Since Reuters is the only news source we trust, we were shocked, shocked we tell you, to read this:

Within the industry, rival cable channels will catch up to their broadcast rivals, securing an estimated $22.3 billion in advertising dollars by 2009 compared with $22.5 billion for the networks. The Internet will be close behind at $17.2 billion.

We really wish we had known that the internet was doing so well a bit earlier. Curse you Reuters for withholding this precious data from us!

Public Relations expert Richard Edelman has some interesting thoughts on the massive change facing his industry:

* Every dollar coming out of print advertising revenue for newspapers is replaced by only 33 cents online, according to Citigroup analyst William Bird. Print advertising accounts for approximately 66% of total revenue for newspapers. This money is ebbing away to web competitors like Monster.com or Yahoo.

* The largest 50 Web companies are attracting 96% of the ad spending on line, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, with the majority going to AOL, Google, MSN and Yahoo. The hottest genre of Web advertising is 15 second commercials that run before on line videos on sites such as WebMD.

* An estimated 9.5 million homes in the US now have TiVo or another digital video recorder. According to a study by CBS, 64% of DVR users skip all ads and an additional 26% skip through most ads. The number of homes with DVRs is expected to triple in the next five years.

These are only a highlight of many interesting stats that he lists but we’re not so sure his advice to PR-folk is very useful. [via Ito]

From the why are we always behind department:

About 8.7 million Europeans will be watching television over the Internet by 2009, or 9.4 percent of a market currently dominated by cable and satellite operators, according to a forecast issued on Monday.

...

“It will emerge faster in Europe and Asia than in the United States,” Schmitt added, saying similar initiatives by U.S. telecommunications companies are only just getting underway.

Tell us something we don’t know. On the other hand, being slow and retarded has its benefits: it makes our job of prognosticating pretty simple. All we need to see the future is to catch a flight to London or Tokyo. No more need to spend money on expensive crystal balls (we take no credit for the assumed drop in crystal ball manufacturer’s stock prices).

Yet another announcement for the day:

“We’re talking to them about a whole slew of things including video-on-demand, including video search,” Moonves told Reuters in an interview regarding Google, ahead of Reuters’s Media and Advertising Summit next week.

Now these guys are just grasping at straws. “We’re talking to them about a whole slew of things” is Hollywood code-speak for “we have no fucking clue what’s going on but I want to make sure I’m not fired first.”

You think that these PR people would realize that a short 3-day Thanksgiving week is not exactly the time to do all these earth-shattering TV-Internet alliance announcements. By next week we’ll have all forgotten about it and they’ll have to whip up a whole new campaign for our attention.

Nothing major was announced (although we are impressed that Hollywood bureaucrats actually trekked all the way to the AFI campus). The main gist of the conference was:

Cohen said BitTorrent.com will remove links that direct users to pirated content owned by MPAA companies from its search engine.

Yes, that’s all it was. They are going to remove illegal links from their search engine. You can all go home now, no revolutionary new technology is being released. Nothing to see here.

The rest of the press release is available after the jump.

We first reported back in early August that there were negotiations between the MPAA and BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen:

“Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman and BitTorrent Founder and CEO Bram Cohen will hold a press conference on Tuesday, November 22th, 2005 at the American Film Institute.”

Didn’t we tell you there would be a lot of announcements? This is getting seriously weird.

Update: While this “press conference” is getting serious attention over at sites like Digg, we have been unable to track down the alleged press release on the MPAA site (in fact, the only BitTorrent press releases seem to be negative ones). Someone has to be at AFI today, fill us in.

Where do we even begin?

The television chief focused his lecture on new methods of distributing programming, such as downloading shows onto an iPod or buying individual episodes through DIRECTV.

Technological advances are already paying off for NBC, Zucker said.

Ratings for “NBC Nightly News” improved over the last two weeks after the television company started offering daily newscasts on its Web site.

But Zucker said he is wary of some of these advances, especially the blog craze and its effect on TV.

“We pay too much attention to blogs,” he said. “It is absurd how much attention they receive.”

Zucker said NBC’s primetime lineup is spiralling down, and it will take two to three years to rebound from the current slump.

Zucker is in for a rude awakening when this “three year slump” turns into a permanent downward spiral. This must be how he has managed to keep his job: by convincing others that this is just a temporary blip. Of course, the timing is perfect because when these three years are over, it will be time for the massive overhaul that is the transition to digital broadcasting. Then he can buy himself another 3-5 years simply by blaming everything on the digital transition. Frankly, if we were investors we’d be telling Jeff that there is no time like the present to put down the crack pipe. Why wait three years?

Zucker misunderstands why blogs get so much attention: it’s not the content. The revolution that it provides is that anyone, anywhere can instantly publish. It may not be nice and shiny like TV yet, but it can get there. TV on the other hand is still out of everyone’s reach.

Although the online version of nightline is cute, we wonder just how many people are actually watching it. Perhaps the day that more people watch nightline on the net that tune in via broadcast TV will send Jeff the memo he needs to read.

From Associated Press:

Movielink, a joint venture of five Hollywood studios to offer movies over the Internet, has signed a deal with Twentieth Century Fox, allowing it to offer movies from all major studios for the first time.

It is very interesting to us how CinemaNow and Movielink, the red-headed and forgotten tech children of Hollywood have suddenly become hot commodities since the Disney-iTunes deal. It seems that all the studios have decided to open the floodgates and get their content online, profit models be damned!

Look forward to lots of deals and announcements in the next weeks as the latest round of lets-copy-everyone-else-in-town makes the rounds.

From “The End of TV (As You Know It)”:

The video-on-demand (VOD) phenomenon isn’t confined to cable-system menus and iTunes downloads. The entire Internet is, in a sense, media on demand, says Tobaccowala. “That has changed how consumers feel toward all media, training them to feel puzzled and even cheated when they can’t get what they want when they want it.”

It gets even better because they actually break down how much money people can make off of iTunes versus network TV ad rates:

That’s why the networks are dipping their most profitable toes into unknown waters, making some of their top-rated shows available in new ways. A deal ABC struck last month to have episodes of its hit Desperate Housewives available for download on Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL ) video iPods for $1.99 shows how the networks are cautiously experimenting. The series about the wacky women of Wisteria Lane generates $11.3 million in ad revenue per episode, according to Forrester Research Inc. (FORR ). That translates to an estimated 45 cents per viewer per episode. By contrast, ABC is expected to earn $1.20 per download of an episode after Apple has taken its cut. Even if 20% of the show’s audience shifts its viewing from traditional TV to iPod and ad revenue falls accordingly, ABC would still net $1.8 million more per episode than if Housewives weren’t available on demand.

If this is true, it is quite impressive.

Warner and AOL are starting a new interactive TV channel called In2TV:

In2TV plans to offer more than 100 TV series and at least 300 episodes per month in the first year, the companies said.

The shows will be delivered through AOL Video on Demand, AOL Video Search and AOL Television. At the time of launch, the programs will be available exclusively on AOL and will not be in syndication on TV, AOL official said.

Warner has been doing very well lately and it looks like it is parlaying this confidence into bold post-broadcast moves.

NYTimes had a little piece on the new economics of studio filmmaking by investing Warner Brothers’ techniques:

A shift has already taken place at major studios: last year, their spending fell for newspaper and television ads in the United States and increased for the Internet and trailers. For Warner’s part, it combined its domestic home video and theatrical media buying - which includes television, radio and newspapers - so it would have the flexibility to adjust marketing campaigns and negotiate better rates. The studio has adopted a similar strategy in Britain and Germany, said Sue Kroll, president of international theatrical marketing.

But perhaps the biggest driver of changes in marketing is the speed at which DVD’s are coming to store shelves. Some DVD’s are now arriving in stores less than four months after a movie hits theaters. Instead of creating two campaigns - one for the theater and another for home video - Warner is considering whether to consolidate its marketing operations under one umbrella.

Seems the studios aren’t quite ready yet to abandon their traditional marketing blitzes but it seems the shift away from traditional media is well underway.

Seems like this time, not everyone is content to let Apple make all the profits:

NBC Universal’s television networks and the DirecTV Group satellite service on Monday said they plan to sell television shows on demand to DirecTV customers.

Selected shows from General Electric’s NBC Universal unit, which includes channels such as USA, Sci-Fi and Bravo will cost 99 cents, be available to DirecTV customers on demand within hours of broadcast and be distributed without commercials, the two companies said.

So is this move to the subscription model going to save TV from the death of the 30-second spot? Are there enough hardcore fans willing to pay a dollar an episode to make up for the lost revenue? We can’t wait to find out.

Don’t put down that TiVo remote:

TiVo Inc. and Yahoo Inc. on Monday launched a service that allows TiVo users to program their digital video recorders remotely using Yahoo’s television information Web sites.

While terms of the deal were not disclosed, the companies said that in the coming months TiVo and Yahoo would also offer Yahoo services like photos, traffic, and weather as part of their collaboration.

Attaching a computer to your TV is a great idea because it allows you to do all sorts of things you could never do before. The only problem is that building a computer is a relatively mundane task easily assembled from off-the-shelf components. Now nearly every cable and satellite system offer their own “TiVo-like” boxes that have most of the same capabilities. TiVo has been trying to bypass the cable and satellite distribution networks for a while now. For example they announced their plan to allow TiVo boxes to download certain TV shows from an internet connection without any need to “record” a show from cable/satellite.

Perhaps this is the first step in TiVo bypassing the traditional networks of distribution. However, replacing cable and satellite with Yahoo! is just exchanging one content provider for another. We here at BBB would like to see a TiVo that can go anywhere on the internet, wouldn’t you?

The latest johnny-come-lately TV to Internet broadcast:

NEW YORK (AP)—NBC News said Monday that it would begin making its “NBC Nightly News” broadcast available for free on the Internet starting next week.

Past broadcasts will also be archived at the http://www.nightlynews.msnbc.com Web site, the network said.

It’s not necessarily news on demand, though. The newscast, aired at 6:30 p.m. on many NBC stations on the East Coast, won’t be available on the Web until after 10 p.m. ET.

“Many of our viewers tell me they often miss the broadcast because they’re not at home or tending to their busy lives and families,” anchor Brian Williams said. “This new service reflects the fact that the pace of our lives has changed.”

The first newscast available on the Internet will be on Nov. 7.

When asked if he knew what the ‘internets’ were, Brian Williams responded “It’s that thingy that brings in money.”