It’s early days and getting consumers to buy movies over the Internet is still a hard-sell. That was one basic message that flowed from a group of top Internet entertainment executives speaking today at an audio event hosted by IP Media Monitor/Emerging Media Dynamics. (Disclosure: my publication/my company).
“I think we’re seeing real experimentation and excitement in the ad-supported delivery of television,” over the Internet, Jim Ramo, CEO of studio-backed consortium Movielink, said. “That’s not the case with movies, which are tending to take on a store or purchase approach.”
“It’s sort of ironic. The Internet, which today primarily talks to PCs, is still not yet a mass market product because the PC is the primary display and that’s still constraining long-form video on the web,” Ramo added. “Clearly it’s not a mass market product until you get it to the TV.”
“Right now we are in the very nascent stages in tools and products available to consumers to access Internet content. There aren’t a large number of devices where consumers can enjoy Internet content,” Roman Arzhintar, VP of Strategic Development and General Counsel of Guba.com, said.
The Internet as a movie distribution medium will only take off once content delivered over the web is viewable on a TV set, Josh Freeman, AOL Video Strategy VP, said. “After you get that, I think you’ll get an increase in consumption by consumers.” The studios, which until recently were only reluctantly pursuing web distribution of films, will become more willing Internet merchants once the content is easily transferred to the TV. “The studios will start unlocking more value,” he said, referring to the limited amount of high-value content the studios put on the Internet.
The studios are, not surprisingly, moving slowly in getting web-based movie distribution off the ground, although they are a lot more eager to experiment with the Internet than they ever have been. “It’s not easy to deal with the Hollywood studios,” Ramo said. “They each have their own individual different desires and strategic initiatives and plans as to what they’re going to do. Fundamentally they all want do business and they all want to license their movies and they have people to do that. But those people are relatively few and they’re worldwide and they’re very busy.”
But the motion picture guys can’t escape the Internet and have come around to viewing the web as another marketplace. “It’s gotten easier. The job we had this year was significantly easier than the job Jim [Ramo] had several years ago [when Movielink launched],” Freeman said.
“The studios have a strong interest in controlling the outlets for their content. They are going to be less conservative going forward but not be completely anarchistic about it,” Arzhintar said. Still, the studios aren’t going to get trapped into relying on only a handful of web-based companies to distribute their products either.
“I think the studios are going to be very careful about anointing one category killer the way we’ve seen in music or in cable with HBO or retailers with DVDs,” Ramo said.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:21 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Steinberg has this interesting piece today about the dangers in embedding video advertisements in web videos, specifcially the “pre-roll” video ads that appear before the video selection. These commercials could turn off viewers who expect the Internet to be different from traditional TV — worse, the pre-rolls can’t be fast-forwarded as is the case with TV programs recorded with PVRs.
To pre-roll or not to pre-roll? It is a rising debate on Madison Avenue and in the Internet community. As video Web advertising starts to take off, pre-roll spots are an increasing source of ad dollars for Web sites that accept them. But by running the spots, sites run the risk of losing viewers to pre-roll-free rivals
The solution, of course, is to just put the video ads somewhere else, either in the middle of the streamed video or at the end. Time Warner’s solution is to make the pre-rolls really short, 15 seconds or less, which is less likely to irritate viewers.
What’s most fascinating about this piece is the implicit recognition that a video advertising market has finally evolved on the Internet, with companies debating such things as the effectiveness of “pre-rolls.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:14 PM | Print | Comments (0)Speaking of creepy software, the New York Times’ Eric Lipton has this piece today about international media monitoring software under development by three universities that is funded by a $2.4 million Homeland Security Department grant. Researchers at Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah are working on technology that would let the government monitor negative overseas opinions of the U.S. or its leaders that appear in newspapers and other publications.
The goal is to identify potential threats in advance based on negative assessments of the U.S. or the President that appear in these publications.
The new software would allow much more rapid and comprehensive monitoring of the global news media, as the Homeland Security Department and, perhaps, intelligence agencies look “to identify common patterns from numerous sources of information which might be indicative of potential threats to the nation,” a statement by the department said
The researchers aren’t looking at U.S. publications. If they did, then the threat meter would likely hilt tilt.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:02 PM | Print | Comments (0)
For those of you who missed it, yesterday was the global “Day Against DRM,” organized by the Free Software Foundation. Groups of “concerned consumers and technologists” gathered in Boston, Zurich, Paris and London, among other cities, to protest the use of proprietary digital rights management technology.
Public interest groups don’t stand alone in their opposition to the content access limitations posed by DRM. The British Library last week voiced concerns that DRM could limit the advancement of knowledge. The Library said that 28 of 30 recent licensing agreements it received contained content limitations more restrictive than what copyright law allows.
“Our concern is that, if unchecked, this trend will drastically reduce public access, thus significantly undermining the strength and vitality of our creative and educational sectors,” Chief Executive Lynne Brindley said in a statement.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:52 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Google CEO Eric Schmidt made some kind of statements to the Financial Times about the future power of the Internet to be a BS detector when it comes to politicians’ statements. (The FT article is here but it’s behind a firewall. Reuters write-up of the article is here.)
Schmidt said that within five years there would be a “truth predictor” that people could use online to check the factual accuracy of what politicians say.
Politicians have yet to appreciate the impact of the online world, which will also affect the outcome of elections, Schmidt said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Wednesday.
He predicted that “truth predictor” software would, within five years, “hold politicians to account.” People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.
“One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false.’ We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability,” he told the newspaper.
Well, that’s kind of creepy. Even if Google, or some other Internet company, could develop software that spits out something called “THE TRUTH,” or even a probability on the veracity of a statement, whose “truth” would it be? Take creationism versus evolution. Believers in both of those ideas about how life began think they know “THE TRUTH.”
Would Google side with the faithful or the scientists on that issue in programming its “truth detector?” Presumably Schmidt meant that a software tool could be developed to check recent statements against past statements to determine if politicians are engaging in convenient revisionism regarding their previous positions on issues. But, aren’t leaders allowed to learn and grow and adopt new positions? There must be more to what Schmidt told the Financial Times than what Reuters reported.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:17 AM | Print | Comments (1)
USA Today’s Laura Parker has this piece about the rise in libel lawsuits against bloggers. In the past two years, more than 50 lawsuits have been filed related to postings on blogs and message boards, which, until now, have been relatively immune from the legal attacks.
The lone blogger has traditionally been considered “judgment proof,” with no money worth going after in one of the most difficult kinds of lawsuits that can be brought. But the recent spate of suits center not on money as much as reputation. Indeed some of the cases cited — a man falsely accused of having herpes, for example — involve situations that seem out and out defamatory.
The best defense bloggers have against libel lawsuits is to bone up on the law.
Robert Cox, founder and president of the Media Bloggers Association, which has 1,000 members, says the recent wave of lawsuits means that bloggers should bone up on libel law. “It hasn’t happened yet, but soon, there will be a blogger who is successfully sued and who loses his home,” he says. “That will be the shot heard round the blogosphere.”
The best place to start is the EFF’s Legal Guide for Bloggers.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:29 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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