If “content is king” then why can’t it run a wireless kingdom?

If Mickey Mouse can’t do it, and sports content can’t do, and even hip and edgy youth-oriented media can’t do it, then who can make the content-driven MVNO model work? This morning Disney Mobile users visiting the Web site were greeted by a notice of closure that reminds us of the days of crashing dotcoms. "Disney Mobile has announced that it will cease its wireless operations as of December 31, 2007," sayeth the Magic Kingdom. "It has been our privilege to serve as your wireless service provider and we want to thank you for your support of Disney Mobile."

According to its press release, the wireless service’s Family Center cluster of family monitoring and location services may end up at another carrier. A reimbursement program is being offered.

Bye Mickey. But we have to wonder what this means for the mobile content industry in general. With the end of Disney Mobile, we now have three media-fueled MVNOs (Amp’d and Mobile ESPN) to bite the dust in less than a year, how powerful is media in drawing people to a wireless service? Granted, Disney tried a smarter route by focusing on its unique kid tracking service. But still, MocoNews reports that part of the problem for Disney was simply getting retail distribution. This was an issue for Amp’d as well.

It may be hard to recall now that just a few years ago the media MVNO was all the rage. I was reporting on up to twenty in the wings. The thinking then was that the major carriers just didn’t know how to market to the niches like young and hip and sport fans. The MVNO let companies ride on the Sprint or Verizon networks but create wholly seprate services and plans. Everyone pointed to Virgin Mobile as the classic success story, but apparently no one successfuly repeated it.   

But getting people to switch is tough. Ultimately, the phone is about convenience and reliable one-to-one communication. People don’t like to fuss with that just to get some cool videos on a handset or even sports scores. The lesson here for digital media is that in most cases our product is nice-to-have, not must-have.   

Posted under Michael's Blog

Media muscles into mobile

In the eyes of the major agencies, mobile advertising remains at the margins, according to Digitas VP and media director Jordan Bitterman at the second day of Ad Week here in New York. Bitterman was speaking on a panel at OMMA East about how the company is allocating resources. Widgets, one of the big buzzworthy hits of the show, were producing good results thus far, but the obile side is not sufficiently big enough to merit inclusion in many campaign plans. "It doesn’t have the scale," he says. "Our marketers are looking for scale."

From the perspective of mobile marketers themselves, however, the market is heating up considerably. One of the panels I moderated at the show involved video advertising to mobile platform. We had executives fro MyWaves.com, which aggregates and re-renders online video programming for mobile, Versaly, which runs an ad-supported Fast Lane network of young adult programming on Sprint and off-deck, and Kiptronic, which has an ad solution for both mobile and online video. One of the themes I keep hearing again and again is media companies willingness to circumvent the carriers and go directly to consumers on phones via WAP. MyWaves.com now will hit two million registered members soon, although only a fraction are from the U.S. Versaly says it has served over 3 million video streams across the Sprint deck since its launch earlier this year. It also brought some interesting new ad units to the table…literally. Steven Burke who runs content acuisitions for the company showed us some units that include a prompt to text a sponsor for more information at various points in a clip. Others used branded entertainment that was folded into the programming as just another channel.

Much like online advertising in 1999, mobile marketing looks like a fast accelerating hot number from within the industry, but from the perspective of the media planners with the big wallets, it is barely on radar.  

The general sentiment that carriers simply have been too slow to embrace the mobile content model was growing among my panelists, and there seemed to me a sense that if the carriers won’t erect a better eco-system for content, then third parties and media brands will do it for themselves off the deck. Just the week alone we saw Fox properties and Myspace announce major mobile launches, and DoubleClick announced it was making its widely used online DART ad serving system available as a mobile platform. This latter development makes it that much easier for the major brands to get into mobile with an immediate revenue stream and an easy way of measuring mobile vs. Web performance. It is not clear to me why DoubleClick would make this announcement just as the FTC ponders its merger with Google. If anything, this move into mobile would just make a Google/DoubleClick marriage seem even more onerous to regulators.

Posted under Michael's Blog

New York hosts the meeting of the marketing tribes

Once a year the Mad Men from around the globe descend on New York to reassess both their own industry and the media industry on which they depend. Yesterday morning I hosted a panel of heavy hitters in the digital and traditional content worlds all arguing that their businesses will indeed survive the tectonic shifts in consumption and distribution that are upon us.

Eileen Naughton, head of media for Google, George Kliavkoff, head of digital NBC Universal, Ron Bloom, CEO, PodShow, Shawn Gold, CMO, MySpace, Sarah Chubb, President CondeNet, and Herb Scannell, CEO Next New Networks were all laying out their strategies for being present when where and how the user wants it.

We posed to them the proposition that media mindshare is so fragmented, traditional media is so deeply threatened by homegrown and user-generated content, that it may not be worthwhile to own one’s own content anymore.

When I asked whether a diffused and fragmented audience would require more modest productions dispersed across more properties, Scannell was honest enough to admit that yes we were facing a world where the content economy would be spread thinner. One consensus is that in the future we would see the very definition of a "hit" change, so that it might be much more than mass adoption. epth of inovlvement with a property could be one of the criteria of a hit in the future. 

More tomorrow on Day Two

See Also

• Advertising Week

Posted under Michael's Blog

When I was a TV reporter seven years ago, us journalists used to pose hard-ball questions to broadcasters about how they were going to deal with their plummeting audience share.

Lower CPMs presumably meant lower ad dollars.

These days, I’m surprisingly beginning to hear  TV executives talk about tailoring their message to each customer.

One of these is Deanna Brown, President of Scripps Interactive Networks, overseeing the interactive components of the Food Network, the Fine Living Network and Home and Garden Television, among others.

For Brown, the message gets as granular as helping Mom make chicken soup.

 "Ultimately, people are looking for things that are important to them, the individual user," says Brown, who spoke at IPTV World earlier this week. "Our job is to aggregate those individuals."

Here’s how it works:

1) One of Mom’s friends tells her about Recipezaar, a Scripps property that creates a web space where she can choose between 1,006 chicken soup recipes, rate them and share her own.

2) Mom becomes a regular user and one day happens to bump into 12 cocktail recipes from the Food Network, the better to ply hard-drinking Dad.

3) Mom gets hooked on Rachael Ray videos.

4) Mom starts watching the Food Network.

What’s interesting is the way this model turns the networks’ current strategies on its head. Your favorite shows are all on TV, but you know you can watch them stream on the Internet. Here, you’re starting on the Web, and gradually pulling people into the TV experience.

And, your Web experience is built around helping them get what they want making, rather than enticing them to do what you want (i.e., click the banner ad).

Food for thought.

See Also

• IPTV World

Posted under Uncategorized

Tuesday will be a defining day in video gaming history

With 1 million pre-orders in the can, Microsoft’s Halo 3 release tomorrow is already guaranteed to break first day sales records and rival Hollywood box office in terms of revenues around a blockbuster release. Who in Hollywood would sniff at a $60 million minimum opening day gross? Indeed, the early reviews are are as stellar as the game setting itself.

The launch of what is arguably the most anticipated game since, well, Halo 2, is a cause for reflection about why video gaming really has not gained the stature of the Hollywood box office even if it does have the revenues.

First, video gaming generally is still about a fairly limited demographic. Sure, sure, the various game organizations like to talk about the average age of the gamer being 30 and how the male-dominated gender split has shifted as women embrace casual gaming online and on phones. But let’s not kid ourselves here. Women and oldsters may be contributing to the games industry at the margins, but financially, the young male remains the cash cow of this industry. Female and older gamers do play, to be sure, but they aren’t fans in the same way these groups are fans of TV shows or celebrities. The kind of broad audience and devotion that fuels other kinds of music and filmed entertainment is not present in gaming.

Second, this is a tough entertainment form to report on. Take it from a seasoned gaming journalist, making video gaming interesting to the uninitiated is not easy. Look at all the gyrations the G4 cable channel goes through to make its game footage as entertaining as, well clips from this weekend’s blockbuster. Both music and film have eco-systems of media coverage around them that popularize and proliferate the properties. The gaming press continues to speak to and about the core gamers. Watch the Halo 3 coverage in the press over the next few days. Most of it will focus on the fans themselves, because they are easier to cover. There may be a clip or two from Halo 3 itself, but first-person game play does not convey excitement or entertainment to most viewers. Gaming is the kind of thing that is exciting to do, not to watch.

Which also explains why this medium still has failed to generate compelling stories and characters. Halo 3 has a hero, for instance, but who is Master Chief? Master Chief is you, and so as a character he must be an empty vessel, faceless, voice-less, character-less. Intricate compelling storyline only get in the way of interactive gameplay, or they get forgotten. As a form of entertainment, gaming has built-in a set of limitations that make it wonderful fun but bad mass media.  

Posted under Michael's Blog

Intel re-commits to the in-between form factor

At the Intel Developer Forum yesterday the world’s largest chip maker re-iterated its faith in the Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) and Mobile Internet Device (MID) concept. Even after a couple of years watching curios like Samsung and Nokia handhelds languish in the market, the company maintains the tenacity of Nokia itslef and its N-Gage or Microsoft and its Tablet PC. There’s no talking them out of it.

Intel will develop a new platform with more power, smaller sizes and much lower power constraints. I have to tell you, however, as a reviewer of just about every UMPC and MID that came into the market in recent years, power and battery life are not the problem here. Units like Samsung’s latest Q1 are interesterting exercises in miniaturization. This unit even runs a full version of Vista. For browsing and low level computing the current chipsets are adequate. Battery life is slight, especially under Vista, which drinks more juice than my three-year-old used to suck down.

But the real problem is that the form factor is unnecessary and a bit frustrating. Most UMPCs and MIDs have the screen size of a half-sized Tablet PC or ultra-light notebook but none of their versatility when it comes to input. Samsung tried to put a stylus and split keyboard on either side of the screen, but I find multi-tap or QWERTY on my phone easier to type with. 

Emboldened perhaps by the success of the iPhone as a convergence device, Intel and its few partners on this journey seem to think that users want that richer multimedia experience on the go, but something more compact than a laptop.

Maybe not. After all, for all the technical brilliance of the Sony PSP as a music and film playback device, few of us use it for more than gaming, and many people don’t even use the PSP for that anymore. The other day I first saw someone use the PSP in the gym as a portable music player. When he put the massive unit in his shorts however I fully expected them to drop to his knees from the weight. At over a full pound, a UMPC in the pocket could be really scandalous. Unless it fits in a pocket without embarrassment, then a device might just as well be an ultra-light notebook because it is going to have to go in a portoflio or backpack anyway. 

There is some sort of balance between media quality and portable convenience that the UMPC/MID form factor missed but the iPod and iPhone get.

I won’t pretend to be Steve Jobs, but I do know one thing about a portable convergence device. You want to design it so it doesn’ pull your drawers down in the middle of the gym.   

Posted under Michael's Blog

I’m already confused

Okay, so let me get all of this straight. NBC pulled out of iTunes because it couldn’t make enough money over there. Bye, Bye "The Office" downloads. But now,the company announces it will try its own ad-supported download model, NBC Direct, where users can view recent episodes of prime time shows and even download them, and their advertisiong wrappers, to devices. Okay, but then they will still have their streaming shows at NBC.com. And then there is Hulu.com, the partnership with News Corp.com that will syndicate and stream episodes across multiple media companies.

Well, all except CBS, apparently, because that company has its own distribution strategy, which involes scattering its properties far and wide. It declined an early offer from NBC and News Corp. to join the Hulu.com project. And it doesn’t look as if Les Moonves is all too eager to put CBS properties into whatever Hulu is going to be. Meanwhile ABC/Disney, which has been a bit quiet in all of this, announced it would distribute ad-supported prime time episodes initially through AOL’s portal in order to preserve the quality experience.

Who’s on first? What’s on second? I don’t know is on third?

It is understodd that the befuddled networks need to experiment with different distribution paths in order to find when, where and how exactly this famously fragmenting American audience wants its media served to them. But consumers don’t distinguish anymore among the networks. They don’t identify shows with networks, except for highly targeted cable brands. So the consumer comes into this year wondering where are the shows I want? Some are on AOL, some on Hulu, some on this NBC Direct? And whatever happened to all that stuff I was used to getting at iTunes? Heroes is hared enough to follow when I do nail it down on a single screen. Don’t add to the pain by making me hunt for it.

The current state of TV distribution on is dizzyingly inconssitent and it may well leave the consumer and the market more confused than anything else in the short term. You don’t have to turn your TV on a different way to get CBS or NBC or ABC. And we shouldn’t have to unravel the business strategies of major media companies before figuring out how and where to donwload our favorite show.

Posted under Michael's Blog

With Nokia’s purchase of enPocket, the great consolidation starts shaking things up

All of the coverage of Nokia’s planned acquisition of mobile ad network and marketing leader enPocket focused on how this move signaled the hardware’s maker’s shifting business model. But the news has important implications for the nascent field of mobile advertising. With AOL’s purchase of Third Screen Media earlier this year, this is the second major validation of the ad-support model for mobile content. Add to that CBS’s recent multi-network partnership to drive ads into its WAP and on-deck properties and some other deals in the works to launch next week, and we have ourselves a bona fide business model.

As is often the case, the mobile marketing industry met the news scrambling to differentiate themselves in an increasingly cluttered field. Ad networks that remain independent are quick to point out the possible dangers of advertising coalescing around too few players with conflicting interests. Exactly how open will Nokia be with its ad platform, some executives whispered in my ear after the deal was announced. Mike Baker, enPocket’s CEO insists this helps grow the ad market by helping the industry standardize in execution and metrics on a global basis.

How it shakes out is anyone’s guess until we see Nokia execute. What is for sure is that pressure on mobile carriers to embrace an ad-supported model aggressively is now coming at them from all quarters. Advertisers want measurable, target-able mobile marketing yesterday. Media companies see ad revenues as the real driver of mobile content innovation and profits. And now the world’s largest handset maker is building its own ad network.

Only two years ago industry pundits in all of those quarters doubted whether consumers would accept ads on phones. Today, it is clear to everyone, even the carriers, that mobile content cannot move forward without the ad model.

Posted under Michael's Blog

Nintendo teaches the digital media industry what it means to lead

With NPD’s latest game console sales figures the stunning reality of next-gen gaming finally sets in: Nintendo spanked the market with its own peculiar genius. We scoffed at its low-res hardware specs. We questioned the wisdom of forsaking a DVD player while other consoles aimed to be media servers. We speculated that after the weak GameCube showing this was the last generation of hardware Nintendo had in it. Maybe it should just be a software company from here out, many argued.

But in August, 403,600 Wii units sold through retail, NPD found, far ahead of the 276,700 a Halo 3-hyped Xbox 360 nabbed and the 103,600 a game-deprived Sony Playstation 3 sold. This has been the game console sales story all year. The behemoths of modern media, Microsoft and Sony, are playing catch-up month after month.

The Nintendo strategy of aiming toward the family and at the non-gamer has worked when everyone thought HD and prohibitively expensive new game design would rule the day. Kids and parents, and just about anyone else who ventures into my living room-cum-test lab can’t keep their hands off the Wii-mote.

The Wii is not the only place Nintendo dominates. It also sold 383,300 handheld DS units to the Sony PSP’s 130,600, even though both machines are fairly close in price now. Likewise, any argument that the Wii’s success is price driven become less convincing now that Xbox 360 price cuts bring it close to the Nintendo price point.

Point being? While Microsoft and Sony merely extended farther into the same old familiar territory with their next-gen strategy, Nintendo took us in a different direction that many observers resisted. We are in an age of focus groups, of supposedly empowered consumers, of a user-led market. It is significant that one Japanese company bucked all of these trends. It led us into a way of gaming, of interacting with technology, that was novel and unfamiliar. The key word here is that it led the market rather than followed it.

This is something to think about the next time your company brags about “following the user.”

Posted under Uncategorized

You’ll recall Tom Cruise grabbing air and moving images around on a giant screen in DreamWorks SKG’s "Minority Report".

Now, Jefferson Han hopes to sell DreamWorks and other Hollywood studios on the real McCoy: a 16-foot long giant touch-screen that lets a group of people similtaneously manipulate images and videos, perform searches, draw and cut with their fingers. Han says he’s held talks with DreamWorks, among others, about the technology, which sells for $100,000 to $200,000 and runs off a single Dell computer.

"They’re interested in doing storyboarding", says Han, who’s marketing the system through Perceptive Pixel, a company he started last year.

Storyboarding is the process of drawing freeze-frames of movies in production. Digital storyboarding — using a computer to replace paper and pencil — is still in its infancy. Steven Spielberg’s "Minority Report" was one of the first films to employ it.

Han, who developed the multitouch system at NYU, says he’s sold a few of the systems for military applications.

I couldn’t immediately reach a DreamWorks spokesperson.

See Also

• Minority Report
• Perceptive Pixel

Posted under Uncategorized