Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Nearly two years ago, Steve Jobs published an open letter to the music industry calling for the death of DRM (digital rights management). He convinced EMI to ditch DRM back in April, 2007, but the three other major music labels held out. Until today. Now all the songs on iTunes are DRM-free, or soon will be. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/06/the-price-of-going-drm-free-apples-hidden-18-billion-music-tax 1/6)

Barack Obama’s U.S. presidential campaign spent more than $16 million on online advertising in 2008. Google was far and away the winner, taking in some $7.5 million. Turner Broadcasting/CNN.com netted $461,000 of Obama’s online ad spend; Washington Post took home $125,000. (Iwantmedia 1/6, http://www.clickz.com/3632263 1/6)

Showtime will make the pilot of its new original series United States of Tara available from Jan. 8 on Netflix’s Watch Instantly service, two weeks prior to its premiere on the network. United States of Tara was created by Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody and stars Toni Collette as a suburban wife and mother struggling with Dissociative Identity Disorder (a.k.a. multiple personality disorder, as dramatized in Sybil.) The season premiers of The L Word and Secret Diary of a Call Girl will also be available to Netflix subscribers the Jan. 18, day and date of their network premiers. (Cynopsis 1/6)

Sci Fi Channel’s SciFi.com has spun off its daily entertainment news service into a standalone site SciFiWire.com. The news blog will continue to focus on pop cultural news related to the Sci Fi and fantasy genres, covering movies, books, television shows, comics, etc. The satellite site is third new launch by SciFi.com during the past year, following the debuts of gadget blog Dvice.com and gaming site Fidgit.com. (Cynopsis 1/6)

Video recommendation engine ffwd has just released its completed API to developers, allowing them to incorporate some of the service’s core functionality into their sites. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/06/ffwds-web-channel-surfing-api-goes-live-is-coming-to-boxee 1/6)

Time spent watching video online jumped an astounding 40% during 2008 according to the November 2008 ComScore Video Metrix numbers. Users viewed an average of 273.1 minutes/month in Nov. ‘08 compared to 195 minutes/month in Nov. ‘07. Number of videos viewed jumped by 34% to 12.7 billion during the same period. Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with nearly 5.1 billion videos viewed with YouTube.com accounting for more than 98% of the total. Google also dominated in terms of unique viewers with nearly 98 million users. Google (and YouTube) visitors accounted for more than half of all video views online during Nov. (Cynopsis 1/6)

Top U.S. Online Video Properties by Videos Viewed – November 2008
Property                    Videos (000)    Share (%) of Videos
Total Internet            12,677,063       100.0
Google Sites               5,107,302         40.3
Fox Interactive Media     439,091           3.5
Viacom Digital               324,903           2.6
Yahoo! Sites                  304,331           2.4
Microsoft Sites               296,285           2.3
Hulu                             226,540           1.8
Turner Network             214,709           1.7
Disney Online                137,165           1.1
AOL LLC                        115,306           0.9
ESPN                              95,622           0.8
Source: comScore Video Metrix. Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks.  Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video.

Top U.S. Online Video Properties by Unique Viewers – November 2008
Property                        Videos (000)    Share (%) of Videos
Total Internet                     146,064                86.8
Google Sites                         97,928                52.2
Fox Interactive Media            58,115                  7.6
Yahoo! Sites                         39,956                  7.6
Microsoft Sites                      34,979                  8.5
Viacom Digital                       27,109                12.0
Hulu                                     22,456                10.1
AOL LLC                                22,442                 5.1
Turner Network                     20,735                10.4
Disney Online                        13,028                10.5
Time Warner – Excl. AOL         12,564                 3.6
Source: comScore Video Metrix. Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks.  Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video.