Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Promising not to give up on the digital subscription model, Starz confirmed it is shuttering its Vongo download service on Sept. 30, refusing any more new subscribers and promising to refund the subscriptions of any current customers. The site has offered unlimited downloads of Starz-licensed movies and TV shows for a flat fee of $10, allowing customers to save titles to their hard drive for later viewing. Instead the company will continue to offer the service as a (branded) white label option for other distributors such as Verizon, which launched the Starz Play broadband video service to its FiOS TV subscribers this past May. (Cynopsis 8/13)

Seasons one and two of HBO‘s popular Hollywood insider comedy Entourage popped up for purchase on the iTunes store, joining past seasons of several more of the network’s Emmy-winning shows. Season three will arrive on Aug. 18 and season four will be available on Aug. 26, building up to the premiere of season 5 on HBO Sept. 7. (The new episodes won’t be available on iTunes until they’re released on DVD.) (Cynopsis 8/13)

Coming to a screen near you on Aug. 18 is Gemini Division, that Sci Fi mystery thriller from NBC Universal Digital Entertainment starring Rosario Dawson (Lost) as a NYPD vice cop searching for her fiancee’s murderer. The studio announced plans to distribute the 50-episode weekly series on the web via NBC.com, Sci-Fi.com and other online video portals; on VOD via Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon FiOS and Dish Network; and on electronic sell through via Amazon Unbox, NBC Mobile and Microsoft’s Xbox Live and Zune platform. (Cynopsis 8/13)

Today at Yahoo’s Brickhouse, a team of developers, press, and Yahoo execs including co-founder David Filo converged for the release of Fire Eagle, Yahoo’s geo-location platform. Fire Eagle allows allows developers to include positional data in their applications with a minimal amount of work. The platform was originally announced in November, and has since been deployed by a number of select partners including Six Apart and LightPole. Today’s release extends availability to anyone. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/12/fire-eagle-launches-geo-location-platform-to-the-public 8/12)

Yup, even the registration scares the crap out of me.  I imagine this is what Sandra Bullock must have felt like in The Net.

Content delivery network Limelight Networks posted revenue of $30.3 million for Q2 2008, a 22% increase from a year ago, but warned of tightening profit margins due to required infrastructure build out and increased pricing pressure. Limelight, which won Microsoft’s business to be the primary deliverer of video for NBCOlympics.com on MSN, also recently renewed its contracts with Disney, Netflix and Veoh. (Cynopsis 8/13)

Video search engine Blinkx announced a new partnership with a voice-enabled audio toolmaker ConvoCast. ConvoCast will utilize Blinkx’s speech recognition technology to provide transcription, discovery and intelligent tagging of user-generated content for ConvoCast’s AudienceVox application developed for radio and television, in addition to their ReaderVox application for newspapers and print publishers. (Cynopsis 8/13)

As if on cue, Hitwise released its search engine market share for July pegging Google with over 70% of the search market for the first time (an increase of 10% over the same month last year.) Combined with Yahoo, Google would control nearly 90% of the search market. (Cynopsis 8/13)

During the past year the total North American audience of social networkers grew by just 9% compared to 25% growth for the world at large. The Middle East-Africa region (up 66%), Europe (up 35%) and Latin America (up 33 %) all showed impressive growth. Among the individual sites Facebook and Hi5 showed the highest international growth rates. Facebook grew its user base from 8,751 to 35,263 in Europe and from 3,7112 to 20,712 in Asia during the past year. (Cynopsis 8/13)

Worldwide Growth among Selected Social Networking Sites – June 2008 vs. June 2007
Total Unique Visitors (000)
Jun-2007        Jun-2008       % Change
Total Internet: Total Audience   778,310          860,514         11%
Social Networking                     464,437          580,510        25%
FACEBOOK.COM                         52,167          132,105       153%
MYSPACE.COM                         114,147          117,582          3%
HI5.COM                                   28,174           56,367        100%
FRIENDSTER.COM                     24,675           37,080          50%
Orkut                                       24,120           34,028          41%
BEBO.COM                                18,200           24,017          32%
Skyrock Network                       17,638           21,041          19%
Source: comScore World Metrix