paidContent news watch | Media & Publishing

The Most Important Thing About Bridesmaids' $40 Million In VOD Revenues

2012-02-10T17:51:33Z

Universal Pictures put a lot of palms on foreheads this week when it announced that its summer comedy hit Bridesmaids has taken in $40 million so far across cable and internet VOD platforms. Certainly, it’s a big performance—long-entrenched entertainment data tracker Rentrak christened it the biggest VOD haul ever, while Steve Savage, co-president of New Video, a leading-edge distributor to digital channels, called the number “extraordinary.” But, perhaps, the bigger news was the fact that Universal was releasing any VOD number at all.

Unlike theatrical distribution—studios give out granular performance data for their movies every Sunday to the press—precious little in the way of revenue or transaction figures on movie VOD distribution makes it to the press. For example, while Rentrak would tell us that the Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX) comedy Due Date ranks second all-time in VOD distribution, followed by another comedy from the same studio, Hall Pass. A Rentrak representative told us the company has revenue and transaction data on those films and many others, measuring their performances across cable and satellite VOD, as well as internet VOD and download platforms.

And what it calls the “movies on demand business” is up, growing 9 percent last year to nearly $1 billion, according to Rentrak—this compares to the $10.73 billion made by studios at theaters in the U.S. and Canada in 2011, and the nearly $15 million grossed selling and renting DVD and Blu-ray titles domestically.

But citing its relationship with the studios, Rentrak said it’s prohibited from giving out VOD data on specific movies beyond ranking unless authorized. A digital executive for one of the major studios told us it’s “normal” practice for big media companies not to routinely release data about developing platforms. The public, he said, would have no use for data points that are too new to have context. The executive insisted that once it evolves just a bit more, we’ll soon start to see data that make the monetization of digital film distribution as transparent as theatrical release.

We’re not holding our breath on that. Back in 1997, when the DVD was launched, some in the home-entertainment market were saying the same thing. Fifteen years later, when Universal touted Bridesmaids’ $100 million in U.S. DVD and Blu-ray sales in the same press release, that nearly opened as many eyes as the VOD number.

On some level, we tie this reluctance to the byzantine nature of the old-Hollywood accounting culture, its remnants still intact despite the corporate takeover of the studios by media corporations—the less the world knows about your revenue streams, the less you have to share them.

“Sure, the more transparent a studio is, the more phone calls they get from lawyers looking for a piece of the pie,” said Marc Schiller, an independent film marketing executive who works with filmmakers including Ed Burns. Strategically, that philosophy may have worked in regard to the DVD business, which was further “downstream” in the distribution chain, Schiller said.

But particularly on the independent side of the film business, where producers and their distribution partners are releasing VOD simultaneous with theatrical release—or, in the case of the so-called “ultra VOD” model, weeks before it—not having enough data is a planning detriment, he said.

“It’s vital that we know what the benchmarks for success are,” Schiller explained. “Rentrak box-office data is readily available for people who need to understand and develop strategies around theatrical distribution. But one of the major challenges in putting a VOD release strategy together is that there isn’t enough historical data.”

In the independent film business, he said, filmmakers and their distribution partners tend to work more collaboratively, and the VOD reporting process tends to be a little more transparent.

The New Video Group, which distributes more than 6,000 movies through outlets ranging from DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) to iTunes, maintains an online dashboard to give its filmmaking partners real-time performance data on their movies. “We are as perfectly transparent as we can be,” said Steve Savage, New Video’s co-president.

But even in the independent world, information about VOD distribution doesn’t exactly seem to be free-flowing. For example, another VOD buzz number that recently surfaced was the more than $5 million reportedly grossed by the Wall Street-themed Kevin Spacey film Margin Call. The film’s backers gave that number to the press, “But you can ask 90 percent of the people in the film industry, and we still don’t know where that number came from,” Schiller said.

Related

Amazon's Kindle Plays A Part In Penguin's Library Decision

2012-02-10T15:41:38Z

Since Penguin announced yesterday that it is ending its partnership with OverDrive and will no longer provide e-books or digital audiobooks to libraries, it’s become clear that OverDrive’s relationship with Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) played a part in the decision.

Back in November when Penguin stopped offering new e-books to libraries, it also stopped offering e-books to library patrons using Kindles. A few days later Penguin restored Kindle access, but also noted, “Penguin informed suppliers to libraries that it expected them to abide by existing agreements to offer older digital titles to libraries only if those files were held behind the firewalls of the suppliers.”

I noted at the time that if you have a Kindle and check out a library book on it, clicking “Get for Kindle” sends you straight to Amazon’s website instead of having you check out the book from within the library’s site. Kindle borrowing is done over the air, so if you check out a library book on Kindle it will be delivered wirelessly to your device, just like a book you buy from the Kindle Store.

That wasn’t how it was supposed to be. “OverDrive does NOT have permission to first authorize the lending of an ebook to a library end user and then forward the request for actual distribution and tracking of the title to Amazon.com or ANY other retailer,” writes InfoDocket today. “Similarly, in most situations, publishers do not permit retailers to lend e-books directly to end users.”

Libraries that already have Penguin e-books and digital audiobooks will be allowed to keep them and patrons will able to keep borrowing those books. But there’s no more wireless borrowing. InfoDocket reports that OverDrive sent this e-mail to its library partners last night:

Starting tomorrow (February 10, 2012), Penguin will no longer offer additional copies of e-books and download audiobooks for library purchase. Additionally, Penguin eBooks loaned for reading on Kindle devices will need to be downloaded to a computer then transferred to the device over USB. For library patrons, this means Penguin eBooks will no longer be available for over-the-air delivery to Kindle devices or to Kindle apps.

Let’s be honest: The over-the-air delivery of library e-books to Kindle is incredibly convenient. It’s just about as easy as buying an e-book from the Kindle Store. From the point of view of the publishers, that is too easy.

So what happens now? Penguin said yesterday “it is vital that we forge relationships with libraries and build a future together.” That future is likely to make the e-book borrowing process a little more complicated, a little less convenient—in other words, less like shopping and more like, well, going to the library.

Related

Digital Downloads Jumped 26% In 2011, Led By E-Books

2012-02-09T21:02:11Z

Users are downloading more e-books, music, TV shows and movies than ever: Digital content and subscriptions were the fastest-growing retail e-commerce category in 2011, according to a new ComScore (NSDQ: SCOR) report.

As tablets and e-readers become more popular, “acceleration of e-book downloads…represented a strong driver of this growth,” ComScore says in its new report, “U.S. Digital Future in Focus 2012.”

Retail e-commerce spending—which does not include spending on travel—hit $161.5 billion last year, up 13 percent from 2010. Digital content and subscriptions were the fastest-growing category, followed by consumer electronics (you need devices to consume all that content, right?).

Download the full report here.

Zeebox Searches For Money In TV's Social Second Screen

2012-02-09T19:28:43Z

After quickly gaining a warm reception and a rapid post-launch investment from BSkyB, the social TV app startup co-founded by ex BBC iPlayer head honcho Anthony Rose is making its first real play at monetisation.

From Thursday, Zeebox is starting to include “click to buy” slots in its iPad and iPhone app and to sell second-screen ads to brands, so that each generates money from people watching TV shows with Zeebox on their laps.

It works like this…

Thanks to speech-to-text, subtitles and other metadata including from Philips’ Civolution fingerprinter spin-off, the Zeebox iPad app already shows users a live stream of info “tags” corresponding to material in shows they are watching on their lounge TV. Right now, they link to Wikipedia articles.

But Zeebox also had always hoped to leverage them to start linking to marketing messaging as well as to purchase options during the commercial breaks between shows.

So, during those breaks, Zeebox will denote actionable tag links with icons for songs, products, travel services etc. Those links will send users through to merchants like iTunes (for music), Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) (for DVDs), Tesco (for food) and Boots (for cosmetics) via Zeebox affiliate codes, so that it generates a percentage commission of any subsequent sales.

Zeebox is running the system so far on about 20 percent of UK TV’s commercial break ads, mostly for ITV (LSE: ITV) hcnanle.s

Will it work?

“Our consumer research told us that people want an easy way to buy things they see on TV,” Rose’s co-founder Ernesto Schmitt says in a press release.

Do affiliate links add up to a business model? Not in isolation. Shazam claims to make a percentage of music purchases worth $100 million a year that its app sent to stores last year. But it has tried to diversify its revenue streams.

Using just the affiliate commission model, Zeebox will need to generate click-throughs and actual purchases at a large scale in order to clock up significant total income. But the startup appears to be seeking other streams, too.

The prospect of selling specific second-screen tag ads to advertiser brands is exciting as an innovation. But brands would likely consider this experimental until such time as Zeebox is being used by large numbers of TV viewers.

Zeebox last month claimed “250,000 users” - but simultaneous prime-time users metrics are not publicised.

One route to scale for Zeebox is through BSkyB (NYSE: BSY). The UK pay-TV platform leader in January took equity in the startup with a deal through which it will leverage Zeebox features in a social-centric upgrade revision to its EPG app for its Sky+ PVR.

But, still, the whole prospect, for all such operators, depends on the usage scale of tablets or smartphones as engagement facilitators during TV shows. On that hinges the very notion of the second screen but, so far, much research points to a growing trend there.

Indie Booksellers All Yanking Amazon Titles? Not Exactly

2012-02-09T18:17:56Z

It would be dramatic to say that independent booksellers nationwide are boycotting Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Publishing titles en masse—and hey, it could still happen. But a new decision from the American Booksellers Association’s IndieCommerce—which comes as bookstore chains Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and Indigo are making similar decisions—is not so far-reaching.

IndieCommerce is a for-profit subsidiary of the American Booksellers Association. It’s a web platform that lets independent bookstores have e-commerce websites without creating them from scratch. About 350 bookstores are currently using IndieCommerce to run customized sites with shopping carts and content. IndieCommerce provides a database of 5 million print books and a database of about 500,000 e-books through Google (NSDQ: GOOG). This allows shoppers to search for and buy print books and e-books through their independent booksellers’ websites and means individual booksellers don’t have to input titles by hand.

IndieCommerce announced this week that it is removing Amazon Publishing titles from its database. That means if you visit your local bookstore’s website and type in an Amazon Publishing title, you won’t be able to find it—unless the bookstore chooses individually to stock it. “All retailers using the IndieCommerce platform are free to stock any published books from any publisher in their stores and/or to fulfill any customer orders through another source,” the ABA notes. “This policy change in no way affects that ability.”

It’s not a “boycott” but a “protest,” Matt Supko, ABA technology director told me, because Amazon does not currently allow other retailers to sell its e-books. “If [independent bookstores] are expected to be listing and marketing print titles that Amazon is publishing, and we’re not allowed to sell the e-book version of the title, that just seems unfair,” he said.

If Amazon makes its e-books available across all etailers, Supko says IndieCommerce will change its policy and start listing the books again.

Related

Google Books Lawsuit Lurches Forward

2012-02-09T18:02:55Z

The fate of Google’s massive book scanning project has been up in the air since a legal settlement collapsed last year. New court filings this week suggest a possible end game.

The filings come after the Authors Guild decided in December to restart a class action lawsuit that demands Google (NSDQ: GOOG) pay authors for scanning their works without permission. The case was on hold for years as authors and publishers pursued an ambitious three-way deal to split digital book revenue with Google.

After Judge Denny Chin rejected the deal last March, publishers have not gone forward with their original lawsuit and some have instead struck their own deals with Google.

Google is responding to the revived lawsuit by trying to knock the Authors Guild out of the case on the grounds that it doesn’t have legal standing. If a court agrees, this would force the three remaining individual plaintiffs in the case to continue to wage an expensive legal battle on their own. (Three other individual authors dropped out in January).

In its filing this week, the Authors Guild pushed back:

Google turns fairness on its head when it argues that every individual copyright owner must sue here, rather than the Authors Guild on behalf of its 8,500 members.

Meanwhile, Google filed a separate document to oppose “certification”, the legal green light that allows a class action to go forward. Citing a recent Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) case in which the Supreme Court tightened the rules for class actions, Google argued that the authors should not be treated as one group:

As became apparent during the settlement approval process, authors differ in their views about Google Books. New survey evidence shows that many authors directly benefit from the program, and affirmatively approve of the way in which Google has made books easier to find.

So what does this all mean? Google, it seems, is hoping the case will shrivel up if it can remove the Authors’ Guild. If that fails, Google will likely dig in for the long haul on the grounds that any settlement could be prohibitive. At the same time, the company has always claimed that it’s legally allowed to scan books under the law of fair use so long as it only shows snippets to the public.

In the bigger picture, it is worth noting that the ground has shifted considerably since the scanning controversy first erupted. Today, ebooks are everywhere and the out-of-print works that Google is holding have little economic value (aside from improving the company’s search algorithm). Compared to Amazon’s mega-footprint or Apple’s new textbook initiative, the once-feared Google book monopoly no longer feels very daunting.

Related

Where Does Arianna Fit Into AOL's New Patch Plans?

2012-02-09T14:51:12Z

AOL (NYSE: AOL) has hired a new Chief Content Officer in its latest attempt to reboot Patch, the network of hundreds of sites that offer “hyper local” coverage.

The appointment of Parenting.com’s Rachel Fishman Feddersen comes at a high time when AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is promising impatient shareholders that Patch is “not a pet project” and that he will turn around the sites that reportedly lost $100 million last year.

While a turnaround strategy is clearly in order, there’s a big wild card here. Namely, what role will Arianna Huffington now play in the Patch properties?

Recall that Huffington talked up Patch when AOL bought her site last spring and that she later told Vogue that “going local” was one of two things that made up her “Zeitgeist” (who says things like that?).

Huffington has also taken a hands-on role by promoting a “Local Voices” opinion feature and by launching 33 new Patch sites in states at the center of the Republican primaries.

The appointment of Fishman Feddersen suggests, however, that Huffington wants to distance herself from Patch. In response to an email query, a Huffington Post spokesman simply referred me to a Reuters (NYSE: TRI) story which said Fishman Feddersen will report to Jon Brod, President of AOL Local, Mapping and Ventures and a founder of Patch.

In the meantime, Huffington appears to have turned her attention to other projects like a video-streaming service and international editions of the site in France, Italy and Quebec.

As for Patch, which lost two senior sales people last year, AOL’s Armstrong said that 2011 was the high watermark for investment and that this year will see “meaningful improvements on the economics.” Industry veteran Jim Romenesko reported yesterday that the turnaround plans includes consolidation, slashing freelance budgets and an editorial emphasis on “easy, quick-hitting, cookie-cutter copy.”

Patch’s original mission—to provide news coverage for underserved areas—has long seemed more like a journalism school dream (albeit a commendable one) than a business plan. Armstrong claimed these local markets were the last “white spaces” on the internet but the ad dollars simply have not appeared.

The new appointment looks like Patch’s last kick at the “hyper-local” can before the sites become “hyper-regional” or simply vanish altogether.

Related

Beloved Librarian Who Signed With Amazon: 'The Vehemence Surprised Me'

2012-02-09T13:35:02Z

Nancy Pearl, the famous librarian (and action figure!) who recently partnered with Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) to republish a handful of out-of-print titles each year, tells the New York Times and Seattle Times that based on the reaction she’s received it’s a “hard question” whether she’d do it again.

Amazon Publishing is launching Pearl’s line at a time when many in her community—independent booksellers, librarians and some authors—are very angry at Amazon for what they see as predatory business practices, relentless discounting and attacks on independent bookstores.

“By aligning herself with Amazon, she’s turning her back on independents,” Seattle Mystery Bookshop owner J.B. Dickey told the Seattle Times. “Amazon is absolutely antithetical to independent bookselling, and, to many of us, truth, justice and the American way.”

The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) says, oddly, that the amount of money that Pearl is getting from the deal with Amazon “is not enough to fill a tin cup.”

Also, “Her agent, Victoria Sanders, shopped a rediscovery line to 20 publishers. None were interested.” Sanders elaborated on this to the Seattle Times: she approached “every major publisher in New York” and “inevitably, the publishers bowed out after deciding it wasn’t worth the effort, particularly because negotiating the rights to so many books was involved.”

Sanders also told the Seattle Times that she’ll make “a couple of hundred” dollars per book. In a statement unlikely to endear her to anyone who does not regularly eat $200 lunches, she said that is “enough to buy me and a guest lunch in Manhattan at a nice restaurant, and I mean lunch.”

Pearl told the NYT it’s “a hard question” if she’d do it all over again, “but I would still want these books back in print.” Many in the book publishing world respond by asking why Pearl didn’t just decide to self-publish the books. Presumably, the reason she did not want to do so is the effort required to negotiate the rights to what the Seattle Times calls “so many books” but which, according to the original announcement, is about six a year.

Related

Virgin Media Slow To Build A Revolution On TiVo

2012-02-09T11:39:01Z

Virgin Media thinks its new-ish TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) set top box is a game changer. But, whilst the new box - with a big PVR drive, capability for over-the-top services and integrated broadcaster catch-up - is a large improvement on its predecessor, one year after launch, some aspects are more evolution than revolution…

Where are the apps?

In a lengthy meeting with City analysts on Wednesday, company executives re-iterated its belief that the box, which is designed to lure Sky customers and head off the emergence of connected TVs, is “an open platform”. But, if Virgin’s TiVo is so “open”, why does it still carry only 15 handpicked “apps”, compared with the 1,000 Samsung Smart Hub has in Europe? That question specifically was asked by an analyst from Cazenove…

“You will see a few apps every month,” he was told by company COO Andrew Barron. “They will be heavyweight apps, not just fodder. It’s easy to publish all sorts of things to it, because it’s got Flash - but we want to the real heavyweights.”

It was a skilled response to what analysts are now realising - Virgin’s TiVo platform is a step-change from its forebear but still a way’s away from rival boxes and TV sets in this regard, and the big-platform-operator way of thinking is notable by its presence.

Virgin claimed viewers called up 2.4 million app sessions in November, spending 21 minutes a time. The showcase apps are iPlayer and Spotify, whose content tends to run long.

iPad controller delayed

For all its advanced additions, the TiVo box, which comes with an additional £5 monthly premium, still does not include basic features of its predecessor like BBC Red Button, which is part and parcel of free-to-air Freeview. Meanwhile, the iPad controller promised pre-launch more than a year ago is still absent. Again, an analyst quizzed Virgin Media on Wednesday.

“We’ve got it, it works,” Barron told him. “Ninety-nine percent of companies would have rolled it by now - it’s stable, impressive - but we haven’t…

“We wanted to make sure early adopter enthusiasts will love it - but that, when it hits, it goes mass-market quite quickly and is not viewed as some flaky application for enthusiasts but is polished and doesn’t generate calls to support. It shows you our philosophy - we’re a mass-market company.”

This is far from the product development method which many developers nowadays favour - ship first, iterate later.

To premium and beyond

If Virgin’s TiVo hasn’t yet got to grips with “open” as many internet afficonados recognise it or with the full-blown revolution in over-the-top connected TV services that is coming in to view, it is, however, ushering in a step change in viewing habits…

Half of viewing on TiVo is now carried out through its My Shows section - that is, shows recorded on its PVR and personalised recommendations. Virgin, whose TV box has three tuners for simultaneous recording as well as broadcaster catch-up services, is spearheading a big rise in timeshifting, now showing 90 million VOD views per month from customers.

It’s a continuation of a trend the previous V+ box, as well as the rise of broadcasters’ own catch-up brands, had created before it. But, if TiVo is still far opening the gates to over-the-top operators in reality, it is proving to be an excellent platform through which to watch VOD on Virgin’s terms.

The company’s strategy is to frog-march customers from Virgin’s existing broadband and TV services to TV upgrades (TiVo) and faster broadband (speeds are being doubled), while continually charging more for the privilege.

It is working - average customer revenue for Virgin’s TiVo customers is £60 per month compared with £45 for regular customers. Virgin’s TiVo adoption doubled in Q4, taking it up to 435,000, it reported on Wednesday.

But Virgin must be mindful that continually ratcheting up price in this way won’t simply turn customers away.

In five years’ time, CEO Neil Berkett told analysts, Virgin will have retired its ghastly old Liberate system, will have all its customers on TiVo and will be scouting for “son of TiVo”.

News Corp: Earnings Surge But Scandal Bill Hits $104 Million

2012-02-08T22:48:05Z

News Corp surpassed analyst expectations in quarterly earnings announced today, but the numbers reflected two wildly divergent trends.

On one hand, the company posted impressive growth in its TV, cable and movie businesses. These segments resulted in a $210 million year-over-year quarterly earnings increase and adjusted earnings per share of $0.39 which is better than the $0.34 analysts had predicted.

At the same time, the company announced a 43 percent decline in its publishing business and a quarterly charge of $87 million related to the UK phone hacking settlement.

On an afternoon earnings call, News Corp executives said that about 85 percent of the charge was for lawyers and advisers and the rest for legal settlements. They added that they could not go into details about future settlements but that the “priority is to make this right.” The company says it spent $104 million in 2011 on costs related to the investigation.

The hacking-related charges were not included in the publishing category where the company’s UK and Australia newspapers are experiencing collapsing revenues. The company also said it expected income from its UK newspapers to drop $150 million in the coming year.

Publishing reported second quarter segment operating income of $218 million, a $162 million or 43% decrease compared to the $380 million reported a year ago, reflecting lower advertising revenues at the Australian newspapers and the integrated marketing services business, as well as the absence of contributions from the closure of The News of the World in the U.K.

Analysts, however, appeared less interested in the scandal than in the company’s surging TV and entertainment businesses. The strong performance in these segments was driven in part by the popularity of Fox (NSDQ: NWS) News, FX cable and hit movies like Rio and an Alvin and the Chipmunks.

News Corp also enjoyed strong results from its affiliate BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) which posted improved quarterly income of $174 million compared to $109 million one year ago.

The company also said it expects a reinvigorated performance from Dow Jones as a result of a new CEO, a strong brand and new digital platforms.

Related

YouTube Video Extravaganza Continues With Motor Trend Channel

2012-02-08T22:24:22Z

In Hollywood, $100 million will buy you about half of a Jerry Bruckheimer action movie. But YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) is spreading that sum out to launch more than 100 new video content channels this year, with the hope that one of these inexpensive video plays will become the kind of mass-audience hit that moves ad dollars away from TV and onto the Internet. Now nearly a third of the way through, by its own estimation, with the rollout of its full array of video channels, the company on Wednesday announced a new offering themed around the popular car-enthusiast brand Motor Trend.

Co-produced with Motor Trend Magazine publisher Source Interlink Media (SIM), the channel will launch Feb. 17 with eight original weekly shows unfurling on a Monday-Friday schedule.

The series will be themed around SIM brands including not just Motor Trend, but also Hot Rod, Motorcyclist, Lowrider, FourWheeler, Dirt Rider and Car Craft.

Motor Trend is just the latest publishing brand to use YouTube’s seed money to launch a video channel on the platform.

Previous channel announcements have included online video platforms for The Wall Street Journal and Reuters (NYSE: TRI), for example.

For Google-owned YouTube, which is trying to transition its model from user-generated video to a more “premium” experience, leveraging the talent and production wherewithal of individual publishing companies which are not traditionally vested in video production could ultimately produce uneven results.

But in the case of SIM, YouTube isn’t exactly working with rank amateurs. While it’s re-launching Motor Trend as an official channel with dedicated weekly programs, the company has quietly operated a less formal channel for the brand for the last six years. “This was the next logial step for SIM as it continues its transformation from legacy magazine publishing business to a media-neutral content creation company,” said Motor Trend channel executive producer Angus MacKenzie.

Related

Windows Work? 'Harry Potter' DVD Sales help Drive Time Warner's Q4 Profits

2012-02-08T16:17:22Z

Delaying DVD and Blu-ray rental releases to outlets including Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) and Redbox made the magic of Harry Potter even more potent. That was some of the takeaway from Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) Inc.‘s fourth-quarter financial report to investors Wednesday. Driven partly by strong disc sales of its eighth and final Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part II, the company reported a 5 percent quarterly spike in revenue to $8.2 billion. Operating income also increased, spiking 17 percent to $1.7 billion for the three-month period ending Dec. 31.

Time Warner’s filmed entertainment division grew 7 percent in the fourth quarter, bringing in $3.9 billion in revenue.

The disc rental delays, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes told investors, “have enabled our titles to significantly outperform competitive titles without a window.”

Warner Home Entertainment recently extended from 28 to 56 days the delay in which it makes its movies available for rental on Netflix. It’s also trying to extend Redbox’s delay to 56 days, although the kiosk chain is resisting. “We’ll keep working to extend the window for kiosk owners and brick-and-mortar chains,” Bewkes said.

Time Warner’s growth was also spurred by its networks division, with subscriptions to HBO and and carriage fees for channels like TNT leading to a 5 percent growth in revenue to $3.5 billion.

For the entire year, Time Warner reported an 8 percent uptick in revenue to $29 billion and 7 percent growth in operating income to $5.8 billion.

Bewkes cited the HBO Go streaming initiative as a growth driver for the conglomerate’s subscription business, which also grew 5 percent in the fourth quarter.

He used the call to urge major cable carriers including Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) to make HBO Go available through connected TV devices including Roku, noting that greater accessibility to premium cable content will make consumers less likely to cancel their cable subscriptions in favor of over-the-top programming services.

“Not allowing the consumer to access premium content on any device they choose actually increases the relative value of over the top services that really offer the same programming at a later window,” Bewkes said.

Related

Jersey Shore, Dora, iCarly To Amazon Prime Instant In Viacom Deal

2012-02-08T15:01:57Z

Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is expanding its Prime Instant Video library in a deal with Viacom (NYSE: VIA), bringing the total number of streaming videos available free Prime members to over 15,000.

The deal brings “thousands” of Viacom episodes to Prime Instant “over the next several months,” including MTV’s The Hills, Jersey Shore, The Hard Times of RJ Berger and several Real World episodes (what, no Teen Mom?); Comedy Central shows like Chappelle’s Show and The Sarah Silverman Program; and Nickelodeon episodes of iCarly, Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants and Yo Gabba Gabba.

In Amazon’s Q4 earnings report, the company said it had 13,000 episodes available through Prime Instant Video, so the Viacom deal appears to add around 2,000 episodes.

The company also said that that in Q4 of 2011, “the number of Prime Instant Video streams increased nearly 300 percent” compared to Q3.

Since launching Prime Instant Video about a year ago, Amazon has added content from Disney-ABC, PBS, NBC, CBS, Sony (NYSE: SNE), Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX) and Fox.

release

Related

Never Mind The Numbers: Mail Online And New York Times Are Chalk And Cheese

2012-02-08T13:55:05Z

Mail Online may have overtaken The New York Times’ website for global audience, according to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) - but, in reality, the two are still an ocean apart.

The macho, competitive ethos of London’s old Fleet Street, on which newspaper executives celebrate beating each other’s circulation, has spilled over on to the web and is being fought across the Atlantic. Mail Online’s meteoric rise, which the company on Wednesday said gives it almost 100 million monthly uniques. is rightly admired.

But that dead-tree machismo is not necessarily the right lens through which to look and comparisons are not helpful. A&N Media’s fast-growing news and pictures vehicle is no more competing with The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) than Coca-Cola is with cod liver oil…

Different content: One is laden with celebrity gossip, bikini photos and outrageous news and features written so expertly succinctly that readers just have to click. The other is a sobre, reflective and, some might say, banal examination of the machinations of American public life and culture. (While NYTimes.com’s U.S. page led with Court Strikes Down Ban on Gay Marriage in California this week, Mail Online’s was splashing with ‘My adoptive father poured hot sauce in my ears, glued my eyes shut and starved us’).

Different businesses: If the two titles aren’t chasing the same audiences, they also aren’t fighting for the same advertisers. While NYTimes.com runs campaigns for $500 handbags, Manhattan apartments and Indian bridalwear, Mail Online advertises WeightWatchers, home telecom services and discount wine.

So, the Mail may now be operating in the same U.S. geography as the Times, but the pair aren’t necessarily competing head-on.

Although they each occupy the “online news” space together, observers of that sector who draw linear conclusions from Mail Online “overtaking” NYTimes.com’s traffic have got it wrong.

For one, the handover must be seen in two quite distinct but important contexts…

NYTimes’ introduction of metered charging early in 2011 has, naturally, negatively impacted upon its web visits.
Mail Online likely has not gained NYTimes.com readers but has acquired its new audience under its own steam from what was a flat start.

None of this is to denigrate Mail Online’s journey. Whilst some criticise the website’s sensationalist bent as much as the newspaper’s political tactics, it has shown how to build a big online news audience in a new country.

But Mail Online isn’t benefitting because it’s eating NYTimes.com’s dinner, and it doesn’t necessarily matter that one’s traffic has surpassed the other - in a still-growing market like the internet, all boats rise.

It is truer to say mass-market U.S. newspaper websites (National Enquirer? New York Post?) face a greater threat from Mail Online than NYTimes.com does. But it may be even truer to wonder if the U.S. as a whole has ever quite seen anything like Mail Online.

Whatever, one must at least compare apples with apples.

Virgin Media Profits As On-Demand Viewing Grows

2012-02-08T08:58:20Z

UK pay-TV and broadband telco Virgin Media clocked its first annual profit in 2011, as its TV set top boxes continued to be an engine of video on-demand viewership.

For the year, the company swung to a £75.9 million net income from a £141.4 million loss a year earlier, as annual revenue rose three percent to £4 billion.

Virgin doubled sign-ups to its new TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) PVR, now at a total 435,000 - but, though it increased its TV subscribe base between October and December, it lost 0.4 percent of its TV subscribers compared with the previous year.

The TiVo box is a big improvement from its predecessor but is still suffering from some quirks, still doesn’t offer some baseline features its predecessor did (like BBC Red Button) and is slow to roll out promised over-the-top services except for Spotify.

Virgin TV customers are now averaging 90 million VOD views per month on their set top boxes through a combination of recordings and hosted on-demand services, exceeding a billion total in 2011 (up 14 percent from 2010).

The company’s strategy is to cater to what it says is growing, voracious demand for digital entertainment and information - in part through its TiVo box and in part by increasing speeds of its broadband service, with which it has a competitive advantage against most copper-wire services by virtue of being fibre optic.

Release.

Mail Online Income Quickening After U.S. Expansion

2012-02-08T08:08:29Z

Mail Online’s annual revenue growth rate has accelerated to a high of 70 percent following its big push in to the U.S., its publisher DMGT reported in Wednesday’s interim disclosure for its October-to-January earnings.

The site clocked a whopping 99 million unique browsers in January, it said, citing its own Omniture (NSDQ: OMTR) logs - 77 percent up from the previous year and 15 percent up from the previous month. It is not yet profitable, thanks to growth investment.

Relative to its burgeoning audience and relative to rivals, Mail Online’s income has often appeared small. Though actual figures were not given on Wednesday, Mail Online and stablemate Metro.co.uk together made £19 million through 2010/11, according to a previous disclosure. But that is partly because, unlike peers, DMGT reports the sites’ results separately from a whole set of supporting classifieds sites that make the bulk of its digital money and which make Mail Online look small in isolation.

Those classified sites - including Jobsite, Motoring.co.uk and the Digital Property Group - appear to be recovering from the economic downturn’s battering they faced in 2011, with eight percent quarterly revenue growth and a “solid performance” from the property sites, DMGT says.

Across formats, revenue for Associated Newspapers, the national division in which the Mail sits, is now stable compared with last year, helped by the digital growth off-setting a “weak” print ad market.

But, in DMGT’s Northcliffe regional newspaper division, revenues fell nine percent because the publisher has moved some daily titles to weekly and because ad revenue is a tenth below 2010 rates. The publisher finds itself hiking cover prices to make up for lost sales and continuing to cut costs - it lopped off 12 percent of costs in the last year, including shedding three percent of its staff.

DMGT’s real engine is B2B, not consumer, information, whose revenue rose three percent.

Milestone: Digital Gains Offset Magazines' Decline At Future

2012-02-08T07:04:27Z

Magazine and web publisher Future has hit a key milestone in the media industry’s great transition - UK digital revenues made up for print revenue falls between October and December.

Digital circulation and advertising revenue growth of 51 percent from the previous year came thanks to Future having pushed 65 of its titles to iTunes Store upon Newsstand’s launch early in October.

The result is finally an encouraging sign of light at the end of the tunnel for legacy media businesses which have spent years attempting to transition their efforts from analogue to digital.

Future CEO Mark Wood: “We are starting to see a significant change in the shape of the business as our digital innovation enables us to reach entirely new consumers in global digital markets.”

Future’s UK revenue for the quarter still fell by two percent, but that was mostly from the loss of a separate customer publishing contract, Future reported in Wednesday’s interim earnings disclosure.

Now, for some, the reality may be dawning that, despite many digital products reaping owners dimes rather than dollars when compared with print equivalents, publishing them at scale can nevertheless return a company to pre-digital revenue growth rates.

As paidContent reported in January, Future’s free container apps for its tablet editions have been downloaded nearly 10 million times since Newsstand’s October launch, generating individual sales of over 430,000 magazines during the period.

Forty percent of tablet edition sales are subscriptions, but some of them may be short-term renewals.

“Print sales will be challenging, but we expect digital revenue to maintain a vigorous growth rate,” the company added in its market disclosure on Wednesday.

In the U.S., Future has been more challenged by the more rapid evaporation of print magazine circulations. But, after the board jettisoned CEO Stevie Spring and its finance director in October, replacement Wood has tackled the problem by selling Future’s U.S.-facing music magazines for up to $3 million and by committing to launch U.S. versions of its Radar web portals, starting with TechRadar. Cost cuts have now offset U.S. revenue falls, Wood reports.

The company did not specify print circulation trends.

Exclusive Video: Mirror.co.uk Relaunches Amid Group Cuts

2012-02-08T06:28:11Z

As it lays off another 75 staff and faces questions over CEO Sly Bailey’s salary, Trinity Mirror’s Mirror Group Newspapers is relaunching its Mirror.co.uk website on Wednesday with a stripped-back new look that accentuates the newspaper’s brand and core content.

In this video for paidContent, digital publisher Matt Kelly, digital MD Chris Ellis and digital product director Malcolm Coles discuss the impetus behind the relaunch…

The new site will employ content recommendations from Rummble Labs, automatic content tagging from OpenText, Facebook accounts for reader login, and was redesigned by &&&.

The Mirror’s separate celebrity gossip site 3am.co.uk - previously so distinct from the rest of Mirror.co.uk - is gaining the Mirror masthead for the first time and, Kelly tells paidContent, last week hired new staff despite layoffs elsewhere in the company. The separate MirrorFootball site is not yet getting the refresh.

In December 2011, Mirror.co.uk’s daily average user count rose 44 percent from the previous year to 726,653, but fell 4.2 percent from November. All national news sites pulled fewer December readers than in November except Independent.co.uk, which surpassed Mirror Group thanks to growth following its own redesign.

The Mirror’s red-top rival The Sun has not had a web refresh in some years, with publisher News International seemingly stopping to take a breath amid its ongoing crisis and reports it will launch a Sunday edition.

McClatchy Beats Earnings Forecasts, Touts Digital Investments

2012-02-07T15:29:32Z

McClatchy (NYSE: MNI) Company’s fourth quarter operating earnings beat analysts’ predictions, while the newspaper chain also reported an overall boost from investments in online properties like Cars.com and Apartments.com.

In figures released this morning, McClatchy announced earnings of $0.49 per share which surpassed analyst predictions of $0.35. Total operating income for the quarter was $90.3 million, compared to $89.3 million a year ago.

Overall, it appears McClatchy’s deep cost-cutting and ongoing debt reduction have resulted in a stable business operation that is being supplemented by successful online investments. Dividends from these investments, which also include CareerBuilder.com, together contributed $28.8 million to McClatchy’s net income in 2011. The company also reported strong growth in its daily-deal product.

Despite this good news, McClatchy faces the same race against time as other newspaper chains which are losing print revenues faster than they can grow digital ones. While the bottom line of papers like the Miami Herald and El Neuvo Herald are improving and circulation has stabilized, print advertising fell by about 5% in the quarter.

Another sign of concern for McClatchy and other newspaper chains is sluggish growth in digital advertising. Sales in the category actually declined 2% in the quarter for McClatchy but this reflects the fact that many digital ads were sold as a bundle with print ads. McClatchy said pure digital sales increased 7.5%. Overall, though, digital still accounts for less than a quarter of the company’s ad revenues.

McClatchy’s share price was up 15% to $2.59 in mid-morning trading.

Related

Another Tech Blogger Launches An E-Book Venture

2012-02-07T15:23:53Z

Does three make a trend? In recent months, both former Gawker editor Emily Gould and GigaOm’s Michael Wolf launched their own e-book ventures. Now Lifehacker editor Jason Chen has left Gawker Media to launch an e-bookstore of his own, StoryBundle.

Chen will sell bundles of DRM-free e-books under a pay-what-you-want plan; he imagines the average price of a bundle will be around $5 in most cases. He is modeling StoryBundle after “Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Rdio, Steam and indie game bundles”—particularly Humble Bundle for games—that “deliver content without having a bunch of physical stores get in the way.” Chen believes “making things easy to buy, easy to get and easy to consume will be the key to StoryBundle’s success. I just have to think about what I personally want as a reader, then do that.”

Chen didn’t give me many details on the kinds of books he’ll sell, though he said the first bundle is coming in “early spring.” He says he is “publishing [selling] in all genres” and plans “themed bundles of different genres down the line.” He did not elaborate on how many authors have signed up so far, but said “we have authors in various stages of being signed up.” He’s finding authors, he says, in “all the ways that you could imagine: Approaching them, recommendations, searching online, them approaching me, asking around, browsing lists, etc. The more books I can sift through, the higher quality the titles will be in the bundle.”

StoryBundle is most unorthodox in the way it charges for content and the way it pays authors. First of all, readers pay what they want for a bundle of e-books. Not only do they decide how much they want to pay, they decide which percentage of that payment they want to go actually go to the authors. That payment is split among all the authors in the bundle. They designate the remaining percentage of their payment “to charity and to keep the site running.” (Readers can choose to give 100 percent of their payment to the authors.)

Assuming that Chen’s correct that the average payment for a bundle is around $5, authors will receive low payments for their work. Let’s say a buyer decides she’ll pay $5 for a bundle of four books and designates that $1 of that to go to charity or the site. That leaves $4, ~~and StoryBundle takes $2, leaving $2 to be split among the four authors~~. Correction: Chen told me that the authors split the $4. They each receive $1. That is more than an individual author receives selling an e-book for $0.99 on Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) (books priced under $2.99 get a 35 percent royalty, so an author selling an e-book for $0.99 makes $0.35) but on Amazon the $0.99 price is guaranteed, whereas at StoryBundle readers can pay what they want so authors don’t know how much they’ll make.

Since StoryBundle doesn’t require exclusivity, though*—authors can sell their individual e-books in other places too—authors may view it as an additional revenue stream. “It’s the philosophy of a whole being bigger and better than the sum of its parts,” Chen said. “Because these titles are bundled together, you’re getting added exposure, and all the aspects intrinsic to the bundle—lower price, higher promo value, more eyes on your work—makes it much better than going alone.” (It is unclear why a lower price is better for authors unless the assumption is that a lower price leads to higher total sales.)

What if someone wants to pay just a few cents for a bundle of e-books? “Existing game bundles allow people to pay barely anything, as in a few cents to ten cents,” Chen acknowledges. “I want to find a way to avoid this without compromising the ‘pay what you want’ too much, but I don’t know if there’s a way. That’s something I’m still looking into.”

For readers, Chen says, “the main service is that we pick quality books, and we offer them at a lower price than they would be paying if they purchased these titles separately. As someone who loves e-books, I’d love to know someone already vouched for the goodness of titles and that I can get them all at a deal. If you’re buying books separately from Kindle or other e-book stores, you’re relying on reviews—which are fine, but the discovery process is more difficult. Also, you’d end up paying more in the end.” Chen will also have “neat people”—more on that to be announced soon—help choose the books for the bundles.

A final note: It’s unclear how the Terms and Conditions of other etailers would handle bundles like this. Both sites reserve the right to drop the price of an e-book sold on their site to match its price on other sites. If a book is included in a promotion or given away for free at Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), for example, Amazon can (and will!) drop the price of that book to $0 in the Kindle Store. But Barnes & Noble and Amazon‘s TOS don’t say what they’ll do if an e-book is included in a bundle at another site and the price of that bundle varies based on what the buyer wants to pay. I’ve asked the companies for clarification.

Related