Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA by Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Rumblings of a possible digital window release shift have began to erupt as 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment quietly released Juno for sale on iTunes for $14.99 on Tuesday, the same day the DVD hit stores. (It is the first Fox movie to be sold on the Apple site.) Paramount has also been experimenting with new releases on the platform, despite widely held concerns of cannibalization. (Cynopsis 4/17)

CBS is opening an office in Menlo Park, Calif., marking an unusual effort by a traditional media group to plant its flag in the heart of the tech industry. The office will include CBS dealmakers hunting for acquisitions. Also: CBS made $4.83 per viewer on its March Madness Webcasts. (Iwantmedia 4/17, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/717a8b76-0bdc-11dd-9840-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1 4/17, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/16/AR2008041603481.html 4/17)

March Madness makes CBS very happy.

Fueled by a redesign and the release of the entire back catalogue of South Park episodes on southparkstudios.com, Comedy Central Digital says traffic to its site jumped 50% in March versus the previous month, with a record 3 million unique visitors and 35 million video plays. In case you’re wondering, Major Boobage was the most viewed episode of South Park in March. (Cynopsis 4/17)

Unfortunately, Major Boobage won’t be available to stream through the site again until 4.26 because of “contractual obligations.”  What?!  Of course I looked. . .

Media companies are scrambling to get their video content on the Internet. But they’re not scrambling fast enough, says a study by online-content distributor Akamai Technologies. Within 72 hours, illegal file sharing can erode nearly 20% of the online audience for a primetime TV show. (Iwantmedia 4/17, http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/04/16/media-companies-need-to-pick-up-the-pace 4/16)

Online views of videos soared 66% in the U.S. in February from a year earlier — but television networks grabbed just a pittance of those eyeballs, according to new numbers of comScore. “We still see our content pop up on YouTube,” says CNN.com exec Sandy Malcolm. “You deal with it.” (Iwantmedia 4/17, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080417/ap_on_hi_te/networks_online 4/17)

YouTube revealed it has paid out more than $1 million to its 100 or so producer partners since expanding the program 4 months ago. No word on what the CPMs or rev splits looks like. The site just exported the program to Japan, Australia and Ireland. (Cynopsis 4/17)

NBC Universal, which pulled its television content from Apple’s iTunes last year, would like to have its shows distributed once again through the service. However, antipiracy measures are needed. NBC is “financially harmed every day by piracy,” says NBCU digital exec George Kliavkoff. (Iwantmedia 4/17, http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9920399-7.html 4/16)

EQAL, the producer of the Internet-video serial “lonelygirl15,” has raised $5 million from tech investors, led by Spark Capital, to expand and introduce new online shows. The studio is said to understand that “the Web is not TV, and you can’t advertise like you do on TV.” (Iwantmedia 4/17, http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120840403372722269.html 4/17)

ComScore‘s paid-click report for March revealed another year-over-year drop in growth for Google. Paid clicks increased by only 2.7% for the month on just 2% for Q1, compared to a 25% growth rate in Q1 of 2007. The industry waits with baited breath as the company prepares to report its earnings today. (Cynopsis 4/17,  http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204&sid=a30kTObB05lA 4/17)

The sun shines down on a Google headquarters sign in Mountain View, California, April 11, 2008. Photographer: Tony Avelar/Bloomberg News

Yahoo is said to have moved closer to outsourcing its search advertising to Google after an initial test of the system yielded what the two firms deemed positive results. A partnership could give Yahoo some leverage as it tries to ward off Microsoft’s unwelcome $42 billion bid. (Iwantmedia 4/17, http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120839839184321833.html 4/17)

Universal Music Group is investing in Buzznet.com. The move is believed to mark the first time a major music company has taken a role in developing editorial programming for a social media site. Buzznet plans to deliver exclusive news and will have artists act as guest bloggers. (Iwantmedia 4/17, http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117984143.html?categoryid=1009&cs=1 4/17)

eBay reported its first quarter results today with revenues of $2.19B, up $424M from the same quarter last year. Its GAAP net income was $460M, or $0.34 per diluted share.  Skype revenues were $126M with 61% year-over-year growth (although revenue is decelerating rapidly). During the first part of this year, Skype added 33M registered users, bringing its total to 309M users. This makes the Skype user base the largest within eBay’s collection of services. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/16/skype-reports-61-yoy-growth-all-quiet-on-google-front 4/16)

(Below)  This is an interesting way to avoid the issue.  Every heard a song by Shaggy titled “It Wasn’t Me”?

In a rare move, all five members of the FCC will convene in Silicon Valley today for a seven-hour hearing on net neutrality. Comcast, which earlier this week announced it would develop a “bill of rights” for peer-to-peer Web traffic, declined an invitation because, as a spokeswoman for the company said, “the focus of this event should be broader than any individual company’s issues.” (The Wall Street Journal 4/17, MarketWatch 4/17)

WorldNow announced it is offering customizable citizen journalists widgets from white label provider KickApps to its local station partners. The applications enable sites to add photo and video sharing, blogging, message boards and content syndication features to increase traffic, engagement and ad revenue via contextual ad inventory. (Cynopsis 4/17)

NBC Universal revamped its universalvod.net website adding a new Flash-based interface to give users one-click access to trailers, behind-the-scenes footage and photo galleries of current and upcoming VOD and PPV offerings. (Cynopsis 4/17)

Most experts are unimpressed with Blockbuster’s proposal to buy Circuit City, saying the merger would not enhance its strategy against rival Netflix. “The acquisition of a major retail chain also highlights the growing divergence between the strategies of Blockbuster and Netflix. While both are aiming to be preferred destinations for media content, Netflix … is making the slow but ultimately critical transition toward digital delivery,” said Doug Anmuth, a Lehman analyst. (The Washington Post/paidContent.org 4/15)

Fans of the Boston Marathon can log onto WCSN.com to watch the whole race for free live or on demand beginning April 21 at 9:25 am ET, thanks to a partnership with Adidas and MarathonGuide.com. (Cynopsis 4/17)

AOL began occupying new headquarters in New York this week to bring itself closer to the media and advertising industries. AOL is occupying two floors of 770 Broadway, a couple of miles from the headquarters of parent Time Warner. (Iwantmedia 4/17, http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080416/techbit_aol_headquarters.html 4/16)

Everyone’s favorite web statistics whipping boy Alexa has announced a major overhaul of how it compiles traffic figures. The biggest change is Alexa’s decision to drop exclusive reliance on the Alexa toolbar for traffic data, with Alexa now aggregating data from “multiple sources” to compile its statistics and web rankings. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/16/alexa-overhauls-ranking-system 4/16)

U.S. Internet users viewed 10.1 billion online videos in February­up 66% year-over-year and 3% from January­ with Google’s YouTube again capturing the lion’s share of the traffic with 34% of all videos viewed, according to comScore’s latest video web metrics report. Other tidbits include:

• 72.8% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• 80.4 million viewers watched 3.42 billion videos on YouTube (that’s 42.6 videos/viewer)
• 50.2 million viewers watched 539 million videos on MySpace (10.7 videos/viewer)
• The average online video duration was 2.7 minutes

The average online video viewer consumed 75 videos (Cynopsis 4/17)

Top U.S. Online Video Properties* by Videos Viewed – February 2008
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Property                     Videos (000)    Share(%)of Videos
Google Sites                3,567,202         35.4
Fox Interactive Media   586,236            5.8
Yahoo! Sites                293,120            2.9
Microsoft Sites             293,085            2.9
Viacom Digital              218,011            2.2
Time Warner(Excl.AOL) 132,734            1.3
Disney Online               130,609            1.3
AOL LLC                       114,853            1.1
ABC.COM                      98,294            1.0
Comcast Corporation      92,828            0.9
Total Internet          10,089,048         100.0
*Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks. Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video
Source: comScore Video Metrix

Cable modem and DSL penetration increased more than 300% in the U.S. since 2002, according to a new analysis from Scarborough Research, jumping from 12% to 49%. Broadband rates are even higher in certain cities such as San Francisco, Boston and San Diego, where they top 60%. Broadband subscribers are 30% more likely than total internet users to have downloaded podcasts during the past month and 29% more likely to have viewed TV programs online. (Cynopsis 4/17)