MaxxoMedia Digital Media and Entertainment Trends

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

About 10 years ago, I was running a small Internet development firm in Santa Monica, CA. We produced a number of the early movie and TV show websites for the studios. We could tell then viewing of video online would be huge as soon as bandwidth opened up. Back then, people would download a 30 megabyte QT video file that portrayed a postage stamp sized, two-minute long video through their 14.4 baud dial-up modem. For some it would take hours to download; people left their computers on overnight. Well, times have certainly changed.

Today bandwidth runs like water through the tap, and watching TV and user-generated video online is getting bigger and bigger each month. A recently released Digital Life America study says that nearly 80 million Americans (43% of the online population) have watched one of their favorite TV shows on the Internet. That number is up significantly from 12 months ago when that figure was just 25%.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

Facebook, the fastest growing online social network, is basically messaging and static pages. You get to look at friend’s page and use some utilities for sharing photos, videos, links and news feeds. One company thinks people are already tiring of seeing what their friends have done … after the fact. So they are developing ways for people to interact online in real time and do things together from any website. This is the vision of ROCKETON, a new “virtual world, social network, real-time gaming and applications platform.”

Founded by Interactive TV pioneers Steve Hoffman and Naomi Kabuko, ROCKETON aims to create the next wave in online interaction and gaming. The service, which opens in public beta in late April, will give you an avatar that represents who you are and allow you to connect with other ROCKETON members wherever they are to interact, chat, trade virtual objects and play games in real time.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

Reselling tickets, once viewed as illegal and a rip-off of consumers, is now being legitimized. Over the past few months there have been a number of large acquisitions of “ticket resellers” made by leading e-commerce companies in an effort to take advantage of this lucrative secondary ticket market. eBay purchased Stubhub for $365 million; last month Ticketmaster purchased TicketsNow for $265 million. Many of the tickets that are re-sold on these secondary marketplaces are initially purchased from the Ticketmasters of the world.

The new combined business model aims to cut in the venue owners and promoters. Ticketmaster President and Chief Executive Sean Moriarty said, “Clients who five years ago were not willing to allow a ticket to be resold now want a piece of it.”

The size of the secondary ticket market is hard to judge, but estimates range from $2.5 billion to $5 billion a year in the U.S. So it’s no surprise that new companies are popping up looking to enhance the experience and take a slice of the pie.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

Not long ago, people had few choices for finding new music. These included listening to the radio, hanging out in their friend’s bedroom listening to their collection, or subscribing to a music magazine. All three were really limiting.

Radio limited the music they played to the hits; you were limited by the number of your friends’ record collections, which were limited by their budget … and the same with magazine subscriptions.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

18 months ago two friends had a conversation about how technology has been changing the landscape of the music business.They agreed that companies like Pandora, Amazon and iTunes were changing how people experienced artist recordings. But, they were concerned that a very important part of the music business was not being addressed – the live performance. They talked about how no one was really focusing on this aspect of the business. So it was decided they would.

What makes this conversation interesting is that it took place between Danny Socolof, a 25 year veteran of the music industry and Jeff Henshaw, a founding member of Microsoft’s XBOX team.

Socolof is a pioneer in pairing brands and music with The Who, Led Zeppelin and well known brands like Pepsi and Apple’s iTunes. He has been responsible for some of the most memorable live performances in the past quarter century including Woodstock ’98. Henshaw was with Microsoft for 18 years and last lead efforts to bring new entertainment experiences to the XBOX.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

To TXT or not to TXT We all know cell phone text messaging is a great way to quickly connect with someone. Everywhere we look people are hunched over their phones, tapping on the keys feverishly. But what about texting while driving?

I know you would never do it .. .but even though the overwhelming majority of adults think that driving while texting is dangerous, two in three adults (66%) who drive a car and have used text messaging say they read text messages or e-mails while driving — and 57% of them even admitted to sending text messages or e-mails from behind the wheel. On January 1st, the State of Washington was the first state in the nation to enact a new law that prohibits text messaging while driving and more states are not far behind.

So what is the technologically well-connected person to do? How can you communicate safely on the go? Enter instant voice-messaging for your mobile phone from San Francisco based Pinger. The service helps you keep your eyes on the road and minimize distractions while you drive. Combined with a hands-free headset, Pinger’s instant voice messaging service is a safer way for drivers to stay in touch from the road.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

The web has forever changed the way people experience music. Here are a few sites I found this week that are cleverly combining elements of social networks, games and artificial intelligence, enabling people to discover and share music like never before.

Music Discovery Game

www.thesixtyone.com is a music discovery game that rewards those who help others listen to good new music. The name of the site pays homage to US Highway 61. According to the founders, “Muddy Waters rode the 61. So did Bob Dylan, Ike Turner and B.B. King. Elvis grew up in the housing projects along it. Highway 61 was the road by which people left to find better opportunities. And by leaving, they took their music to the world.”

by Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

For the most part, listening to the radio is a passive experience. Tune in your station and let the DJ lead you through the programming. Aside from the occasional call-in request to win tickets or call-in to Talk radio, there isn’t a lot of direct response interaction with listeners.

A Colorado-based company is looking to bring interactivity between radio stations and listeners to a whole new level. CynoCast (pronounced sin-O-cast) aims to help stations keep listeners tuned in longer and generate new streams of revenue by giving stations the ability to easily launch web pages while broadcasting live on the air.

With CynoCast’s “DJ CynoCaster,” stations can simulcast web pages that run alongside live broadcasts. Instant push-polls, poll results, song lyrics, traffic maps, news articles, blogs, weather maps, sports scores and any other type of information can be fed directly to the listener’s computer in real time.

By Mark Levy

CEO of MaxxoMedia

Lately, my inbox has been inundated with invitations to join new online social networking sites. Unlike early entrants to the social networking market like MySpace and Friendster, these new services are more focused on helping people do business. The largest and seemingly most popular business network is named Linkedin. A little over four years old, it boasts over 17 million members.

New social nets seem to be popping up daily.Many just duplicate features and functions of the leaders. They simply offer a network of people from many different walks of life the opportunity to connect with each other. However, one recent entrant is making waves by focusing the power of social networking software into a marketplace that has always been insulated and inefficient – the entertainment industry.

Nextcat.com aims to be THE business social networking hub of the entertainment industry. Based outside of Boston, the company was founded by two serial entrepreneurs, Jeff Pucci and Richard Viard. Though they both attended the Berklee College of Music, they didn’t meet up until 1988.

By Mark Levy CEO MaxxoMedia

The Camera and Imaging Products Association announced today that growth in digital camera shipments by Japanese makers in 2007 is expected to slow to 7.5 percent from a year earlier, when lower prices and a wider variety of models with interchangeable lenses spurred growth to 22 percent. The association did not provide any indication of why the slowdown will occur, but a likely culprit is the increase in sales of mobile camera phones. Projected shipments for camera phones by 2009 is over 900 million units.

A recent study by the Consumer Electronics Association says that 9% of pictures taken today are taken with a camera phone. So far, people seem to be switching between their camera phone and digital camera — taking photos at different times with different cameras.

However, this might change. The article says Tim Herbert, senior director of market research at CEA, predicts that as camera phones improve with three megapixel (and better) resolution, better storage and additional features, more people might use only camera phones for taking photos.

“You know when I was your age I had to get up off the couch and turn a knob on the TV to change the channels!” I say to my son of 11 years. “Awww come on dad – stop making up stories,” he replies. “No really, and we only had three channels that came in halfway decent – don’t get me started about the ‘rabbit ears.’ I know it sounds crazy, but we had to wait for our favorite shows to come on at the time shown in the TV Guide magazine.” “The what?” he says with a quizzical look on his face. “If we wanted to listen to music we had to put a record on the record player or wait for it to come on the radio. Phone calls meant waiting for the single house line or calling from a payphone.” More quizzical looks. “Our video games were one dimensional and we only had one button to press to kill the aliens. And if we wanted to take a picture we had to take the roll of film to be developed, make prints and mail them to our friends and family.”

ONE TO WATCH: A first of it’s kind ringtone service called Ringjacker has been released in the latest version of Skype 3.0 from Emotive Communications (these guys pioneered music downloading and created the biggest ringtone company in North America)

So what does Ringjacker Do? Ringjacker allows Skype users to ring their contacts with a ringtone that they choose. The company is soon to announce new funding and plans to extend the services for online and mobile telephony users of VOIP, 3G and 4G worldwide.

Initially launching with a small catalog of music and sound effect tones, Emotive is in negotiations with the record companies to bring users music from their favorite artists in early 2007.