For those of you who missed it, here’s Apple’s ad for the iPhone that appeared several times during the Oscar telecast last night. The fact that Apple is running ads for a device that won’t hit the shelves until June is interesting, even if the ad itself could be a lot more intriguing.
The ad consists of a series of video clips of iconic TV and movie stars answering a phone and saying “hello,” in rapid succession. At the end of this montage, a picture of the iPhone appears (with those ubiquitous clownfish on the screen) and then the words “Coming in June,” followed by Apple’s logo.
Not as inspired as some of Apple’s ads — and if I didn’t already know what an iPhone is, I might be very confused about what the ad is hawking. But, I never underestimate Apple’s marketing genius and perhaps Apple has something else up its sleeve.
(Big hat tip to Richard Greenfield of Pali Research.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:04 PM | Print | Comments (0)The New York Times’ Noam Cohen has this fun article about how even Congress gets confused about video sharing and copyright infringement. It seems that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) put on her new blog (!) The Gavel 16 clips of House floor debate taken from C-SPAN.
The House Republican Study Committee jumped on what they claimed was Pelosi’s violation of C-SPAN’s copyrights, going so far as to issue a press release condemning the Speaker’s “piracy.” It turns out that the Republicans were wrong: the clips Pelosi purloined were “government works,” shot by government-owned cameras, and therefore in the public domain.
Unfortunately for Pelosi, she also posted a different clip that was recorded by C-SPAN’s cameras and therefore the property of C-SPAN. The non-profit cable network asked Pelosi’s office to take down that clip.
Admittedly, C-SPAN is a special case. About 5% to 15% of its programming falls in the public domain, but it’s awfully hard to distinguish the difference between public domain and copyrighted content.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:36 PM | Print | Comments (0)As I discussed in an article over at IP Media Monitor, the incumbent telcos have an uphill battle in finding a way to offer multichannel video services that can compete with their biggest rivals — the incumbent cable operators. Verizon is pursuing a turbo-charged fiber-to-the-home strategy, which takes a long time (and a lot of money). AT&T, on the other hand, is trying to cut corners by building out a fiber-to-the-node architecture for its U-verse video services, a plan that is causing nothing but headaches for the carrier.
In the meantime, however, the phone companies are still managing to rack up multichannel video subscriber gains, as the table below shows. From Q4 05 to Q4 06, the telco video customer count jumped from 1.517 million to 2.671 million, an increase of 76%.
Most of this growth flowed from the old-time DBS partnerships that the three big phone companies (BellSouth is now a part of AT&T, of course, but I’ve kept it separate in the table) struck up about four years ago. Verizon, however, is juicing the telco video market up a bit with its FiOS TV service. Of the group, Verizon posted the biggest gains in video customer counts during Q4 06 — 133,000 net new video subs. during the quarter — with a good chunk of those, 89,000, flowing from the telco’s FiOS initiative.
Google may be struggling to land YouTube video distribution deals with entertainment giants such as Viacom and CBS, but the online ad innovator is still gaining traction in the online video business. But, unlike the action it’s trying to start with YouTube, Google’s latest video victories are much closer to the company’s core competency of relevant, targeted advertising.
As today’s New York Times reports, Google has deals with Dow Jones & Company, Conde Nast, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and new upscale broadband network LX.TV to distribute those companies’ video clips across thousands, if not possibly tens of thousands of, web sites.
The videos appear in Google’s standard ad boxes that have, to date, been almost solely used for video advertising alone. But instead of allowing users to watch only video ads, the boxes are filled with relevant programming content that is preceded or followed by the contextual video ads. For example, Young Money, a web site aimed at, well, young people with money, has this ad box from Google featuring a video on cross-country skiing from LX.TV, a broadband video network aimed at…young people with money. The mini tutorial on the winter sport is followed by a video commercial for Research in Motion’s Blackberry.
With a third party now a participant in the advertising transaction, the revenue generated from these clips is split three ways — Google, the video provider and the site owner each get a slice of the ad revenue. Because most, if not all, of the video content providers will be savvy in the ad businesses themselves, Google apparently is willing to cede control over the ad sales, at least some of the time. MTV Networks (a Viacom-owned company) apparently got to sell the ads that accompanied its video content in a test of the new distribution service that Google ran last fall.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:21 AM | Print | Comments (1)
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