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YouTube is shedding its scruffy adolescence and seeking to redefine what entertainment means in the online video era. In fact, with each passing day, it becomes more evident that YouTube is building a parallel universe to the traditional world of cable TV, targeting niches that have long been mined by a multitude of specialty channels. This theme will crystallize as 2012 unfolds.
YouTube’s 100 new channels of original online-only content have begun rolling out and will continue to do so throughout the year. For a relatively modest $100 million (by Google’s standards!) YouTube is getting first dibs on programming that is laser-targeted at valuable niches. Importantly, it is helping galvanize a community of content creators who have either not been a part of the traditional pay and broadcast TV ecosystem, or are seeking a new, less constrained environment to play in, or both.
The latest sign of YouTube’s magnetic pull came yesterday as Electus (the multimedia studio headed by NBC’s former entertainment honcho Ben Silverman and backed by IAC) announced that it had recruited Bruce Seidel to head its food channel on YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG). Seidel, who most recently led programming for the Cooking Channel and was previously a senior programming executive at Food Network, where he developed the Iron Chef shows among others, obviously knows a thing or two about creating compelling food-related content. No doubt he’ll quickly establish Electus’s food channel as a popular draw while leveraging YouTube’s many interactive possibilities.
Meanwhile, today brings the launch of “START” the new gaming channel from IGN, which News Corp. (NSDQ: NWS) acquired for $650 million in 2006. It will feature at least 5 long-form original programs, some of which will be produced by Reveille, another News Corp. property (coincidentally founded by Silverman) that is responsible for popular TV shows “Ugly Betty” and “The Office.” START will compete for audience with cable’s G4 among others.
On top of these are channels from celebrities like CSI’s Anthony Zuiker, Stan Lee, Jay-Z, Deepak Chopra and action sports stars Tony Hawk, Shaun White and Kelly Slater among others. Then there are a host of new channels backed by hugely popular online content destinations like Machinima, TED, SB Nation, The Onion, WSJ, VICE, MyDamnChannel, Bleacher Report and others. Each one of them will compete for attention, to one extent or another, with various channels found on the cable dial.
Beyond the channels themselves, there are also interesting dynamics regarding how YouTube will play a role in launching new talent. For example, I was intrigued by a session I moderated at last week’s NATPE Conference (where YouTube also had a huge presence) with David Sievers and Jeremy Welt, executives with Maker Studios. For those not familiar with Maker, it’s an online-only studio that is now generating over 500 million views per month via YouTube, and is also part of the 100 channels effort with its Maker Music channel. Something that really struck me in our conversation is how they view YouTube as offering a totally new playbook for breaking new talent. YouTube’s vast reach and engagement offer a vibrant platform for new artists to express their creativity and directly find their audience. The new channels represent a launch pad for them.
I was recently having a spirited debate over what impact new over-the-top alternatives will have on the pay-TV industry (e.g. cord-cutting, shaving, nevering, etc.) with a former colleague of mine from my cable days who has gone on to become one of the industry’s top researchers. My position was that the wasteful cross-subsidies inherent in multichannel subscription bundling, coupled with spiraling rates, will create momentum for Over-the-Top (OTT) options, eventually leading to fragmentation. The internet has proven itself ruthless in rooting out analog era market inefficiencies and long-term, I believe the video business will be no different. He took the opposite view, insisting the firewall is that the majority of new, compelling content is not available on the Internet.
That comment struck me as reflecting the same type of thinking as that of broadcast TV executives from 30 to 35 years ago as they dismissed nascent cable TV networks then airing a hodgepodge of re-runs and lesser sports. The lesson: it’s all too easy for incumbents to see the world only as it is, not as it could be. YouTube - and the many others who are pursuing original online programming - are still in their early days. But when combined with changes in viewer behavior, the proliferation of connected and mobile viewing devices and the firming up of online video monetization models, I’m betting that these efforts, particularly those led by YouTube, are going to be a highly disruptive force to the traditional TV ecosystem.
Will Richmond is president and founder of Broadband Directions LLC, a market intelligence, publishing and consulting firm specializing in broadband-delivered video, which he established in 2003. Will edits and publishes VideoNuze, a daily online publication widely read by broadband video decision-makers.
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]]>It appears so far that this is less about any issues with Kelly’s performance and more about getting Kenny. Kelly will become an advisor to TWCC and to Bain, and Kenny begins in his new role effectively immediately.
Kelly had been CEO of TWCC since July 2009 and other past roles have included head of media at AOL (NYSE: AOL). Kenny, meanwhile, brings with him some skills that could help TWCC’s growth in the years ahead. He comes from streaming and content delivery giant Akamai (NSDQ: AKAM), where he had been president. Prior to that, Kenny racked up of years of experience in digital marketing and interactive advertising: he co-founded VivaKi, the digital and television arm of Publicis Groupe, and he was chairman and CEO Digitas Inc. He also sits on the board of Yahoo.
In an interview with paidContent a few moments ago, Kenny said that the offer of a CEO job had come out of initial conversations for him to join the board of The Weather Channel. “We’d been talking about how to move faster on programming and other areas,” and that gradually progressed to the subject of Kenny taking on a bigger role.
He told paidContent that the three key areas he hopes to focus on as CEO are to invest more in programming, digital assets and international expansion. In programming, the emphasis will be on making more long-form content, while the mobile apps and the website will focus on more basic weather information. Both of these are largely ad-supported at the moment, and Kenny said this is how they will remain.
As for international, this is where you can see the Akamai content delivery expertise coming into view: “TWCC has been more focused on the U.S. up to now, but there is an opportunity globally and I believe you will see a much more global enterprise going forward,” he said.
In a departing internal memo to staff, which paidContent has obtained and is copying below, Kelly gave Kenny a full endorsement in the role: “TWCC will be in good hands with David Kenny at the helm,” he wrote. He noted also that the pair have been good friends for many years.
Under Kelly, TWCC has seen some huge growth in its digital media business—specifically around its many apps for mobile devices.
Being about weather—a subject that is continually changing—these apps have picked up a particularly loyal following.
At paidContent’s mobile conference last year, Kelly noted that mobile users use The Weather Channel’s apps 26 days a month, with 30 million of the company’s apps getting downloaded in 2010. Overall reach for the company, as reported last year, was 35 million people, covering access from TVs, PCs, and mobile devices. During one period last year the company launched 10 separate apps in 11 weeks.
Kelly’s memo:
As you know, this morning we announced a change in leadership for TWCC. As we make this transition, let me take a moment to thank you for making the last two and a half years such a pleasant and rewarding experience.
I came to The Weather Channel with many goals, including building a strong team, developing long term plans and moving the business forward. A part of these efforts included our “one company” initiatives, which I believe have been a tremendous success. I’m proud of these accomplishments and even more proud of the teamwork it took to get it all done. I will continue to be involved in the company, serving as a special adviser to David and the Board of Directors and I will also serve as an adviser to Bain Capital.
TWCC will be in good hands with David Kenny at the helm. We’ve been friends for many years and I am certain he is the leader who will keep things moving forward and secure a great future for the company.
Thank you again for your hard work and dedication. We’ve come a long way together and we’ve seen the power of one company and the power of vision and values. In the past years, we’ve seen record viewership and page views and saw our mobile business reach unimaginable heights. The resulting economic growth has put us in a strong position. Thanks for the great teamwork. Keep growing.
Sincerely,
Mike Kelly
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]]>Earlier this week, Netflix and the BBC announced that the service would feature several, but not necessarily all, popular programs from the broadcaster. The BBC would push episodes from current shows like Top Gear, but only six months after the programs were broadcast on the BBC itself. Other shows, like Fawlty Towers, are no longer in production and will probably see more flexible terms for the content.
Now it’s being reported that a deal with the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, ITV (LSE: ITV), may not include episodes of some of its most popular shows, such as the costume drama Downton Abbey, penned by Academy Award-winner Julian Fellowes. (To be clear, no deal between the two has been announced yet.)
An article in Bloomberg cites sources that paint a challenging picture for Netflix, whose entry into Europe comes as local broadcasters are establishing their own streaming services as a way of shoring up their traditional TV businesses.
These broadcasters will want to promote their own services first before passing their top content to third parties like Netflix. The pay TV market in Europe is currently worth some $76 billion, and PwC says it will grow to $95 billion in the next four years—although Netflix has not yet announced plans to offer content in other European markets beyond its launch for the UK and Ireland.
In addition to the BBC, Netflix has signed deals with MGM, Lionsgate (NYSE: LGF) and Miramax for films. Amazon-owned Lovefilm has managed to wrest Sony (NYSE: SNE) away for itself with its own exclusive deal.
In truth, it seems that Netflix’s dealings with European broadcasters are a very mixed bag. Beyond the BBC and possibly ITV, Mediaset in Italy seems open to collaboration, while RTL seems to only be interested if it can sell ads alongside whatever content it licenses.
That makes Europe not unlike Netflix’s situation in the U.S., where it looks like it will lose access to content from Starz and does not carry any from Time (NYSE: TWX) Warner’s TBS, but has forged deals with many of the main broadcasters for selected content.
Bloomberg reports that the company lost some 800,000 customers when it changed its pricing this year, but as of September still had 23.8 million subscribers and remains the biggest paid streaming property in the U.S. At peak times, Netflix can apparently account for 25 percent of all internet traffic in the U.S., according to network management firm Sandvine, cited by Bloomberg.
Correction: An earlier version of this report incorrectly referred to an article from Reuters; (NYSE: TRI) it was from Bloomberg.
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]]>When CNN signed Morgan to replace the venerable Larry King as its primetime interviewer, “they haven’t hired Mother Teresa,” as Morgan himself put it. But until the abuses of the British press were brought so sharply to light earlier this year, CNN surely did not realise what it had got itself into.
Thanks to Jay and the Leveson inquiry into the seamy underside of the British media, CNN now knows a lot more than it did when it signed Morgan to a multimillion-dollar contract in 2010.
Repeatedly pressed by Jay and Leveson to explain his past statements and career – which may or may not have involved phone hacking – Morgan’s memory became worryingly unreliable. By the end of Jay’s questioning the imperious interviewer familiar to viewers of Piers Morgan Tonight was reduced to sullen, one-word answers delivered with curt annoyance.
The difficult question for CNN is: what does it do with Piers Morgan now?
As the excesses of Britain’s tabloids came to light in the US media, CNN replied to enquiries that “Piers Morgan has been firm and specific in his denial, and we continue to be supportive of his programme.”
Morgan himself flatly denied any involvement: “I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone.”
But as a witness at the Leveson inquiry, when asked to explain his guide to hacking into telephone voicemail from a 2001 entry in his own published memoirs, Morgan said: “I’m sorry – it was 10 years ago, I can’t remember.” Questioned further, Morgan couldn’t offer even the vaguest recollection where the “little trick” might have come from.
Confronted with a statement that he had heard voicemail messages left by Paul McCartney on Heather Mills’s phone, Morgan clammed up, saying “I’m not going to discuss where I heard it or who played it to me.”
And so it continued, with Morgan saying his knowledge of phone hacking was merely from hearing rumours, that as editor of the News of the World or the Daily Mirror he was never “directly involved” in the hiring of private investigators.
Most eyebrow-raising was over Morgan’s claim that, as editor, he only knew “5 percent of what his journalists are up to at any given time”. That may be true in a general sense but given tabloid culture’s famously hands-on editors, the real question is what that 5 percent may have included – and that’s what Morgan’s new bosses at CNN would dearly like to know.
A CNN source told the Wall Street Journal in August that the network’s executives had closely read Morgan’s memoirs and questioned him about his career:
A lot of the questioning, this person said, surrounded not telephone-hacking practices but Mr Morgan’s firing from the Mirror in 2004, after he authorised the newspaper’s publication of photographs showing Iraqis being abused by British soldiers that the British army alleged were fakes.
If CNN didn’t do enough due diligence a year ago, the Leveson inquiry is doing that job for it. And it comes at a time when Morgan’s ratings are diving – although there is no way of knowing if Morgan’s tainted past as a British tabloid editor has contributed to his failure.
In the most recent month, November, Morgan’s ratings declined to their lowest point since he replaced King, lagging in third place far behind Fox News’s Sean Hannity and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in the daily 9pm slot.
Come January, Piers Morgan Tonight will no longer enjoy its year-on-year comparison with the feeble ratings of King’s last spell in the interviewer’s chair. At that point CNN may decide that the baggage is not worth the fare. Especially as Leveson is now hinting at calling Heather Mills as a witness – and her memory may be much clearer than Morgan’s.
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]]>Best exemplified by TiVo and other DVRs, preceded by the creaky VCR, the act of consuming media at a time much after its initial airing is so commonplace that live viewings are so uncommon that friends often tiptoe around current storylines for top shows. In some social circles, only the most breaking drama series get the “day it actually aired” treatment - like Breaking Bad, Dexter or Homeland, while everything else goes to TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO), to be consumed later. (Obviously, I saw the season finales for Dexter and Homeland last night)
News, with some exceptions, can be similarly stored away for later viewing, be it through RSS readers or on your social network of choice. One must not be glued to the real time stream to make sure you don’t miss anything. Instead, the RSS reader traps your own hand-picked links, ready for viewing when you get the opportunity, not necessarily tied to their time of posting.
On the big screen, movies may bank on a massive opening weekend, but with consumers having so many options for entertainment sources, it’s common to see people mention they’ll “wait for Netflix”, which could be months or years away, content to save a few dollars while also getting the comfort of watching in their own home. And if you do find yourself suddenly interested in a show your friends have been seeing which has been out a few seasons, don’t fret, as you can, in almost all cases, catch up - tapping into many options, be they Netflix, Hulu, Xfinity, iTunes or Android Market.
This fall, I made it a personal mission to watch all of Mad Men, after hearing people go on and on about its quality. I powered through it with many late-night Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) marathons. After finally ordering Showtime, I caught up on this season’s Dexter on Xfinity, and then did the same for Homeland. If my wife misses her favorite shows, she can do the same, tapping into the various video repositories on the web, including the big three networks, typically slower to adapt to the innovation of the web.
I watch my evening talk shows 3 to 5 in a row, from Jon Stewart to Conan, fast forwarding through commercials and skipping uninteresting guests - efficiently getting the best and skipping the rest. It’s almost the same approach I take to my RSS reader or activity on the social networks, skimming, reading, clicking and leaving no prisoners. Even if I’m not constantly connected, and I do a good job of getting close, I don’t feel this sense of missing something.
Realtime reactions to breaking news events, kicked off by an initial discovery, and then rattling around search engines and social media, can’t be duplicated by time shifted content, but for most buckets of content, be they text, audio or video, the drive to be first and in the mix of the story as it is interpreted and curated, is not essential. Advents in information and content sharing over the last few years have instead made “on demand” a reality, getting me what I want when I want it, not when someone else decides for me.
This post originally published on LouisGray.com.
Louis Gray is a Silicon Valley tech geek blogger and author of LouisGray.com. In his day job, he is a Product Marketing Manager on the Google+ team for Google.
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]]>BBC Worldwide has taken a great leap forward in getting U.S. carriage for its BBC World News channel by striking a deal with Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA), the largest U.S. cable operator.
Comcast’s Xfinity TV is adding the channel in six major markets, including Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, with plans to offer it in nearly 15 million U.S. homes by 2012’s end.
BBC Worldwide (the BBC’s commercial and overseas wing) has been building up its content and ad sales operation for BBC.com/news over the last couple of years, but had still been seeking significant TV traction beside its own BBC America channel. NPR executive editor Dick Meyer is leaving to run and expand the BBC’s U.S. news coverage as the 2012 presidential election nears; previously Meyer was at CBS (NYSE: CBS) News.
Al Jazeera English, which is now a firm fixture on many TVs outside the Arab world, has still not yet made the leap in the States.
It is available in a handful of U.S. city cable networks in New York; Washington DC; Burlington, VT; Toledo, OH; and Bristol, RI. But, as online head Mohamed Nanabhay told paidContent in 2009, most of the new carriage is coming from new online platforms like Boxee, Roku, Livestation, Al Jazeera, YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) and Pulse, as well as through Creative Commons re-use.
The latest are Google TV and the Chrome browser. While the app for the former offers text stories, on-demand video and a notification ticker, with live streams coming later, the browser extension includes the live channel as well as a Chrome-esque on-demand video carousel.
While large-scale cable traction continues to be elusive, the coming connected TV boom could mean an even bigger opportunity for Al Jazeera to get to U.S. televisions.
Nanabhay (via Broadband TV News): “We are constantly looking for new ways to deliver our content and interact with our audiences. Our online philosophy has always been to make our world-class content available to audiences on the platforms they choose.”
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]]>Bewkes sought to play down the threat posed by so-called ‘cord cutters’ to the lucrative cable business by saying that only a small number of low-income people were ceasing to pay for tv. In his view, any drop in cable subscribers is attributable to the economy and is not due to “some kind of distribution change.” Such distribution changes would presumably include services like Netflix which some cord cutters are using as a partial alternative to cable or satellite.
A year ago, the Time Warner CEO famously belittled the would-be upstart as “the Albanian army” and then this week reflected on Netflix’s recent stumbles by telling the Financial Times, “It can do certain things and not other things. It can fly, it’s not a submarine. Don’t turn a hamburger into a cow.”
At today’s gathering, Bewkes did, however, acknowledge that the price of cable packages are beginning to strain consumers and added that the squeeze stems in no small part from the price of sports channels. He suggested that hefty fees like those charged by ESPN (NYSE: DIS) are resembling a tax on subscribers but said that Time Warner has the right amount of sports in its current programming mix. The company appears to be sitting out a recent bidding frenzy for slices of the NFL and is instead looking forward to using the end of the NBA strike to showcase its new basketball offerings.
On the more fundamental question of how Time Warner plans to keep making money from its cable offerings, Bewkes was candid.
“The monetization strategy is simple. It’s the one we all love and the one we’ve used for years,” he said, explaining that carriage fees and a broad subscription base would continue to be the enormous driver of profits that they have been for years.
Time Warner is also enjoying a rebound in other parts of its business empire, including CNN which is profitable and has increased ratings after an abysmal 2010. As for publishing, Bewkes noted that its flagship magazine, Time, was named ‘hottest in its category’ by AdWeek and that magazines have not suffered in the way that newspapers have. But he was also vague about the company’s digital strategy, only noting that tablets allowed publications like Sports Illustrated to show a “more powerful version of their pictures.” Time Warner just appointed digital advertising veteran Lara Lang to lead its magazine division which has been slow out of the gate to exploit opportunities like the iPad.
Audience members asked what Time Warner was going to do to juice its flagging channels, TNT and TBS, and improve sales of its video games. Bewkes acknowledged that numbers in these areas were weak but said he saw promise in the success of the show The Big Bang and the value of games like the Midway franchise.
In coming years, Time Warner can also look forward to cash cows like the Harry Potter and Dark Knight franchises helping it retool the flagging parts of its operations.
Bewkes was speaking at the 39th annual UBS Global Media and Communications Conference.
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]]>HBO Co-President Eric Kessler told a gathering of industry boffins this morning in New York that there is no chance his company will make shows like True Blood or The Wire available to digital non-subscribers. HBO currently has around 30 million customers, all of whom must buy its content as an upgrade from their cable or satellite package.
Kessler said that, despite the success of HBO GO (“It’s HBO Anywhere”), the company has no plans to offer the new mobile offering to a broad audience. HBO first unveiled GO as a browser-only service last year and then launched it as an app for phones and the iPad this spring. Kessler said 55 percent of GO downloads have occurred on the iPad (GO is not yet available on other tabloids) while phone downloads were about evenly split the iPhone and Android devices.
HBO’s decision to remain tightly wedded to the cable industry makes it something of an outlier in this age of aggregation. The rationale, according to Kessler, is that services like Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) and Hulu are competitors and that HBO’s bread and butter is content not licensing.
The strategy makes sense but still seems like a risky one. The rising cost of basic cable means that would-be subscribers must shell out ever more money before they can even contemplate buying HBO in the first place. This means that HBO’s strategy remains based on persuading already strapped consumers to add more to their cable bill while also forgoing so-called ‘cord cutters’ altogether.
Kessler is undaunted, saying HBO regards cord cutting as a temporary phenomenon that will go away once the larger economy improves. He also says that HBO will flourish under its current model thanks to its star power (its latest coup is getting The Social Network‘s Aaron Sorkin to pen a series) and because its partnership with cable companies allow it to avoid transaction costs like billing.
It is hard to argue given that HBO has been dominant in its field for so long. Still, as a cord cutter who has seen a few episodes of HBO’s Game of Thrones and would pay to watch more on my iPad, the company’s decision is an incredibly frustrating one. I am not going to go out and buy a cable package simply so that I can pay even more to watch the show and, at the same time, I’m unable to buy it the current season on Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) or rent it in a video store. There are no doubt a large (and likely growing) pool of customers like me. It is hard to believe HBO will ignore us forever.
Kessler was speaking at “VideoSchmooze NYC”, an event hosted by VideoNuze editor Will Richmond.
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]]>The companies have also teamed to offer a six-month grace period on Spotify subscription to Virgin Media customers on particular tiers.
Virgin repeatedly says that it is embracing over-the-top services with its new TiVo box. Whilst the box is impressive, it is also quite slow and those services are confined to formally-struck deals in a distant Apps & Games menu item.
Spotify was already available on TV with Telia in Sweden and recently launched on Boxee. More smart TV and box roll-outs are expected.
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]]>The defection from Bloomberg TV to Reuters comes as the financial news services try to expand their audiences to a more general business audience while continuing to jockey for position among Wall St. traders and firms, which are experiencing massive layoffs amid the wild daily swings of global market indices. One of the central areas of that battle, which is also being waged by Dow Jones (NSDQ: NWS) as well as smaller outlets like TheStreet.com (NSDQ: TST) and Seeking Alpha, apart from web traffic, is around getting video viewers.
Last year, Reuters introduced a video on demand option for its subscribers called Reuters Insider. Colarusso will take over responsibility for that video product and will report directly to Chrystia Freeland, editor of Thomson Reuters Digital.
In the meantime, Chris Cramer, who has previously run much of Reuters’ video programming efforts, will become editor at large and will focus on several key projects as Reuters expands its multimedia focus.
Over the summer, Reuters’ Markets division was the focus of a major shakeup that had several top executives ousted, as the company sought to streamline operations and manage its costs better in the face of disappointing results from products like Reuters’ Eikon and Elektron platforms, which were intended to attract more financial services customers as the company attempted to match its traditional data and news distribution with multimedia and social media features.
Colarusso is also the latest high profile hire on Reuters’ editorial side this past year. Since February, when Stephen J. Adler was shifted from his role as SVP and editorial director of the news service’s Professional division to editor-in-chief of Reuters News, he has moved a number of staffers around and brought in some well-known names as the news service tries to match Bloomberg, which has been aggressively trying to build its brand among wider audience of professionals that goes beyond both companies’ core financial markets clients.
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]]>The partnership between HBO and Time Inc.‘s SI has been a long one, but this one is a bit different. The annual SI “Swimsuit Issue” has been accompanied by an HBO special for years. SI also contributes segments from time to time to HBO’s Real Sports series.
As the website gets kicked off, HBO and SI, along with the program’s producers Endgame Entertainment, in association with Playground, will also be working on social media connections to both outlets’ respective sites.
The direction will largely come from SI, as Terry McDonell, Time Inc. Sports Group Editor, is one of the show’s producers.
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]]>TV Newser estimated that 50 jobs would be eliminated at CNN. A number of the layoffs were made at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters, as the network plans to rely on editors from different locations. Nevertheless, cuts were also handed down in New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles and Miami.
Apart from reducing staffing size, Womack’s memo said that the review also led to changes in how photojournalists are assigned stories. Some photojournalists lost their jobs as CNN’s review found that user-gen, through CNN iReport, and social media in general did a fine enough job in producing and distributing breaking news stories. The review also looked at how the number of stories across broadcast, online and mobile tend to correspond during various dayparts.
The layoffs come as a number of news organizations are trying to better position themselves to cover the U.S. presidential election and the summer Olympics. In past years, that would tend to mean staffing up, but with the economy weak, newspapers, broadcasters and other publishers are more likely to look to technology to fill the gaps once made up by staffers.
Womack’s full memo appears on the following page.
From: “Womack, Jack”
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:58:35 -0500
To: “*CNN ALL Cities ImageSound (TBS)”, *CNN ALL Cities Tech Ops
Subject: NOTE TO STAFF
For the past three years, we have been analyzing our work process across Image + Sound, both in the field and in our editing and production areas.
Our goal has been to make sure we have the right resources in the right places to meet the demands of all of our programs. Technology investments in our newsrooms now allow more desk-top editing and publishing for broadcast and online. This evolution allows more people in more places to edit and publish than ever before. As a result of these technology and workflow changes, CNN is reducing the number of media editors in our work force in Atlanta. CNN Image + Sound will continue with high end craft editing that has positive impact on our networks and platforms.
We also spent a great deal of time analyzing how we utilize and deploy photojournalists across all of our locations in the U.S. We looked at the evolution of daytime and evening line-ups. We analyzed how stories are assigned and more importantly the ratio of stories assigned that actually make it on to our networks or platforms. We know that we have to sharpen our focus on stories assigned to ensure that this great work gets on air. We looked at production demands, down time, and international deployments. We looked at the impact of user-generated content and social media, CNN iReporters and of course our affiliate contributions in breaking news. Consumer and pro-sumer technologies are simpler and more accessible. Small cameras are now high broadcast quality. More of this technology is in the hands of more people. After completing this analysis, CNN determined that some photojournalists will be departing the company.
We cannot begin to thank these individuals enough for their service to CNN. They leave with our respect and our sincere best wishes.
Now that we have completed this three-year review, we believe that we have the right resources in the right places and the proper staffing at Image + Sound, and that the unit is well-positioned to have an even more positive impact on our networks and platforms.
Jack
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]]>The AP began overhauling its video capabilities last November, when AP Television News started planning a “multimillion-dollar upgrade” of its video and image production. For London-based APTN, the company’s global video news agency, the revamp is considered the single biggest investment the wire service has made in it since 1998, when the AP bought its competitor, Worldwide Television News.
Competition between the AP and a variety of news services has centered around providing multimedia, as Reuters (NYSE: TRI), Bloomberg and Dow Jones (NSDQ: NWS) have placed greater emphasis on broadband video as well as supplying news to cable and broadcast outlets.
AP Entertainment Daily News, as the HD video venture is called, will cover the usual mix of celebrities, fashion, awards shows, film premieres, concerts and theater. The service runs more than 300 stories per month. AP’s Celebrity Extra, Movies Now, Film File and Entertainment Now are also available to customers in HD.
To make sure its clients stay interested, the AP will be producing a higher volume of entertainment stories on weekends, which will amount to an extra 50 minutes’ worth of weekly entertainment video.
Sports will be the next area to get the HD video treatment. That part is expected to be available in January, giving it plenty of time to get ready for the summer Olympics Games in London and the U.S. presidential elections in November. Release
]]>Still, 19 percent is a big chunk, especially since ESPN’s strong performance helped Disney beat analysts’ expectations in FYQ4. In any event, while recent reports have suggested that both sides of the NBA lockout have made progress, Iger expressed little worry that even if the NBA season were to be completely canceled, ESPN would be able to run enough college basketball and football game to retain most advertisers’ commitments. Still, that seems like a stretch, and media buyers would probably demand give-backs.
“We deliver the male demographic that advertisers desperately want to reach,” Iger said.
Turning to the uncertain economy, Iger insisted that the scatter market looks strong. However, advertising activity has been slowing in the last few weeks, he acknowledged.
Iger’s confidence was also on display in discussing how video on demand, either online or through cable set-top boxes, have helped driver greater interest in the company’s programming.
“A few years ago, we were all worried about the effects of DVRs on advertising and ratings,” Iger said. “But with 42 percent penetration of DVR households in the U.S., the actual increase in ratings is remarkable. We can now sell against C3 ratings and maybe one day, we’ll sell against C7 ratings. It’s not detrimental, if anything, it’s enhancing ratings.”
When asked what inning the industry is in when it comes to broadband video, Iger laughed and said he still considers this “the pre-season.” “You’re going to see a lot more forms of SVOD and other devices for watching filmed entertainment and TV programming,” he said. Still, he doesn’t expect the broadband video business to provide anything more than incremental revenues for some time. “It will continue to grow, but it won’t approach 50 percent for many years, because the traditional business is still so strong.”
Instead, he sees e-commerce as the main source of Disney’s main digital growth, certainly by the time Iger’s contract as CEO ends in 2016. “When you talk about growth in digital platforms, it’s not just from Netflix,” Iger told the analysts on the call. “Our total digital revenue is around $1 billion. And that comes from a lot of different areas, not just video.”
Gaming and social are the other areas Disney has put enormous investment behind. But the company has lately taken a more cautious approach to social gaming since acquiring social game developer Playdom in the latter half of 2010.
“We purposely dialed back the number of game releases for a variety reasons,” Iger said. “We wanted to monitor the social games space more closely, and make sure our infrastructure was sound. The other reason was looking at the intellectual property implications” and how the mix of in-house and outside gaming development should look.
Disney will launch eight new social games in the next year, some which will come from existing Disney and Marvel brands and others that are represented by “original intellectual property.”
]]>Disney earned 58 cents a share for its fiscal fourth quarter, up 35 percent, on $10.4 billion of revenue, up 9 percent. Operating income rose 23 percent to 42.1 billion.
Walt Disney Interactive Media was the only segment operating at a loss, as the the unit’s income was down 32 percent for the year, though it gained 10 percent during the quarter. On the plus side, Interactive Media revenues gained 29 percent for fiscal 2011 and rose 19 percent during the quarter.
The company blamed part of the problems at the Interactive unit on the inclusion of social game developer Playdom, which was acquired for $763.2 million in July 2010, though the deal didn’t close until last fall. For the past year, the Playdom integration has impacted Disney’s earnings negatively, though the effects from that purchase were partially offset by an improvement at entertainment company’s console game business.
While entertainment rivals like Viacom (NYSE: VIA) benefited from its few box office and home entertainment successes, Disney’s Filmed Entertainment revenues for the year fell 5 percent to $6.4 billion as its income dropped 11 percent to $618 million.
Among the other parts under Disney’s Media unit, cable TV was strong from the beginning to the end, as revenues rose double digits during the quarter and for fiscal 2011 in total. Even broadcasting, which is typically a weaker area at most major media companies, was particularly robust on the income side, mostly thanks to cost-cutting as revenues were in the low single digits throughout 2011.
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In its Q3 earnings report last week, MSLO said that its publishing segment’s revenues were down 3.2 percent. At the same time digital sales rose 17 percent, while broadcasting dollars gained 14 percent. The opposite trajectory of those two revenue poles is something most major magazine publishers are dealing with to some extent. MSLO has been particularly aggressive in trying to drive cross-platform ad sales across its publishing and broadcasting units, but the weak economy has made the process more than challenging.
Lagani is viewed as someone well-versed in both sides of the print and digital divide and certainly can bring existing relationships with marketers and agencies to MSLO, though the company’s problem is not a lack of interest from brands—it’s the ability of the publisher, and its peers, to better manage the shift to digital as advertisers pull back due to economic uncertainty.
At the same time, MSLO is still clearing up some corporate uncertainty that’s hung over the business the past few months.
This past June, Blackstone was retained as an adviser to help MSLO see if it should sell the company completely, or in parts, seek investment capital or find alliances. Since that point, the company has said it is only looking for strategic alliances as Blackstone’s main focus. Separately, Martha Stewart had been preparing to rejoin the board last quarter, years after her conviction in charges related to a 2004 insider trading case.
At the same time, MSLO hired Oxygen co-founder Lisa Gersh as president and COO, as president and CEO of merchandising Robin Marino stepped down.The company also said that Gersh will become CEO within the next year or so
Even before June’s big announcement, MSLO had restructured its ad sales team in October 2010, making one person the focal point across all print, broadcast and online marketing efforts.
With the dust settled over last year’s ad sales reorganization, Lagani will be the focal point for the company’s advertising efforts. He left Glam Media just over two years ago to join NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) Universal’s women’s content network iVillage, which was in the middle of its advertising turnaround at the time he signed on. He had previously been at Condé Nast and Meredith Corp. (NYSE: MDP) Release
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]]>» NYT Digital Head Martin Nisenholtz Retiring; Won’t Be Replaced; (paidContent; paidContent)
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]]>Tercek began his presentation—slides will be available shortly, along with video—by tapping his inner Marshall McLuhan by telling the audience, “Content is always shaped by the container.” And in the case of the record industry with CDs and cable television with the set-top box, the container is shattering.
He illustrated his point with a description of Charles Dickens revenue model for the novel. The British author, like others of the period, didn’t sell books—he sold serialized chapters. The container of the “serialized pamphlet” influenced Dickens to write chapters with a cliffhanger so readers would be hungry for the next one. Because he was successful, he wrote a great many chapters. Dickens was so good, in fact, interest in his works crossed the Atlantic, where they were packaged as complete books—which publishers in the U.S. produced without paying Dickens royalties for his content. “We complain about China, but once, we were the content pirates.”
Eventually, story structure was determined by TV, which structured scenes around commercial breaks. But as broadcasters create shorter, more frequent commercial pods, they’re ending up losing their audience.
While cord-cutting has been talked about as an emerging threat, if not currently an actual one, to the cable industry, Tercek says that MSOs would do well to prepare for users to turn away from the set-top box.
Even broadcasters (i.e. “content companies”) find themselves in jeopardy, as they face competition from quarters they never had to worry about, such as device makers and telcos and the cable distributors themselves. TV channels like ABC (NYSE: DIS) and NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) face a future where they are simply apps on a tablet that consumers choose to view.
The move to TV Everywhere, where cable subscribers are given permission to view subscription programming on digital devices, is the way cable believes it can hold on to their value in the eyes of consumers, as device manufacturers, telcos and content providers compete to show programming on their own terms. This will force the unbundling of cable and the MSOs will have to create new services to compete, Tercek said.
Some argue that the telcos will be the winner by “rebundling,” by offering to sell users a basic tier of service and then premium on top of that. “I don’t think the consumer has been asking for that,” Tercek said. “People don’t want a choice between a collection of basic and premium channels. In fact, we’re seeing the end of the channel.”
In the two-way network, channels, are about getting viewers to tune it at a specific time. As time-shifting increases, the value of programming for a specific moment will fall by the wayside. Unbundling will lead to the creation of marketplaces of content. “Every successful business on the web is a marketplace of some sort: Google (NSDQ: GOOG) with search, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) with retail products and iTunes with music and apps. They are all marketplaces: efficient mechanisms for matching buyers and sellers. These companies don’t need to monetize content the way TV companies do. Facebook monetizes your social graph and market it to the highest bidder. Google does the same; it’s all about selling consumer behaviors, identities and relationships.”
The end of the channel has been happening for a while, Tercek said. “Broadcast news used to be the flagship of the brand. But we’ve hollowed out newsrooms because of the cost. Reality television was thought to be a fad, but it is here to stay. Every TV programmer has some form of reality show. We’ve also started to notice endless repeats of hits in cable, because it’s cheaper to rerun a show than invest in a new one. About 60 percent of cable viewing on a particular channel is three or four shows; the rest is filler.”
While Tercek expressed a great deal of pessimism for the current state of cable TV, he is particularly excited about the kinds of businesses that will emerge. “What might the service of the future look like? A company called Frequency—I wish I could talk about what they’re releasing next week. I was at a presentation of their’s earlier and it rocked my world.”
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]]>Yaccarino will be responsible for all cable entertainment and digital advertising sales for the company, including USA, Syfy, Bravo Media, E! Entertainment, Oxygen Media, Style, G4, Sprout, Chiller, Cloo and their respective digital platforms. Additionally Yaccarino will oversee the sales efforts for NBC.com, AccessHollywood.com, NBCSports.com, NBCOlympics.com and GolfChannel.com and the stand alone digital businesses DailyCandy, Swirl, Fandango, iVillage and Television Without Pity.
She will report jointly to Bonnie Hammer, Chairman, NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment & Cable Studios, and Lauren Zalaznick, Chairman, NBCUniversal Entertainment & Digital Networks and Integrated Media.
Yaccarino is known by media buyers as a tenacious ad seller. The new post gives her a good deal more power than what she had accumulated over her nearly two decades with Turner, where she worked under ad sales head David Levy. Now that Comcast and NBCU have put a number of their content pieces into place, Yaccarino will be overseeing a long list of shows and digital properties.
While ad sales forecasts have continued to predict a healthy rise as audiences and advertisers continue to migrate to cable. ZenithOptimedia’s forecast calls for cable to grow 12 percent this year and 10 percent in 2012, while Magna Global says that national cable networks should gain 12.4 percent in 2011 and outpacing nearly every local category, including local online media.
]]>Much like rival MSO Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) said the day before, Cablevision lost subscribers on the video side, but gained on the broadband side. While TWC CEO Glenn Britt admitted that over-the-top services—he didn’t mention any by name, but the usual suspects are providers like Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Roku, Boxee and others—seemed to be having an impact. Over the past year, Cablevision has blamed the video subscriber losses on the weak economy, especially high unemployment and weak housing starts, as the cause of its declining video numbers.
Specifically, Cablevision lost 19,000 video subscribers in Q3, compared to 24,500 last year and 23,000 in Q2. Overall, it ended Q3 with 3.26 million video subscribers in Q3, and gained 17,000 broadband customers and 38,000 telephone users.
As for the “other” category, which includes Newsday, News 12 Networks, MSG Varsity, Clearview Cinemas, Cablevision Media Sales Corporation (formerly Rainbow Ad Sales), revenues were 5.5 percent, primarily due to declines at the Long Island daily newspaper, though the company didn’t break out separate numbers for the property.
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