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How consumer media will change in 2013

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 07:55:50 +0000

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Over the top in 2012: trends and technologies to watch

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 06:55:23 +0000

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Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room

Thu, 31 May 2012 06:55:44 +0000

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Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:55:54 +0000

The first quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile legal and regulatory battles over privacy, antitrust and copyright that could eventually reshape digital markets, including the pay-TV business and online advertising. It was also marked by shifts in the online video landscape, including a seductive new display from Apple and Hollywood’s first efforts in the cloud. We examine these trends and others in this quarterly report, as well as provide a near-term outlook for the next 12–18 months.

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How Wal-Mart could move ahead in the cloud-based storage race

Paul Sweeting — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 14:00:13 +0000

Wal-Mart is looking to use its leverage in Hollywood to accelerate the movie industry’s move to cloud-based storage and digital commerce. In the process, it could steal a march on other providers of cloud-based media lockers like Apple, Google and Amazon, whose platforms to date are geared largely around music storage, by establishing itself as the first video-based cloud media service.

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What’s driving the next phase of the e-commerce evolution

Paul Sweeting — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 03:35:17 +0000

The outsize growth in online spending this holiday season suggests that e-commerce as a sector of the economy has passed some kind of tipping point and that factors beyond simply convenience and price — both long-standing hallmarks of online shopping — are propelling the e-commerce sector into a new phase in its evolution.

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Hollywood’s UltraViolet offers an alternative to iTunes

Ryan Lawler — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:18:02 +0000

Apple’s iTunes store continues to be the main way consumers buy movies online. Even with increasing competition from the likes of Amazon, Vudu and others, iTunes still reigns supreme as the top digital storefront when it comes to renting and purchasing movies online. But that might soon change, as the three-year-old UltraViolet initiative is finally coming to market with a product that will let users purchase a piece of content and watch it across a number of devices, and even online video services.

With the release of Horrible Bosses from Warner Home Entertainment on Tuesday, viewers will be able take ownership of a digital title across multiple devices without having to transfer huge files. And soon, they will be able to stream the movie from a number of different digital storefronts, or they will be able to download the file to a mobile phone or tablet to take it on the go.

Of course, viewers who live within the Apple ecosystem — those with iPhones and iPads, Apple TVs and an iTunes account — have been able to do most of this already. According to the latest numbers from IHS iSuppli, iTunes had nearly two-thirds of the online movie market in the first half of this year. And with Apple’s iCloud launch imminent, the company will make accessing and transferring movie files even easier.

But iTunes doesn’t play well with non-Apple devices. That means that if you have an Android tablet, you won’t be able to take your movie on the go. And if you don’t have an Apple TV set-top box, forget about watching an iTunes movie on the big screen.

UltraViolet is Hollywood’s first real effort at breaking the Apple stranglehold. The idea is that by implementing a digital rights locker, the studios involved (basically all the majors except Disney) will enable viewers to purchase a piece of content once and watch it on potentially any device with a web connection. In essence, consumers will be able to store their purchases in the cloud and access them from anywhere.

Sounds good in theory, but in practice the initial launch is a bit lacking. For the Horrible Bosses release, Warner Bros. has teed up availability on mobile devices through its Flixster apps, but no other applications or digital stores are on board — yet. Hopefully that will change when other partners, like Vudu, come on board and enable viewing across other devices, like connected TVs.

As a first-time user, you’ll need to create a Flixster account, open an UltraViolet account and link it to Flixster, and enter a 12-digit redemption code from the Blu-ray disc to gain digital access. It’s a five-step process, but the good news is that once those accounts are set up, you won’t have to enter that information again.

Finally, there’s the physical media aspect of the launch. Today, the only way to score an UltraViolet-enabled digital copy of a movie like Horrible Bosses is to buy a physical DVD or Blu-ray disc. That’s because currently, there aren’t any digital-only storefronts available. Again, Vudu and digital stores like Best Buy’s CinemaNow are soon expected to offer their own UltraViolet-enabled products, but in the meantime requiring a DVD or Blu-ray purchase to gain digital access seems a bit counterintuitive.

Hopefully, the rolling launch of UltraViolet partners and capabilities will fulfill the promise of the initiative’s charter. In the meantime, however, it seems unlikely that UltraViolet will make much headway in combatting Apple’s digital dominance.

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Fanhattan’s iPad app makes video discovery social

Ryan Lawler — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:00:56 +0000

When the Fanhattan iPad app launched in early June, the idea was to help viewers access the movies and TV shows they wanted to watch across a number of video services available on the Apple tablet. With a unified search function and access to advanced metadata, as well as a smart navigation system, Fanhattan delivered an easy way to find users’ favorite content, wherever it was. The one thing it lacked was a social discovery and recommendations mechanism. That’s been corrected in the latest update, which went live on Tuesday.

Fanhattan is betting big on integrating social networks — especially Facebook — which will not only provide more interesting content for users to watch but will also allow them to share their own interests with friends. Once signed in to Facebook on the app, Fanhattan users will be able to get recommendations from their social graph, including movies and TV shows that their friends have Liked on the social network.

Users can also Like content of their own on Fanhattan, which serves a couple of purposes. First off, Liking a piece of content will help Fanhattan recognize what types of movies and TV shows a user is interested in, which will eventually help build its recommendations system. Second, the Like function allows users to share their interests with their friends, giving others an idea of what they’re watching.

Liking a show also helps surface posts about related movies, shows and actors on users’ Facebook walls. As part of the integration, the company has introduced a Fanhattan widget for Facebook, which posts Likes to users’ Facebook walls and appears in their friends’ news feeds. When users Like a piece of content in the app, the widget will let their friends see where they can watch those videos.

But the social elements don’t end with Facebook. Fanhattan has also added Twitter integration to let users participate in conversations around their favorite TV series or movies. Users can now directly follow conversations from within the app without having to go to Twitter.

Finally, Fanhattan has added support for Vudu, adding a new source of streaming content that can be watched on the iPad. The app already let users search between native apps from Netflix, Hulu Plus, iTunes and ABC. By adding Vudu, Fanhattan will, for the first time, also surface content from within the iPad’s Safari browser. That’s because, rather than introducing an app, Vudu is making its streaming video-on-demand service available via a mobile website.

Fanhattan is just the latest video discovery company to embrace social networks for finding out about new videos. Apps like Boxee, as well as web experiences from startups like VHX.tv, enable viewers to connect with their friends on social networks and see what they’re watching and sharing. But Fanhattan is the first to integrate with premium content apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus, which lets them link back directly to Hollywood studio and broadcast TV content.

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Did Wal-Mart Throw A Lawsuit To Get Access To Netflix Customers?

Jeff John Roberts — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 03:20:57 +0000

Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) recently surged into third place in the movie-download business, barely a year after buying the startup Vudu. Now, the giant internet retailer may have scored another coup.

A new court ruling gives Wal-Mart a major boost in its effort to muscle in on Netlix’s streaming subscribers. A federal court in California late last week approved a class-action settlement that requires Wal-Mart to pay out $27.5 million. But here’s the key element of the ruling: Wal-Mart will be allowed to pay the 40 million Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) subscribers in the form of gift cards for Wal-Mart.com — where there is prominent advertising for Vudu, which rents and sells movies a la carte..

The court ruling is a blow to Netflix, which had earlier blasted the settlement as “the equivalent of a marketing campaign that costs Walmart only 68 cents per potential customer.”

The class action came in response to a dinner meeting in 2005 at which the CEOs of the Netflix and Wal-Mart.com allegedly agreed to divvy up the DVD market. Consumer advocates say that under the pact, Wal-Mart agreed not to rent DVDs if Netflix agreed not to sell them. Class action suits were filed against both companies in 2009.

In what now appears to be a shrewd move by Wal-Mart, the company reached a settlement with the plaintiffs in July. The court ruling last week gave tentative approval to the settlement. Under its terms, approximately 40 million past and current Netflix subscribers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico will be notified by email that they are entitled to redeem an online settlement card at Wal-Mart.com. Members of the class action can also choose to receive a check in the mail. The settlement states that claimants will receive their share of the $27 million, minus 25 percent legal fees.

In court filings, Netflix argued that the settlement effectively hands over its customer list to Wal-Mart at a time when the retail giant is trying to expand its online video offerings. In response, the court approved an arrangement that will see a third party, not Wal-Mart, manage the payouts. The procedures also say that Wal-Mart cannot keep track track of which people that register their gift cards on the site are class action claimants.

Still, the way the settlement is being carried out will likely increase awareness of Vudu as a potential alternative to Neftlix at a time when Netflix is facing some new challenges. In recent months, Netflix has failed to renew a key agreement major content provider Starz and announced a controversial plan that will significantly increase costs for subscribers who elect to receive movies both in the mail and a streaming service.

For the first half of the year, Vudu had 5.3 percent of the online rental-and-purchase movie market, behind only Apple’s ITunes, with a 65.8 percent share, and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Corp.’s Zune Video Marketplace, with 16.2 percent. Vudu was more popular than comparable offerings from both Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and Sony (NYSE: SNE).

“Netflix continues to believe the lawsuit is without merit and the settlement changes nothing,” said spokesman Steve Swasey by email. Wal-Mart didn’t reply to phone requests for comment.

The Wal-Mart settlement is slated to receive final approval next February. Meanwhile, Netflix says it will continue to fight ongoing court claims that it is also liable for the same antitrust allegations.

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Looks like HTML5 is gaining momentum

Om Malik — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 18:00:05 +0000

Sometimes I can’t help myself. After spending years in the trenches as a reporter, anytime I see three or more information blurbs about a technology or a company, I immediately think of it as a trend. And this time, I’m making a somewhat obvious observation — well obvious for most of our readers, at the very least — that a set of technologies collectively known as HTML5 is finally starting to gain a lot momentum, and to me, that’s a good thing.

In last month or so, we’ve seen some major services re-launch their websites for the iPhone, iPad and other tablets based on HTML5 and are bringing them to the mainstream users — so much so that even giants like Microsoft are ready to cast aside their own technologies in favor of HTML5.

There’s Google of course, whose apps keep getting better and better. It’s clearly leading the HTML5 charge. And if that wasn’t enough, in July 2011, Pandora re-launched its website for tablets. Earlier this month, Twitter launched an HTML5-based web client that’s as fantastic as the dedicated app itself.

Today, Amazon launched Kindle Cloud Reader, which is so good, writes our Darrell Etherington, that “you’d be hard-pressed to tell that you aren’t using a native app, especially if you place a shortcut to the web app on your iPad’s home screen.” Walmart-owned Vudu launched an HTML5 version of its web-app. And as we had previously noted, “more than 2.1 billion mobile devices will have HTML5 browsers by 2016, up from just 109 million in 2010, according to a new report by ABI Research.”

I find it ironic that when the iPhone first launched in 2007, the whole idea was that mobile would help reinvent the web, but those web apps never really materialized. Four years later, that very same idea could become a drain on Apple’s booming app business as companies deploy web apps to avoid Apple’s 30-percent revenue cut for apps and content.

That said, I don’t think HTML 5 and dedicated apps are mutually exclusive. Websites have to come to realization that they need to be tablet-ready for a seamless experience for their customers. What’s more, the closer they can bring the app and browser-based experience to each other, the better it is. Pandora and Twitter have done a good job of providing a somewhat consistent experience across different browsers and apps. Hopefully, this is going to get easier and more commonplace.

In a post, Why HTML5 web apps are going to rock your world, Simon Mackie said:

As technologies like HTML5, CSS3, SVG and WebGL start to become more mainstream, not only will the web apps we already use become more useful, but we should also see developers building web apps that do things that previously could have only been done by desktop applications. It’s an exciting time to be working on the web, both for the developers of web apps, who have a plethora of new technologies and techniques to experiment with, and for users of those apps.

With Facebook set to launch an HTML5-based Project Spartan, many of us would be able to see this first hand.

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