An entirely new way to tell the news is launched this weekend: the Wii News Channel. It is for Wii users with an online connection. They will be able to get AP news and pictures (and soon video we guess), with the news displayed on an interactive map. It is very cool, and an innovative way to distribute information.
People getting news through their gaming consoles is a breakthrough: a captive audience and a niche market all at once. Now imagine offering local content on that map. There is a user-generated video on YouTube about the Wii News Channel.
Broadband video expands the audience for networks
Broadband video is the hot space for ad revenue right now, Nielsen Analytics says. It extends the reach of traditional television and provides a perfect place to target advertising to a young, affluent, highly educated consumer with access to high-speed Internet.
Stations and networks are starting to understand it. There is no audience cannibalization at all. Concerns that allowing consumers to view those popular programs and others over the Internet would cut into the number of people watching them on television are unfounded, the study found.
"Video on PCs and iPods actually is expanding the audience for broadcast and cable programs," the study said. "Internet broadband expands the market for programming by offering the potential for watching shows at the office, and in non-traditional locations, such as coffee shops equipped with WiFi connections."
Moreover, the audience watching shows over broadband is highly attractive for advertisers, who spend about $70 billion a year on TV commercials.
Online video ads cannot be skipped
"The broadband consumer is really the sweet spot for TV -- younger, more affluent, better educated and tech savvy," Larry Gerbrandt, general manager and senior vice president of Nielsen Analytics, said in an interview to Reuters.
Gerbrandt said advertisers could find yet another advantage running commercials over broadband -- they cannot be skipped, unlike those that run on TV sets with digital video recorders.
"Over time, you would hope the viewers even realize that they can click on a link, interact with an ad message, and come back and watch the programming," he said.
European start-up improving YouTube’s features
European entrepreneurs are taking the start-up culture pioneered in Silicon Valley, according to the NY Times. Some analysts say that these new companies are generally more sophisticated than their American competitors.
The start of this year is Niklas Zennstrom, the Swedish co-founder of KaZaa and Skype, who is now involved in Joost, the new name of The Venice Project, a company that intends to provide a peer-to-peer approach to distributing video online.
Significant projects in the video field are Vpod and Sevenload, technically more advanced than YouTube, according to many. Sevendoad adds the features of Flickr to its YouTube style video site.
Other European start-ups include Rebtel and Truphone, which are offering low-cost Internet calls to cell phone users. Another European start-up, JaJa, is also pursuing the market.
Netflix tries to rewrite the rules of movie-rental biz adding streaming
Netflix, the DVD rentals by e-mail start-up, now with six million clients, has taken a radically different approach to Internet movies. They started to stream in real time from the Internet to your computer the desired movies. This service is now free for Netflix DVD-by-mail subscribers.
The movie watching is measured by time, not by individual movie title. The hours of movie watching you get each month depends on which DVD-by-mail plan you have. You get one hour of online movies per dollar of your monthly fee. Movie surfing like this has never been possible before.
So far, only 1,000 movies and TV shows are on the Play list, being 70,000 the number of total DVDs available from Netflix.
Movies arrive in one of three resolutions, depending solely on the speed of your broadband Internet connection. In the Basic version (0,5 megabits per second), the image is blurry and somewhat unsatisfying, like bad VHS. At Good (1Mb/second), the picture looks about like regular TV. At High (1.6Mb/second), it seems like a DVD: razor-sharp image, superb color and shadows, perfect smooth motion.
To avoid a technical meltdown, Netflix is rolling out this service in phase to 250,000 customers at a time.
Very funny parodies of Steve Jobs and iPhone
Watch the parody of Steve Jobs iPhone speech. MadTV pokes fun at the often evangelical feel at MacWorld conference. It is very funny.
