MaxxoMedia Digital Media and Entertainment Trends

The media industry goes into 2010 with a sense of cautious optimism, but there’s no hiding the casualties that were left behind in 2009. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, there were 1,025 media and entertainment company insolvencies in the two years to the end of Q309.

paidContent reported on a whole host of company collapses this year, from Setanta to Shiny Media and Borders, and some in the past few weeks. But the worst appears to be over…

—There were a total of 1,025 entertainment media company collapses from Q307 to Q309, including 305 publishing companies.

—The worst period was Q109, when 203 companies went into administration.

—From January to October this year, publishing companies falling into administration jumped 25 percent year on year, accounting for a third of all business failures.

—Books, software, journals and periodicals were worst hit: the “migration of readers from print to digital media” is the main culprit, says PwC.

And PwC has some words of warning for consumer media companies looking to launch online subscription-based content models to increase recevnues in 2010: make sure you know what you’re doing. Financial services practice director Peter Simon says: “In many cases, launching new payment systems is not the same as making money… It brings a whole deal of complexity that many media companies will not have had to deal with before.”

Specifically, he says businesses need a system that’s user friendly and has a fool-proof IT infrastructure—and don’t forget the cost of building your paywall: “Even seemingly simple decisions such as fixed or variable fee setting, geographic scope, mobile solutions or customer loyalty offers can create significant cash flow issues.”

via PwC: 1,025 UK Media, Entertainment Companies Folded In Last Two Years | paidContent.

Busta Rhymes posted a YouTube video giving his thoughts on the impact of digital music and the internet on his career, and he’s not best pleased. “We was able to go into these labels and secure $4 million album checks. That’’s not happening no more. The computer caused that.” He also gives his views on YouTube and ringtones during the vid.

By Belinda Goldsmith

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – Surfing the net has become an obsession for many Americans with the majority of U.S. adults feeling they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the Web.

A survey asked 1,011 American adults how long they would feel OK without going on the Web, to which 15 percent said a just a day or less, 21 percent said a couple of days and another 19 percent said a few days.

Only a fifth of those who took part in an online survey conducted by advertising agency JWT between Sept 7 and 11 said they could go for a week.

“People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line,” said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT, which conducted the survey to see how technology was changing people’s behavior.

“They felt disconnected from the world, from their friends and family,” she told Reuters.

The poll, released on Wednesday, found the use of cell phones and the Internet were becoming more and more an essential part of life with 48 percent of respondents agreeing they felt something important was missing without Internet access.
More than a quarter of respondents — or 28 percent — admitted spending less time socializing face-to-face with peers because of the amount of time they spend online.

It also found that 20 percent said they spend less time having sex because they are online.

Continued…

By Eric Eldon 09.10.07 at VentureBeat

Meebo, provider of a popular instant messaging service, is unveiling a useful service tonight: File sharing.

The Mountain View company is letting users share files with each other, from office documents to photos to music.

Any file under ten megabytes is fair game, although each user is restricted to 30 megabytes per month, and Meebo stores files for only four hours after they’re sent.

As the school year gets going, this service could be a hit.

High school and college students are already some of the most active users of the service. It lets them IM with each other across IM protocols — including AOL’s AIM, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk — from its web browser. This useful when places like school libraries won’t let students download IM software to their desktop.

More than 6 million people use Meebo per month, and the median age is 21, the company says. Almost every user is between ages 14 and 29. More than 140 million messages are sent through Meebo daily, with about 20 million of those going through Meebo Rooms, its chat room service.

The file-sharing service works two different ways. If you’re using Meebo’s own chat protocol, simply click the file-sharing icon in the Meebo chat window, upload the file, and hit return to send. Your friend will see an icon of the file in their chat window that they click on to begin downloading it (screenshot to the left).

The company has a necessary but slightly less convenient solution for sharing files with people using Meebo to chat via other IM protocols. If you’re say, chatting with a friend on AIM, your friend will receive a web link to a Meebo page they can download the file from (screenshot below).

The service uses Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services for storing and retrieving files online. It is currently available for Internet Explorer and Firefox, although it plans to support Safari soon.

A new IBM online consumer study, a component of the upcoming report “The end of advertising as we know it” planned for the fall, shows that among consumer respondents, 19 percent stated spending six hours or more per day on personal Internet usage, versus nine percent of respondents who reported the same levels of TV viewing. 66 percent reported viewing between one to four hours of TV per day, versus 60 percent who reported the same levels of personal Internet usage. When it comes to mobile and Internet entertainment, consumers are seeking consolidated, trustworthy content, recognition and community. Despite natural lags among marketers, advertising revenues will follow consumers’ habits, concludes the report.

To effectively respond to this power shift, the study sees:

• Advertising agencies going beyond traditional creative roles to become brokers of consumer insights
• Cable companies evolving to home media portals
• roadcasters and publishers racing toward new media formats
• Marketers forced to experiment and make advertising more compelling

Bill Battino, Communications Sector managing partner, IBM Global Business Services, says “Consumers are demonstrating their desire for both wired and wireless access to content… an average of 81 percent of consumers surveyed globally indicated they’ve watched, or want to watch, PC video, and an average of 42 percent indicated they’ve watched, or want to watch, mobile video…”

The steady growth of consumer adoption of digital music, video, and other entertainment services — though markets are still small by comparison to traditional media — show households are no longer one size fits all:

• 23 percent of respondents reported using a portable music service
• 7 percent reported having a video content subscription for their mobile phones
• 11 percent reported a PC-based music service
• 18 percent reported an online newspaper subscription

Saul Berman, IBM Media & Entertainment Strategy and Change practice leader, said, “The Internet is becoming consumers’ primary entertainment source. The TV is increasingly taking a back seat to the cell phone and the personal computer among consumers age 18 to 34. Just as mobile communications have replaced traditional land-lines, cable and satellite TV subscriptions risk a similar fate of being replaced as the primary source of content access.”

In the largest digital video recorder market, says the report, 24 percent of U.S. respondents reported owning a DVR in their home and watching at least 50 percent of television programming on replay. 33 percent in the U.S. reported watching more television content than before the DVR.

Additional survey highlights say that:

• More than twice as many U.K. consumers surveyed use video on demand services than own a DVR
• Less than a third of U.K. consumers have changed their overall TV consumption as a result of DVR ownership
• In Australia, despite owning a DVR, most respondents prefer live television or replay less than 25 percent of their programming

Consumers are increasingly contributing to online video or social networking sites:

• 9 percent of German and 7 percent of U.S. respondents claim to have contributed to a user-generated content site
• 26 percent of U.S. respondents reported contributing to a social networking site
• While the numbers were slightly less from other countries like the
• 20 percent from the UK
• 9 percent in Japan
• Australia topped all countries surveyed with 36 percent contributing to social networking sites and nine percent contributing to video content sites.
• An average of 58 percent worldwide, who contributed content, did so for recognition and community, not monetary gain

In the UK, nearly a third of users who watch mobile TV reduced their standard TV set viewing patterns as a result of new mobile device services:

• 18 percent said they reduced “normal” television by a little and another
• eight percent reduced “normal” television by a lot
• four percent substituted television on their regular TV with their new device altogether
• 23 percent of respondents in Germany who had watched mobile video prefer to view user generated content, and 21 percent prefer video trailers or promotions

Read the complete release here, or visit IBM here for the complete study download opportunity.

KPMG has released a 36-page report on how digital media are affecting work, play and relationships across Europe, and in particular how Generation Y is interacting with that media.

The paper contains interviews with industry experts and a summary of consumer research, based on interviews with 3,000 people in Germany, Spain, United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the U.S.A in December 2006.

New technology can often be disruptive. But the pace of change in information technology over the past few years, and the speed with which technology has has been adopted by Generation Y, poses particular challenges for business in general, and for media companies in particular. What has become known as Web 2.0—a somewhat overused term that refers to a second generation of internet-based services (such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies) that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users—has upset the hierarchy among media companies in a few short years.

Broadly, there have been four big developments in the online world in the past few years.

1. Decline in the cost of media distribution—thanks to digitisation and broadband—which has helped to make even relatively unloved content commercially viable.

2.  The rise of user-generated content perhaps better described as “participatory media”.

3.  The rise of sharing.

4.  The way in which information is organised.  Instead of a traditional hierarchy of information by experts, i.e., a taxonomy, web users are increasingly categorising online content—web pages, photographs and links—for themselves. given rise to new businesses.

Download report (pdf, 1 mb, 36 pages)

I ran across a site this morning that allows you to convert a video from any format (.mov, QT, FLVto a video in any other format. The service at www.mux.am (.am is Armenia – for those of you wondering). You enter the url of a video you want to convert, choose the outputfile type and the size of the video, bit rate and frames per second. Pop in your e-mail address where you want the file delivered when it is finished.

The site says Mux is for personal, non-commercial use – I suppose to make it easier for people to share their own videos online – which is a service I personally could use. I just wonder a bit about what happens when people find a video that the owner doesn’t want shared and points this service to it.

The service also allows for you to convert and deliver any video to your cell phone. Just enter the url for the video, your cell phone number and Mux does the rest. Currently only available for subscribers of Cingular, T-mobile and Sprint in the US. Again a very interesting service for sending home video – but what about copywritten material that the owner wishes to exploit commerically?

There is a link to Amazon Web Services, the new service offering from Amazon that provides developers with direct access to Amazon’s robust technology platform. I’m not sure what type of due diligence is done when a company wants to use the platform or what the liability might be. Just speculating.

By: Priyanka Pradhan | Jan 17,2007

The free service will allow viewers to access all kinds of television from across the world, over the Internet.The ad supported site will try to replicate the complete television experience, in full-screen, broadcast quality, along with channel flipping, and interactivity. The service is still undergoing trials, but thousands of people have been invited to download the software on trial.

Joost aims to offer TV-like experience enhanced with the choice, control and flexibility of Web 2.0, which enables broadcasters to get their program in front of a global Internet audience. Joost CEO Fredrik de Wahl says the team plans to offer studios, cable stations and anyone else who wants to distribute high-quality video over the Internet, a fast, efficient and cheap distribution method. He says the company will use the same peer-to-peer technology used in Skype and Kazaa.

The Joost menu allows users to switch channels with the click of a link, TiVo-like control of the content and access to any show, any time of the day. Users may also move forward or backward within a show and skip commercials. There is a line-up of sports, documentaries and music programming, but the team says this is just trial programming and that when the full launch takes place in the next few months, there will be more impressive content on offer.

The site also promises to provide a platform for the ‘best television content on the planet’ to bring users the shows from TV studios, as well as the specialist programs created by professionals and enthusiasts. The Joost team also reveals that they’re working on a native Macintosh Intel version and expect it to be available in the next few months. A Linux version is also in the works.

Read more here.

Applause to CBS for reportedly joining with Slingbox to investigate how sharing of video clips builds communities around content. The Clip+Sling service will allow owners of Sling Media’s Slingbox device to clip and share content directly from live or recorded TV shows with both other Slingbox owners and others over the Internet.

Usually big media companies wait to be disrupted and then react from a position of fear. Quincy Smith, CBS Interactive President, is taking the unusual step of being a catalyst for disruption. One thing I’ve seen over and over though is that you can’t control what happens after the disruption. That keeps many in paralysis, afraid that what they do will come back to haunt them. Funny thing is that doing nothing leads to the same result. Only time will tell if the decision was the right one.

New device will send Web videos to TV. Makers of Slingbox will release sub-$200 Sling Catcher mid-year. Sling Media Inc. will unveil its upcoming SlingCatcher product at the International Consumer Electronics Show, joining a growing group of companies that aim to bring Web content into the living room.