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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

By: Priyanka Pradhan | Jan 17,2007

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.