Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Six months ago, OpenSocial was nothing but a list of promised partnerships. But the social network application platform backed by Google has made a lot of progress since then as those partners started to go live with their OpenSocial Apps. First there was MySpace and Orkut, then Hi5, and most recently Friendster. All told, if you add up the various social networks that are now live with OpenSocial, it reaches a total of 350 million users. And it will soon reach 500 million, as four more social networks and services prepare to launch by the end of of September. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/20/opensocial-now-reaches-350-million-users-and-growing 8/20)

Today, Aircell announced that their fleet of Boeing 767-200s will have the Gogo service enabled on flights originating from NYC’s JFK to LA, San Francisco and Miami. CrunchGear will have a seat on a flight to LAX today that leaves JFK at 12 PM EDT. Head on over there now for more details and the full press release. Again, there will be no VoIP enabled on these flights nor will there ever be.  (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/20/aircells-gogo-inflight-wi-fi-service-going-live-today-and-crunchgears-got-a-seat 8/20)

Flying in the face of conventional wisdom that online video should be short, CBSSports.com unveiled a new weekly Fantasy Football show to premiere Sept. 7 that will run a full 90-minutes in length, streaming live every Sunday morning of football season from 11-12:30 pm ET. The show will utilize segments from the cast of CBS’ NFL Today filtered for value to fantasy team owners, along with input from CBSSports.com Fantasy Football Senior Writers Jamey Eisenberg and Dave Richard. Going head to head against the 4 established Sunday morning football preview shows (on CBS, FOX, ESPN and NFL Network,) Fantasy Football Today will have its work cut out. Then again, none of the shows cater exclusively to fantasy football fans. The show will also benefit from wide distribution across the CBS Audience Network, including YouTube, AOL, MSN, Veoh, TV.com, Bebo, Joost and Fancast. (Cynopsis 8/20)

Introducing one of its first big content projects under AOL’s wing social networking service Bebo debuted Model.Live, a broadband reality series chronicling the lives of 3 IMG Models as they work the runways during Fashion Week in New York, London, Milan and Paris. As with past Bebo shows users are given the chance to interact with the models via video diaries, text messages, photos and blogs. The 12-episodes series, produced by IMG Media and sponsored by Express.com, will run simultaneously on Bebo and Vogue.tv, with new episodes appearing each Friday. (Cynopsis 8/20)

I found the series incredibly dry.  That aside, I think this series will be successful in the online series space because of the sponsorships attached (Vogue and Express) and simply for the fact that it’s a show about beautiful people.

Good news for Mac users. CinemaNow, one of the oldest movie and TV show download sites, will finally be available for Mac users. Pay-per-view titles will also be streamable using Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox or Opera browsers. iTunes still has a lock on content playable on the iPod, but such integrations should help loosen Apple’s lock on content options for Mac users nonetheless. (Cynopsis 8/20)

Former CEO and founder of CBS Sportsline.com Mike Levy has launched a new online Sports destination Open Sports. (Cynopsis 8/20)

Intel and Yahoo have announced plans for a new “Widget Channel”, a widget platform for consumer electronic devices running on Intel’s hardware. The platform will support a number of current technologies, including JavaScript, HTML, XML, and mostly notably Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash, which many current platforms on CE devices don’t support. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/20/intel-and-yahoo-want-to-bring-widgets-and-the-internet-to-your-tv 8/20)

iaTV (formerly ImaginAsian TV) entered into a licensing and sales deal with Los Angeles-based manga publisher TokyoPop to sell a range of digital media assets including anime series Initial D and Psychic Academy. iaTV’s ad sales team will represent sales activities for TokyoPop’s digital assets as part of the agreement including tokyopop.com, brand integration within original and user-generated video content, mobile advertising and other applications. (Cynopsis 8/20)

Encouraged by recent improved revenue results from professionally-themed social networking sites such as Linkedin, eMarketer is predicting steady growth in social networking business-to-business ad spending during the next few years, projecting last year’s $15 million to grow to $210 million in 2012. (Cynopsis 8/20)

Hulu continued its climb up Nielsen’s VideoCensus chart measuring web video streams and downloads, ranking 8th in July with more than 105 million total streams delivered to an audience of 3.2 million + viewers. Hulu now offers some 250 TV shows and 100 full-length movies. (Cynopsis 8/20)

Top 10 Web Brands Ranked by Total Streams, July 2008
Brand                       Total Streams (000)      Unique Viewers (000)
YouTube                          5,024,249                 77,838
Fox Interactive Media           295,646                 20,142
Nickelodeon Kids & Family      211,802                   7,211
Yahoo!                               183,124                22,546
MSN/Windows Live               146,260                  9,345
Disney Online                      134,356                  8,949
ESPN                                 106,391                  5,387
Hulu                                  105,830                  3,293
CNN Digital Network               94,746                  7,128
Turner Sports & Ent.              90,205                  4,591
Includes progressive downloads and excludes video advertising
Source: Nielsen Online, VideoCensus