MediaFile

AOL, Yahoo, Demand Media set sights on the ladies

Jennifer Saba

Oct 6, 2011 18:14 EDT

It’s early October in New York which means that Advertising Week, which kicked off on Monday, is officially in full churn.   This year, the organizers of the conference that attracts all stripes from publishing outfits to retailers to ad agencies  may as well have slugged the event Ladies Week given the number of companies pitching to women.

Specifically that would be AOL, Yahoo and Demand Media all of which launched in the past couple of days “premium” video channels catering to the women, and, by extension, consumer packaged goods companies looking for a means to place their online advertising dollars.

AOL rolled out more than 15 original Web series some aimed at the ladies with such titles as “Little Women, Big Cars,” ” A Supermodel Stole My Husband,” and “Jocks & Jills.” (An aside: AOL also touted its “You’ve Got” one minute series lumping in President Barack Obama with other “notables” such as Kevin Bacon and Paula Abdul.)

Over at Yahoo, Senior Vice President of the Media Network Mickie Rosen introduced Screens and its new fall line-up on Tuesday that includes original content  mainly aimed at females 25 to 45 in addition to other programs from third party sources from the likes of Hulu, CBS, Turner Sports.

Demand Media launched  a new channel within its eHow network called Shift that targets “professional women seeking an online channel that reflects their holistic life,” according to a Demand press release.

“A lot of content designed for women is on the softer-side. What we are doing is different,” said Erika Nardini, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Demand, adding that Shift is focusing on solution-based articles and videos.

All three companies are going after lucrative online display ad dollars from the consumer packaged good companies that like to reach women. According to eMarketer, the CPG segment — that’s industry short hand for staples like soap and food products like mac-n-cheese — is poised to spend almost $2.5 billion in online advertising in the United States this year, more than doubling to $5 billion by 2015.

Should media owners rethink Hulu sale plan?

BTIG’s Rich Greenfield is an analyst who seems to have never met a contrarian debate on the media business he didn’t like. This morning, he turned his attention towards online video site Hulu, arguing in a research note that its owners should think twice about selling the business (subscription needed). First round bid for Hulu, which is owned by News Corp., Disney, Comcast, and Providence Equity Partners, are due Wednesday and are expected to reach as high as $2 billion.

In his note, Greenfield, known for his embrace of hyperbole, says selling Hulu is “a mistake of epic proportions.” He says Hulu is the perfect weapon for combating cable TV’s excessive ad load, supercharging on-demand TV, and for integrating social media’s impact on how consumers watch TV.

Greenfield asks why Hulu owners would sell now, at a time when Hulu is growing viewers, advertising and subscription revenues. As he sees it, on-demand online video is clearly the future and big media would be better served having a say in how the future of video distribution over the long-term is shaped rather than handing Hulu over to Google, Amazon, Yahoo or some of the companies that are supposed to be interested.

The site’s success has clearly left Hulu’ owners conflicted over how to proceed with the sale and there is even talk about whether a sale will happen at all. For instance, prospective buyers we’ve spoke with are uncertain about the Hulu’s value, particularly after the owners appear to be caving into pressure from pay-TV distributors to restrict the newest TV shows to paying subscribers.

“All you’re getting is a bunch of rights, and if they’re restricting those rights you have to ask what is the value of what they’re selling,” said one source we spoke with on background.

More to come.

A chat with Google’s Seattle video-chat guru

Bill Rigby

Jul 28, 2011 15:40 EDT

If you want to be at the forefront of video social networking, Seattle is the place to be, not Silicon Valley.

A month ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an “awesome” launch coming out of the company’s growing Seattle office, which turned out to be Facebook’s video chat link up with Skype.

About the same time, Google trial-launched its broadside against Facebook, the social Google+ service. One of the most arresting features is Hangouts, a service that lets up to 10 people video-chat simultaneously. And it’s designed by a bunch of engineers just the other side of Lake Washington in Seattle.

Hangouts is the creation of a team run by Chee Chew, engineering director at Google’s 500-person Kirkland office, who has been at the company for four years after 14 years at neighbors Microsoft.

Comparisons are inevitable, but Chew says Hangouts is aiming for a different sort of user than Facebook and Skype. It’s not really video-conferencing, he says – with a set time, leader and agenda – it’s more like hanging randomly with whoever happens to be around.

“For Hangouts — even the name – the idea isn’t necessarily that we have a topic, it’s just I want to be with my friends, or with other people,” said Chew at the Kirkland office earlier this week. “We use video-conferencing as an important element of it, but the whole serendipitous, run across a hang out, jump in, people flowing in and out. To me that’s the essence of Hangouts. The video is just one important element of it but it’s a whole different construct.”

A few people have grabbed onto the idea in the last month, says Chew, citing a marathon hangout event and concerts conducted on the Hangout platform.

Clicker.com tells you what to watch and where to find it

As the number of TV networks and programs has exploded in the last decade, a major concern for cable companies has become how will viewers find their favorite shows among 1,000 channels. The problem has gotten even worse with the availability of more and more TV shows online, where some of the helpful network silos have disappeared altogether.

So where do you go if you want to see last night’s episode of Modern Family, then follow it with episode 6 of Season 3′s Mad Men, before checking out if your favorite Indiana Jones movie is online?

You go to Clicker.com, a year-old Los Angeles-based programming guide for Internet television founded by former Ask.com chief executive Jim Lanzone. True to his roots in search, Lanzone and his team have created a comprehensive database so a user can find every legally available TV show and movie available online.

The company is now upping the ante for users with the roll-out of Clicker Predict, which predicts what you’d want to watch based on your data. And to make it not just intuitive but social, Clicker also announced it is being integrated into Facebook’s platform. This means you not only get program recommendations based on your previous viewing habits but also based on what your friends are watching.

“While companies big and small have been trying to solve this problem for years,” said Lanzone in a statement, “Clicker Predict comes closer than any technology to date in actually surfacing the right shows for a given user.”

Clicker gets paid whenever a user clicks through to watch a a show or download a show from its partner sites which includes most of the major TV and cable networks. Lanzone says over 1 million shows are available to view online.

Hulu to charge? It’s getting closer…

Everybody loves free. But free has a price. And that price might just be $9.95 a month, according to The Los Angeles Times,  which writes that Hulu, the second most popular video site in the U.S, will soon start charging for a premium version of its site called Hulu Plus. We haven’t been able to confirm the details yet (Hulu’s staffers are sticking to the ol’ decline to comment). But rumors of premium version of Hulu have been doing the rounds for the last year. Back in October an NBC executive said the company was experimenting with various business models, including subscription content.

Let’s also not forget Hulu is soon to be a third owned by Comcast (through its ongoing acquisition of NBC) — which is not known for giving video programming away for free. Its other parents, News Corp and Disney, also aren’t known for their charity in the video programming business.

And it’s not just Hulu, YouTube has also started to experiment with pricing models and has indicated it would be open to subscription models if its content partners asked for it.

Still, how will consumers feel about paying to watch their favorite shows online? And is there any chance a premium Hulu, when it becomes partly owned by a cable company, will undermine the TV Everywhere project? TV Everywhere offers ‘free’ online TV if you’re already a paying cable subscriber.

And, hey, $9.95 is a lot less than the average $60 most cable companies charge for a standard cable video package.

YouTube has 24 hours of video uploaded every minute

YouTube, the world’s most popular video site, has just revealed that a whole day’s worth of online video is uploaded to its servers every single minute. That’s a mind-boggling statistic when you bear in mind this site is just five years old.

Last May YouTube, which is owned by search giant Google, revealed up to 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute. Clearly more and more people are using online video and this graphic from the YouTube blog shows the trajectory.

YouTube: “We’re still kings of the world!”

YouTube, the video site, is celebrating the third anniversary since it was bought by Google with news that it now serves more than a billion views a day to users around the world.

In a blog by YouTube CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley, he reminisces about how he and co-founder/former CTO Steve Chen made a fun video declaring themselves the “burger kings of media”. How sweet.

But on the serious side of the media equation Hurley has some important points about the fast changing world of online video (You could also call it the ‘why we won’ manifesto).

Hurley says:

• Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly
• Clip culture is here to stay: Short clips are voraciously consumed and perfect for watching a wide variety of content
• Open platforms open up possibility: Content creation isn’t our business; it’s yours. We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection can share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases they can make a living from doing so

Questions remain about the business model of YouTube, which is being built around the fledgling online video advertising sector. The company is yet to declare a profit. Yet with 40 percent of all online video viewing in the US, according to comScore, YouTube will have a lot of say in writing and re-writing the rules for Web video ads.

Comcast’s Fancast tries TV ads to catch Hulu’s coat tails

When most Americans think of where to catch up with episodes of their favorite TV shows on the Web, they more than likely think of Hulu, the online video site owned by NBC, News Corp and Disney that offers free viewing of TV broadcast shows and archive movies. Second to Hulu would probably be YouTube.But not Fancast. Despite being owned by the largest U.S. cable TV operator Comcast, it doesn’t even make the top 10 video sites in the U.S., according to comScore data. (Hulu is No. 5). One of the ways Hulu became better known was by launching a national TV advertising campaign which kicked off during this year’s Super Bowl TV extravaganza. Hulu’s user numbers jumped after those ads — and Fancast hopes for a similar boost.Fancast has dubbed its debut TV campaign “See It For Yourself” and will feature a series of five spots with recaps of shows including CSI Miami, Glee, NCIS, How I Met Your Mother and Gilligan’s Island. Three TV spots will debut on CBS and also on targeted national cable networks. See the Fancast/CSI ad here: The campaign also features an online push and an outdoor drive with interactive bus shelters around the San Francisco area.In truth, beating Hulu might not be Comcast’s biggest prize. It’s more likely to have its eye on its On Demand Online /TV Everywhere initiatives, which aim to make popular cable shows available on demand to paying subscribers. Fancast will be one of Comcast’s key platforms for that new service when it fully rolls out so building awareness of the site now is important.(Photo: CSI Miami’s David Caruso/Reuters)

Cloud-gaming service OnLive opens up

Gabriel Madway

Sep 2, 2009 18:13 EDT

OnLive, the “cloud-based” gaming service that generated plenty of interest when it was announced in May, is opening itself up.

The company is aiming to challenge game console makers Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony with a bold and ambitious service: on-demand, lag-free access to graphically rich games, which can be played on any TV and nearly any PC, even budget netbooks.

Analysts say such a product could fundamentally change the economics of the multibillion dollar video game industry. The only question is how well OnLive works, and some have expressed skepticism. Since its splashy introduction, little has been heard from the company, which was busy testing its service internally and installing servers in its data centers to handle traffic. OnLive delivers games run on servers in the cloud, rather than locally on a PC or a console.

The company is now opening the OnLive beta to testing from outside gamers, said Steve Perlman, the company’s founder and CEO, in a blog post. Perlman is a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur who helped launch WebTV, which Microsoft bought in 1997. You can sign up to test OnLive at http://www.onlive.com/beta_program.html.

“One of the key challenges that OnLive technology addresses is providing a high-quality, fast-response gaming experience over a wide range of situations: different speeds/locations/types of broadband services, a variety of different PC and Mac configurations, several kinds of input and display devices, etc. So, a major focus of OnLive Beta is to test as many of these different situations as we can,” Perlman said in his post.

OnLive has been in development for seven years. It already has deals in place with 10 publishers to provide new game titles, including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and Take Two.  The company has said it expects to launch its service in the winter of 2009.

Is Google’s message on YouTube starting to get through?

YouTube executives and spinmeisters have been pushing back more aggressively at the perception that the video site is a great big drain on Google’s bottomline, probably  losing $200 million to $500 million a year by some estimates. These execs say that hundreds of major advertisers are taking spots on YouTube against “hundreds of millions” of video views every week.

The problem with this is the lack of precise details. How much revenue is YouTube generating from these monetized videos exactly (even approximately)? And how much does it cost to stream and store those hundreds of millions of videos every week? Google and YouTube decline to provide any numbers other than to say things are moving in the right direction. Wall Street and investors are yet to be convinced.

Goldman Sachs analyst James Mitchell is the latest to have a shot at a respectable estimate for YouTube. He says it will generate around $300 million in 2009. He also thinks the best is yet to come from YouTube — and that Google will see some benefit.

We believe YouTube revenue will grow at 40 percent year-over-year or faster in 2010 as YouTube is generally under-monetizing its home page traffic versus peers, and as its home page is a natural venue for studios to advertise new movies.

For Google investors, the most important part of Mitchell’s analysis is that he thinks display advertising, of which YouTube is a major part alongside DoubleClick, could add 1-2 percent to Google’s revenue growth.

In the meantime, the majority of the videos uploaded to YouTube are done so by its users — and as the world’s most popular Web video site YouTube has a lot of users. Over a 100 million in the U.S. alone according to comScore. Goldman Sachs’ Mitchell says:

We do not expect serving query-specific video advertisements to represent a substantial business for the foreseeable future given branded advertiser discomfort with unknown content, and given consumer unwillingness to tolerate 30-second advertisements against 60 seconds or less of content; however, Google does not need such advertising to make YouTube profitable given YouTube’s cost leverage against Google’s existing assets and homepage traffic.