Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

ABC.com’s “Lost” and NBC.com’s “Saturday Night Live” top the list of the most-viewed shows from U.S. network online video players, according to Nielsen. “SNL’s” online popularity suggests that “there is a Web audience that might otherwise not watch these programs at all.” (Iwantmedia 2/16, http://www.worldscreen.com/articles/display/19768 2/13)

The much-anticipated online piracy trial aimed at shutting down P2P streaming site The Pirate Bay once and for all begins today in Stockholm, Sweden. Plaintiffs including Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., MGM Pictures Inc., Colombia Pictures Industries Inc., 20th Century Fox Films Co. and Sony BMG are seeking $14.3 million in compensation for lost revenues. Long a target of studios due to its popularity, cheekiness and utter disregard for copyright protections, The Pirate Bay found itself a target beginning in May of 2006 after Swedish police raided one of the group’s data centers containing servers that facilitate its file sharing activities. With more than 25 million peers at a given time, The Pirate Bay is by far the largest BitTorrent tracker and shutting down the site’s numerous servers could severely disrupt P2P file sharing across the globe, predicts TorrentFreak. (Cynopsis 2/16)

CBS Interactive utilized YouTube effectively last week by actually making a crucial clip of content available before it appeared on air. CBS uploaded Joaquin Phoenix obtuse interview with David Letterman, in which he discussed his new career change to hip-hop, in a play to increase on air viewership and get a head start on viral buzz. The ratings didn’t substantially spike that night but the clip racked up more than 2.5 million views within 36 hours of the telecast, according to internal CBS measurement. (Cynopsis 2/16)

Open APIs may not be a foregone conclusion after all among studios. Indicating a possible digital media policy sea change at Viacom, MTV notified developers through a blog post that, beginning in March, MTVN’s embeddable video player will no longer be available to third-party sites. Until now developers have been able to embed full-length, ad-supported videos from MTV, VH1, CMT and Logo directly on their sites. Going forward, third party sites will only have access to thumbnails and lists of videos that link back to MTVN sites. Needless to say developers, who spent time testing the API and helping to greatly increase the distribution of MTVN content on the web, are not happy. (Cynopsis 2/16)

Disney unveiled the Flash-driven DisneyXD.com, a companion site to its newly rebranded cable network Disney XD now focused on boys (formerly knows as Toon Disney.) The site combines elements of video sharing, virtual worlds and social networking, enabling kids to create profiles and avatars, accumulate points, play casual games and watch videos of original Disney content. (Cynopsis 2/16)

As layoffs continued to pound the economy in January, one beneficiary was job networking site LinkedIn. According to the latest January data from comScore, the LinkedIn’s U.S. unique visitors shot up 22 percent to 7.7 million, up from 6.3 million in December. Total minutes spent on the site doubled in January to 96.8 million, from 47.6 million in December. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/14/as-the-economy-sours-linkedins-popularity-grows 2/14)

Adult entertainment industry professionals are bemoaning New York Gov. Paterson’s plan to apply the so-called “iPod tax” on online music downloads to adult content on the Web. The Paterson administration wants to expand the state’s 4% sales tax to all digital purchases. (Iwantmedia 2/16, http://www.nypost.com/seven/02162009/news/regionalnews/taxxx_sparks_a_furor_155419.htm 2/16)

MySpace has introduced a new image search feature to its integrated search engine, allowing users to quickly search through photos shared by their friends and the MySpace community. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/13/myspace-quietly-launches-site-wide-image-search 2/13)

Fast growing microblogging service Twitter raised $35 million in series C financing from Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners. The company’s plans include enabling a robust echosystem to grow around the service and building revenue-generating products. (Cynopsis 2/16)

Web-site staffers at Vanity Fair magazine are “learning to Twitter,” they say. While the Conde Nast magazine made plans to live blog the Vanity Fair Oscar Party next Sunday, staffers discovered that the interface of VF’s blogging platform “doesn’t really work on an iPhone.” (Iwantmedia 2/16, http://www.vanityfair.com/online/culture/2009/02/13/vanity-fair-invades-the-twitter-zone.html 2/13)

Max Goldenson, daughter of ABC network founder and TV pioneer Leonard Goldenson, has launched a new multiplatform digital production outfit dubbed MWG Entertainment. MWG’s first project – “My Two Fans,” a 16-episode web musical about a late twentysomething’s attempt to rebound from a broken heart, is set to premiere on March 9 on YouTube, Blip.tv, Veoh, iTunes and Sling.com. (Cynopsis 2/16)

HarperCollins has turned to the Bebo community to find Britain’s latest slang words. The words were originally short-listed by a panel of 14-18 year-olds and have been divided into six categories; money orientated, ‘cool’, friends, girls/boys, street language and put-downs (always a source for inspiration). Bebo’s 10.5 million unique users in the UK are currently casting their votes and views on which of the slang words they think should be included. The list of teen slang words selected for the 30th edition of the Collins English dictionary will be made public by Bebo this summer. (Cynopsis 2/16)

Online video usage in the U.S. remained relatively flat in terms of uniques and total streams in Dec. compared to the previous month, according to Nielsen Online. The engagement metric of time spent per viewer actually declined by 4%. (Cynopsis 2/16)

Overall Online Video Usage (U.S.)
Nov-08      Dec-08      Percent Change
Unique Viewers (000)           124,262       124,611             0%
Total Streams (000)          9,548,267    9,593,320             0%
Streams per Viewer                76.8            77                 0%
Time per Viewer (min)           177.9          170.7              -4%
Source: Nielsen Online VideoCensus, Includes progressive downloads, excludes video advertising

Top Online Brands ranked by Video Streams for December 2008 (U.S.)
Brand                                          Total Streams (000)   Unique Viewers (000)
YouTube                                            5,561,410                     84,603
Yahoo!                                                 223,604                     22,231
Fox Interactive Media                             223,130                    16,245
Hulu                                                    216,344                       6,679
Nickelodeon Kids and Family Network        203,164                       7,213
Google                                                 189,964                      25,484
ESPN                                                   171,930                        8,228
MSN/Windows Live                                153,056                      12,384
ABC.com                                              117,652                        3,578
Turner Sports and Ent. Digital Network      99,909                      4,423
Source: Nielsen Online VideoCensus, Includes progressive downloads, excludes video advertising