Someone in TV-land is finally getting a clue:

“Mike Shaw [ABC president ad sales and marketing] announced today we are going to take a product to market in May. Viewers will have the ability to access shows such as “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives,” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” on ABC.com. They will be ad supported, free to the consumer.” Ads that accompany the video offering would not necessarily be the same as those that appeared alongside ABC’s hit programming, he said.

A genius move that gives advertisers the kind of metrics they can only dream about in Nielsens-land while tossing free candy to any loyal viewers of their shows. Who needs a Tivo to record missed episodes? Who needs to spend $400 on an iPod to watch episodes from iTunes? If we get TV free because of ad-support why not do the same for downloads. Will people rip ads out of the episodes and post them to all the P2P or video distribution web sites? Of course, but they would have done that anyways.

Good job ABC, it looks like Steve Jobs is already having an effect on you.

Jeff Jarvis (creator of Entertainment Weekly) once again waxes eloquently on the death of journalism:

When I do my scary blogboy dance for old-media companies, I warn them that their real successor - the true media mogul of the age - is not someone they know, not someone named Murdoch, Hearst, or Newhouse. He is Kevin Rose, the scruffy geek behind Digg.com, a site where users edit the news. In him, we see the media industry of the future.

While anyone should be amused by a “blogboy dance” (what is that? hopping around with treo and powerbook precariously balanced on your head?) it is most certainly an attempt to soften the your-business-plan-is-dying blow.

That sound you hear is the brick that network TV is shitting trying to justify ad rates to Madison Ave.:

The “Yes, Dear” episode in April 2005 marked the first commercial use of a patent-pending innovation dubbed Digital Brand Integration, or DBI, developed by New York-based Marathon Ventures, and grew out of an unprecedented marketing deal with CBS.

Since then, CBS has used the technology to plug brands such as StarKist Tuna and Chevrolet on several other shows, including the hit police drama “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and new sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.”

David Brenner, founder and president of Marathon, said his company expects to unveil a new pact soon with the Fox network, a unit of News Corp. Ltd.

Blending brand names and products into television shows, as opposed to traditional ads that run during commercial breaks, has gained greater currency in recent years as the industry faces the rising popularity of TiVo and other devices that let viewers skip commercials.

Product placement and integration (or PPI as it is referred to in the biz) has always been a long shot at best. TV advertising is an amorphous world since there is no exact way to measure just how many people saw your ad. PPI extends this voodo magic even further by causing normal people to somehow believe that they will instantly purchase product X just by seeing it integrated into their favorite character’s hands.

The last gasps of TV are going to be interesting indeed. We are just eagerly awaiting for the day that TV eliminates 30 second spots altogether to return to a live-only variety show format called the “Texaco Star Theater” starring Milton Berle. You’ve come a long way baby, full circle that is.

Sometimes you read about something so stupid it makes your brain hurt:

Earlier this week, NBC asked YouTube.com to take the video down. Web surfers wanting to see the clip yet again will have to go to NBC.com, where the network has posted a copy.

Bloggers—the ones who made the video a hit in the first place—are grumbling that “Lazy Sunday” now doesn’t play on non-Windows computers. Fortunately, NBC’s lawyers evidently don’t know about Google Video yet. Whoops.

Remember “Lazy Sunday”? The video clip from SNL that became an overnight internet sensation and was seen by more internet surfers than ever watched it on broadcast TV? Yeah, that one. Sometimes as we watch these TV executives slice open the golden goose we wonder to ourselves how much they will be kicking themselves a year from now.

Would someone please call up NBC and give them a clue?

The iTunes juggernaut takes on Cable:

“Sleeper Cell,” “Weeds” and “Fat Actress” are the initial programs included in the deal, which was announced Tuesday by Apple Computer and the CBS Corp.-owned channel. Viewers will be able to choose any or all episodes from the first episode in each series.

Despite the fact that these are from a premium cable outlet the episodes are still the magic $1.99. Say what you will about Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field but it seems to work on everybody including senior execs. Half the genius behind iTunes is that you know exactly how much you’re going to pay for anything (tracks are always 99 cents and TV episodes always $1.99).

A new age has begun to dawn: the TV networks are beginning to see the Internet as an opportunity rather than a threat. CBS just announced that they are dumping iTunes so that they can sell their own programming from their own web site:

CBS Corp. has spoken: When it comes to making its reality hit “Survivor” available for downloading, iTunes has been voted off the island.

The company announced Wednesday that it was experimenting with cutting out the Internet middlemen by offering downloads of its popular show for $1.99 an episode on its own website, CBS.com. The service is to be launched tonight, immediately after the show airs on the West Coast.

CBS would be the first broadcast network to sell its shows via its own Internet storefront. The move signals that CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves believes the network is a potent enough brand that it can go it alone — without Apple Computer Inc.’s popular iTunes software and website — and thus not have to split the spoils.

Whether or not this is a smart move remains to be seen. Just like Google admitted last week, it is awfully difficult to compete with Apple when it comes to the slickness of the iTunes video store. We applaud CBS nonetheless for their bold foray into internet TV sales.

Now here is something you don’t see every day:

“We made a big mistake,” Mayer, who oversees all of Google’s search products, said Tuesday. “You can’t come out and launch a product like Google Video and say ‘CSI’ and ‘Survivor’ are there if they’re not on the home page.”

The video service has “fallen far short” of competitors such as Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes music and video offering, said Allen Weiner, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. “What Apple has done with the iTunes store sets the bar really high.”

New York Times technology reviewer David Pogue said Jan. 19 that Google’s video store was “appallingly half-baked” and that the site “doesn’t live up to Google’s usual standards of excellence.”

We don’t know which is more shocking: the admission of error or the praise of uber-competitor Apple.

What’s strange really is that Google has a long history of releasing “half-baked” products. For example, Google News which has been in “beta” for over three years has only just now been released as a finished product. Why should the Video product be any different? In the technology world where product cycles are so short and competition is fierce, releasing a half-baked product early is often the difference between first-mover advantage and complete obscurity. Frankly, comparing yourself to Apple is always bad news: Apple has far more experience in pleasing, user-friendly interfaces that nearly any other tech firm around.

One day Google will realize that it cannot be all things to all people. It needs to concentrate on what it does well and leave the eyecandy to others. Unfortunately, Google has decided to take the Mega-Media-Takeover approach using its inflated stock to fuel its way into all sorts of places. In the long run, you cannot outspend Microsoft and you cannot out-design Apple. Google’s genius lies in innovation, rather than taking over traditional media they should concentrate on redefining media on the internet.

Netflix hits pause on movie download plan:

However, due to problems obtaining license agreements with Hollywood studios, the test phase of the service has not been postponed. Hastings said the company would hit the play button on its plans “when the content climate beings to thaw.”

The studios’ reluctance to let Netflix squirt their movies down the wire is no great surprise. Because of its paranoia about unregulated distribution of its content Hollywood is currently about as keen on the internet as it is on thoughtful, foreign language dramas featuring real, unaugmented people. Perhaps Netflix would have more success if it courted Bollywood instead of Hollywood.

It seems funny how far apart Silicon Valley and Hollywood can be. They are only a little over 300 miles apart in sunny California but they might as well be on opposite sides of the planet. The software geeks are stumbling over themselves to create new video distribution sites too numerous to mention while the studio execs struggle to find new ways to restrict digital distribution.

The only solution is the California Republic civil war. North vs. South. We’ve got front row seats.

John Battelle’s Searchblog is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to know more about Google:

The ability to sell video is great, but not news. We’ve known that was coming. What is really interesting is the pricing leverage: Google is splitting revenues 70/30 - that’s 70 to the content producer. Also very important is that the producers of content are the ones who set the price - again, totally different from traditional models. Thirdly, Google is doing its own DRM. That’s very interesting, and probably best left as the subject of another post. Producers can decide to not use DRM, as Charlie Rose did, Feiken told me.

This is a major step toward entirely new models of content distribution, and if I were Comcast, DirecTV, the telcos, or frankly anyone in the traditional video business, I’d be a bit concerned. It gives content producers far more power to connect directly to audiences, and the leverage will only increase - in five years, it won’t be 70/30, it’ll more likely by 80/20.

John goes on to predict that the studios will be among the first to sign up for Google’s new service but we’re not so convinced. Firstly, the studios have already spent gobs of money building and promoting their own online movie distribution services. Their future is certainly in jeopardy but will the studios have the stomach to kill their own children right away?

Secondly, iTunes gives studios much more control over display, ranking and other promotions. If you have learned anything about the big content producers like the studios and networks from this site it is that they love micromanaging control over their product. The wild west of Google Video may be fine for indie producers but definitely not the studio’s style.

Introducing Digital Rights Management (DRM) definitely puts Google into direct competition with Apple and Microsoft. This should shape up to be an interesting race. See John’s post for links to other Google Video competitors.

The New York Times isn’t exactly renowned for its technology coverage, so you can safely assume that by the time they cover anything that it is a pretty safe bet:

In the battle for the living room, cable, satellite, and increasingly, phone companies are trying to defend their turf by offering more choice through an array of content in video-on-demand programs.

But fending off the Internet’s openness will be a struggle, one that the online companies themselves lost years ago.

At the onset of the dot-com era, large online service companies like AOL, Compuserve and MSN tried to lock customers into electronic walled gardens of digital information. But it quickly became apparent that no single company could compete with the vast variety of information and entertainment sources provided on the Web.

The same phenomenon may well overtake traditional TV providers. Potentially, IPTV could replace the 100- or 500-channel world of the cable and satellite companies with millions of hybrid combinations that increasingly blend video, text from the Web, and even video-game-style interactivity.

We’re not usually Markoff fans over here but we found this analogy to be uncharacteristically apt. [via BoingBoing]

Google isn’t happy with letting Apple be the only player in TV downloads:

Google will announce its plans to allow consumers to buy television shows or other videos that can be downloaded onto their computers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Friday.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal said Google is likely to unveil partnerships related to the new service with CBS Corp. and the National Basketball Association.

CES is starting up this weekend and this is just the first of what we expect to be many interesting announcements.

EMarketer has a cute little piece based on some Forrester Research data:

Aside from ads integrated into games themselves, marketers would be wise to advertise on related Web sites. Young consumers spend more hours per week on the Net than adults, and Forrester found that much of this time is spent on sites related to gadgets and games — almost 80% visit games sites, almost 50% visit movie sites and over one-third visit music sites.

To be fair the data still shows that TV has a large influence. The trend over time however shows that the younger the audience gets the less TV is watched. Younger people spend more time away from the TV and much more on the internet, videogames, mp3 players, etc. [via Wonderland]

A cute WSJ piece on the death of TV:

Audiences are splintering off in dozens of directions, watching TV shows on iPods, watching movies on videogame players and listening to radio on the Internet. All these activities cut out the usual forms of sponsorship and take place when and where consumers—not media executives—choose.

The upshot is that any advertiser with an urgent message needs to start planning now to reach consumers in new and unexpected ways. Some already have.

Unfortunately, their list of newfangled advertising techniques amount to nothing more than product placement and integration, the same thing we’ve been harping on for a while now. No new surprises here other than the WSJ repeating what you already know.

The good news is they have finally found a way for tightwad studios to support upgrading to digital projection in theaters:

The digital projection guidelines, published in July by a consortium of Hollywood studios called the Digital Cinema Initiatives, say every five-minute chunk of video must contain a 35-bit “forensic marker” specifying the date, time and location at which the movie is shown. The guidelines don’t say how to get that information into the movie, but they require it to be “visually transparent to the critical viewer” and “inaudible in critical listening” tests.

The bad news is that the studios will never be able to justify the upgrades once they discover that steganography won’t stem the flood of piracy.

Let’s hope they upgrade all our theaters before they notice.

Did you think that people with Tivo were skipping ads? According to the TV industry, you thought wrong!

Contrary to some anecdotal evidence and many industry forecasters, new research indicates that the use of digital video recorders - gadgets that allow users to record TV shows and zip through commercials - actually increases the amount of viewer exposure to ads because people with the devices end up watching more TV, executives from major TV networks said in a presentation to reporters Wednesday.

New research shows that homes with DVRs watch 12% more TV, and could boost the average prime-time audience for a show by an average of 4%, exposing viewers to more commercials.

Although most DVR users zip past ads, proprietary research from the TV networks found that 58% pay attention to commercials while fast forwarding and 53% have gone back to watch commercials they mistakenly skipped.

We are glad those TV execs stepped in to provide this helpful research that is in no way biased to help them generate more revenue. Everyone we know is constantly hitting rewind to see the ads they missed. Sometimes we even just watch the commercials on an endless loop!

What does this mean for you?

Updated: IEEE standards body has approved the 802.16e standard and with that, what is commonly known as Wireless MAN or WiMAX has gone mobile. (More information here.)

It means the death of the cellular phone companies. Remember you heard it here first.

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]

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.