digiANALYSIS, BIZ + RESEARCH
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The fourth largest social network (socnet), Bebo, is soon going to fall under the purview and jurisdiction of AOL, as the company plans to purchase the site for around 850M/USD. This is to further AOL’s moves to garner more socnetters should bring a combo total of around 80 million non-dupe, uniques to the service. And that will certainly be of assistance as AOL continues to drive forward into the online ad space revenue market. The key to future advertising as many see it is no longer the one-off online ad, but “conversations” with customers. Many consumers simply hope those discussions are chats and not dissertations.
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New consumer research from Leichtman Research Group, Inc. found that with ongoing growth in the number of households subscribing to broadband Internet service, and an increasing number of online viewing options, usage of online video expanded during the past year. In total, 31 percent of adults online at home reported they viewed video online at least weekly, including 10 percent who view video online daily. This compares to 25 percent of those online who viewed video online at least once a week last year. However, increases in online video usage over the past year were primarily among younger individuals, a group that watches video online far more frequently than others.
- Among all individuals ages 18-34, 42 percent report they watch video online at home at least weekly, up from 28 percent last year
- Among all individuals ages 35 and above, 15 percent watch video online at home at least weekly, as compared to 13 percent last year
- Men ages 18-34 account for 40 percent of those who view video online on a daily basis, while comprising just 17 percent of online subscribers in the sample
These findings are based on a survey of 1,250 households nationwide, and are part of a new LRG study, Emerging Video Services II. Other key findings include:- 9 percent of those who watch video online strongly agree that they now watch TV less often
- 52 percent of online video users typically spend ten minutes or less when they view online video at home
- 9 percent of all online watched a recent episode of a TV show online in the past week
- Among all online, just 4 percent strongly agree that they would consider disconnecting their TV service to only watch video online
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BigBand Networks, Inc. has reached a milestone for SDV deployment in Motorola set-top box environments. The company is in the process of deploying across three Motorola cable systems with two different cable operators that collectively pass more than 1 million households. BigBand’s Motorola deployments build upon the company’s expanding SDV deployment experience in more than 20 cable systems across North America. BigBand is currently deploying its 5gen SDV solution across four electronic programming guide environments and has achieved significantly more commercial SDV deployments than any other vendor—Redwood City, California
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The realm of digiBITZ
- Good “uncovery” by AppleInsider who found a patent filing from Apple that seems to indicate the company is stepping toward incorporating DVR features into their Apple TV offering.
- Informitv‘s online news site reveals Vincent Dureau, who is the head honcho at Google when it comes to TV technology, is a huge fan of online video. Having been the CTO at OpenTV, he spoke at the IPTV World Forum in London and stated he believes there is a virtually indefinite appetite for TV. The article goes on to state that, in the United States, there are more than 300 digital television channels available on a typical platform. Of those, only 40 are actually measured because the Nielsen panel of about 10,000 households can only measure with any degree of accuracy the channels that have more than 0.5 percent of the audience. Google has been collecting viewing data from several millions of set-top boxes for the past 10 months and found out that actually 40 percent of the audience is actaully watching channels that weren’t even being measured. He concluded with a call to “embrace the web and understand that IPTV is “not ahead of us—it is already behind us.”
- Put this in your “pipe” and work it—according to an IDC study, in the digital universe in 2007, there were approximately 218 exabytes (that’s 281 billion gigabytes)—that’s approximately 10 percent more than original estimates indicated. Figuring in a compound annual growth rate of around 60 percent, the digital universe could reach nearly 1.8 zettabytes by 2011—that’s a faster growth rate than projected, as well.
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Pre-set pricing for music downloads? I don’t think so… Nine Inch Nails‘ 36-track digital album “Ghosts” was positioned online for consumers to retrieve and pay extremely reasonable prices for the music. Within two weeks, the super group had garnered $1,619,420 USD in revenues with 780k downloads! Not too shabby. Nine Inch Nails offered nine of the album’s tracks free of charge, with the entire album going for $5 to an autographed version for $300 and all 2,500 copies of the latter set were totally sold out. Yes, this was a gutsy decision by Nine Inch Nails in regards to music distribution and marketing. However, the bottom line also reveals that their decision to do so was also a highly profitable one and perhaps reveals the true course of future online music distribution. Nope, you won’t find this set in stores.
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- Formula One motor racing is one of worldwide TV’s top events. To meet the complex requirements for a perfect broadcast, the FOM, short for ‘Formula One Management’, has decided to use a Lawo mc_66 as the mixing console used to produce the international Formula 1 host feeds.
When, on March 14th, 2008, the royal league of motor racing’s season kicks off with the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne, one of the royal league of digital mixing consoles will also be on the starting grid—Rastatt, Germany
- Spot Runner called and Joanne Bradford listened, and responded… the Chief Media Officer for Microsoft‘s MSN has booked for the advertising startup company as their new Vice President of National Marketing Services. Expect her to work diligently on media buying streams as well as online advertising at a company who, until now, had concentrated on TV advertising campaigns. Other recent Microsoft departures have included Pieter Knook (mobile phones) and Steve Berkowitz (online business group).
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Balslev Media in Denmark, an Internet company, has just glommed onto the German domain name of www.casino.de—the cost? A mere 400k euro (that’s around 591k/USD), which is a new record breaker as far as cost for a German domain name. The new website owner believes this domain name will act as a gatekeeper for online gamblers who need assistance meandering their way through a variety of online casinos and poker rooms through the site’s researched info about online gaming—Holstebro, Denmark
digiCONTENT, CREATION + DELIVERY
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A new Editor’s Toolkit Pro for video editors has been released by the video and audio masters at Digital Juice. This is the Editor’s Toolkit Pro Mega Library 5, which contains Pro Sets 21 through 27. The boxed set includes network quality sets of matching graphics, animations and elements as well as more than 250 animations and graphics and HD & SD animations (both formats included). The set arrives on 12 DVD-ROMs and 7 matching sets which include: backgrounds and templates, overlays, lower-thirds, full screen swipes and transitional wipes, overlay and lower-third mattes, Motion Design Elements, animated frames, line items, revealers and Juice Drops. For any NLE system, all images are 100 percent royalty-free.
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A high integrated System-on-Chip (SoC) is the just launched high definition (HD), multi-standard, video decoder device for DVB (Digital Video Broadcast) from Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe (FME). The new device, the MB86H60, decodes both MPEG-2 and H.264 compressed video to full HD resolution (1920×1080) and sample shipments will start at the end of May. The SoC complies with the digital broadcast standard DVB that’s used in various regions, including Europe. All of the necessary processing functions required by digital HDTV receivers are integrated into this single chip solution, making the MB86H60 decoder suitable for integrated digital sets, set-top boxes and portable receivers as the ramp up for HD broadcasting continues in Europe—Langen, Germany
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Microtune, Inc. has unveiled an optimized tuner that can meet multiple TV reception standards (analog/digital and off-air/cable) across worldwide markets. The new universal tuner is the MicroTuner MT2063. The tuner brings low-power consumption and multi-standard TV receiver performance to standard consumer products as well as power-sensitive or space-constrained devices, including small, display TVs, DTT set-top boxes, portable devices and PC-TV products. The MicroTuner MT2063 is the only low power, 1GHz tuner chip sampling today that is engineered to exceed the expected performance defined by analog and digital TV standards across the U.S., Europe, Japan and China. Additionally, it supports terrestrial and cable broadcast transmission and meets all relevant radio frequency (RF) performance requirements, supporting ATSC, DVB-C, DVB-T, DMB-T, ISDB-T, NTSC, PAL, SECAM, as well as U.S. cable networks, including 256 QAM modes—Plano, Texas
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Playout Means Business @ RRsat
RRsat Global Communications Network Ltd. [NASDAQ: RRST] provides global, comprehensive, content management and distribution services to the rapidly expanding TV and radio broadcasting industries. Through its proprietary “RRsat Global Network,” composed of satellite and terrestrial fiber optic transmission capacity and the public Internet, RRsat is able to offer global distribution services for content providers. The company has announced the inauguration of their new High Definition (“HD”) playout center, capable of providing end–to-end HD services, including high resolution graphics and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. This new installation will expand the playout services RRsat currently provides to more than 90 channels, as well as the global distribution services we supply to more than 400 TV and Radio channels. RRsat’s infrastructure allows the receipt of transmission content from all continents, over a broad variety of transmission mediums, as well as the ability to convert these materials into a variety of formats—Omer, Israel
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Fan-driven, word-of-mouth distribution… that’s the cause for Surrge, a new brand in the world of online music. This social distribution net and music community allows fans to play a role in any given artist’s success. Artists are actually promo’d by their biggest fans—performance fees for music streams are actually paid—and access to target audiences pays off for fans and artists, alike. Artists can recognize fans who contribute to their success, and those fans are then compensated, through Surrge, for their promo efforts. New music tends to spread quickly, fan bases increases, and there’s a “Top 40” effect that’s based on actual sales. For more info, head over to the Surrge site—where their tag line reads “Culture On Tap“.
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Emmy award-winning Toon Boom Animation Inc. has a new partnership with Final Draft ’Professional Scriptwriting Software’ to offer end-to-end solutions to the pre-production market. Both Toon Boom and Final Draft products will offer greater integration with file format compatibility to ensure a smooth process between script writing and storyboarding. Geared towards the entertainment industry at large, Final Draft and Toon Boom Storyboard Pro combo well together for live-action, advertising, animation and storytelling projects. Schools and educators can also fully appreciate the academic benefits of using these award-winning applications, as part of their film, animation and design programs. And speaking of Storyboard, the company has released both Storyboard and Storyboard Pro 1.5, with performance improvements and support for Mac OX X v10.5. Plus, Storyboard Pro customers will find further production integration with the support of Final Draft, Acrobat and Photoshop file format and improved editing capabilities in the timeline as well as enhanced drawings tools—Montréal, Quebec
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