everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: television

  • If Doritos are your thing. . .

    If beaming messages of Hope and Beauty are not your thing – through December 4th you can try your hand at creating the next advertisement for Doritos. Win prizes (cash and a trip to Miami for the Superbowl, having your video shown on TV during one of the coveted million dollar ad spots).

    More info on the Crash the Superbowl site which gives you access to high quality graphics, music, and video clips that you can mix into your home movies using Jumpcut, the online video editing tool recently acquired by Yahoo.

    Maybe we should beam this stuff into space as well.

  • Yet another way to monetize your audience

    The NY Times writes about how TiVo is getting into the audience research business. It’s inevitable really and the fact that they have a VP of Audience Research doesn’t suprise me. The usage behavior that they can dig through can reveal all sorts of trends that would be of interest to any market researcher.

    For example, one study for a consumer packaged goods company, which Mr. Juenger declined to identify, found that commercials featuring animal characters, when shown on animal-related programs, were skipped less often than usual.

    They already make available a running tally of the most recorded shows and have the technology to look at the most replayed ads of the Super Bowl. As more and more TiVo devices connect to internet broadband connections to take advantage of the free extra services, the ability of TiVo to pull in usage data from multiple sources of media will present a challenge to more traditional, TV-centric services.

  • Amanda Signs off from Rocketboom

    amanda.JPG

    June 16th

    Andrew Barron, owner of 51% of mega-popular video blog show, Rocketboom posts on his blog about the CBS and Dan Rather parting ways,

    I always liked Dan Rather and feel as though he made one mistake that pales in comparison to all the worth he brought the world over the years. I’d like to see him drop CBS and his PR agents to create an online video news site.

    July 5th

    Saying that, “Andrew no longer wants to be my partner,” Amanda Congdon, the host and face of Rocketboom, says that she will no longer be on the show

    Coincidence?

  • Reuters Video Affiliate Network

    reutersvideo.JPG

    Reuters is using Brightcove to distribute its video content via an affiliate network of bloggers and small publishers. The network is in the pilot phase now but you can apply here and, if accepted, copy & paste some code into your site to make Reuters Video available on your site via a player like the one pictured above. If you’re a publisher, this is a quick and easy way to add a constantly fresh list of the most important videos of the day from Reuters. If you’re Reuters, it’s a great distribution network that inserts your brand into blogger/reader conversations everywhere.

  • Tivo serving up advertisments to 30-second skippers

    tivo-commercials.jpgDavis Freeburg has a long post about Tivo’s new Product Watch service which allows people to subscribe to advertisments. I’ve signed up for the service and will post more about it once I’ve had a chance to try it out.

    Davis writes:

    Advertising, ironically enough for an ad zapper, is probably more important to TiVo than just about anything for them right now. While TiVo makes far more money from a standalone subscriber, the explosion of TiVo users in the years ahead are more likely to come from the major cable deals that they are striking with folks like Comcast (and many more surely to come shortly). In these deals TiVo makes much less money per subscriber but is entitled to valuable advertising revenue from a far greater audience.

    We’re seeing an honesty in the dialog between advertisers and their audience that I hope will unleash a new wave of innovation in marketing. Tivo teaches us that people resist interruptive advertising. This tends to be the case with most advertising (that’s why we have pop-up blockers on the web) unless it is highly relevant or entertaining.

    If you want to reach a specific audience for your products, why not just ask them to identify themselves? If I understand it correctly, Tivo’s Product Watch is giving advertisers room to stretch out their creative and offering 2 – 6 minute segments. In return, users are directing their interest and are explicit about what products they are interested in. Tivo’s already got the “thumbs up/thumbs down” rating buttons on their remote and this feedback can be used by the system to serve up suggested advertising just as they do with their existing programming suggestion engine.

    Just as we all went to the web to view clips of the best Super Bowl commercials along with commentary and discussion, Tivo’s Product Watch has the potential to be the place to go to view the most informative or creative advertising on television. Instead of being something you skip, this showcase may actually be a reason to sign up to Tivo.

  • Why you will no longer skip the ads on “Lost”

    If you’ve been following the ABC television show Lost, you may know that they’ve been building up to a season finale that would integrate the internet and game play into the viewing experience. Tonight the game launched itself with a non-descript advertisement from "The Hanso Foundation"

    Any regular viewer of Lost knows that this is the Hanso Foundation plays a key role in the show and the phone number at the end of the commercial (1-877-hansorg) is the first clue. What follows is a trail  via a voice mail tree that brings you eventually a website that’s been set up for the game.

    I’m a bit lazy and shortcutted my way to the site via The Lost Experience which is doing a great job documenting the twists and turns of this very immersive "alternate reality game." I’m really interested to see how this all turns out but one thing is certain, by running an ad with clues to kick this off, ABC has skewered my reflex to zip through the commercials on my Tivo.

    Brilliant. 

  • If you have a small screen, you need to be able to point it anywhere

    Russell Beattie has his Tivo streaming to his cellphone and says, “who needs Location Free TV or a Slingbox if you have a TiVo sitting there already? And all those $5 a month video plans? Forget it. This is awesome stuff.”

    Mass media is being sliced into ever smaller chunks. First it was the 200+ channels that allowed you to find something interesting. Tivo and the DVRs let you capture just what you wanted from the stream. Then video-on-demand let you dip into a large back-catalog of programming served up by your cable or satellite company. With video search and video archive sites you can now find pretty much anything online including regular network programming on places like iTunes if they’re going with the flow or Bit Torrent if they’re not. In this environment, the fixed video programming served up by the mobile operators feels constrictive.

    Pull in your favorite shows and have Tivo suggest what else might be interesting. Use the fat pipe of your cable to catch everything and the intelligence of your Tivo box to filter out to just the stuff you want. Use the cellphone to sample the cream of the crop while you’ve got some downtime.

    Orb DVREverywhere, check it out.

  • A $46.6 million Bet on Sling Media

    UPDATE: One of the main investors is EchoStar, which also operates the Dish Network satellite TV service. The plan is to differentiate the Dish service with the Slingbox “take your video anywhere” service and, “to expand into mobile platforms like cell phones and handheld devices. Sling Media also recently announced plans to introduce Macintosh-compatible versions and offer the service beyond the U.S. market.”

    Silicon Beat reports that Sling Media, the folks behind the Slingbox set top box that allows you to stream your television or DVR over the internet to your PC have raised a gigantic $46.6 million round of financing. This is on top of the $15 million they raised two years ago so obviously someone is thinking this whole rush-home-to-watch-your-favorite-television-show thing is coming to an end and the boys at Sling Media are going to strike it rich.

    We’ll find out more tomorrow but I think it’s clear that the future of disintermediated television is going to include viewing on any internet-enabled device which includes wifi-enabled PSPs, video iPods, and phones. The future is going to be one of television where and when you want it.

    I remember skipping work on Monday morning in Tokyo to catch the live broadcast of the Super Bowl at the US embassy residential apartment because that was one of the few places to get the live feed (strange to drink at 6am on Monday morning but that’s for another post). Now, with Slingboxes, anyone with a friend in the US can get their own private feed.

    My wife and I pay Comcast $25/month to get Japan TV which carries NHK (the BBC of Japan) live. Every so often a broadcast is interrupted with an image of Mt. Fuji set to generic background music and a message on screen saying the segment is not covered by NHK’s overseas copyright distribution agreement. In this new world of Slingboxes, as long as you’re accessing your own TV signal, then there is no restriction on transmissions across borders right? It’s as if you have a long pipe through which you’re watching your television set.

    I know that the professional sports leagues are very restrictive on which regions can carry which games. I wonder what the NBA or Major League Baseball league is going to have to say about travelling salesmen using their PC to watch the homegame outside of the broadcast region. I’m sure someone’s already run into this, we’ll just have to see how it all plays out.

  • Rocketboom now available on Tivo

    Rocketboom, the daily video newscast is now available for download to your broadband connected Tivo.

    We differ from a regular TV program in many important ways. Instead of costing millions of dollars to produce, Rocketboom is created with a consumer-level video camera, a laptop, two lights and a map with no additional overhead or costs.

    Podcasting News

    It’s also distributed via RSS and does a complete end run around traditional network and cable distribution channels. Subscribe today for your first taste of citizen media in the living room.