t stopped growing for an instant. While investors and the stock market pulled back, people kept right on going. Every day, more people have become comfortable using the Web and more companies slide quietly into an Internet-oriented world.

Today, the Internet drives the daily life of business and increasingly dominates our waking hours. To quote Winston Churchill, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

The character of the first phase of the Internet’s life has been driven mostly by bandwidth and file size. Dial-up bandwidth speeds were painfully slow, so file sizes had to remain very small in order to create an acceptable user experience. I remember well the common wisdom that the user experience required Web pages to load in less than seven seconds. That was very frustrating for a creative person. This led to an almost exclusive focus on text content on the Web. Since text didn’t take up a lot of bytes, or bites for that matter, it became the lingua franca of the medium.

What followed was the digitization of just about everything ever written, billions and billions of pages of text; Carl Sagan would have been proud. The user experience was fairly fast, but it was also about as much fun as an accountant in April. It was fine for researching Ukrainian farm production stats and other minutiae, but it couldn’t hold a candle to TV for owning your attention. However, the fact that it was boring didn’t matter, since the primary use for the Internet was email, research and functional transactions.

Throughout this whole time TV ruled, with average Americans viewing a whopping seven-plus hours a day. While we wanted the knowledge that the Web could bring us, we wanted the experience of TV even more. Part of this, I theorize, is the comparative stimulating power of dynamic imagery (sight and sound) vs. a static experience. TV is addictive, like a drug, as it lulls us into a passive, alpha state. Just watch a toddler with the TV. The moment you turn it off he cries, not because he wants to know whether Big Bird finds his lost bus ticket, but because of the loss of stimulation. Adults are no different. That’s why people just leave the TV on, even when they are not watching (Nielsen, take note).

Broadband turns everything on its head
Now something new is happening, something with the power to turn everything on its head. Broadband. OK, we all know about broadband -- faster downloads, always-on connections -- sounds nice, but no big deal. Telcos and cable companies have been touting it for many years, with mixed success. But it’s in the last two years that it has really begun to take off.

Today we are seeing critical mass, as virtually 100 percent of businesses and nearly 50 percent of all homes have high-speed connections.

Broadband doesn’t just make downloads faster and eliminate the bothersome need to dial-in and log-on (ah, the good old AOL days). It also enables the transformation of the Internet from a purely functional medium to an experiential medium -- not unlike, you guessed it, television.

Today, with broadband speeds of 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps being most common, we are starting to see innovative rich media (I wish someone would come up with a better name!) all over the Web. It’s motion, sound, imagery and interactivity all in one, and it’s starting to seduce us with the same dynamic power television has had over us all these years. But unlike television, it has the additional, enormously powerful dimension of instant interactivity that turns it into something completely and profoundly new.
Already, close to half of all ads on the Web are rich media. Web sites are no longer just print catalogs. They’re becoming experiences, and the first glimpses of the Internet as an entertainment medium are appearing. But this is barely the beginning.

Next speed increase will change the game

In the next two years, give or take a few months, broadband speeds in the United States will jump to 25 or more Mbps (there are lots of reasons for this, such as new compression technologies, competition and fiber). Japan, Korea and a number of other countries are already there.

To put this in perspective, regular broadcast TV signals are the equivalent of approximately 20 Mbps in the digital world. So all of a sudden, every URL becomes a worldwide, interactive television network. No longer do John Malone, Comcast, Rupert Murdoch and the rest of the moguls and behemoths control a closed universe.
Now the game isn’t about the distribution system and who owns it, but rather the content and who produces it. This changes the natural order of things from a producer-run world to a consumer-run world -- and the implications for brands are extraordinary.

Brands have funded television -- and most other media for that matter -- all along. Right now, brands spend 90 percent of their ad budgets on carriage rights -- the fees they pay to distribute their message on someone else’s network. Only 10 percent is spent on the messaging itself. This new world media order will let brands spend 90 percent on the messaging and 10 percent on the carriage costs. Imagine GM with a bigger creative/programming budget than all three broadcast networks combined.

At the same time as all of this is going on, the world’s electronics manufacturers -- like Sony and Panasonic, as well as smart companies like Dell and HP -- are preparing the coming wave of new digital products that hook directly into the Web, like TVs with smart chips that surf the Net. One man’s opinion: In the convergence war, just like in the software war, open source wins in the end. That means one Web pipe into the home or the office, connecting to many devices with many different functions.

Change is happening fast and quietly, so companies cannot afford to wait for the writing on the wall to be seen by all. The new Web will again change the way people buy, shop, communicate, interact, learn and amuse themselves. The Web is turning into a bright, rambunctious teenager, strong, creative, energetic and fearless. Now give it the keys to the car and keep your fingers crossed.

Hurtling Onto Your Hard Drive, Short Films on Demand

2004-04-29T17:42:00.000-05:00

April 29, 2004
New York Times
By MICHEL MARRIOTT

Sit back, relax and enjoy. That's how AtomFilms Hi-Def, a new free online film service seeking to be so easy to use that instructions will be superfluous, introduces itself. Blending the services of AtomFilms, a Web-based film-on-demand pioneer, and Maven Networks, a broadband media software company, AtomFilms Hi-Def automatically downloads film to Windows-based computers with high-speed Internet access.

Three films a week, 60 seconds to 30 minutes each, are saved onto the hard drives of computers running the AtomFilms-Maven software, which can be downloaded at www.hidef.atomfilms.com. The service says that all films can be viewed in full screen and, at the very least, DVD quality.

For computers using Windows XP and Windows Media High-Definition Video the service begins to live up to its name: it delivers two high-definition films each month. Those films can be viewed at a progressive-scan resolution of 720 lines, almost twice the resolution of standard digital television. The films delete themselves two weeks after arriving. Next month the service is adding the second season of "Angry Kid,'' a popular British series of one-minute animated films about an oversize adolescent rendered in computer animation and live action, to its lineup.

Now, if only someone could figure out how to download popcorn.

ROO Group, Inc. Launches ROO TV Broadband Video Portal

2004-04-28T17:31:00.000-05:00

Wednesday April 28
PRESS RELEASE

ROO TV is a network of individual country-based web sites which provides visitors access to view a range of News, Business, Entertainment, Music, Movie, Fashion, Computer Games and Travel videos from their computers and other emerging platforms.

ROO Group, Inc. (the "Company") (OTCBB:ROOG) announced today the official launch of the ROO TV group of web sites (www.rootv.com), which currently includes country sites for USA, UK, Singapore, South Africa and Australia and displays specific content relevant to that region.

Over 4,000 unique videos are currently available which can be viewed in full screen either on the customer's personal computer or TV through a set top box.

ROO TV currently generates revenue from the sale of advertising. These advertisements are generally 15 to 30 second TV-style commercials that can be played before each video. Advertisers have included Saab, ING, American Express, Sony Music and Nescafe. Future revenue models may include pay per view and video download for ownership as well as the ability to view videos in a choice of resolutions and sound qualities.

The ROO TV video portal is also available for re-branded syndication with targeted markets including ISP's and Telco's wanting to provide a value add to their existing product range.

ROO Group Chairman and CEO, Robert Petty, stated, "The launch of ROO TV is in line with the worldwide growth of broadband and the ability to view 'on demand' video content through the web, on PCs and now TVs."

Bush Pushes Broadband Access

2004-04-27T11:31:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, April 27, 2004
By Staff, iMedia Connection

President Bush has urged Congress to make high-speed Internet access permanently tax-free and to reduce regulations so broadband will be universally available by the 2007 goal he set.

Bush complained that the United States was ranked 10th in the deployment of broadband. In an effort to boost that rank, he has signed an order for the government to make it easier for broadband facilities to be built on federal land.

"If you want broadband access throughout the society, Congress must ban taxes on access," Bush told the American Association of Community Colleges annual convention. "Clear out the underbrush of regulation, and we'll get the spread of broadband technology and America will be better for it."

Bush's broadband push coincides with debate beginning in the U.S. Senate on whether to renew or make permanent a ban that bars taxes on Internet access. Lawmakers are split on whether a ban would boost innovation and the roll-out of new technologies or deprive states and local governments of much needed funds.

See Me, Blog Me

2004-04-19T15:53:00.000-05:00

Apr. 19, 2004
Time Magazine
By JEFFREY RESSNER

Turned on by online opinion sites? Then get ready for Web video journals

Boston-based music-video producer Steve Garfield, 46, is no ordinary blogger. Instead of simply posting his thoughts online in a chatty weblog like millions of others around the world, he links a Canon GL2 digital video camera to his laptop and uploads short clips of protest rallies, traffic short-cuts and even news events onto his personal Internet site.
Garfield belongs to a small but growing legion of video bloggers, or vloggers, who are turning the Web into a medium in which someday anyone could conceivably mount original programming, bypassing the usual broadcast networks and cable outlets. "My last entry was a news story about a local ice rescue, and this July I'm going to cover the Democratic Convention," says Garfield, who posts one or two new clips every month. "With cheaper digital cameras and cell phones that can also shoot video, more and more regular people like me will start becoming citizen-journalists."

Video blogs don't require sophisticated equipment, just a PC or a Mac, a high-speed connection and a digital video camera as well as a hosted weblogging service like TypePad and, if you want, editing software such as Final Cut Pro or iMovie (the latter is free with most Apple computers). For really spiffy professional results, it makes sense to invest in tools like Serious Magic's Visual Communicator, a TelePrompTer-graphics-backdrop package that provides network-news — style production values for $199.

While millions of text-driven blogs have blossomed worldwide, there are only a couple hundred video blogs out there. To sample some, check out Japanese slacker vlog avoidinglife.com, music-video blog sxsw.com/music or the Drudge Report — like compendium of diary vlogs vidblogs.com. Hollywood celebrities are also plunging in: Adam Sandler's personal site offers regular video messages from the comic.

Jeff Jarvis, an early champion of vlogging and founder of BuzzMachine.com, a blog that deals with politics and the media, sees great potential in the phenomenon. "Vlogs are a weird, new kind of way that people can document their lives," says Jarvis. "It has the potential to be the farm team for new talent used by big, mainstream media. Suddenly anybody can become an Andy Rooney." Or better yet, an Edward R. Murrow.

Broadband Tops Dial-Up for First Time

2004-03-11T12:47:00.000-05:00

Thursday, March 11, 2004
By comScore Media Metrix

Broadband use eclipses narrowband in San Diego; Boston and New York are close.

San Diego is the first city in the U.S. to have more Internet users on broadband connections than on narrowband.

That’s according to a new comScore Networks analysis of broadband penetration at both the national and local market levels based on consumer behavior in the fourth quarter of 2003. Boston and New York ranked second and third.

At the national level, 36 percent of online users accessed the Web through a high-speed connection in the fourth quarter of 2003, up 2 points from the third quarter. Comcast dominates the broadband market, providing access to approximately 19 percent of broadband users and 7 percent of all online users. SBC, the country’s largest DSL provider, accounts for 11 percent of consumer broadband connections and 6 percent of total ISP subscriptions. Not surprisingly, AOL continues to supply Internet access (narrowband and broadband) to more Americans than any other provider, with a 28 percent share.

Broadband Pulls Nearly Even in Major Markets
comScore’s research revealed that in many of the largest markets in the United States, consumer broadband use is nearly on par with narrowband connections. But in the fourth quarter, San Diego became the first in which broadband subscriptions outnumbered narrowband connections.
Broadband use is more common in larger markets, with approximately 40 percent of Internet users in the top 50 markets enjoying the, compared to 36 percent elsewhere.
A number of the nation’s major population centers rank among the top ten markets in terms of broadband penetration. By contrast, only three top-25 markets (St. Louis, Sacramento, and Indianapolis) were ranked among the ten markets with the lowest broadband penetration.

“In the past several months, we’ve seen the U.S. online population reach 150 million people and household broadband penetration cross the 33 percent threshold,” says Russ Fradin, executive vice president of comScore Networks. “Now we’ve recorded another milestone, with broadband accounting for more than half of a major U.S. market’s Internet connections.”
At a national level, 63 percent of broadband subscriptions are cable connections, while DSL subscriptions account for approximately 37 percent of the high-speed market. In nine of the 10 markets with the highest broadband penetration, the majority of subscribers with a high-speed connection use cable modems. The exception to this pattern is San Francisco, where approximately 60 percent of broadband subscriptions are DSL accounts.

One in Four Internet Users Intends to Switch ISPs
A comScore proprietary survey indicates that more than one in four Internet users intends to switch ISPs in the next six months. The majority of those reporting they plan to change ISPs say they would be selecting a broadband provider. By far the most common reason cited for switching providers is a desire for a faster connection. The second most popular reason for switching ISPs is price, which is likely a key contributor to the strong performance of United Online relative to other dial-up providers in the fourth quarter.
“comScore’s survey research reveals a substantial number of people on the verge of switching their ISPs, indicating that a significant number of consumers are benefiting from intense competition among incumbent phone and cable providers, as well as newer market entrants,” says Fradin. “It’s clear that increased promotional activity and lower prices introduced by these competitors are fueling the momentum of broadband growth, particularly in larger markets.”

How Videoblogs Will Change Newsgathering

2004-03-05T15:00:00.000-05:00

March 5, 2004
Forbes.com

Just when you thought you had a pretty good grip on the fast changing technology of newsgathering, something comes out of left field and makes you re-evaluate where you are with newsgathering technology and where you're headed.

The latest shot over the bow of the good ship Business As Usual may come from an unexpected quadrant of the Internet known as blogs specifically Vblogs, or video web logs. To say this is phenomenon is nascent may be giving it too much credit for being established at this point. But with the power of the Internet to spread ideas and the inclination of hardware vendors to throw capabilities at cell phones, video cameras and PDAs until those gadgets catch on, VBlogging may one-day soon present challenges and opportunities to television news departments.

Blogging encompasses everything from way-out rants to legitimate news and commentary from established, mainstream reporters, pundits and columnists. Video blogging is likely to follow the same path, offering a stations correspondents greater freedom to communicate with a constituency 24/7 and those with a desire and a little technology the chance to write, shoot, edit and distribute video journalism on their own, even from the field.

Some of the technology and tools facilitating Vblogging includes: SV-AV30 MPEG4 video camera from Panasonic (nyse: MC - news - people ) PDA or PocketPC with a keyboard Serious Magic Visual Communicator for Vblogging templates and workflow Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Portrait v 2.21, a mobile video communications software package for the HP (nyse: HPQ - news - people ) Photosmart Mobile Camera and Hitachi (nyse: HIT - news - people ) G1000 Pocket PC phone built-in camera.

Vblogging is already used by a handful of traditional media outlets to supplement their reporting efforts. The question that remains unanswered at this point is how many individuals and organizations that have never set foot inside a local television station will use Vblogging for newsgathering and disseminating community news and who will watch

Hi-Definition TV Comes to the Net

2004-01-22T12:48:00.000-05:00

Thursday, January 22, 2004
By Staff, iMedia Connection

Through a partnership between Atom Films and Maven Networks, marketers can now deliver TV-style ads online at a higher quality than TV itself can deliver.

The two companies announced the debut of Atom Films Hi-Def, a free, advertising-supported service that enables high-quality online viewing of independent films, including select titles presented in high definition 720p format. After an initial download, Atom Films Hi-Def users automatically receive weekly desktop delivery of three of Atom Films best movies, viewable at 850kbps, ensuring full-screen playback that rivals DVD quality.

Atom Films Hi-Def users also have the option to receive two films each month that are viewable at almost three times the resolution of DVD video: Windows Media High-Definition Video (WMV HD) at 720p resolution. This enables a stunning visual experience for users with Windows XP-based machines and marks the first time that true high definition movies are available on the Internet.

For brand advertisers, Atom Films Hi-Def offers high-quality playback, detailed usage tracking, and no ad-skipping or channel-changing, as the commercials play prior to each film in the weekly line-up.

Nintendo and Microsoft Windows Media Center have signed on as initial advertisers.

Study: U.S. getting hooked on high-speed Net

2004-01-08T12:23:00.000-05:00

By Dinesh C. Sharma
CNET News.com
January 8, 2004

The number of Americans connecting to the Internet over broadband is growing at a rapid rate, according to a new Nielsen/NetRatings report.

Nearly 49.5 million Americans, or 38 percent of all home Internet users in the United States, now use a broadband connection to go online, said the report, released on Thursday. That figure represents a 27 percent increase since May 2003. The survey found no increase in the total number of homes using narrowband, which remained static at 69.6 million.

A study conducted by the International Telecommunications Union last year predicted that broadband penetration in the United States could reach 25 percent of the population at a faster rate than PCs and mobile phones saw.

Broadband providers--such as phone companies that offer digital subscriber line (DSL) service, and cable companies--have been reporting a steady growth in broadband customers, despite having had problems in installing high-speed lines. Aggressive price cuts for DSL connections are boosting subscriber numbers.

"The increase in broadband connections indicates users are seeking ways to improve their Internet experience," Marc Ryan, a director of analysis at Nielsen/NetRating, said in a statement. "Moving to a high-speed connection opens the door to a number of new content possibilities, driving further evolution of the Internet and facilitating bandwidth-intensive applications like digital music downloading."

The increased number of broadband connections is spurring the use of applications like on-demand video and flash-based content in advertising, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. In November 2003, 17 percent of all online advertising impressions were rich media ads--a jump of 10 percentage points from November 2002. Non-rich media ads decreased 10 percentage points from a 93 percent share in November 2002 to 83 percent in November 2003.

On the Rise: Broadband Programming

2003-11-03T18:48:00.000-05:00

November 03, 2003
TVSpy
By Stephen Warley and James Sheridan

At the high of the dot-com mania, online video promised to take the Internet to even greater heights by offering programmers new distribution channels and advertisers new opportunities that would be just as compelling as television, while enabling them to target consumers like never before. Unfortunately, life doesn't always turn out the way the analysts predict. Three years later, online video is evolving into a new medium of its own.

High Quality Video Online

For the almost 20-million broadband subscribers now in the U.S. or for anyone who has ever viewed video on their computer at work, online video has improved dramatically over the last three years. It's no longer the size of a postage stamp and soon that dreaded word "buffering" will work its way out of our everyday vocabulary. DSL at 50 times faster than a dial-up connection, and cable modems at twice that speed, are equipped to handle massive video files.

Users are also no longer at the mercy of RealOne Player or Windows Media either. Increasingly, online programmers like TV Tonic by Wavexpress and ESPN Motion have their own players, offering higher-quality video and VCR functionality like fast forward, rewind and pause. In the case of The FeedRom, you don't need to download anything at all, just click and watch. According to Ed Davis, Director and General Manager of ESPN Motion, improving the quality of video is changing the expectations of users, "Technology is no longer the driving factor, people just assume that video on the Internet is going to be great." ESPN Motion offers highlights, interviews and other content drawn from other parts of the ESPN empire.

As high-quality online video proliferates, it will finally offer an alternative distribution for video, challenging the exclusive domain of television. "The upcoming year is going to be the first year that people stop making those annoying statements about the PC being a terrible place to view video and the television is the center of it all," argues Michael Sprague, President of Wavexpress. TV Tonic subscribers can view movie trailers, news clips and music videos.

There are also more and more devices connecting the TV with the PC. People will be able to store television programming on their hard drives or watch video from the Internet on their television. "In 2004 we are going to see hundreds of devices that merge the two systems together, where PCs are set tops and there's lots of little devices that will take content from your PC and put it on your television screen," says Sprague.

Reaching Out to the Audience

There has already been talk of an upfront ad market for broadband and there's no doubt online video will have limitless advertising potential. However, the tremendous value of using online video to connect with audiences not reached by television can not be underestimated.

Ironically enough, one of the biggest beneficiaries of online video will be television. "The Web is the best place for TV promotion and to get the audience to sample a show via a short clip," says Patricia Karpas, Vice President and General Manager of AOL Television. AOL Television offers comprehensive television listings and programming information like the newspaper. Fans can also check out exclusive previews and behind-the-scenes looks from television's shows, watch interviews with stars, and voice their opinions in polls and message boards. "AOL Television's goal is help broadcasters create a 'buzz' for their shows that can only be done on the Internet," says Karpas.

Not only can online video help market television programming, but there is an opportunity to take television programming to where viewers are, many times outside of the home and increasingly at the office. The latest Nielsen numbers showed a big dip in young male viewership, causing great concern about television's most lucrative advertising demo. Want to know where the boys are? Just ask ESPN Motion or The FeedRoom. "Our audience tends to be more male, the exact same audience that TV is losing," says Bart Feder Senior Vice President and General Manager of The FeedRoom, the leading online provider of video news content.

At this point, ESPN Motion is completely supported by advertising and they haven't had a hard time getting advertisers on board says Davis, "Advertising works here because we have a very attractive demographic and have access to the sports fan in one of the most uncluttered media environments." Feder, a former News Director at WABC in New York says he also doesn't buy the argument that online video will cannibalize the broadcast product, "The argument I always make is that you can't make viewers watch. I think online video will be increasingly a way of how television stations reach their audience going forward."

Beyond television, online video gives every company in America the opportunity to connect with their consumers more closely and to deliver information about themselves using a more compelling presentation. "What we tell our potential clients now is that every company is a media company," says Feder. Both TV Tonic and The FeedRoom are now reaching out to corporations to help give them an online video presence. TV Tonic is behind Howard Dean TV, one of the online tools the Dean campaign is using to connect with its supporters. They can view video of Dean along the campaign trail that they might not have otherwise seen. The Internet has undoubtedly played a crucial role in the dark-horse campaign of Howard Dean.

Programming Online

Television and online video both offer moving images, but that is where the similarities end. "You've got the opportunity to leverage the technology to make the programming interactive," says Davis in regard to online video. The Internet allows users to experience programming when, how and where they want.

Television has evolved to control the viewer experience and to discourage interactivity. Feder sees a new relationship with the audience, "What broadband allows you to do is to turn the paradigm around. Instead of living in fear of the clicker, which is the TV remote, embrace the clicker, which is the mouse and tell people to go click." He also says that a story that only appeals to 10-20% of an audience would never make air on television, but would appeal to a passionate online user that would view the video over and over. Sprague notes that people have different navigation habits online compared with television, "It's very different because you are trigger happy within a program rather than trigger happy across channels."

Since it's launch in February of this year, ESPN Motion has had 2 million downloads and they average 900,000 content views each day. The FeedRoom serves between 25 and 30 million streams each month. While these aren't primetime audiences, they are numbers that can't be ignored. More importantly, many of the lucrative demos advertisers covet can now be reached during the day as usage patterns begin to form on the Internet. ESPN Motion says it sees a spike in the morning and in the late afternoon/early evening. The FeedRoom sees a surge in traffic around the middle of the day and in the evening. Feder says their users will also spend an average of 6 to 7 minutes watching video and up to 30 minutes watching a live streaming event, no doubt a testament to the increased quality and reliability of video online.

Visionaries have long made predictions about the demise of broadcast television. While it still commands the largest mass audience of any medium, the trends are difficult to brush aside. As the broadcast audience continues to decline, broadband's audience is on the rise. Television is being forced to evolve by broadband, as television did to radio when it become a part of the media landscape. The most important step television needs to make now is to push aside its ego and to become a guide to the audience rather than trying to control it as television and broadband continue to blend together. Somehow the technology piece of all of this seems to be the easy part.

TV or not TV?

2003-10-16T11:33:00.000-05:00

Thursday, October 16, 2003
By Joseph Jaffe, Editor at Large

Transplanting TV commercials online WILL increase the size of the pie – but at what price?

For all those who have threatened grievous bodily harm to the next person who asks the question, “Is the Web a branding or direct response medium?” I am pleased to offer up the next debate which is sure to become both as overdone and hackneyed as the branding/DR conundrum: Should TV commercials be transplanted on the Web as is…or is this selling out?

I’m glad you asked.

First, let me state for the record that I was staunchly opposed to putting commercials online. And then out came ESPN Motion and I shut my trap once and for all, determined not to be remembered as either a fool, a liar or a foolish liar!

This discussion couldn’t be hotter or more relevant right now. We are at a critical juncture in our emergent media sojourn and the way we resolve this debate could arguably affect where we go from here. (This being said, when I look at our resolution track record, I can’t help but shudder.)

I’ll say this – love it or hate it – the simple fact of the matter remains: transplanting TV commercials online WILL increase the size of the pie – and quite conceivably more/quicker than any other efforts are currently yielding.

I want to make one thing evidently clear: I’m not saying I accept or reject this notion (or at least, I’m trying not to).

Back at an iMedia Summit in May of 2003 in Scottsdale, Starcom CEO Jack Klues said it would be so. Many felt he was just appeasing the room of interactive zealots by talking about committing more dollars towards broadband in an upfront-like way, but then $5 million later, he delivered his version of the Upfront: Up Front (that’s like saying she’s my girlfriend…she’s a girl and she’s my friend = GIRLFRIEND).

And if you believe everything you read, then you ought to take note of what SMG’s below-the-radar President Rishad Tobaccowala had to say: “About a third of the broadband budgets are coming out of traditional TV advertising budgets, a third from online ad budgets and a third from incremental spending.” Translation: Mo’ Money.

I intentionally used the word transplant to refer to a trend that for all intents and purposes couldn’t be more appropriate. The 30-second commercial is terminally ill right now. For starters, it resides in a place which is not exactly good for its health – TV. In addition, it is constrained by an arbitrary constraint that makes storytelling – in a time when results are as (if not more) important than romance – rather tenuous and challenging.

I also used the phrase selling out as this represents heresy to some, but profitability through scarcity to others. Our friends at ESPN would probably not put up a big fight against being labeled as such.

At a time when there are those who are debating whether rich media should be called just plain media or whether flash is in fact considered to be part of rich media, I’d like to focus on the richest form of media, that which combines sight, sound and motion in a flawless delivery mechanism – you might call it a television commercial, although I would challenge you if you did.

For example, I often ask the question, is the Honda Cog commercial the best online advertisement ever created? Whether you believe it is a TV or a Web ad (…on the Web) is really not that relevant. What is important is what the consumer believes, and if he or she doesn’t look to distinguish between the two, then neither should you.

And so to those who have chained themselves to the gates of Parliament in silent (or not) protest, I would draw your attention to a variety of new approaches that are boldly going where no 30-second has gone before, and in doing so extending legs, longevity and hope to an increasingly endangered species (I’ll let you decide whether I’m still talking about the 30-second spot or the agency that created it):

“Opt-in TV”: Porsche on Yahoo! or any click-to-view trailer creative in the entertainment sector

Made-for-the-Web original content: Reebok’s Terry Tate or Buick’s Tiger Trap

Viral Longevity: Honda Cog

TV commercials that are deeply integrated into a Web-based experience: Reebok’s Whodunnit

Seamless viewing technology: ESPN Motion

Launching campaign’s online: ING Direct debuted its TV ad on the Web

Watch to Win! American Airlines incentivized consumers to watch its television commercial online through a sweepstakes offer.

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The Scoop on ESPN Motion

2003-04-17T11:40:00.000-05:00

Thursday, April 17, 2003
By Joseph Jaffe, Editor at Large

With everyone talking about ESPN Motion, Joseph goes straight to the source by interviewing the man behind the Motion, John Skipper, executive vice president at ESPN.

ESPN Motion provides ESPN.com visitors with crystal-clear instant-on video right inside the ESPN.com front page, without streaming. Every time new ESPN Motion video is published out to the company’s servers, an ESPN Motion component on a user’s computer automatically goes out and fetches the newest video and stores it in a temporary location on his hard drive. This all happens in the background. When a new video has been downloaded and is ready to view, the user sees a blue 'E' icon in the right side of his Windows taskbar, which the viewer can click on, or just visit the front page of ESPN.com and the ESPN Motion video will start playing automatically.

The technology has caught the attention of the online advertising industry. Joseph Jaffe, for example, has always felt that simply taking TV and transplanting it on the Web would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. He also was not convinced with the current level of quality in similar offerings. However, when he saw ESPN Motion in “motion”, he began to reconsider his point of view and in order to learn more quizzed ESPN Motion’s skipper, John Skipper, about – among other things – the proprietary technology, convergence, broadband, and buying and selling methodologies.

Jaffe: Take me through the thinking behind ESPN Motion…any unique consumer insight which led the way or was this rather a marketing driven initiative?

Skipper: This starts from being consumer driven. The thing that got me excited when I saw this was the fact I could come into my office the next day, go to ESPN.com and didn’t have to launch a media player or wait for a buffer to see the game winning home run from the West Coast game the night before. Or if news broke during the day I could cut to ESPN.com and there would be leading analyst commentary waiting for me.

I didn’t want this to be about technology – I wanted to be able to provide a better experience for consumers.

At ESPN.com, we’re very fan-focused. We believe that if we serve the fan, we’ll figure out a way to make money out of it and grow our business. The first way to do this was to provide the fan a better experience online – in this case, through video.

Then we had to figure out how to make money from it and pretty quickly we realized the way to do it was through convergence – so if you have television commercials, you can run this online as a way to sponsor or pay for fans to receive free video.

Jaffe: Let me ask you the question on everyone’s mind right now: the technology. What technology did you choose or use?

Skipper: I saw this the first time at Walt Disney Imagineering. I had some pals there who were taking me through everything from new rides in the Park to new technologies. Somebody had on their machine a new prototype that wasn’t live yet, but reflected the ability to click on a page and to see video which would start playing automatically. I asked how we could do that and they said they didn’t really know as it was just a concept at that stage. I then went to our engineers and asked them if they could figure out how to do this.

So the technology is proprietary from ESPN.com and Walt Disney Internet Group Engineers

Jaffe: So you built this in house and basically in one fell swoop you’ve been able to achieve something that I don’t think the industry has not been able to do yet.

Skipper: And I can’t emphasize enough the great people on our side that made this possible.

Jaffe: So we’re talking about great talent combined with the magic of Mickey Mouse. Seriously though, the insight I take away from this is that you started from scratch. It wasn’t like taking an existing model and tweaking incrementally in an attempt to evolve it. This was starting off with a clean slate.

Skipper: It is a scientific concept: the a-ha phenomenon. This was the a-ha phenomenon.

Jaffe: Is there a revenue stream in terms of licensing this technology and exporting it throughout the Net, or are you thinking of keeping this in-house for just a wee while longer?

Skipper: I think we wanted to launch this and be leaders in this. This being said, I don’t want to be the only person who has this for very long, because ultimately I think this will grow the business. I believe that at ESPN.com we have a strong enough position such that as the overall Internet grows, we will benefit.

Jaffe: It seems like you’ll be taking an open position which can only be good for the industry.

Skipper: The person who led the project – Aaron LaBerge – developed this on open source and our sense is that we are interested in sharing this.

Jaffe: How important was it to be able to serve up a streamless offering? Were there any specific considerations which had to be met in order to arrive at your intended outcome?

Skipper: I think you’ve figured it out which is why you stressed it. We didn’t think people were responding very well to the existing way of viewing video, which is why we wanted to improve and evolve it.

Jaffe: One thing I noticed is that the video plays immediately – it doesn’t seem to be loading at all.

Skipper: Part of the beauty is that when you download the application, you’re allowing us to put the video on your hard drive for a short period of time so that you don’t have to wait for it: It’s there waiting for you.

Jaffe: So it’s loading every day in the background unbeknownst to the user, and that’s how it plays automatically?

Skipper: Yes.

Jaffe: Let’s talk about the plug-in for a moment. You’ve obviously taken a strong position on both broadband and convergence.

Skipper: I believe broadband fundamentally changes a user’s experience. Something important to understand is that 80% of our connections on ESPN.com are on broadband already. So I think we’re a little bit of a harbinger for what’s going to happen in the market.

Jaffe: Can this product work without a broadband connection because of its ability to download politely in the background?

Skipper: It can work in 200K, but not really anything below.

Jaffe: Comment on your belief in the power to bring the best of television to the Web. ESPN Motion moves a lot closer from the mainstream “print on steroids” approach towards a more television-like model.

Skipper: You’re right -- this sort of blows through the existing method through the use of video. Before, what we (the industry) were doing was a little bit clumsy in terms of putting one medium on top of the other by trying to take television quality and putting little bits of it on your computer.

My job is to experiment and push as far as possible on the computer screen, while my colleagues push as far as they can on HDTV, iTV or Enhanced TV, and we’ll both learn from each other in the process.

Jaffe: Do you believe the two worlds will soon collide or do you think they will remain apart, yet still leverage the best of each?

Skipper: I think it’s still pretty far out. However by 2015 (I’m deliberately picking a time far in the future), I don’t think people are going to have two screens in their house.

My theory on this is that all things get adopted slower than you think they will at first, and then faster.

Jaffe: That’s probably more along the lines of the Tipping Point.

Skipper: Exactly. There are people on the forefront of things who get all excited about how new things are going to revolutionize everything and then get disappointed when it doesn’t happen immediately. So they move onto the next thing and then six years later, everybody’s on-board.

This may sound silly, but it will answer your question. When we do our five-year plan, we’re still not planning on convergence yet.

Jaffe: Not at all. It goes back to ESPNMotion being born organically, and not contrived or forced based on a plan.

Could you briefly outline the selling process? I noticed a banner at the top of the page. How are you going about selling these embedded 30-second commercials versus the standard online units? Which groups are involved in the process? How is the overall package being positioned and sold, and how is this different to the process before Motion was launched?

Skipper: The banners at this stage are still being sold by the ESPN.com team. Now as we go to Motion, we made the decision as a company to work together, certainly in the initial stages.

In the first six months, we’re trying to sell category-exclusive sponsorships, so once we have an automotive client aboard; we won’t sell to their competitors. And we’ll restrict these categories to about eight to 10. The reason for that – and you’ll appreciate this as a former media director – is that there’s a lot of stuff we don’t know about this. When we go to people, we recognize that they’ll ask a lot of questions we don’t really know how to answer. Some examples include initial downloads, number of daily plays, whether a 15-second or 30-second spot works best in terms of attentiveness.

So we’re asking these advertisers to be our launch partners and we’re guaranteeing them a certain number of impressions and other advantages down the line in return.

Right now, the banner at the top is being sold separately on a per-day basis with a guaranteed number of impressions. We have also guaranteed to advertisers that there will not be any competitive conflicts between banner and Motion.

Jaffe: I think you’re going to find a lot of buyers who want to purchase both together.

Skipper: We can certainly do that and we’re happy to talk to people about it. You’re hitting on some important points…it’s almost as if you’ve been sitting in on our meetings. I mentioned earlier that we’re very focused on delivering value and experience to the consumer, but we are also very focused on delivering value to the advertiser.

We’ve tried to be at the forefront of creating big ad impressions and impact on the site; we’ve offered to every significant advertiser we’ve had to do research.

I think you’re right that some people are going to want the whole thing synced up…but it does get expensive.

Jaffe: What about the buy side…are you going to the interactive, traditional buyers or both?

Skipper: It’s both of course. But we’re going predominantly to the television folks because they’re the ones that represent the larger budgets.

Jaffe: And are you finding them receptive or are they passing you along to their interactive counterparts?

Skipper: No we’re finding them to be receptive because after all, we’re talking about television commercials.

Jaffe: And are you finding the way they’re being priced, accounted for and measured are being easily accepted by this community, or do they tend to bring along an interactive representative to help facilitate and streamline the process?

Skipper: It certainly helps if there’s an interactive buyer in the room. We’re taking this to big name agencies, and because they already do a fair amount of business with ESPN, there’s a certain amount of trust that already exists – trust that we’re going to deliver value to them, even through there’s a lot that both sides don’t fully understand yet.

Jaffe: This is a crazy buyers’ marketplace, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a host of buyers try and bundle in ESPN Motion’s 30-second spots as value add.

Skipper: We may get some of that, but since the beginning we’ve been really aggressive at resisting it.

Jaffe: You are after all one of the premier media brands, with integrated touchpoints from cable to online to the magazine …

A few final questions: How are you promoting Motion?

Skipper: We started on the Web only. Everyone already on ESPN.com represents our prime audience. We just introduced a new home page so we’ve been using this to communicate and promote ESPN Motion. We also want to make sure that this ramps up in a manageable and scaleable fashion. Once this happens, we’ll turn to television.

Jaffe: What percentage of your visitors has already downloaded this?

Skipper: So far, we’ve had close to 1.5 million installs.

Jaffe: Any user feedback to share? From an intrusiveness perspective, I would imagine there shouldn’t have been any negative response as this is a user-initiated process.

Skipper: For the most part, our broadband-based audience gets it and we’ve already received positive consensus about this being the future. Early on we got a fair number of e-mails about concerns regarding sound at work and bosses finding out. We just pointed out that they should hit their mute button as the process is user controlled.

Jaffe: So just to be clear, does ESPN Motion launch automatically upon arrival at ESPN.com or is this within the user’s control?

Skipper: At this point it’s in our control whether to launch with ESPN Motion or not.

Jaffe: My point of view is that we need to be cognizant about sound at work, especially amid a cubical environment. So the option of being able to initiate it from the get-go is going to be preferred long term…

Skipper: …and it’s something we’re going to spend time thinking about

Jaffe: Final question. If Jaffe Juice were a drink, what would it be and why?

Skipper: Given the thoroughness of your interview, some serious carrot/wheatgrass juice - good for you!

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

2003-02-11T19:56:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the Broadband Revolution blog. It’s not often that technology fundamentally changes our way of life. The telephone, radio, TV and PC can be counted among the few shining examples. Today, the Broadband Revolution is well underway, promising to change the very essence of the Internet and the way we communicate and consume media. Depending on which analyst you trust to be wrong the least, there are now approximately 50 million broadband connected users in the US alone. This summer will see Broadband surpass dial-up as the predominant Internet access method in US homes. The impact -- the PC has taken over the phone as the #1 communication medium and the TV as the entertainment and information medium of choice for the broadband user.

Akin to the Cable TV revolution, the pipes are now in place to reliably publish, deliver and share broadcast quality media on any IP-enabled media device. The long-expected convergence of three previously distinct technologies: computing, communications and broadcasting has arrived. As a result, Broadband communication services (e.g. VOIP) have enjoyed explosive growth over the past couple years, yet the Web as we know it today has barely begun to leverage the dramatic technological shift. That transformation is happening daily. This blog will chronicle some relevant industry developments and milestones by aggregating insightful articles on subjects of particular interest to me including Broadband Video, Video Ads, Video Blogs, P2P Media, and the re-birth of Push Technology. Got an article to share? Let me know.