Tech companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter are targeting the living room TV, while second-screen experiences for our smartphones and tablets are being introduced by the likes of GetGlue and Shazam.
According to Fast Company, the interest-sharing (and soon-to-be e-commerce platform) Pinterest has been meeting with various TV networks including MTV, VH1 and Bravo.
“While it’s too early to say what such meetings could yield, they serve as a sign of the two-year-old startup’s increasing interest in brands and media,” notes the post. “But what would Pinterest TV look like, should such a thing exist?”
Fast Company was told that the meetings were generally about relationship building (not uncommon with startups) and how to optimize the platform for third parties. “In other words, it’s not likely the 70-person shop is already looking to expand to on-screen TV engagement — it only just landed on the iPad.”
However, it’s worth noting that television brands have played a significant role in nurturing social media platforms.
“Twitter and Facebook have become intertwined with live-TV viewing; Instagram has worked with broadcast networks like CNN; and Foursquare has helped devise interesting applications with the History and Weather channels,” explains the post. “On Pinterest, for example, we’re already seeing popular feeds from MTV and the Food Network.”
Could there come a time when we find ourselves pinning kitchen devices featured on Bravo’s “Top Chef” to Pinterest? “I don’t know yet — maybe,” responds Lisa Hsia, EVP of digital for Bravo, with a smile. “Watch what happens.”
The DSLR is becoming “one of the more interesting tools in the 21st century journalist’s kit,” according to TV Technology.
“Everyone wants the shallow depth of field that DSLRs offer, and it works so well in low-light situations,” says Art Donahue, an editor and producer at WCVB in Boston. “With the fullframe sensor, you’re downsampling to HD. The noise virtually disappears and you’re able to shoot in low-light situations that you couldn’t do with a standard 2/3-inch imager — this is a huge, huge advantage.”
“It’s really hard to monitor audio properly, even with an outboard adapter,” counters Carl Mrozek, an independent shooter based in Buffalo, New York. “Also, the audio adapters make the DSLR package clunky and harder to handle.”
Many new film and video students have abandoned conventional camcorders for DSLRs. “They cost less, produce great pictures and offer a ‘film look’ because the glass is better,” notes Chuck Gloman, chair of DeSales University’s TV and Film department. “I think that eventually it will be universally accepted for news work.”
“It would be good for special applications such as war-zone shooting, where a larger camera would be too conspicuous,” admits Mrozek. “DSLRs have obvious advantages for news applications involving stealth and traveling light. Getting a DSLR through customs shouldn’t be a problem either, where carrying a conventional video camera might.”
However, drawbacks include issues with the sensor overheating, the need for some operators to use an external monitor for better focusing and the comparative lack of handling comfort based on form factor (which may change in the future). Yet its form and size can provide access in terms of shooting news.
“People don’t know you’re shooting video — they think you’re shooting stills,” explains Geoff Poister, faculty member at Boston University’s Film and Television program. “These cameras let you get away with it. You look like a tourist and are not likely to be stopped as a professional shooter might. Plus the images are great — high-definition, which can be downscaled.”
When Windows 8 launches later this month, Microsoft will also launch its own news operation as part of its new MSN website.
In July, Microsoft sold its 50 percent stake in MSNBC.com to its longtime partner NBCUniversal in order to do its own coverage.
According to Bob Visse, GM of the MSN Product Management Group, MSN plans to primarily aggregate news from sources including Reuters, the Associated Press and NBC, but also expects to produce its own content.
“Microsoft’s flagship website, which gets about 480 million visitors per month worldwide, is one of the biggest portals on the Internet, alongside Yahoo and AOL, and serves as the gateway to other Microsoft online services such as Outlook mail and Skype online calling,” explains Reuters.
The site is being dramatically overhauled to integrate with the October 26 launch of Microsoft’s touch-optimized Windows 8 system and Internet Explorer 10.
“The new look is designed to appeal to tablet and touch-screen PC users, who can manipulate large icons across the screen and tap on items they want to read,” details the article. “For the first time, the site will have a uniform look across all its sections, from news and sports to money and job listings.”
Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett predicts shifts in the satellite television model, “as increases in the cost of programming are also outpacing cable or satellite providers’ ability to support them,” reports TechCrunch.
As the satellite television subscriber rate remains relatively static, programming costs have risen 32 percent over the last five years, and continue to rise at a rate of 10 percent per year.
“According to Moffett, part of the reason that per-subscriber programming costs are rising at DirecTV is that subscriber growth is flat to down,” notes the post. “Meanwhile, programmers continue to ask more for their content, with no signs of letting up.”
Moffett says this combination is “a train wreck in the making” and suggests “something’s gotta give.” He believes the change could come either as a rise in price for subscribers, or a cutback in offerings.
Some providers have already begun offering bundles of channels that do not include higher-priced networks like ESPN. This allows customers who are not interested in these channels to pay less while allowing the provider to remain profitable.
TBS announced it will present its postseason Major League Baseball programming with added features like 3D holographic images.
“Specifically, TBS says it will use ‘innovative 3D imagery [to] illustrate detailed examples of pitch grips while demonstrating the pressure points, release points and rotation. Analysts will use the tool to explain how pitches work and how the hitter approaches each type of pitch,'” TV Technology reports.
“The network will also triple the number of super slo-mo cameras it typically uses during the postseason,” notes the article. “It will again integrate Bloomberg Sports statistics into the telecasts, and use Pitch Trax in-game pitching location technology during its coverage.”
The 2012 MLB postseason will kick off this week with TBS’s first-ever Wild Card game coverage on October 5.
“In the first year of the new postseason format, two Wild Card teams in each league will play a single-elimination game with each winner advancing to compete with the three division championship from its respective leagues in the Division Series,” the article explains.
Turner Sports has created a Facebook page as well as Twitter accounts and hashtags to increase participation.
Fewer than 115,000 American households watch 3D TV channels at any given time, reports Businessweek.
After “Avatar” became the highest grossing film of all time, many expected 3D to make a successful transition into homes. But disappointing content, uncomfortable glasses, and increased costs have led to a lack of 3D TV penetration.
Currently only 2 percent of American televisions can show 3D content. IHS Screen Digest expects this number to increase to 6 percent during the holiday season, but only because newer televisions come with the technology.
“While operators like DirecTV and Comcast Corp. don’t charge specifically for channels like ESPN 3D, they are generally bundled in packages that require other spending,” notes the article. Packages that include 3D channels can cost an additional $10 in some cases, and include upfront costs of up to $200.
IHS analyst Tom Morrod says that because 3D technology is typically bundled with other technologies, like motion-smoothing and better color contrast, some people buy 3D capable televisions and never even buy 3D glasses. “There’s very little direct consumer demand,” he says.
From a business standpoint, it is difficult to justify shooting in 3D with such low demand. 3D shoots require extra cameras and about double the labor.
ESPN 3D’s business leader Bryan Burns suggests 3D adoption will eventually take hold, just as HD made it into homes. “It took five years before reporting systems caught up and we knew who actually had the service,” Burns says of HD. “It’s not unfamiliar territory to us. We’ve been down this road before.”
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.
