• Prime Time is Web Video Time?
    For the Web video phobics who expect streaming media to cannibalize TV viewing and undermine age-old business models, warm up your paranoia. The share of Web video viewers who are watching online media between 6 pm and 9 pm has gone up more than 30 points in the last two years. The Yahoo!/Interpret study of over 4,000 online viewers compared survey results compiled this year with those from 2009.
  • Perrier's "Interactive" Party: Same Crowd, More Sweat
    Apparently at its end, the Perrier Le Club campaign online can claims some level of success if video views are the measure. Earlier in June, Perrier invited users to watch and share a video of a party scene on YouTube. The hook was that the more people who watched and shared, "the hotter the party." To wit, increased viewer levels would unlock new versions of the same clip of a beautiful woman making her way through the party to an ice bucket to pull out a Perrier. I gather they got what they were after.
  • BRUT Launches Manly Men Behaving Manly Theater on Facebook
    Raise your hand if you weren't quite sure BRUT still existed as a brand? Maybe it is an aging thing. I vaguely recall coming upon the forest green bottle in drug stores here and there since my youth, but we are long past the days when Joe Namath, Jimmy Connors and Muhammad Ali fronted for the brand. Perhaps I am being unfair but I tend to identify BRUT with long sideburns, oversized gold medallions on hairy chests that were made apparent by the shirt that was open down to the sternum. Now BRUT seems intent on identifying itself with yet …
  • Warning: Video Time Machine for Web and iPad Will Eat Your Night
    "This is really addicting," I admit to my wife after more than an hour of my distracting her from reading with a new iPad app called Video Time Machine. From gangster films of the 1930s to Ford commercials of the mid 60s, Wonderama in the early 70s to Chet Huntley explaining to Dick Cavett why he was signing off from the Huntley Brinkley Report, this app is a trove of historically indexed video for the hard and softcore media mavens.
  • An American Family: The Chilling Birth (and End) of Reality TV
    What is real in an age when purported "reality TV" has "finales" and one-named self-branded celebrity wannabes posing as people? When being on a show like "Survivor "or "Jersey Shore" is just another path to celebrity in which every move is self-conscious and calculated to achieve effect? You want real? Try enduring the clip below - the emotional climax to the 1973 PBS series "An American Family."
  • Video Wayback Machine: When TV Told Us When to Laugh
    Back in the days when the TV was a "box" not a "display," when "boob tube," "idiot box" and "vast wasteland" were synonyms for the most powerful medium of the 20th Century (we weren't being ironic, either) the very symbol of television shallowness was the laugh track. Few artifacts of communication history so well embody media condescension to its audience. Programmers not only gave us tepid situation comedies; they tried to convince us the shows were funny by piping in canned laughter. True videophiles, get your checkbook ready. At an auction gallery in California this weekend (June 25-26) two of …
  • Swipe Me, Touch Me, Command Me: Microsoft Shows Kinect-Powered ITV Ads on Xbox
    Well, now I am going to have to dig that long-unused Xbox Kinect full-body controller out of its box somewhere and reconnect the gadget that took last holiday shopping season by storm. Frankly, after jumping my way through a few test games, me and my family pretty much forgot about that black bar and mess of extra wires sitting beneath our HDTV. And when we moved our home a month ago and didn't' unpack the Kinect, no one seemed to notice. But this week in Cannes, Microsoft gave me a reason to reconnect my Kinect, at least for another test …
  • Our Screens, Ourselves: The Three Screen Connection
    How do you feel about your TV, your desktop and your mobile screens? No, how do you really feel? At Cannes this week, during the 58th Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, BBDO and Microsoft introduced new research that tries to get under our skins, into our heads, and behind even our emotions about our multi-screen lives. The multi-national survey of 15,000 consumers in five countries tries to find how we connect emotionally to TV, Web and mobile.
  • Intel Inside...You? "The Escape" Interactive YouTube Thriller Tries Too Hard to Get Into Our Heads
    Late last week, Intel and its agencies Tribal DDB and DDB Hong Kong released an elaborate interactive video adventure on YouTube that is aimed at promoting the feature sets of the newest Intel Core processors. You are the hero in this fast-paced first-person thriller. You meet up with a striking young female agent and help her elude two badasses who are in hot pursuit. There are interactive fighting and shooting sequences as well as puzzles that need to be solved to advance the action.
  • Video Viewing At Record Highs
    When I was a kid, my parents screamed for me to turn of the damned TV and go outside to play. It was a ploy and we all knew it. Mom and Pop just wanted to watch their own shows. Decades later I tell my daughter to turn down the damned video clips from her laptop while her father is trying to watch TV. There is a weird justice to this. My parents thought TV would turn me into a boob, whether they had the metrics to back it up or not. I confess to a small tugging fear that …
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