If you're a Flickr user and not a Flickr Desktop Uploadr user, you should be. It is the hidden gem of the heavily trafficked site and best friend of frequent uploaders.

The Flickr Uploadr for desktop use have gone through changes over the years. It's reached its current maturity at 3.2.1 after being plagued with upload crashes, double uploads and copy loss for images. This version doesn't suffer likes its predecessors . . . well, not as much.

There still are occasional crashes but the Uploadr handles restarting better and will load up the last batch of photos for upload with their copy intact on restart. I've found this to be a more frequent issue if I am trying to upload photos to Flickr from a throttled internet connection with slow speeds. Cough, Time-Warner Road Runner, cough.

With that said, I've found the Uploadr the easiest way to get batch photos online with titles, descriptions, tags and grouped the way the I want them with privacy settings. Here's a peek for the uninitiated:

With the ability to create groups like this and see them in left hand column I am able to more effectivley tell a story about each image as it relates to one another. To be honest, it is kind of fun to be able to create a narrative about a photo set that can be shared with viewers.

You'll also notice in the Description' box that the copy begins with two characters *^'. Well, as an added bonus of using the Flickr Uploadr to get photos on Flickr, I also use it as a front-end to insert photos on my own blog and to also send links to them on Twitter.

With the use of the magic API, RSS, I have two separate crontab scripts running that read my personal Flickr RSS feed and look for these two characters. The * tells the script to take the title and description and add them as posts to my personal blog. The ^ tells the script to grab the title and URL of the image on Flickr (shorten it), then send it on to Twitter in my personal Twitter account. The special characters are a control mechanism that allow me to filter or choose additional syndication for my photos.

I'm going down a geeky path here and will pull back a bit. The Flickr Desktop Uploadr isnt' something that is brand new or undergone a massive revision lately. What it is to me an many others is a powerful tool built as an add-on to a service to make it more valuable.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Flickr Desktop Uploadr for Photos is a post from: TechStartups.com

But first lawsuits first.

Advertise.com, which was purchased by ABCsearch.com earlier this year and rebranded as such a few months ago, is a variation on AOL-owned Advertising.com, the beleaguered Internet company claims. In legalese, that translates as follows:

Advertise.com recently commenced use of the virtually identical and confusingly similar designation Advertise.com and design in connection with the same and complimentary services as those offered by Plaintiffs under their federally-registered Advertising.com name and marks and their Ad.com name and marks.

Update: looks like Advertise.com sued AOL first (August 17, 2009)

A search of the USPTO database shows that AOL does in fact have three registered trademarks for Advertising.com, but all are design trademarks, which means they stand little chance of exercising trademark rights over something as generic as the domain name advertise.com. Granted, the logo looks vaguely similar, but virtually identical and confusing' it ain't.

Note that AOL doesn't even effectively market Advertising.com as a business unit anymore - although it may soon recommence doing just that - and redirects the domain name to its Platform-A website instead (AOL rebranded it to the name of this whole-owned subsidiary in April last year and now prefers AOL Advertising as the overarching denominator).

So why would anyone confuse Advertise.com for an AOL property? It just doesn't make any sense to try and claim ownership over any domain name with a variation on the word advertising' in it. What's next? Ads.com? Advertisement.com? In the court documents, embedded below, AOL even boasts the fact that Advertise.com has only about 25,000 unique visitors per month, so what's really at stake here?

The second case is even more bizarre: although often used in its communication, Ad.com is apparently not a trademark owned by AOL, although the company has filed an application for it in the past. But that domain name is actually owned by a Marcos Guillen, who recently sold it to Directi and Skenzo for $1.4 million. Well, almost sold it, because the deal fell through after all, according to industry watchers due to the fact that the mark has not yet acquired distinctiveness for any of the applicants - including AOL - following a recent examination. Guillen has now filed a lawsuit against Directi and Skenzo for backing out of its auction purchase of Ad.com, seeking $1.4 million, prejudgment interest, and/or damages according to proof.

Aol

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Sony was supposed to win this. The company made magnetic tape out of like paper and mud back in the 1940s, turned out a "pocketable" transistor radio in the 1950s, and invented the "portable" television by 1960. They had their first video tape recorder by 1963. They weren't the only ones, but they were among the first and best.

The so-called VTR business had a rocky start. The things were hulking bastards, with huge price tags and poor recording capability.

A company called Ampex put out the first "home entertainment" VTR in 1963, only it cost $30,000 in the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog, and was nicknamed Grant's Tomb because the product manager who thought it up was going to be shoved inside by the company's accountants. (He would have fit, too, the thing was so big.) Sony comes along in the middle of that decade and puts out a $1,200 "portable" VTR that came with a leatherette case and its own TV. It still weighed 65 pounds.

The worst part about these 1960s VTRs was that they were basically reel-to-reelyou had to thread your own 1-inch videotape through spools and stuff, and by the end of the decade, a one-hour spool of tape was like 8 inches in diameter. Can you imagine your TiVo needing 180 spools of videotape to get the job done?

As Sony toiled on the videotape problem, Matsushitawho we now call Panasonicand its independent subsidiary JVC weren't really standing out in the VTR business. Let's say this: Nobody would have guessed they'd be able to overthrow Sony and kick mecha ass within the decade.

However, these guys were among the biggest manufacturers, dwarfing Sony many times over. Matsushita, known for efficiency, not innovation, tended to focus on big boring appliancesTVs, refrigerators, air conditionerswith a smaller team, branded Technics, devoted to dominating the hi-fi realm. JVC was all about TVs and audio gear, and had decent video know-how.

It was Sony who solved the reel-to-reel problem withta daaa!a video cassette. It was called U-Matic, and at 3/4" thick, it was smaller than the earlier formats, but still a bit of a chunkster. Since video was a bit of a Wild West, Sony felt like it needed partners to firmly establish a format, and to avoid a format war. It asked Matsushita and JVC, who said "yes" as long as Sony adopted some changes. They key here: The partnership included a deal where everybody shared all the patents. Turns out, probably not the smartest move by Sony.

Sony was right to form a posse, though. Every single electronics maker in Japan, Europe and America was trying to build a video recorder. Some American firms were obsessed with lasers (though ironically it would later be the Dutch and Japanese firms who actually put lasers to good use); other American firms were jazzed about microfilm...for video. None of them had success. Before we get on with the story, here's a list of totally failed video players and recorders:

Matsushita VX-100 and VX-2000
Matsushita AutoVision
Toshiba/Sanyo V-Cord
Ampex InstaVision
MCA DiscoVision/Magnavox Magnavision
CBS Electronic Video Recording
RCA HoloTape
Sears/Cartridge Television Cartrivision

See what I mean? A friggin' mess it was.

Part of the problem was the message. Nobody knew what the hell this was all about. Sony wasn't just a pioneer in the technology, they thought hard about how to explain why you totally desperately want something bad. At one point, Sony hired Bela Lugosi to dress up one last time as Dracula, and explain that, since he worked nights, he needed to catch up on primetime shows when he got home. Get it? Vampiresthey're out killing people when Barney Miller is playing! It was a good bit, and there were a lot more like it. Little by little, the public caught on to what VCRs were for.

Anyway, U-Matic, launched in 1971, wasn't a runaway success, either, but it was the bestselling video recorder to date, and the first successful VCR. In the realm of pro video, it was hot. Sony cashed in by steering from the home market to the businesses but JVC, who kept trying to pitch it for home use, got hosed. Like villains in some Shakespearean play, Matsushita and JVC kinda lurked in the background, planning for the next round when they might one-up that little charmer, Sony. The name of their plot? Video Home System, which you and I call VHS.

Sony was naive. Like, crazy naive. In 1974, it asked Matsushita and JVC to partner up again, this time on a fully baked format called Betamax. They weren't asking for intellectual collaboration, just a deal to make and sell the things. It was a nice system, with really small tapes, but the problem was, the tapes only recorded for an hour. Sony was like, "That's not a problem," but everyone else was like, "Yes, it is." The would-be partners dragged their heels suspiciously, not signing any deals. Sony kinda thought that was weird, but went ahead and launched the one-hour Betamax box in 1975.

Big mistake.

Not long after Sony went into wide release with the one-hour Betamax, JVC pulled a two-hour VHS out of its butt. And in time for Christmas 1976 no less. Sony had another flash of naivete when it pressed on with the one-hour system for a while, even though it had a two-hour system in the works. In that gap, JVC and its big poppa Matsushita scored sales and recognition.

Some people say Betamax was "better" but that depends on many factors, and could very well be an urban myth. The technologies were so close Sony's own chairman called VHS a copy of Betamax. What may have looked good in one system with certain settings might not look as good on another with different settings. And by some accounts, Betamax's more moving parts meant they were more expensive to manufacture and more costly to maintain and repair. It's not an open-and-shut case of quantity vs. quality. Either way you look at it, there are compromises.

By this point, it wasn't just some anything-goes contest with a million formats. By 1976, all those above had died or were dying. In Japan, there were just two choices. The Japanese government told everyone to sort it out. Hitachi, Mitsubishi and Sharp joined Team VHS, but didn't really move forward.

In February 1977, Sony grabbed Toshiba and Sanyo, and then signed the American powerhouse brand Zenith up for an order of Sony-made Betamaxes with the Zenith name on them. Was it going to happen for Betamax after all? Seemed like they'd finally drawn at least a few good cards from the deck.

Sony might not have been totally screwed at that moment, but there were two American powerhouses, and the other one, RCA, was undecided. Ironically, the fate of the Japanese VCR industry relied on how well it could handle the most American of sports: Football. In other words, now that both players could manage two hours of recording time, what RCA wanted was enough recording time to capture a gamethree hours would do.

What transpired next is unclear. Even though, at the time, both technologies were limited to two-hour capacity, Matsushita pledged to make RCA tape machines that could record for four hours.

Was this a lie? Was it vaporware? Whatever the deal, JVC engineers pulled off a four-hour capacity six weeks later, and RCA agreed to buy 55,000 machines that year, and up to a million more in the next three years. Better yet, RCA's SelectaVision VHS decks would cost $300 less than the two-hour Betamaxes, at $1000 a pop.

Although Betamax hung on for a bit longer, that, boys and girls, was the end of the competition. In 1979, Sony market share tilted downward, and by 1980, the jig was up for those poor bastards.

Note: I recognize that there are other issues that might have come into play here, including Universal's lawsuit of Sony, which lead to today's Supreme Court definition of fair-use copyright law, and the fact that some studios, including Warner, began squeezing movies onto videotape early, with varying degrees of success. However, I contend that none of that changed the outcomethe war above was fought between Sony and Matsushita, and Matsushita won.

SOURCES:
Fast Forward: Hollywood, The Japanese, and the VCR Wars - James Lardner (Special thanks to you, Jim, for chatting me through some of this)
Sony - John Nathan
The History of Television - Albert Abramson
Sony History - Sony Global Website
Made in Japan - Akio Morita
Quest for Prosperity - Konosuke Matsushita
[PDF] Case Report on Betamax - Verardi et al
"Why VHS was better than Betamax" - Guardian UK - Jack Schofield

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

Shuffling the deck is nothing new at Time Inc., of course; indeed, it seems to be management's answer for everything from sagging ad revenues to the common cold. But this reorganization sounds like a pretty big one, involving a "more centralized management structure" and plans to share resources between titles.

Writes Tim Arango, "Power within Time Inc., which through many mergers over the decades became the modern Time Warner, has long been diffuse, with individual publishers and editors essentially running their own shows. That distinct culture is coming to an end."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Time Warner, seeking to cut costs and streamline operations, plans to split off AOL's Internet access business from its Web site and online advertising business and cut 100 jobs at its corporate unit, the company's new chief executive, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, said Wednesday...
Mr. Bewkes's plan to lay off 100 people is expected to save $50 million at the corporate unit.

It seems that the net cost of those 100 people at the "corporate unit", whatever that might be, is half a million bucks apiece; one assumes most of that is salary, and possibly substantially more, if those people provide any value at all. What's more, "corporate unit" executives generally come with support staff; if support staff are included in the 100-people headcount, then one can assume that pretty much all the laid-off executives were making seven-figure salaries.

Why will serial media fade? Because consumers are changing from listeners to adept conversers. The Web has acclimated them to ultimate control (I'll go when and where I want to) and to participation. Ever wonder why TV watchers flip so much? Because they are looking for what they want, not what CBS wants to show them. Their attention span is short, and their appetite for choice is too high to bear passivity.

This trend will put increasing pressure on the serialists like XM/Sirius, NBC, Fox, Clear Channel, The New York Times, and Time Warner to accelerate their transformation.

(In a little historical twist, top Microsoft exec Ray Ozzie was at Lotus when IBM bought the company. In fact, Ozzie was one of the main reasons IBM bought the company.)

Certainly Microsoft is doing this to battle Google, which has become a legitimate threat not just to Microsoft's non-core Internet businesses like MSN, but to its very core business of applications software such as Word, Exchange and Excel.

Microsoft + Yahoo equals...what? Well, Yahoo hasn't done so well the past couple of years, and Microsoft management and cash might help. Microsoft sure could use Yahoo's know-how in Internet services like mail and calendars and instant messaging -- none of which Microsoft has been able to dominate. One of the big things Microsoft gets in the deal is sheer infrastructure -- huge data centers that can serve Internet content and apps. That kind of stuff is underappreciated, but Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have been in a data center arms race. In that sense, Microsoft and Yahoo joining forces is like the U.S. and Russia becoming allies against Germany in WWII.

But caution is in order. Tech mega-mergers have rarely worked well. (H-P + Compaq? Nope. Compaq + Digital Equipment? Nope. AOL + Time Warner? Ummm...nope.) Yahoo is a unique culture. It flows out of the personalities of its founders, Jerry Yang (now CEO) and David Filo. Insiders had felt that ousted CEO Terry Semel had taken Yahoo too far from its roots, and were just getting enthusiastic about Yang's leadership and a return to its core culture. Now Microsoft comes along, and that can't be a positive for the culture. Hard to imagine Yang and Filo and other long-time Yahooians -- who've long made their fortunes -- sticking around after a Microsoft buyout.

All in all, this one's going to be interesting.

The HBO on Demand service is being rolled out to customers of HBO in Wisconsin who are also users of Time Warner's broadband cable Internet access product. The HBO service will make a rotating list of 600 movies and shows available each month for online streaming.

The usage capped broadband, meanwhile, is going to be tested sometime in the next quarter in Beaumont, Texas. So for the time being, the two services won't overlap.

According to Time Warner, the reason for the trial of usage based billing net access, is because the growing popularity of online video is causing congestion on their network. Why, then, introduce a service at the same time that will only serve to increase the amount of online video being downloaded over your network? Of course, by tying the HBO service to the Road Runner broadband service, Time Warner is essentially passing the cost of a "free" product to consumers by raising rates elsewhere.

If Time Warner wants to encourage users to stream more video over its network, it can't also penalize users who stream more video over its network.

As Ars Technica points out, the whole thing is short-sighted. Per usage billing won't fly with consumers who have unlimited use broadband options elsewhere, and competition is only going to get stiffer for the cable industry. Verizon, for example, has no plans to try usage caps with its DSL or FiOS services, and on the horizon we can look forward to 4G wireless broadband, a possible wireless broadband service on the 700MHz spectrum being auctioned off starting this week, and Sprint's Xohm WiMAX network. Not to mention continued roll-outs and improvements of Verizon's FiOS and AT&T's U-Verse services.

"Instead of developing plans designed to discourage consumers from feeding at the bandwidth trough, cable companies would be better served in the long run by making investments in new technologies like DOCSIS 3.0 and the kind of infrastructure improvements necessary to meet bandwidth demands," writes Ars Technica's Eric Bangeman. It seems likely that in the face of competition and potential consumer distaste over proposed usage limits and practices like bandwidth throttling, cable companies may be forced to make just that type of investment, even though it might be unpopular with shareholders.

Read More...

HBO has announced that it is finally going to start offering its content online (in a somewhat meaningful way) through its new HBO on Broadband service. But the initiative seems so unnecessarily complicated that one has to one wonder if HBO gets a sick thrill out of frustrating its customers.

Here are the basics:

• The service is in the testing phase, and will only be available in Green Bay and Milwaukee, Wisc.
• To subscribe, you must already have HBO and you must be a Time Warner Cable subscriber (Time Warner Cable, don't forget, is considering charging for broadband based on usage).
• HBO on Broadband requires a separate (PC only) download.
• You can download movies or HBO TV shows to your hard drive, but they expire after four weeks.
• About six episodes of a TV show will be available at a time. Additionally, each month, all of the episodes of one series will be shown.
• The service won't feature HD content.

HBO is in a tough position. Its entire business is based on aging media models, such as offering exclusive content and making people pay for its programming. But as Liz pointed out in an earlier essay, we are approaching the end of exclusivity. And at a recent CES panel, entertainment execs said they're looking to dump paid downloads in favor of ad-supported streaming because people online want to watch for free.

Additionally, the parsing out of content works a lot like HBO's On Demand service, which is simultaneously kinda cool and kinda sucky. It's obviously nice because you could watch the entire series of Rome without ever leaving your couch. But the method by which they parse out content is aggravating. To ensure that you keep your subscription, HBO dribbles out content slowly and somewhat randomly. Shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Real Time with Bill Maher are in constant rotation, but I've never seen a single season of Deadwood be offered.

Rather than muddle matters with an assortment of constantly changing schedules, HBO should just focus on its original content (after all, the movies are old and will be available through numerous other outlets, like iTunes and Unbox). Meanwhile, offer every HBO TV series and every episode for online rental. Or syndicate it to Hulu. HBO shows are already sanitized and shown elsewhere on old teevee with ad support, so why not do the same thing online?

Finally, HBO should turn its site into something more meaningful than just a boring rundown of what's available, with the occasional cast and crew interview. HBO fans are passionate. Tap into that and empower them to create content.

HBO says this broadband plan is just laying the groundwork for the future, but I'm not sure it realizes that the future is already here.

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Bad news for big downloaders who use Time Warner Cable as their ISP: you may soon face a higher bill. The nation's #2 cable ISP is set to begin charging customers more based on the amount they download.

A spokesman for the company says that the top 5 percent of downloaders can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity, which is why they are considering the new pricing structure. According to a report from the Associated Press, Time Warner Cable would offer various tiers of pricing, versus what could become painfully expensive pay-as-you-go charges for bandwidth. However, there is no need to freak out yet if you're currently a TWC customer for now, the new pricing structure is only being offered as a trial in Beaumont, Texas, and will only impact new customers.

While I imagine the immediate reaction to TWC's plan will be decidedly negative, it at least seems more reasonable than AT&T and Comcast's filtering of traffic for users that frequent p2p download services like BitTorrent.

On the other hand, if TWC's interest is truly to be fair, prices won't only go up for big downloaders, but they'll go down for those that consume little bandwidth (yea, right).

Is it fair for ISPs to charge heavy downloaders higher fees?
• Yes
• No
View Results

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Time Warner May Cut 1,000 Jobs Due to Strike
McGraw-Hill to Cut 611 Jobs; More May Come
Martha Stewart Said to Lay Off More Staff
Chicago Sun-Times Reduces Size, Cuts Jobs
Seattle Times Plans to Cut Its Work Force

Holy cow.

Running time: 3:42
File Size: 4.25 MB

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Among the first bits of news out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week (I'm not attending this year) comes this word, via the Associated Press:

TiVo Inc. said Monday its subscribers will soon be able to select video from the Web for playback on televisions through its digital video recording service, building on its strategy to extend its DVR beyond regular TV.

The new feature, announced at the International Consumer Electronics Show, will let users apply ''Season Pass'' recording to video content available on Real Simple Syndication, or RSS, feeds. Such Web-based videos could range from network nightly newscasts to more niche videos culled from blogs or independent Internet sites, such as DiggNation or Ask A Ninja.

Users would need to use TiVo's software on PCs for the feature, though TiVo said it will provide a guide within its TV-based menu system to record select Web video sources as well.

The Web video recording capability will be available in March with a new version of the TiVo desktop software, which will cost $24.95 for new users. It will be a free upgrade for users who have already bought the program.

TiVo had previously allowed Web video creators to submit their feeds to the service, which could be accessed in a roundabout way. And presumably, this announcement, too, applies only to the TiVo Series II.

I fretted in Darknet, 2 1/2 years ago, about cable companies and satellite operators having a chokehold over the Internet TV programs coming into our living rooms, though I agreed with ex-Warner Bros. CEO Warren Lieberfarb that the elimination of those corporate controls was inevitable. (A handful of companies, like Akimbo, had deployed services and boxes to allow people to watch Internet TV on their TVs, but the process was too costly or cumbersome for it to catch on in a big way.)

Widespread deployment of digital video recorders like TiVo will be one important way to route around those traditional choke points.

Source: Engadget
Author: Ryan Block
Link: http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/04/hd-dvd-group

Techmeme permalink

I guess you can call it peer pressure. All the major labels - Warner, EMI, Vivendi - have already given up on DRM (remember who started it all with his fiery imagine a world without DRM speech) and Sony BMG probably woke up, looked around, realized that everyone else is long gone from the DRM party, and decided to quickly follow suit before the landlord shows up.

Remember, this is the company that embedded an evil rootkit on CDs - and then did something similar again with USB flash sticks. Even other major labels look like the good guys compared to them, but now they've at least partially redeemed themselves by not being a lot more stubborn than them.

I'm gonna let you in on a little story here. I was close to a team that worked on an online music shop in a country where that would be a first. At first, they've designed the entire service around MP3 format; when they tried to talk to the major labels, they were practically laughed at, as each and every major demanded some DRM-supporting format. The team worked a couple of months to change the application and rerip the music into some other format, and now it's no longer necessary. Fun, eh? This example illustrates how sudden and abrupt this change really was. For reasons known only to them, major labels did not simply decide to drop DRM - they were forced to do it.

In any case, DRM is officially dead, and everyone that predicted this for 2008 (hint: everyone) was right. Sony BMG will probably offer only a part of their catalog in DRM-free format, but I'll go out on a limb here and predict that there's no turning back now. Soon, all music will be DRM free, and again, I hope that DRM will soon be a relic, forgotten by everyone except tech blogger-fossils like us. Unfortunately, while DRM will probably be gone from music altogether quite soon, it's still very much alive in other formats. When will they learn?

[via BusinessWeek]

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A year later, Sharp's still working on launch plans as the set stands to be unseated as the world's biggest flat-panel display in little more than a week.

Then there was Warner's much ballyhooed, allegedly format-war-ending Total HD disc that crams HD DVD and Blu-ray onto one shiny piece of plastic. Status? Vapor. It got delayed until 2008 halfway into 2007, and then was basically shitcanned as the format trench war squeaks along into yet another year. So many promises, so many broken hearts. [IT World via /.]

The big question for those of you who bravely bought in: Will my bastard child videos still work even with the permanent closed sign in the store's window?

The videos you purchased and downloaded are yours to keep. Yes, you can play your videos as many times as you wish on the computer you used to download the videos. Due to licensing restrictions, you cannot copy or transfer your video files and play them on a different computer.

The store's sudden death actually isn't too surprising even though it was less than a year old and the first one to sport content from the "big six" studios. Who thinks "Wal-Mart" when they think "video downloads," and wants to deal with a clusterfuck of DRM, WMV files and Windows and IE-only compatibility? (Not Hollywood types!) Besides, its goose might've been cooked anyway when iTunes finally snagged a video rental deal.

On the other hand, its online music store is still going strong, or at least going enough to try to pressure labels to sell MP3s through it, though it looks like Amazon has the upper hand (in more ways than one.) Let's hope they weren't taking any cues from their cubicle mates in the vid store department! [Wal-Mart, Thanks MarktMan!]

An Advertising Recession?

Another New Ad Medium

Watching the Audience

Information Will Be Free

Since the dawn of the internet, "content wants to be free" has been the rallying cry of digital evangelists. But those who wanted to charge for content could always point to a shining example: the Wall Street Journal, with its 1 million online subscribers and $65 million in digital subscription revenue.

That will all change in 2008. Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. recently completed its $5 billion acquisition of Dow Jones, plans to set WSJ.com free, judging from several fairly unequivocal public pronouncements.

Despite the short-term loss of subscription revenue, "long term, it's kind of a slam dunk," says Mike Vorhaus, managing director at the consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates. The money that is made from selling ads that reach a much larger audience will more than make up for losses, he adds.

The New York Times had a similar epiphany in September, when it shut down TimesSelect, its premium content service. But business news seemed to be one place where online subscriptions could still be sold successfully.

The Journal's move, however, will change the economics for competitors such as the Financial Times, which also charges a fee. "If the Wall Street Journal goes free, I suspect [FT.com] will also do it," says John Morton, an independent newspaper-industry analyst in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Companies that provide data rather than news may perhaps be more immune to the live-free-or-die fever, but then again, they might not.

ConsumerReports.org has been another success to date; just this month, it signed up its 3 millionth paid subscriber. But Jarvis predicts that free content will triumph eventually in that arena as well.

"Somebody's going to come along and pull a Craigslist on them," says Jarvis, referring to the listings site that has decimated newspapers' classified sections. "It's the kind of data you can get from your fellow customers."

Time to Part Ways?

The disconnect -- the inability of music labels to get it -- is continually astounding.

Our story said this: The Telegraph reported that Led Zeppelin record sales skyrocketed 500 percent the day after the concert. Warner has good reason to want to protect its intellectual property in this case, given that the company is expected to release a DVD of the concert for sale next year.

Record sales don't rocket 500 percent because of a concert seen by 20,000 people. The DO rocket 500 percent or more when millions of people around the world see a few video clips and renew their love of an old band. And does Warner Music actually think that people would skip buying a beautifully-produced DVD because they watched a few songs shot with a cell phone from seats near the rafters?

Granted, there's a lot more at stake for Zeppelin compared to far lesser draws. But I thought it was interesting -- last time I saw my friend Roger McGuinn play (to a packed house at The Barns at Wolftrap near DC), he at one point asked everyone to get out their cell phones, video a song or two, and -- please -- post them on YouTube...

Continue reading The EVDO Card Shootout

To clarify, this happened because NBC doesn't own the distribution rights to all the shows they broadcast. In the world of television, networks and production studios are separate entities. It's not uncommon for a studio such as NBC will produce a show that will air on another network like ABC or Fox. And generally, the production studios get the final say as to how a show is used after it airs on television (i.e. DVDs, syndication, etc...). In this case NBC didn't get the say on all its shows on the iTunes Music Store. That explains why some shows, such as Chuck (pictured above and produced by Warner Bros.) are still on iTunes.

It also seems only this season of NBC shows have been pulled. Prior seasons of NBC shows previously sold are still available in their entirety. [setteB.IT]

Greenberg co-founded The Comotion Group, a "viral marketing" firm. He boasts that in the past three months he's achieved 20 million views for his clients. However, I'm not linking through to their site, as quite frankly I don't think they deserve the Google juice - the tactics he espouses are, quite frankly, disgusting.

First, though, the positives. The post does provide some very useful pointers for producers of YouTube videos:

• Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal
• Design for remixing
• Don't make an outright ad unless it's really amazing
• Make it shocking
• Optimize the thumbnail image

However, Greenberg's post also outlines a few "strategies" that I find disgusting:

• Using fake headlines
• Paying bloggers to post the videos
• Spamming forums on websites
• Spamming peoples' comments on their MySpace pages
• Spamming email lists
• Fake comments by his company on videos to provoke controversy

Oh, and this classic:

Also, we aren't afraid to delete comments if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can't let one user's negativity taint everyone else's opinions.

Yes, you can. That's called conversation. It's a two-way thing.

This is exactly the kind of behaviour that I, along people like Todd, Brian, Geoff and many, many others, despair about. This is the kind of thing that gives marketers and PR practitioners a bad name.

Why am I going to town here? Because, even when confronted with the inherent problem with his tactics, Ackerman Greenberg continued to defend them.

In response to criticism about his fake comments:

What we do is grease the viral wheels. If that means commenting back and forth between fake users, who cares? It's all about entertainment - we're just making the whole experience entertaining, not just the video itself.

And again:

Beyond commenting back and forth to make the comment thread more interesting on each video, what exactly do you guys find so morally wrong here?

I'm not naive - I know this goes on all the time. The difference here is, Ackerman Greenberg has come out and admitted it, and I give him some credit for that. He also has some useful pointers, for which I also give him credit.

Still, the fact that this happens all the time isn't an excuse for copying it. There are precedents for all sorts of unethical behaviour, but that doesn't justify the continuation of those behaviours.

Deep down, I think Ackerman Greenberg knows this is wrong:

I can't reveal our clients' names and I can't link to the videos we've worked on, because YouTube surely doesn't like what we're doing and our clients hate to admit that they need professional help with their "viral" videos.

How about: They're afraid of being exposed?

Unfortunately for Ackerman Greenberg, as an enterprising commenter on the TechCrunch article found, his LinkedIn profile claimed:

Notable clients include: 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros Records, Fox Atomic, Walden Media, Yari Film Group, Nike, Oakley....

Ackerman Greenberg quickly removed this from his information once the commenter flagged it, but Google's cache (posted here for future prosperity) reveals he did in fact post those names.

If Ackerman Greenberg & co don't see the error of their ways, hopefully their clients will. This kind of behaviour shouldn't be encouraged.

Disgusting.

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For one thing, the WSJ scooped everybody else on this story, so I can guarantee you that they didn't spend a huge amount of time phoning up "people in the music industry" before they ran with it. Those "people" are in fact almost certainly just one person, who probably came up with the number off the top of his head.

I talked some numbers yesterday with Peter Kafka, who's been running Silicon Alley Insider's coverage of this deal. He's also been hitting the phones, and has come to this conclusion:

After talking to industry sources, we think the breakeven per album is closer to high single digit millions per album -- this assumes that 1) Madonna is getting as much as $45 million in advance for all three albums upon the deal's close and that 2) Live Nation will have to pay onerous distribution fees to get the discs in stores.
There is a debate about how many albums Madonna sells: The only audited numbers available are from SoundScan, which only counts U.S. sales. Some websites provide unsourced numbers that claim her last album sold 11 million copies worldwide; music industry sources say the number is closer to 6 or 7 million.

I'm much more upbeat on the Live Nation deal than Peter is, for many reasons.

For one thing, Madonna is not getting $45 million for all three albums upon the deal's close. More likely only half of the deal is upfront, and a large chunk of that will be in stock, not in cash.

But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Madonna is getting a $45 million advance against royalties for three albums. And let's say she gets $3 in royalties per album. Then Live Nation basically gets to keep Madonna's royalties for the first 15 million albums sold before paying Madonna any extra. But Live Nation, as the music label, makes its own profit on every album sold as well. Yes, it will have to pay larger-than-usual distribution costs, since it's not a major record label, and it will also have to pay marketing costs and the like. But after all that it's reasonable to assume that Live Nation's profit per album will be at least $2.50.

In order to recoup the up-front $45 million advance, then, Live Nation would have to sell just over 8 million copies of all three albums combined. Which is not far off Kafka's low estimate of the global sales of Madonna's last album alone.

If Madonna sells 7 million copies of each of her next three albums globally, then that's 21 million albums moved in all. Live Nation's profit on those albums would be $52.5 million, while Madonna's royalties would be $63 million. In other words, even if Live Nation pays Madonna a total advance of $60 million at the top end of estimates it's quite easy to get to a point where she earns that out over three albums, and makes a lot of money for Live Nation on top.

But that's not all. On top of album sales there are single sales, which are increasingly popular in the age of iTunes. And on top of single sales there are ringtone sales, which are huge in Europe and getting big in the US as well. And then on top of ringtone sales there are all the licensing fees that Madonna will charge people who want to use her latest song in their TV advertising or whatever. And then on top of the licensing fees are the videos sold on iTunes and the expensive remixes and "special edition" CDs and DVDs sold to completists, etc etc... It all adds up.

Live Nation is a concert promoter, so one assumes that they know what they're doing with the $50 million advance for the right to promote her concert tours: certainly concert-ticket price inflation doesn't show any signs of slowing down. And the $17.5 million for everything else think merchandising, which has insanely enormous profit margins seems pretty low, especially given that Live Nation is divorcing Ticketmaster and will henceforth pocket for itself all those exorbitant "convenience" and "handling" and "shipping" fees which get tacked onto every ticket sale.

And the bigger picture is even better for Live Nation, which is using this deal to get out of the razor-thin margins of the concert-promotion business and into the world of music-industry home runs. It's conceivable that Live Nation will lose money on this deal, although I doubt it. But it's equally conceivable that they will make a fortune on it, if the stars align. Live Nation has very few opportunities to make that kind of money, and it makes sense to grab this one. Warner, by contrast, has hundreds of artists who might break out into megastardom and make them the same kind of fortune so they're less concerned about the loss of Madonna, especially given that they retain all the rights to her enormously profitable back catalogue.