SMPTE has scheduled its 2012 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition for October 23-25 with a pre-conference symposium slated for October 22.
Billed as “the premier annual event for motion imaging and media technology, production and operations,” the conference will take place at the Loews Hollywood Hotel.
“Join us and network with world-renowned technology thought-leaders in the motion picture studios, broadcast and distribution networks, production and post-production community, software companies, systems integrators, manufacturers, display technologies and distribution providers,” explains the SMPTE conference site.
The event will feature technical sessions, a tech-focused exhibit hall, a welcome reception, a keynote luncheon and the prestigious Honors & Awards Ceremony and Dinner.
Presentations and discussions will involve high frame rates for digital cinema, file-based workflows, image processing, high performance networks, migrating to the cloud and much more.
Registration is accessible from the conference page.
USC undergrads answered questions about their media consumption habits during the September 20th ETC MegaSession.
The students indicated that they typically watch movies in theaters or on laptops and mobile devices, while television viewing is most common as a community experience in dorms and houses.
When in a theater, most electronic communication is restricted to before and after the film is screened. They seemed leery of a second screen interaction that detracts from the immersive movie experience.
However, one student noted: “I’ve always wondered if a film would be developed that integrated social media into the movie. I think it would be fantastic, but it would need to be specifically developed for that.”
The students are annoyed by tech choices that prove disappointing (such as 3D and IMAX), yet seek out the best theater technology for films they anticipate to be viewing events. Favorites this year included: “The Dark Knight Rises” (IMAX), “The Avengers” (3D) and “Brave” (3D).
Live sports and social engagement will get them in front of a TV, but they primarily watch content on Hulu and Netflix. The students noted the growing popularity of piracy sites and generally found the video quality to be good enough for their viewing.
“Second screen activity at home was of interest as long as it adds value and doesn’t detract from the programming,” explains the summary. “Two students suggested pop-up facts pushed during the commercial breaks, rather than during the show. The students were defining second screen activity as something ‘pushed at them.’ They did not mention texting, tweeting or other viewing-time commenting as a second screen activity.”
Top consumer electronic makers in Japan including Sony, Panasonic and Sharp are seeing their stock plummet and their staff cut after missing some key opportunities to innovate and stay relevant. Now, Apple and Samsung are fighting over market share as these top-name companies are fighting for survival.
“Japanese companies were busy defending old business models that the world simply bypassed,” says Michael Gartenberg, industry analyst for Gartner. Although these companies still offer high quality products, consumers are moving towards paying less for good-enough quality.
“In the past there was a huge gap between the best of breed and second best,” Gartenberg says. “Now, maybe there’s still a small gap between a Sony high-definition screen and an LG screen, but most consumers can’t see it. And if most consumers can’t see it, it’s not there.”
These companies also completely missed the smartphone revolution. And even though Sony was quick to adopt e-book technology, it couldn’t create a software or library service and was quickly surpassed. “It’s been years since they’ve turned out products that people feel they need to have,” writes The Washington Post.
Once known for their TVs, the companies have started cutting back this now profit-losing sector. They’ve also made significant salary and workforce cuts. Some have looked to other sources of revenue such as developing solar panels or even medical devices.
“And Sharp is taking it a step further, laying out a plan in its 2012 annual report to ‘create new essential products that people realize they always wanted’ through a ‘shift in categories.’ This means developing medical diagnostic imaging monitors, 3D high-definition digital mirrors and electronic textbooks,” explains the article.
Oracle is making a late appearance to the cloud market as it branches into Amazon’s territory, the public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) business.
Oracle’s new public and private clouds will use “our OS, our VM, our compute services and storage services on the fastest most reliable systems in the world — our engineered systems, Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics, all linked with Infiniband,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said at Oracle OpenWorld Sunday night.
“The promised Oracle 12c (the ‘c’ stands for cloud) database will be the software foundation and Ellison said this iteration of the database will put multitenancy — the ability to securely keep separate sets of data in one place — at the database level where it belongs,” GigaOM writes, noting that Ellison himself used to call multitenancy an aging technology.
“By moving multitenancy into the database, software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) providers can relinquish that workload to the database and use database query and business intelligence tools to work with them instead of having to come up with application-specific tools,” the article continues.
Oracle must make a case for its hardware though, critics say. On Twitter, people said the venture would be more impressive if Oracle had a list of customers and/or partners that have come on board.
“In addition, Oracle’s decision to use very high-end specialized hardware to power its cloud flies in the face of conventional wisdom espoused by Web giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon that yoke together thousands of commodity servers in webscale data centers,” the article states. “Oracle’s take is definitely scale-up in what appears to be an increasingly scale-out world.”
FreedomPop is a startup looking to provide every American free wireless with a pay-as-you-go service that offers 500MB of data each month at no cost.
Users do, however, have to buy hardware to access the free wireless. They can opt to pay a refundable deposit for a “Freedom Spot” hotspot or the USB dongle “Freedom Stick.”
FreedomPop also will offer $99 iPhone and iPod cases in four to six weeks that double as a hotspot — or triple as a battery charger, as is the case for the iPhone option.
“For the time being, the touted 4G service will come courtesy of Clearwire’s WiMAX network, but FreedomPop says it will switch to Sprint’s LTE spectrum sometime in early 2013,” Engadget writes. “In the meantime, though, you can expect speeds anywhere between 4 and 10 Mbps down, and 1 to 2 Mbps up.”
Consumers can pay for faster 4G; the company will also offer packaged deals, “hoping to recoup the costs of that free data by selling premium services, with three to start and more coming later,” the post states.
There are ways for users to add to their monthly free allotment by watching ads — a 20 second clip earns an extra 3MB — or recommending a friend, which gets users 10MB for every month they stay with the service.
The allure of mobile TV is there. People want the ability to stream live network programming on their handheld devices. But “delivering that content in ways that don’t abrogate rights agreements and can somehow be monetized has proven mercurial,” writes Variety.
But it may be time for the field to evolve.
“The initiative got a big push recently with the commercial launch of Mobile TV, a Web and mobile service that lets viewers watch live programming from ABC, CBS and NBC, as well as 25 cable channels including CNN, ESPN, MTV, USA and AMC,” notes the article.
A competing service called Dyle Mobile TV runs on a partnership including Fox, NBC, Cox Media Group, E.W. Scripps Co and others.
Aereo is another mobile TV service. But it’s run into a series of legal challenges already. “In July, Aereo scored a key victory when a federal judge refused to block the service at the request of NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Fox and other content providers. The decision is being appealed,” reports Variety.
Mobile TV likely still has a long way to go. “Cable and satellite companies are still largely opposed to mobile TV broadcasts, as they circumvent traditional outlets among a growing segment of the population. These traditional distributors — mostly cable and satellite companies — remain largely opposed to mobile TV broadcasts, which they feel can carve away a growing, younger, segment of the population.”
As of August, for the first time ever, U.S. smartphone owners visited Instagram from their mobile phones with more frequency and for longer periods of time than they visited Twitter, according to comScore data.
“Instagram had an average of 7.3 million daily active users — or DAUs, in Facebook parlance. That tops Twitter’s 6.9 million DAUs over the same period of time,” writes AllThingsD.
“What’s more, the average Instagram user spent 257 minutes accessing the photo-sharing site via mobile devices in August, the data claims, while the average Twitter user over the same period spent 170 minutes viewing,” notes the article.
And Instagram only has 22 million unique U.S. smartphone-based visitors for August compared to Twitter’s 29 million.
“For a number of reasons, this is a pretty big deal. That the barely-two-year-old Instagram could rocket up in user engagement and retention in such a short amount of time, eventually surpassing Twitter in the process, speaks to the sheer momentum of the photo-sharing product,” according to the article.
But can Instagram figure out how to monetize the product as Twitter has? “eMarketer projects that Twitter will rake in close to $130 million in mobile ad revenue in 2012, nearly doubling that of projections for Facebook, which sit at around $72 million,” reports AllThingsD.
“Lost in the recent noise about Twitter’s developer relations and product designs is that Twitter is quickly (and relatively quietly) becoming a successful advertising business,” reports ReadWriteWeb. “And it’s doing this in its own way: Not by running banner ads or video pre-rolls, but through its own interactive, networked ad products.”
Twitter’s “ad boss” Adam Bain recently took the number one spot on the Adweek list of the top 50 industry power players.
“Twitter is where the new ad wars are being waged,” according to Adweek, noting that “promoted Trend ads now command $120,000 a day — and advertisers have to wait in line.”
“Twitter ads are designed to be human — content, in a brand’s ‘voice,’ but not robotic — and meld with the content around them,” notes the post. “They’re designed to provoke feedback — via favorites, retweets, hashtagged tweets, and replies — in the same medium they’re created and presented in.”
“And advertisers can increasingly target them to people who might actually be interested in their pitch,” adds RWW.
While Twitter’s first priority is still user growth, one could feed into the other. “The result, if everything works, could be a Twitter with many hundreds of millions of users, and a billion-dollar-plus ad business,” concludes RWW.
Business Insider has created a list of the top 30 social media advertisers based on total social impressions served from January to August of this year.
Researcher comScore calculated the number of ads served on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, MySpace, Pinterest and others. While these impressions didn’t all cost the same for advertisers, there is no simple way to track the ad spending on social media as there is for TV.
The top social media advertiser was AT&T, generating 12.9 billion impressions. Interestingly, this number was three times that of the second place advertiser. The telecom company has 11 separate Twitter accounts, six Facebook pages, three YouTube channels, a Flickr account, eight blogs, a LinkedIn page, and a Google+ profile.
Microsoft came in second with 4 billion impressions after having bought the business-oriented social network Yammer for $1.2 billion this last June.
JustFabulous follows in third with 3.9 billion impressions. “JustFab’s marketing strategy relies almost entirely on creating the feeling of a one-to-one relationship with each customer,” the post states. “Users sign up, take a quiz to determine their personality, and are then assigned a stylist who creates a shoe collection for them.”
Additional leaders in social ads include Disney, IAC, State Farm, Amazon, Weight Watchers, Universal Technical Institute, Netflix, Google, Guthy-Renker, Nestle, Capital One and Procter & Gamble.
Check the link for the full list with each brand’s number of impressions.
Ad-related companies are convening in New York for Advertising Week, and the media buying/research group ZenithOptimedia has made some forecasts regarding where the ad dollars are expected to go.
Overall, ad spending is expected to fall; Zenith cut its forecast from 4.3 percent to 3.8 percent in light of financial problems in Europe.
Even as new media grows, TV remains “dominant and unmoved,” AllThingsD writes. “Digital’s growth, to date, remains fueled in large part by the decline of print,” the article adds.
An interesting aspect of Zenith’s report is how digital ad spending is divided up. Where before Internet advertising was essentially synonymous with paying Google for search advertising, that has changed with the rise of display ads.
“Globally, display ads will be growing at a 20 percent clip the next couple years, Zenith says, while paid search will move at 14 percent,” the article explains. “Google is a big player in display advertising, too — it has been spending heavily on acquisitions there for years — but it doesn’t have anything like the lead it does in search.”
“That’s a big growth story for Facebook and a potential lifeline for Yahoo and AOL,” AllThingsD continues. “And if somebody else wants to build a business based on selling ads — not just eyeball acquisition, but the actual work of turning those eyeballs into marketing opportunities — that’s a real opportunity for them, too.”
Nielsen announced it is launching a new rating service that will enable advertisers to gauge the popularity of their campaigns across a variety of viewing platforms.
The long-awaited Nielsen Cross-Platform Campaign Ratings will combine data from online and television metrics. The project was developed in partnership with ESPN, Facebook, GroupM, Hulu and Unilever.
“According to the latest Nielsen Cross-Platform Report, in addition to watching 34-plus hours of TV per week, the average American spends nearly five hours online on the computer,” reports Broadcasting & Cable. “Nielsen also said more than half of Americans now watch video online, with online viewing increasing average weekly video consumption to somewhere around 35 hours.”
“Since traditional TV and the Web typically use different metrics, it has been hard to calculate a campaign’s total reach and frequency across platforms,” notes Advertising Age in a related report. “This effort builds upon Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings, which was rolled out last year to provide demographic ratings of online-ad campaigns with metrics comparable to those used for TV advertising.”
“Creating a way to reach, measure and monetize inventory across screens and platforms advances the industry toward the high caliber, seamless standard that can provide new opportunities for players across the industry,” says Steve Hasker, president, global media products and advertiser solutions at Nielsen.
However, some argue that the new approach is oversimplifying matters since consumers engage differently with TV than they do with their digital devices.
Microsoft plans to release its Windows 8 operating system by the end of October, but the system may not be fully ready by then, according to Intel CEO Paul Otellini.
Bloomberg reports that Otellini shared his thoughts with employees at a company event in Taiwan, suggesting that although the software will need post-release improvements, the release is the right move since it will allow Microsoft to establish a market before the holiday season.
Microsoft hopes the new operating system will allow it to carve out a segment of the crowded tablet space. Apple and Amazon dominate the market, and Google recently experienced some success with its Nexus 7 tablet.
Microsoft is expected to roll out its own tablet — the Surface — by the end of October.
“With over 16 million active preview participants, Windows 8 is the most tested, reviewed and ready operating system in Microsoft’s history. We’re looking forward to making Windows 8 available to the world on October 26th,” Microsoft said in a statement to CNBC.
A survey of more than 50,000 early Windows 8 users found that 53 percent prefer the current Windows 7 operating system.
Conducted by the support site Forumswindows8.com, the survey found that only 25 percent of participants said that Windows 8 was their preferred version of the operating system.
The strongest selling feature for most was the fast boot and shut down. The easy installation was the next popular feature followed by Internet Explorer 10. Only 22 percent of respondents claimed the Metro UI as their favorite feature.
“Microsoft claims that Windows 8 is the first version of Windows to be designed for both tablets and desktops, with users able to switch between the new user interface and the more familiar desktop mode. This was viewed to be a weakness by 18 percent of respondents,” reports TechWeekEurope.
“However the biggest concern was price, with 35 percent believing that this could be improved. It is possible to upgrade to Windows 8 for just $39.99, but without promotional prices, the cost is around $199.99. Just over a quarter were worried about system requirements while 25 percent feared incompatibility,” the article notes.
Despite the bad news, the Windows 8-based Microsoft Surface was the tablet of choice for 35 percent of participants, beating out Android tablets and Apple’s iPad.
Speaking at a Royal Television Society conference in London called “When Worlds Collide: Beyond the Digital Looking Glass,” Anne Sweeney explained that Disney sees the greatest growth opportunity for video consumption in mobile devices.
The co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney/ABC Television Group noted that iPad users currently watch 60 percent more video than PC users, while iPhone users watch almost 40 percent more.
“Sweeney said apps are simple and therefore the preferred way for people to watch video on new devices. She said 80 percent of video is viewed that way,” details The Hollywood Reporter. “She also said the ABC player app for Apple devices has been downloaded 6.5 million times and drawn more than 135 million video views.”
Sweeney described ABC as a content engine for Disney, one that serves “as a navigation device and as a brand.”
She described how YouTube is becoming a useful tool, citing how Jimmy Kimmel has used it to help build an audience. She also explained how the stake in Hulu was meant to draw “a broader, more diverse audience” for ABC, which was skewing female at the time.
“The executive said a scene from the popular Pooh stories illustrates Disney’s approach to the digital age,” explains THR. “Pooh says the first thing he thinks of in the morning is ‘what’s for breakfast.’ In comparison, his friend Piglet says: ‘I wonder what exciting is going to happen today.’ Disney follows the Piglet approach, Sweeney said.”
Dish Network Corp. says it will launch a nationwide broadband service this week under the brand dishNET.
The satellite TV company “is expected to disclose plans to sell broadband, at a speed of between five and 10 megabits per second, for between $39.99 and $69.99 a month for customers who also take Dish’s TV service,” explains the Wall Street Journal.
Those who aren’t already Dish customers will have to pay $10 more per month, similar to the approach used by cable operators.
“Dish’s satellite rival, DirecTV, says it plans to roll out a nationwide broadband offering by the first quarter of next year, in partnership with a number of firms including ViaSat and using Echostar’s satellite,” writes WSJ.
The new dishNET won’t be able to match the high speeds of rivals, but will aim for rural customers with little or no Internet access.
“Some 19 million Americans — 14.5 million in rural areas — remain without access to fixed broadband, according to a report released by the Federal Communications Commission in August,” notes the article.
SMPTE has scheduled its 2012 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition for October 23-25 with a pre-conference symposium slated for October 22.
