NBC and MTV are unveiling an unusual plan to promote a new television show, “quarterlife,” that will premiere on MTV, but air weekly on competitor NBC. The groundbreaking “quarterlife,” which portrays struggling artists in their 20s, was created for the Web in eight-minute segments. (http://www.reuters.com/article/industryNews/idUSN1341166420080214 2/14)
NBC Entertainment co-head Ben Silverman is selling his television production firm Reveille to London-based Shine, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth. The deal resolves conflicts of interest issues posed by Silverman’s dual role. “I just want to focus 100% on NBC,” he says. (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-reveille14feb14,1,7572319.story 2/14)
Advertisers will spend some $1.6 million for each 30 seconds of commercial time during the ABC broadcast of the Academy Awards on Feb. 24. Marketers appear to be treating the Oscar show as if it were the Super Bowl, when viewers pay more attention to the ads. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/business/media/14adco.html?_r=1&oref=slogin 2/14)
Showtimeplans to air two 30m comedy series in a one-hour block on Mondays starting June 16, as Weeds returns for a fourth season at 10p and the British series Secret Diary of a Call Girlpremieres at 1030p with eight episodes. Showtime ordered thirteen episodes of Weeds with production beginning in April from Lionsgate in association with Tilted Productions. Secret Diary of a Call Girl is an IMG/Tiger Aspect/Silverapples Media/ARG production.
Secret Diary of a Call Girl
Love this show already. Something needs to come along and crush this Cashmere Mafia/Lipstick Jungle Madness once and for all.
Showtime’s smart, edgy shows have made believers of the channel’s corporate bosses at Viacom and CBS and, even more important, with viewers, according to this article. The home of “Dexter,” “Californication” and “Weeds” added 1.3 million subscribers last year and now reaches about 16 million U.S. homes. (Mediaweek 2/13)
USA Networkscheduled the new dramaInPlain Sight starring Mary McCormack on Thursdays at 10p and will open with a 90-minute episode on April 24. USA will air 12 episodes of the drama produced by Universal Media Studios.
Click the image below for a video preview.
TNT gave the go-ahead for a new action drama series Leverage starring Timothy Hutton and executive produced by Dean Devlin (Independence Day) and John Rogers (Cosby). TNT greenlit 13 episodes produced by Devlin’s Electric Entertainment and will premiere the series later this year. The drama is about a team of thieves, hackers and grifters who act as modern-day Robin Hoods, seeking revenge against the powerful and rich who victimize others. (The Hollywood Reporter 2/13)
ABC Family has ordered a new project based on the Samurai series of novels targeting young adults, about a teenager who discovers her adoptive father is also the head of the Japanese mafia. Samurai Girl from Alloy Entertainment and ABC Studios picks up with the teen played by Jamie Chung, goes into training to become a Samurai, with the end goal of destroying her father’s empire. ABC Family will present this project as a “major event” in three 2-hour episodes, airing late this summer.
(Below) WOOHOO!! Way hot Markey.
Congressman Ed Markey (D.,Mass.) and Rep. Chip Pickering (R. Miss.) introduced the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act” on Tuesday to help prevent discriminatory bandwidth allocation practices by ISPs such as Comcast, long accused of interrupting the connections of P2P users without properly notifying customers. (Comcast finally admitted to the practice in a new filing to the FCC this week.) Other ISPs are complaining to regulators that video is heavily taxing their networks; Time Warner estimates that 5% of its users account for 50% of the bandwidth usage on many parts of its network, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Fueled by strong performances from its broadband and telephony offerings, Comcast announced today that its revenue jumped 24%, to $30.9 billion, in 2007 and profit was up 2%, to $2.59 billion. The country’s largest cable provider added 331,000 high-speed Internet customers last year and 604,000 voice subscribers. (Google/Associated Press 2/14)
Comcast, the biggest U.S. cable-television provider, may have to buy back stock or pay a dividend to satisfy investors after a 35% drop in the shares last year. CEO Brian Roberts should “free up cash” to reward shareholders, says investor Pat Becker Jr. of Becker Capital Management. (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204&sid=a1nlPZOsafok 2/14)
Cox has announced that it added 357,000 phone customers in 2007 and a total of 1 million revenue-generating units last year. Cox, which now has broken the 1-million-RGU mark for seven straight years, said that 62% of subscribers now received two-service bundles and that more than 30% had gone for the company’s triple-play offering. (OneTRAK 2/13)
Here’s what I think is most exciting. 1) Personalized recommendations for video similar to what Amazon.com does for music and book recommendations. 2) New video editing tools. (the existing tools aren’t very exciting) 3) New analytic tools that allow video watchers to be tracked by geogrphic locations.
(Below) Way to point out the obvious Mediapost. . . Hulu intends to be a central point for search and discovery of all video across the internet, not just video provided from Fox and NBC. This is their strength, not the content from their own content partners. What I am desperate for is one portal on the internet through which I can gain access to ALL the professionally-produced content I’m looking for. I don’t want to go to NBC.com for NBC shows, to ABC.com for ABC, etc. I’m already developing carpal tunnel as it is. Sheeeeeeeet.
Hulu, the online video venture from NBC and News Corp., is in the process of “indexing” all video content on the Internet, with the goal of providing links to video content that isn’t licensed to play on its own site. “It’s about letting the consumers grab your content,” says Hulu exec Kevin McGurn. (http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=76518 2/14)
Time Warner’s AOLand IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Citysearch site will announce a partnership to share local content and advertising resources. Citysearch will provide its local business reviews and other content for AOL Web sites; AOL will open its sites to Citysearch’s local advertisers. (http://www.reuters.com/article/mediaNews/idUSN1346164820080214 2/14)
Ad supported music streaming site Imeem acquired digital music wholesaler Snocap, reports TechCruch. Snocap announced a number of distribution deals with sites such as MySpace and Imeem last year, offering paid music downloads but the service has failed to gain much traction.
TNT.tvis upgrading its online coverage of NBA All Star Weekend, offering live streaming coverage during NBA All-Star Saturday Night and the 2008 NBA All-Star Game on Sunday Feb. 17 to complement TNT’s broadcast coverage of the events. TNT will also host an interactive poll that allows users to pick the players they’d like the All-Star Access cameras to follow during game, with a different player from the East and West being isolated live each quarter.
CBSSports.com, in the midst of absorbing the assets of CSTV.com and high school sports site MaxPreps, announced it will stream all 63 games of March Madness this year for the first time. More than 1.38 million users watched the games on the site last year.
After launching a major redesign, MSNBC.com reported record web traffic in Jan., registering 1.4 billion page views – up 22% from its ‘07 average. The site averaged 94 million uniques and delivered 32.2 million video streams for the week ending Feb. 9, its 3rd biggest video week ever.
Plaxo finally got bought, say valley whispers, and blog after blog have speculated incorrectly about who the buyer might be (first Facebook, then Google). Finally, someone may have gotten it right - Valleywag is saying that Comcast is the buyer, for $175m. That makes sense based on what Techcrunch heard earlier today, too: that one of the cable players bought them, for something just under the $200 million previously rumored. Comcast is the most active buyer in the bunch. In fact, they’re getting a bit of a reputation as the guys who’ll look at any deal, and don’t quibble much on price. If no one else will take you, there’s always Comcast. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/13/plaxos-buyer-not-facebook-not-google-likely-comcast 2/13)
French internet entrepreneur Loic Le Meur assembled a list of investors which reads like a who’s who of Silicon Valley to back his latest project called Seesmic. The site, currently in alpha, adds video to the popular social conversational model pioneered by Twitter and others, allowing users to post videos straight from their webcams. Seesmic has secured $6 million in financing led by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis’ Atomico, with contributions from other such luminaries as Steve Case, Michael Arrington and Reid Hoffman.
Internet searches on mobile phones will overtake fixed-line searches “within the next several years,” forecasts Google exec Vic Gundotra, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Google is unlikely to build its own handset, he adds. “We want every phone to be a Google phone.” (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/667f13de-da60-11dc-9bb9-0000779fd2ac.html 2/13)
