As TV slowly slides into oblivion:

TV viewers must have taken to the beach: It was the least-watched week in recorded history for the four biggest broadcast networks.

CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox averaged 20.8 million viewers during the average prime-time minute last week, according to Nielsen Media Research. That sunk below the previous record, set during the last week of July in 2005.

I bet they’re glad that mideast violence always picks up in the hot summer months to help generate some ratings. [via BoingBoing]

Did you notice that Google now offers certain “premium” content for free if you watch advertising? What a novel concept, I wonder if anyone has thought of that before…

With Google’s just announced “test” of “free today” sponsored streaming of premium videos at Google Video, Schmidt may no longer be disclaiming that as the company seeks to “organize the world’s information,” it is a media company.

Bogatin’s piece rightly points out the hypocrisy coming out of Google Video.

We’ll get back to you after the Google overlords have convinced everyone that they invented the 30-second spot.

A company that you’ve probably never heard of just beat iTunes and BitTorrent to the punch:

Through its deal with Warner, Guba will initially sell almost 200 movie and television titles (quickly expanding shortly thereafter), ranging from new releases like “Good Night and Good Luck” to ‘classic’ television content like “The Jetsons”.

Guba will offer two services to users. View-On-Demand (VOD) is priced from $1.79 to $2.99 and affords the user a 24 hour rental. Download-To-Own (DTO) will range from $9.99 to $19.99 for newer titles and allows unlimited viewing on 2 computers and 1 portable device, while allowing a single DVD burn for backup. The service will play content through Windows Media Player on a 640X480 screen. Downloads are progressive and will run up to 1.3MB/second.

Unfortunately, the pricing model for VOD will be problematic as iTunes sells TV episodes for $1.99 that don’t expire after 24 hours. Welcome to the party Guba.

Unless you are live under the proverbial rock, the talk of the town has been Apple’s negotiations with studios to finally sell feature films on iTunes. What is interesting is that most people haven’t been discussing why this has taken so long. You see, unlike the music industry, Apple doesn’t have the studios over a barrel:

ITunes was the first etailer to start selling songs and TV shows online, but when it adds movies, it will enter a competitive market. Movielink and CinemaNow already sell permanent downloads of films. BitTorrent has a deal in place with Warner Bros. and is in talks with other studios. Amazon.com also will start selling movies online soon, possibly through its IMDb Web site.

It’s everyone’s favorite time of year again: the upfronts! That wonderful, magical season when we learn once again why TV is so special to us, and by us we mean goliath advertisers. Unfortunately this year seems a little less shiny than in years past.

First piece of bad news, most teens can’t even name the TV networks:

Most teenagers can’t name the four top television broadcasters, finds an online poll Monday.

Almost 80 percent of 16- to 18-year-olds were unable to name the big 4 broadcasters, said Bolt Media.

Of the total audience, which ranged from 16 to 34 in age, 33 percent correctly responded with NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox.

A vast majority of respondents - 85 percent - said they spend their free time on the Internet, compared to only 69 percent who said they spend their free time watching TV.

If that wasn’t bad enough, one of the biggest advertisers simply decided not to show up:

Johnson & Johnson, the New Brunswick, N.J., health-care products maker, has informed the major TV networks that it is planning to sit out the annual selling bazaar, the time of year when TV networks secure ad commitments for about 80% of the coming fall season’s primetime ad inventory. J&J;spent almost $500 million on network-TV ads last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, although not all of that is necessarily committed in the upfront market.

J&J;’s decision is a sign of how the balance of power in the TV industry has shifted to advertisers, who are less dependent on network television nowadays, partly because of the growing list of media options like Internet and even cellphone advertising.

To add insult to injury, the advertisers who remained are demanding lower rates because of DVR users skipping commercials:

You can bet the DVR will be a divisive issue as network executives and advertisers gather in New York this month for the annual “upfront” scrum, when most of the haggling over ad rates happens. Some big ad agencies say they intend to pay only for “live” viewing, such as the 10.6 million homes that tuned in recently for ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy .

Mike Shaw, ABC’s sales president, publicly blasted the ad industry’s position as “unfair and unjust” and intimated he wouldn’t negotiate with those who won’t pay for more than live viewers.

This is shaping up to be a fantastic year for TV.

Remember when people like George Lucas said they were looking forward to using digital tech to replace sets and actors? Those “movies” already exist, they’re called videogames:

Activision will be opening a dedicated studio facility on the DreamWorks Animation campus in Glendale, California, following on the heels of their strategic alliance. The move, which establishes an unprecedented level of collaboration between a Hollywood studio and a videogame company, will facilitate simultaneous co-development between DreamWorks’ 3D-animated features and Activision games based on those films.

“This announcement marks an unparalleled step in the convergence between Hollywood and videogames,” stated Robert Kotick, chairman and ceo, Activision Inc. “For the first time, we will be able to align our games’ production schedules with the movies’ from the pre-production phase onward. This will allow us to fully leverage the movie assets and storylines, in addition to collaborating closely with the talented production teams at DreamWorks to develop storylines that expand the movie experience in new and compelling ways.”

While Hollywood has a very spotty track record turning games into films, the gaming industry has done a good job of increasing the quality of their output to become more “cinematic.” As every E3 convention every year shows, movies and videogames have long been on a collision course, especially since large chunks of nearly every studio film has gone through digital manipulation of some kind.

Yet another IPTV announcement, this time from Fox:

News Corp.’s Fox network has signed a six-year agreement with its 187 affiliated stations that will let it show reruns of its television programs on the Internet, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Thursday.

The revenue-sharing agreement allows Fox to make 60 percent of its prime-time schedule available online the morning after the shows air, the Journal reported.

The formula is complex, but stations essentially will get a 12.5 percent cut after costs, the paper also reported.

It is interesting that Fox managed to convince the skeptical affiliates to allow such a deal. Fox is also smart to move away from the iTunes pay-per-download model towards an advertiser supported model.

Pretty soon this will just be the normal course of business.

It is just another in a long string of TV-over-IP announcements:

CNET Networks on Monday said it will launch “CNET TV,” a new video on demand network over cable, on digital video recorders made by TiVo and on the Internet as it broadens its reach to viewers.

It is unclear yet how exactly this content will be distributed but the inclusion of Tivo in the deal gives us a clue. Those of you who follow BBB regularly will realize that Tivo has long been the trojan horse for IPTV in the living room. Since every Tivo is essentially a fully functioning Linux computer it has always been possible to bypass people’s cable and satellite providers and download directly to the box.

Perhaps now Tivo is ready to push this into regular usage.

Those folks at Reuters sure are perceptive:

The widely hyped merging of the PC and TV is finally taking shape in a way that only a few people imagined in the late 1990s Internet boom.

From independent producers like Mondo Media to big media companies like MTV, and even kids who post videos on community sites like YouTube.com, the World Wide Web is becoming a sort of worldwide TV network for audiences seeking offbeat entertainment not shown on mainstream television.

Where do we even begin? During the dotcom boom years, full-motion video over the internet was so overhyped as to be a self-parody.

But we’re glad that Reuters takes the time to correct themselves:

...the late 1990s when the dot-com boom fueled the notion that eventually all TV would be delivered on the Web, on-air broadcasting would become wired webcasting and computers would be the TV sets of the future.

“Really, I had this vision 6 years ago,” said Mike Tuinstra, chief executive officer of Joecartoon.com Inc. “It’s just now kind of happening.”

So remember that you read it at Reuters first: TV is coming to the internet. If only we listened to Mike Tuinstra in 1999! 

BusinessWeek reports:

Facebook, the Web site where students around the world socialize and swap information, has put itself on the block, BusinessWeek Online has learned. The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale, senior industry executives familiar with the matter say.

To put this into perspective you have to remember that when “maverick” Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, he paid $580 Million. 

Seems like sanity is busting out all over the TV world:

YouTube.com, a popular video-sharing Web site that was smacked around in recent weeks by CBS and NBC, is starting to make friends in the TV world.

The site has struck its first formal partnership to obtain copyrighted content with MTV2, a cable channel overseen by Viacom’s MTV Networks, a spokesman confirmed.

Assuming that MTV2 doesn’t go out of business tomorrow, we hope this will be taken as a good sign throughout the industry.

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.

If you’re in the TV business, you probably shouldn’t read the WSJ’s coverage of the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ annual conference:

Much chatter this year is likely to center on marketers’ increasing demands for better measurement of the effectiveness of their commercials. Advertisers are no longer content with simple measures such as circulation numbers or Nielsen ratings that measure how many people see a particular magazine, newspaper or TV show. Increasingly, marketers want an idea of how many consumers remembered an ad, for instance, or recalled it when making a decision to buy a particular item.

Driving this emphasis is the rise of increasingly measurable Internet advertising and a perception that mainstream ad outlets, like TV, have become less effective. Rising numbers of consumers have digital video recorders, which allow consumers to skip through TV spots.

Look, the WSJ is ripping quotes almost verbatim from us. It is amazing how much more data computers give you about your audience than the ridiculous voodo of the Nielsens. Goodbye TV, hello Net.

Jeff Jarvis, the founder of entertainment weekly and seer into the internet media future, posted a slightly different take on the “small internet mice will destroy old media dinosaurs.” The renowned videoblog Rocketboom just auctioned off a single week of advertising on ebay for $40,000:

And here we have in a microcosm the explanation of why media is so horribly out of sync today: The public is valuing new media much more than the old, but the advertisers still value the old. Most every newspaper and in many cases TV networks and magazines have much larger audiences online, but the revenue for their old media properties remains much higher because the advertisers and agencies still value the old and the safe. They want metrics. They want control. They want guarantees. This, in turn, makes big publishers and producers play it safe because they don’t want to mess with the cash cow. And that means that advertisers miss the opportunity to reach a larger, younger, smarter audience in the new medium, which is — supposedly — what they’re dying to do. And that means that big media companies now face competition from a thousand Rocketbooms and a million Gawkers. That allows a TRM to come along and snatch away an opportunity from the big, lumbering giants. That is why small is the new big. Small be nimble, small be quick, small jumped over the conglomerates.

Or let me summarize the problem in one word. Big advertisers and big agencies are chickenshit. They need to grow some balls or else they’ll find new competitors running circles around them. The explosion — the rocketboom — that has already come to newspapers, magazines, TV networks, the music industry is coming next to the ad business.

Please take this, advertisers, as a friendly kick in the pants.

Calling people “chickenshit” is a great way to get their attention but not necessarily get you to change their minds. Instead we would point out that the media dinosaurs obsessed with control should realize quite quickly that if they want “metrics,” “guarantees,” and “controls” then the internet is lightyears ahead of other media in that department.

Many of you are probably already familiar with Chris Anderson’s theory known as ”the long tail”:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

And while his theory is well researched and has some excellent evidence to back it up, a new study just released seems to shed new light:

The researchers used the Internet to create an artificial market for singles, all recorded by bands not on the current Top 40 hit parade in the United States.

They then persuaded more than 14,000 young Internet users to log onto the site and choose their favorites.

...

While people do genuinely seem to like some songs better than others, their preferences change once they know what other people like, Watts and colleagues found.

“The popular things become more popular and the less-popular things get less popular,” Watts said.

People, it seems, do not entirely trust their own taste when it comes to music. The same may hold true for books and movies and may explain why the top sellers vastly outsell the rest, the researchers concluded in their report, published in the journal Science.

In Anderson’s theory the reason that we see such a large gap between hits and less successful fare has to do with marketing budgets. It appears however that he is only partly right. Instead it is a more complicated scenario: people buy what their peers tell them is “cool.” So while a marketing budget can help spread the word, the Internet will not eliminate hits, just change the way hits are marketed.

We can’t wait to see what happens with this new research…

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).

Many in Los Angeles celebrated the announcement that city attorney Rocky Delgadillo slapped the makers of “Grand Theft Auto” with a lawsuit. But finally, in a hilarious op-ed piece in the same newspaper, the voice of reason comes out:

The city believes that parents who simply wanted to buy their boys a wholesome cop-shooting, hooker-killing, car-stealing game were unfairly duped. Because if the ratings board had known about the scene, the game probably would have been bumped up to an “Adults Only” rating (restricting it to those 18 and over) instead of “Mature” (which keeps it away from anyone under 17).

That means that all across Los Angeles, innocent 17-year-old boys with advanced computer skills were being exposed to moderately rendered, computer-animated soft-core pornography. And City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo wants to make sure someone pays for doing this to our kids. Because if these teen computer geniuses are given the opportunity to unlock a video-game sex scene, then they’ll be just one step away from breaking the code that allows them to type dirty words into Google.

Although I wish a teenage boy’s world were as full of innocence and wonder as Delgadillo does, I wondered if consensual animated sex was really the kind of thing that would offend a 17-year-old male who grew up in Los Angeles. So I tracked one down and asked him if this was the kind of thing that would warp his impressionable mind.

Here is an interesting indicator that TV is headed over the hill:

Spots in ABC’s telecast of the Super Bowl, the most-watched television program of the year, are going for $2.4 million. That’s the same as what FOX got for ads during Super Bowl XXXIX earlier this year. It’s also the third time since 2000 that prices for ads during the game haven’t increased; the going rate was $2.2 million per 30 seconds from 2000-02.

Sprint is announcing today that they are making available downloadable feature-length films to certain phones:

Among them are “One-Eyed Jacks,” the Marlon Brando-Karl Malden Western, as well as “Angel and the Badman” with John Wayne. Other titles include “Night of the Living Dead” and the most recent—“Short Circuit” from 1986.

“This is what we could get rights to quickly,” said Dale Knoop, Sprint’s general manager for multimedia services. He said the company and MSpot are in negotiations for more current content, but declined to say which studios are involved.

Now we could make fun of the terrible movies, but that is simply too easy. Instead we are going to wonder who would pay money to watch a two hour movie on a two inch screen.

The snitches over at ThinkSecret are reporting on Steve Jobs’ next front in the war on TV:

Apple’s Mac mini will be reborn as the digital hub centerpiece it was originally conceived to be, Think Secret sources have disclosed. The new Mac mini project, code-named Kaleidoscope, will feature an Intel processor and include both Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality.

We should know in about a month Apple (at MacWorld Expo in SF) whether this rumor is true and if it is Apple’s answer to Tivo. Better buckle up.