As Sean Garrett points out, Viacom may have yanked 100,000 videos from YouTube, but a lot of popular Viacom-owned video content — including the Daily Show — is up in full force on MetaCafe, DailyMotion, Grouper, etc., etc.
Either Viacom’s attorneys haven’t yet fired up the take-down notices for these sites or the company is merely trying to extract negotiating leverage from YouTube only, leaving all of its best videos up just about everywhere else. Lots of Spongebob Squarepants videos up at these sites, along with the best parts of Punk’d, Crank Yankers and on and on and on…
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:04 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Over at IP Media Monitor (disclosure: my pub), Paige Albiniak has this great piece on the “American Idol” empire and how the web properties for the hot show are doing just as much a bang-up business as the TV franchise is. (Traffic quadrupled on the americanidol.com web site after the show’s premiere and all the would-be idols maintain their own promotional MySpace — naturally — pages, etc., etc.)
What’s really interesting is that the show’s producers plan to sell video performances (presumably via download) of the contestants on the americanidol.com site shortly after they air on the show. One big hurdle that the show has to overcome: gaining the clearances from the songwriters or music rights holders.
Last year, King [Jeff King, Fox Interactive Media President] and his staff tested the idea in the show’s last eight days. It was wildly successful, selling some 170,000 downloads in just over a week. But doing that requires legally clearing each of the songs for sale with the publishers and artists, which can be a tricky feat. And if each performer remaining on the show doesn’t have a song cleared, King feels it isn’t right to offer any songs.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:17 PM | Print | Comments (0)
“We take the integrity of the show very seriously,” he says. “In our photo gallery section or contestant section, we make sure we treat every contestant fairly. If we have a picture of one contestant, we have to have pictures of everyone who remains in the contest.”
“American Idol’s” fans are so loyal that they complain if they feel their favorite isn’t getting treated equally. “This fan base is really rabid and active,” he says.
The Wall Street Journal today has this extensive page one piece on a major dispute between broadcast station group owner Sinclair Broadcasting and small cable company Mediacom. For those who haven’t followed this relatively arcane but high-stakes fight, here’s the background.
Under a 1992 law, local broadcast stations have the freedom to elect one of two options when it comes to cable system carriage of their signals: must-carry or retransmission consent. Under must-carry, cable operators have no choice but to carry the station on their channel line-ups. Under retrans consent, the broadcaster can negotiate with local operators and receive some form of compensation for their signals; if the negotiations aren’t successful, the operator can’t carry the TV station.
Sinclair and Mediacom failed to reach a retrans deal and in early January Sinclair pulled 22 of its 57 stations from Mediacom’s systems — an event that was preceded and followed by lots of negative press, appeals to the FCC and Congress and fights at various state legislatures. But, with a Super Bowl game pending, Mediacom caved last Friday and acceded to Sinclair’s unspecified payment demands. (Whatever Sinclair was asking for, Mediacom claims that the cost of the deal could boost subscriber’s bills by $2/month.)
As bad as this fight has been, a bigger battle looms between Sinclair and Comcast, the nation’s top cable company. Comcast, however, doesn’t plan to budge an inch and with no big broadcast-only sporting event coming up until the World Series, the operator thinks it can afford to force Sinclair to blink. Sinclair will lose audiences and therefore advertisers each and every day its stations are blacked out. “We don’t pay for free TV,” Comcast’s top lobbyist David Cohen says in the WSJ piece.
But, and here’s where cable is screwed: most people will think of Comcast as the “dropper” and Sinclair as “the droppee,” despite the fact that it is Sinclair that would instigate the signal black-out. Comcast, like Mediacom and Cablevision and Time Warner before it, will have to cope with endless customer complaints, bad press engineered by Sinclair and threats emanating from public officials. And, on top of these hassles, some customers will likely switch to DBS providers, or worse, Verizon’s FiOS TV service, if Comcast keeps the Sinclair stations off the line-ups for long.
It’s not fair to Comcast. It’s extortion, actually. Sinclair is actually benefitting from Comcast’s carriage (and could have legally demanded it be carried — at no charge) while Comcast is using channel capacity for Sinclair that it might otherwise use for more profitable efforts. In fact, the cable industry fought long and hard to strike down must-carry laws as unconstitutional, generating two Supreme Court decisions on the matter (the first, Turner I, struck down must-carry as a violation of the First Amendment, and the second, Turner II, was a divided decision that basically upheld must-carry rules). But, fair or not, Comcast stands to lose a lot and gain, um, practically nothing, in any stand-off with Sinclair.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:54 AM | Print | Comments (1)
Two articles today underscore the little-understood money-making potential of blogging. The first, from the Christian Science Monitor, says that most bloggers make nothing from their efforts, a sizeable minority makes $1,000 per year, while a few rare bloggers make “serious money.” (It’s very depressing to me that one of the biggest and earliest bloggers out there, Jeff Jarvis, makes only $1,000 per month for his efforts.)
On the other hand, John Battelle’s Federated Media is stepping into the breach to pump up bloggers’ ad revenues, as this Business Week article attests. FM has signed on some big new advertisers, including Cisco, Nissan and Nike and generated $10 million for its 90 member web sites last year.
Equally depressing to me is the statement that blogs have a tendency to drop out of the FM network when their revenues hit $500,000 per year — at that point, bloggers think it’s better to hire an ad sales person than rely on FM to rope in the sponsors. Based on these articles alone, it looks like blogging will pay only chump change, but, alternatively, if you’re very good, you’ll hit the half mil. dollar mark and grow out of the FM network.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:52 AM | Print | Comments (1)Richard Greenfield of Pali Capital sent out this morning a research note to clients predicting a decline in total U.S. industry music sales of 3% for 2007, compared to his earlier prediction that music sales would remain basically flat this year. Driving Greenfield’s pessimistic view are new data from Nielsen Soundscan that indicate a steeper-than-expected fall-off in physical album sales in Q1 07. While the sales of music via CDs and other physical media dropped by 3.4% in Q1 06, they are poised to drop by a dramatic 20.1% during Q1 07. Although Pali doesn’t think sales will drop by that much for the full year, the firm is predicting that physical music sales will decline by 10% this year.
Although in years past the rise of mobile and Internet music sales has basically compensated for the decline in CD sales, it’s unlikely that digital music sales will increase fast enough this year to wipe out the huge drop in physical music sales, Greenfield says. “Digital growth year-to-date is only 63% compared to 131% growth year-over-year at the same point in 2006,” he writes. Overall, music sales are on track to drop 7.5% this year, based on Q1 07 estimates.
One big factor slowing down the growth in digital music sales is, of course, piracy, and Greenfield blames the record companies for dithering around with their DRM policies, making it difficult for consumers to buy music.
Digital piracy remains a big problem and no matter what company executives say about piracy containment/leveling out, digital piracy is a growing problem, particularly in the face of DRM and the lack of service/device interoperability. While the music industry continues to talk about removing DRM (selling unprotected MP3s) to end interoperability problems, we believe the industry is likely to move slowly. The most concerning issue is the growth of bandwidth as piracy has shifted from stealing an individual song on Napster to stealing albums on Kaaza to now using Bittorent to steal entire Discographies.
The New York Times’ Bob Tedeschi has this piece today about the infiltration of video clips into online merchants’ web sites. Some merchants, such as 1-800-Flowers.com, leverage the infrastructure of YouTube to show such things as “reconnections” of lost loved ones, accompanied, of course, by flowers.
JimMcCann, CEO OF 1-800-Flowers isn’t sure that the videos are paying off in increased sales — “We’re just going on a leap here,” he says. But, another online merchant, blender-maker Blendtec, which runs an oddly intriguing, special video series called “Will It Blend?” (check out the most recent video which puts footballs from the Chicago Bears and Indianapois Colts in two separate blenders to see which one blends first) attributes much of its growth to online video.
Not mentioned in the article is online video product review company Expo.TV, devoted to nothing but posting product reviews (and sponsor videos) of all kinds of merchandise, from metal detectors to lip balm. Expo.TV just raised $6 million in a series A round led by Masthead Venture Partners and Prism VentureWorks, and landed a deal with Yahoo!
It was hard enough for merchants to get the hang of online sales when web-based store fronts were little more than text and still images. Now, do online sellers have to think about video too? Yup, judging from the unbelievably rapid adoption of video across web storefronts, it looks like video will become a mandatory part of ecommerce.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:06 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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