know | Future

The New York Times reports that carriers are just raring to suck up all that high speed bandwidth you just got on your phone with video ads. Cell phone carriers in the past have been leery of infuriating their customers with advertising, but the confluence of data rates high enough to credibly do video, almost universal gps capabilities on newer handsets and the explosion of video-on-small-screens a la iPod has just proved to be too much for them to resist. The plan is to offer opt-in for the incredibly short three second ads. Leading the charge is newcomer ESPN Mobile which has already inked deals with Visa, Nike and Hilton Hotels. Analysts are breathlessly predicting a $1.2B market by 2009.

It will be interesting to see what agencies come up for a three second spot…

Robert X. Cringely speculated ahead of Google’s CES keynote that they would announce this very capability. As it turns out, they didn’t though they did announce an online video store. However, you owe it to yourself to read his column as I believe he makes a very strong case for this hapening in the near future. And I am not just saying that because I had already said the same thing here back in October

Premium cable channel Starz announced today ahead of CES that it will begin offering a subscription based service called Vongo that will allow users unlimited access to their current movie roster for viewing on devices supporting Microsoft’s media software. For $10 smackers a month you will be able to download movies to three devices as well as be able to stream a live feed off the Starz channel. This on the heels of further announcements from Disney that they are expanding the content they are offering on iTunes to include ESPN and ABC sports. It seems that we will be reaching a tipping point soon pushing download content to the mainstream as surely many more announcements like this will surface this week at CES. If you are not thinking about what this means to your clients, this may be a good time to start.

At the risk of making it seem like all I talk about here is DVRs, I have to bring to your attention a news item from Media News Daily about a new report issued by Ipsos in conjuncton with the Associated Press that pegs DVR penetration at 25%. They also report that 72% of those that have the DVR use it. Impressive numbers if they are representative

Adweek reports that Nielsen will start providing same day ratings for DVR playback starting wih the dataset scheduled out on December 28th to be followed by the addition of seven day playback ratings starting on January 17th.

The catch is that they will only have equipment to track DVR in 60 of it’s 9,000 households. I’ll save you reaching out for your calculator, that represents .6% of Nielsen households though they claim they will be adding households at the rate of 100 a month through July to better represent the current official 7% DVR penetration (many peg that penetration as high as 11%). Though NBC is planning to start using at some point in the future the Live+7 data, it is non-commital about it’s timing. The lines still remain drawn in the sand in the same place they have been. Advertisers feel that they should not continue to pay escalating network costs while viewers are increasingly zapping their ads with DVRs while the networks look at the same data the advertisers are looking at and in a classical glass half-empty/glass half-full fashion and say, it’s not so bad, not everyone fast forwards or skips past ads. I think everybody needs to buck up and realize that they need to either make the ad so compeling, even outside of Superbowl Sunday, that viewers will not be likely to skip it, and/or, diversify their media portfolio and reduce their reliance on Network ads.

You can also read more at Reuters…

Over the past month Sony has shown in the most spectacular way everything that is wrong with the music publishing industry. I suspect that this story did not have in the real world quite the impact that it had in the demi-monde of pop technology that I sometimes inhabit, so in case you have not heard: On October 31st Mark Russinovich broke news on his blog that he had discovered that certain Sony Music CDs he had played on his computer had without due warning, installed what is referred to as a rootkit, a piece of software that is completely hidden from the operating system. Furthermore, if you tried to remove it, your DVD or CD drive would stop working requiring a complete reinstall of Windows. Not only that, the software would also automatically cloak any files starting with a specified string hence becoming a handy method for other bad guys to infect your computer. The software was also found to be sending information back to Sony from the affected machines. And why did Sony do this: to prevent unauthorized duplication of the CD content.

Sony’s initial arrogant reaction was best encapsulated by Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG’s president of global digital business, when he told NPR that “Most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”. (more…)

TiVo has announced that an upoming version of TiVo ToGo will allow users to transfer recorded content to their brand spanking new video enabled iPods as well as to the PlayStation Portable which more practical mobile video viewer. Details are sketchy though apparently you will need to purchase additional software to make the magic happen.

Now, if it works properly, which considering how difficult TiVo ToGo is to use I don’t expect it will, and you look past the fact that out of the total population of TiVo subscribers that use TiVo ToGo is only about 300,000, this may ultimately put the kibosh on dreams of selling tons of downloadable, drm’ed video content via iTunes. (more…)

Well, Walmart for one, along with newspapers, magazines, real estate agents, book publishers and in general anybody who feels Google’s inscrutable gaze on their market. The New York Times is running an article that talks about this subject at some length. Now I don’t feel so bad about having so much Google content on the blog, if WalMart is taking notice, something is going on…

Struggling Tivo has signed a deal with Yahoo that allows, as of today, Yahoo portal users to schedule Tivo recordings straight from Yahoo TV listings. Yahoo content would also be integrated into Tivos in an automagical way yet to be detailed. The only reason this is important is that it throws into sharp relief the failure of the Netflix/Tivo deal to allow users to have their Netflix movies delivered over broadband to their Tivos. One can only surmise that the pressure brough on by the MPAA was just too much. (more…)

Tanqueray has announced that they will be running new 150 second radio ads on Sirius radio which seems to have been transformed by their Howard Stern deal. This would not be that noteworthy except for how it shows that the long standing self restraint of the media when it comes to advertising for hooch which has been slowly cracking since 1996, is about to splinter to bits. The core issue is that we are no longer dealing with broadcast as traditionally understod, the national hearth of the big three at which we all sat and consumed pablum, but the edgy world of subscription entertainment where anything goes, including the right to stuff the pipe with more crap than you can measure, as long as we can find a splinter audience for it. So, the word of the day is opportunity. In the soon to be wild west of new media advertising, we can bring back the Marlboro Man and cigarrette advertising, for that matter, we can start advertising the local gun show, come on down!
Civilization though has a way of righting itself and surviving. On the positive side, there are new opportunities for brands such as Trojans that have been relegated to nether media buys in the high digital ghetto. There are saner comments on this matter at Mediapost