Articles of the Day
Netflix Streams Into Future - Netflix today took a significant step towards online distribution with the announcement that it will start rolling out streams of movies on top of its snail mail service. The company will offer select subscribers now paying $18 a month for three rentals at a time the chance to also stream up to 18 hours of video for free. Netflix plans to extend the offer to all subscribers within the next six months.
Traditional Media Advertising Gain Small in 2007 - Total U.S. advertising spending is expected to increase 2.6 percent in 2007 to $153.7 billion, according to the full-year forecast released today by TNS Media Intelligence, the leading provider of strategic advertising and marketing information. This anticipated tepid gain is the smallest since the media economy emerged from its 2001 recession and follows estimated advertising spending growth of 3.8 percent in 2006.
MSN Tests Analytics Tool - Microsoft is currently testing a keyword analytics tool, code-named “Gatineau,” to compete with Google’s free analytics offering, Google Analytics. The product is slated for release later this year.
AOL Signs Napster For Digital Music - In the midst of a rapidly changing music subscription market, AOL is ditching its own service and replacing it with Napster, the companies announced Friday. AOL will now migrate its roughly 350,000 paying subscribers to Napster’s service. AOL also plans to promote Napster with links to its service throughout its free music site, AOL Music. Napster also will retain Music Now’s current pricing tiers for migrating subscribers, and transfer any pre-paid track credits they have in their accounts.
Display Ads Wane On E-Mail Sites - E-mail sites claimed just 44.2% of online display ads last month–down from November’s 47.5% and October’s 51.1%, according to new data by Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance. Yahoo’s e-mail service drew 36.4% of ads last month–also down from November’s 40.4% and October’s 43.6%. MSN Hotmail captured 6.4% of ads, up slightly from November’s 5.7% and almost flat from October’s 6.3%.
Media Companies Wonder What to Do About YouTube - Media companies are frustrated with Google’s YouTube. NBC Universal, for example, says it sends out more than 1,000 requests per month to have copyrighted content taken down. At this point, the media giant has three full-time staff members troll the site each day looking for studio-owned material. Execs estimate that nearly half of the NBC-U content on the site is unauthorized.
If They Build It: NBCU And Social Sites - With TV networks poised to embrace social networking, NBC Universal reportedly is working on a far-reaching plan to create social networking communities for its major TV shows.”NBCU is building a core social networking platform that will provide various tools and functionality on all our major properties to enable users to self-express and find, interact and share with other like-minded users,” Vice president of digital innovation at NBC Digital Media, Sab Kanaujia, wrote on his blog.
User-Generated Video: Where’s The Money? - Market research analyst Screen Digest predicts that although 44 billion video streams — 55 percent of all video content consumed in the U.S. — will be created by 2010, the market will only account for 15 percent of total revenues. Compounding the problem of making money from video streams is that many such sites do well in content that can be violent, rude and boring, not something big advertisers are drawn to.
