Fox Tries For Advertiser Love With Facebook 'Likes' by David Goetzl

Now that Nielsen is melding online and mobile viewing into its overall ratings, how long until Facebook and Twitter traffic are considered important enough to be included somehow? A recent effort by Fox shrewdly suggested that a show's popularity on social-media platforms can no longer be ignored as a measure of its value. Playing off the "Like" button on Facebook pages, the campaign used a "Family Guy" character and claimed Fox is "America's Most LIKEd Network." ...Read the whole story

TV Audience Ratings: Less And Less Relevant for Advertisers by John R. Osborn

With the National Television Upfront presentations for the 2011/2012 season completed, it's a good time to ask what TV audience ratings really mean for advertisers today. ...More

  • Farewell, Oprah. R.I.P., Daytime TV by Ed Martin

    n terms of regularly scheduled daily broadcast programming, Oprah Winfrey's prolonged swan song this week was the biggest event in daytime television since the wedding of Luke and Laura on "General Hospital" way back in 1981. Sadly, given the forces currently at work to marginalize this once robust and highly profitable day-part, it is the last such event we are ever likely to see. ...More

  • My Phone, My Remote: Let the Living Room Wars Begin by Steve Smith

    "Who did that?" my wife wonders when she see the TV channel change even as the remote control sits abandoned on the coffee table. I am being puckish and have been fiddling with the various mobile app extensions of the set-top boxes we have here in the family test lab. "This is grossly unfair," she protests. "You are the only one who even knows how to turn the TV on anymore." ...More

  • Set-Top-Box Lexicon: More on Content Forensics - Fingerprints and Signatures by Jane Clarke

    Continuing with last week's column on Watermarks (Set-Top-Box Lexicon: Watermarking) we now focus on other forms of content identification - Fingerprinting and Signatures. According to the CIMM Asset Identification Primer, Fingerprinting differs from a watermark in that fingerprinting does not add any new information to the content. It merely uses the asset's current features and characterisitcs to create a prototype identification that can then be compared to other content fingerprints on file in a reference database to see if there is a match. Here are the terms associated with content identification in its many forms: ...More

  • Univision Eyes Growth Through Traditional TV Expansion by Wayne Friedman

    Traditional television -- broadcast and cable -- is a growth business, an area where media companies can add existing programming and channels. Univision, for example, wants to start three new cable networks, one for sports, one for telenovelas, and one for news/information. For many existing media companies, launching even one new network would be a massive undertaking -- especially in this TV environment. It has been a while since any media company made such a big shelf-space announcement about new traditionally distributed TV channels. ...More

  • Why GoogleTV And AppleTV Are Still Hobbies by Sam Vasisht

    In an earlier article, I talked about why the nomenclature for GoogleTV and AppleTV is ill-conceived, and why Google and Apple are doing the marketing of these products a disservice. At the same time, the opportunity to bring Internet and digital media to the largest screen in the home is immense. The nomenclature, the product development and marketing approaches demonstrate that neither company has qualified this opportunity sufficiently. ...More