Media Experience

Industry News from TechCrunch

Excerpt: “

Ever since OS. 3.0, the latest operating system for the iPhone, launched on June 17, prices among the top 100 apps in the iTunes App Store have been fluctuating wildly as developers push out apps taking advantage of all the new features in the OS. Some of the new features we are starting to see in apps include push notifications, turn-by-turn navigation, cut-and-paste, embeddable maps, access to external accessories, search within apps, and subscriptions.”

Link: iPhone App Prices Fluctuate As Developers Adjust To OS 3.0; Nav Apps Gain Pricing Power

META Blog “Industry News” posts are cited verbatim and are intended for informational purposes only. Any opinions expressed are those of the source and should not be construed as an editorial position of the Media Experience Trade Association or its members.

Industry News from GigaOM Network

Excerpt: “Do you have what it takes to create the next great iPhone app? Or have it featured on iPhone commercials and installed on the all iTouches at the Apple store? Maybe have a big ol’ icon flashing so fast at the next WWDC that you have to include a seizure warning? There’s an app for that!

It’s called your checkbook.”

Link: Secret to App Store Success: $1,875 per day [TheAppleBlog]

META Blog “Industry News” posts are cited verbatim and are intended for informational purposes only. Any opinions expressed are those of the source and should not be construed as an editorial position of the Media Experience Trade Association or its members.

Industry News from TechCrunch

Excerpt: “Since it launched a year ago, Apple’s App Store has had a series of successes (50,000 apps, a billion downloads, transforming the market), but also some failures…there’s a new potentially troublesome front opening up as well: Bait and switch apps. Yes, the old practice of luring customers with a shiny price, only to reveal the real cost after (in this case, the download), could find its way to the App Store, thanks to in-app purchases.

Link: iPhone In-App Purchases Already Leading To The Dreaded Two Words: Bait And Switch

META Blog “Industry News” posts are cited verbatim and are intended for informational purposes only. Any opinions expressed are those of the source and should not be construed as an editorial position of the Media Experience Trade Association or its members.

Industry News from TechCrunch

Excerpt: “Blu-ray was declared the winning format last year when HD DVD threw in the towel. This victory came after major studios left the HD DVD camp and joined up with Blu-ray. But just because a victory was celebrated, that doesn’t mean the format is successful. In fact, a recent Harris Interactive poll shows that many purchased an HD DVD player last year and most don’t plan on buying a Blu-ray player anytime soon.

This poll’s results might be shocking to some outside the tech community, but it clearly shows that consumers are ready to move past physical media and onto the digital downloads. In fact, secondary polls were conducted as well and found that an overwhelming number of people are ‘not at all likely’ to purchase a Blu-ray device within the next year and many will buy fewer DVDs within six months.”

Link: Poll Finds That Physical Media Is Dying, HD DVD As Popular As Blu-ray

META Blog “Industry News” posts are cited verbatim and are intended for informational purposes only. Any opinions expressed are those of the source and should not be construed as an editorial position of the Media Experience Trade Association or its members.

Industry News from paidContent.org

Excerpt: “Epix, the high-profile premium movie JV from Viacom (NYSE: VIA), Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate, is launching online tomorrow in a private beta. The service, announced with much fanfare in April last year, still hasn’t announced a distribution deal on cable or satellite. Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer said in an earnings call earlier this month that they won’t have all the carriage deals in place by October, the slated month for the channel’s launch, but is confident about the launch itself. ‘It’s kind of a rolling process for us…We are all very confident,’ he said. Late last year we reported about the total investment in the channel run by the JV company called Studio 3 Partners, LLC: the partner companies will sink in close to $100 million over the channel’s lifetime and more if performance criterion are met.

The online channel has about 100 movies on it, reports NTV, including new movies like Iron Man. It also plans to have original series, like the one it announced in Feb. The service launches tomorrow here, and users will be able to request access on a rolling basis. It is streaming the movies in HD format, using a dynamic-streaming feature offered with Akamai’ CDN, as described here. The company’s chief digital officer is Emil Rensing, one of the co-founder of online video studio Next New Networks, and his company Twitter feed is here, in case you want to get updates about the online service.

Link: Premium JV Movie Service Epix Launching In Private Beta Online

META Blog “Industry News” posts are cited verbatim and are intended for informational purposes only. Any opinions expressed are those of the source and should not be construed as an editorial position of the Media Experience Trade Association or its members.

Industry News from GigaOM Network

Excerpt: “Epix, the new pay TV channel that’s a joint venture between Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM, is launching a private beta of its online film distribution on Monday. Online distribution from day one on a premium channel? It’s a whole new ballgame.

Epix, meant to disintermediate pay networks like Showtime, will be sold for a low license fee so that access to the channel will be included in your basic tier of HD service instead of for an extra fee. And its site will be available at no extra charge, commercial-free, to cable subscribers with web authentication. Epix’s distribution partners (and their authentication models and their timeline for release) have not yet been announced.

Epix has about 100 films live in the private beta today, including new movies like Iron Man. It will also have original series and airings of concerts and comedy shows. It runs an adaptive bitrate player through Flash Media Streaming Server 3.5 and Akamai that streams all the way up to 720p at 3 megabits.

Social TV startup ClipSync built the Epix player, which means it will include ClipSync’s flagship ‘watch with friends’ feature. In this case, you can schedule a viewing with up to four people. There will also be public activity feeds, user ratings and other social features. Epix Chief Digital Officer Emil Rensing, also a founder of Next New Networks, said Facebook and Twitter integration are likely coming as well. So this does sound quite a bit more savvy than past joint studio digital projects like Movielink.

From what we’ve seen of the very basic site, streaming looks nice and plays well. The navigation may be a bit innovative for its own good; it seems you can only browse through all the movies using a ‘3D wall’ visual interface from Cooliris (see above). Some of us don’t mind a simple text list! But movie pages are nicely built out already, with content like cast and crew, trivia, and still images.

Members of the general public will be able to register for rolling access to the beta starting Monday. Epix has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from its three parents, and is run as part of MTV Networks with its own team.

If only as one of the first glimpses into how premium content will be distributed to paying customers online, it’s cool to see what Epix is doing. But given that this is a project of only three studios, it does signal a future in which the videos we want to see online are spread across many more channels and access points than ever before.

Link: Will Epix’s Digital Ambitions Be Epic? [NewTeeVee]

META Blog “Industry News” posts are cited verbatim and are intended for informational purposes only. Any opinions expressed are those of the source and should not be construed as an editorial position of the Media Experience Trade Association or its members.

Industry News from paidContent.org

Excerpt: “It’s been a while since we’ve heard any definitive news about BD Live, the platform that lets studios embed interactive features like games and IM chats into their Blu-ray movies—but at least one studio has figured out that BD Live needs to tap in to preexisting social networks for it to gain traction with more than a handful of users: Warner Bros. The company’s Warner Home Video division will be linking all new BD Live-enabled releases to Facebook, letting viewers access their friends lists, games and other applications while they’re watching a film.

Kris Brown, Warner’s VP of worldwide high-definition tells Video Business that Facebook ‘adds credibility’ to Warner’s BD Live offering because it expands the available pool of people a movie viewer can interact with, beyond the studio’s own relatively small BD Live community. (There aren’t any hard stats on the overall number of active BD Live users, but a look at some individual communities, like the relatively new CBS BD-Live site, for example, show participation in the hundreds—not thousands.)

This walled garden approach—where each studio sets up its own BD Live community and content—is part of the problem; Warner seems to understand that the walls need to be lowered a bit to foster more widespread adoption. Whether rival studios like Sony and Disney will jump on the bandwagon and partner up with Facebook or another network remains to be seen.

Link: Will Adding Facebook Drum Up More Interest In Warner’s BD Live?

META Blog “Industry News” posts are cited verbatim and are intended for informational purposes only. Any opinions expressed are those of the source and should not be construed as an editorial position of the Media Experience Trade Association or its members.

Industry News from TechCrunch

Excerpt: There’s no question that Hulu has firmly established itself as one of the dominant video sites on the web. But its incredible growth seems to be dropping off, and quickly. Between January and February of this year, the site saw a 42% increase in unique U.S. visitors and 33% increase in streams. Between Feburary and March, it moved up to become the third most popular video site in the US, with a 14% growth in uniques and a 20% growth in overall streams.

The latest comScore data for Hulu, which covers the month of April, reports a much more modest 4.4% growth in overall streams, from 380 million streams in March to around 397 million in April. And its unique visitors actually went down month over month, from around 41.5 million in March to 40.1 million over the same time span.

Much of the site’s growth between January and February can probably be attributed to its prime time Super Bowl commercial, which introduced the site for the first time to millions of viewers. Since then the site has kept up a star-studded marketing campaign to keep awareness up. I suspect that most of the site’s new users earlier this year were the low hanging fruit — people who would love to watch their TV and movie content on their computer screen, but didn’t know that Hulu even existed. Now the site is going to have to convince the die-hard TV fans to switch up their viewing habits if it wants to keep the same momentum going. Hulu Desktop, one of the first products to come out of Hulu labs, may help with this. But it’s going to be hard to break people out of old habits.

Link: Hulu Still Going Strong, But Growth Is Dropping Off Sharply

META Blog “Industry News” posts are cited verbatim and are intended for informational purposes only. Any opinions expressed are those of the source and should not be construed as an editorial position of the Media Experience Trade Association or its members.

Industry News from Ars Technica

Excerpt: “Vuze, maker of one of the most popular BitTorrent clients (formerly named Azureus), hoped to dispel the myth that peer-to-peer users are poor, freeloading, antisocial misfits, so it commissioned a survey into the demographic makeup of Vuze users. What it found was that Vuze users are in fact freeloaders when it comes to buying digital content online—shocking, we know—but that they are actually ‘Hollywood’s best customers’ when it comes to spending money offline.

Frank Magid Associates conducted the survey, looking at 693 American Vuze users and 606 American Internet users, all aged 18-44. The most surprising result was that, when surveyed about their moviegoing behavior, Vuze users bought far more movie tickets, rented more films, and bought more DVDs than did the general Internet population.

Click here to read the rest of this article“

Link: Study: P2P customers are Hollywood’s best friends—really!

META Blog “Industry News” posts are cited verbatim and are intended for informational purposes only. Any opinions expressed are those of the source and should not be construed as an editorial position of the Media Experience Trade Association or its members.

Industry News from Ars Technica

Excerpt: “TiVo has continued its utter patent beatdown of EchoStar in a case that goes back forever in Internet time (that is, 2005). A US District Judge rejected EchoStar’s latest attempt to work around the TiVo patents in question and went so far as to hold the company in contempt of court. As a result, the judge ordered enforcement of the permanent injunction and awarded another $103 million in damages to TiVo. Plus interest.

TiVo originally sued EchoStar in 2005 over the DVRs that the satellite provider offers with the DISH Network. In April 2006, a jury found EchoStar liable for patent infringement. In August of that year, TiVo obtained an injunction against EchoStar, ordering it to stop selling DVRs and disable the DVR functionality on its products within 30 days. In November 2007, the US Patent Office upheld TiVo’s ‘multimedia time warping system‘ patent, delivering yet another blow against EchoStar. Finally, EchoStar and DISH Network agreed to pay $104 million to TiVo in October of 2008 after the Supreme Court denied the company’s request to intervene.

Click here to read the rest of this article“

Link: EchoStar to cough up $103M more for TiVo patent infringement

META Blog “Industry News” posts are cited verbatim and are intended for informational purposes only. Any opinions expressed are those of the source and should not be construed as an editorial position of the Media Experience Trade Association or its members.