Technology360

Coming Soon via Your TiVo: Internet Video on Television

Saul Hansell writes:

TiVo plans to introduce features that will allow people to use its digital video recorders to watch some video programming from the Internet on their televisions. ...

... Many TiVo recorders have technology that allows them to be connected to the Internet, and 500,000 of them are online through high-speed connections. But TiVo’s recorders use a video format used in DVDs that is known as MPEG2, and not any of the several formats used for online video.  ¶    TiVo has found several ways around this problem. A handful of producers have agreed to convert some of their programming to MPEG2 and make it available to download directly to TiVo recorders. TiVo has already offered some programs in conjunction with programmers including iVillage, Heavy.com and The New York Times. It will soon add more programming, from  CBS and Forbes, and make the content more prominent on its menu screens. ...

Link:  New York Times.

Jeff Baumgartner has some additional feature details in, TiVo unleashes broader broadband video strategy.  Link: CED. 

Here's the Associated Press story, TiVo stretching into the Internet, via CNN.  --Dennis

This Box Was Made for Walking

Dr. Shani Orgad of the London School of Economics and Political Science has written a report of this title (PDF), commissioned by Nokia, that provides a good overview of mobile television.  James Pearce at mocoNews.net has a summary.  --Dennis

Satellite radio subscriber growth

Satellite radio had 12.3M subscribers as of September 30th.  Sirius Satellite Radio gained on XM Satellite Radio between 3rd quarter 2005 and 3rd quarter 2006.  The former increased from 2.17M subs to 5.12M subs (135.5%), while the latter increased from 5.03M subs to 7.18M subs (42.7%).  However, looking at gross new subscribers only for the 3rd quarter of 2006, Sirius gained 732,406 (14.3% of its ending total) while XM gained 868,007 (12.1% of its ending total).  Gross new subscribers have been trending down for both services since the December 2005 holidays.   Data source: Orbitcast.

Over at paidContent.org, Jonathan Berr has the 3rd quarter earnings story for Sirius and for XM.  Both did better than Wall Street expected.  --Dennis

Sirius Applies for Repeaters in Hawaii and Alaska

Orbitcast reports:  "Sirius Satellite Radio has filed an application with the FCC (PDF) to install four new repeater towers in the states of Alaska and Hawaii. ..."

Media Frenzy: A Struggle Over Dominance and Definition

Richard Siklos writes:

... In the last few weeks an enormous swarm of activity has been coming out of the Googleplex beehive in Mountain View, Calif. — much of it aimed squarely at preparing the search company to move its phenomenally lucrative advertising business beyond Web pages and into video, newspapers and radio. ...

... What’s at stake is pretty much everything in the $400 billion global advertising honey pot. Google’s efficiency at putting text ads next to search results is what sets it apart from Yahoo, MSN and the other big boys online. ...

Link:  New York Times.

Conferences write-up: The Relevant New 2.0

Writing from Switzerland, Bruno Giussani has one of the more original weblogs out there.  In a couple of posts, he's summarized in interesting fashion threads of discussion from some of the conferences he's recently attended.  The speakers represent a wide variety of disciplines but each provides a thoughtful point of view.  One of my long-time favorites is NYU professor Clay Shirky, who seems to have disappeared from the web, but is still thinking.  I'll quote from Giussani's summary of his remarks as an example:

... Social software expert and NYU professor Clay Shirky believes that organizations that want to encourage innovation should focus on reducing the cost of failure rather than focusing on minimizing its likelihood, as most companies do today. He derives this insight from the surprising results of an analysis of the open-source software movement. Open-source is software that any owner can look at, modify, transform. A central repository of this software is SourceForge.com which carries over 122'000 open-source projects. Shirky analized some of their numbers, and discovered that the most popular products (those with an activity score on SourceForge of 100%) are downloaded millions of times. ...

Link:  LunchoverIP part 1 (April 2006), part 2 (November 2006).  --Dennis

HD Radio Gets Distribution Boost, Holiday Push

FMQB reports:

The next phase of a $200 million marketing campaign for HD Radio will launch on November 13, touting Circuit City as the initiative’s first “big box” retailer. The campaign also will alert consumers to RadioShack’s HD radio rollout to new markets and the price reduction of JVC’s automotive HD radio receiver to $199. Plus, rebates of up to $50 are now available on select receiver models ...

Old Media and New Media: Friends, Not Foes

Scott Kessler writes:

If content is king, then its queen is making money. This marriage of substance and sales has driven progress and profits in the media world for decades. The Internet has been and will continue to be no different, in our view. This is why we believe Internet companies that enable and promote revenue generation from their content should be viewed as critical allies of, not necessarily competitors to, traditional media companies.  ¶  Despite a growing population, TV and radio audiences have been declining in the U.S. Movie ticket sales peaked in 2002, and magazine and newspaper circulations have been trending lower for half a decade, with revenue and earnings growth stagnating.  ¶  Conversely, from 2000 to 2005, the number of U.S. households with Internet access rose 31%, and the number with broadband access increased more than sevenfold, according to Forrester Research. Internet advertising revenues jumped 55% during the same period, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. From 2001 to 2005, spending on Internet content nearly tripled, according to the Online Publishers Assn. We view this as impressive, considering that the Internet bubble burst in 2000, and the industry really didn't start to recover until mid-2003. ...

Link:  Standard & Poors via BusinessWeek.

Google eyeing radio play

Reuters reports:

Web search leader Google Inc. is hiring scores of radio sales people and is spending heavily in a bid to expand its position in the $20 billion radio industry.  ¶  Google spokesman Michael Mayzel said this week that the company will begin a public test of Google Audio Ads by the end of the year. Advertisers will be able to go online and sign up for targeted radio ads using the same AdWords system they use to buy Web search ads. ...

... It made a clear move into radio in January when it agreed to pay more than $1 billion, depending on performance, for dMarc Broadcasting Inc., which connects advertisers to radio stations through an automated advertising system. ...

Link:  Reuters via CNN.com.

The Tail That Wags the Web

P. J. Fusco writes:

... Long tail theory suggests an expansive search referral treasure trove exists in the unbranded keyword universe. But a strong brand should do more than just yield brand-centric search traffic. It should be put into a position to win non-branded search referrals too. To do so, more than 30 pages of the site need to be optimized.  ¶  Although branded search queries drive the search head, the number of pages that receive search referral benefits is usually a diminutive figure. Studies show as few as 5 percent of a site's pages successfully yield traffic for branded search queries.  ¶  Conversely, this leaves 95 percent of an online merchant's site that can be leveraged to target search tail keywords and keyword phrases. The primary concern is to get those pages yielding traffic. The non-yielding hordes of pages must be optimized, because merely being crawled and indexed aren't enough. ...

Link:  ClickZ Network.