by Steve Smith on Aug 17, 12:40 PM
Now that the initial dust has settled over the audacious Google acquisition of Motorola, analyst eyes are turning deeper into the deal and beyond the obvious. More than just mobile phone patents, the Motorola acquisition puts Google squarely where it has wanted to be for a while - on the set top box. As IMS Research points out in a brief yesterday, Motorola has long been one of the top manufacturers of set-top boxes for many MSOs. They also have longstanding relationships with the very companies that otherwise see something like a Google TV as an intrusive layer on their …
by Steve Smith on Aug 16, 12:46 PM
Mobile video finally is getting traction among users. In a recent Ipsos/Yahoo survey in the last year, video use just across the mobile Web was up by a third. As mobile users come to expect fatter pipes, they don't balk at the sight of a video play button on their phones. Under most 3G networks, buffer lag and consistency of experience are improving to the point where streaming media is a viable medium. But in most cases involving video, marketers either have to rely on the traditional pre-roll messaging, a branded video effort that pulls people in, or perhaps an …
by Steve Smith on Aug 15, 1:21 PM
Back in TV's sit-com heyday coming up with ideas for new shows was relatively easy. Who had the highest Q Rating with the public? Let's build a show around her. For smart online video producers, the rough equivalent may be Facebook popularity. Who has the network already in place, Web series producers might ask. "LeBron had 12 million people on Facebook already," says Dan Goodman, co-founder, Believe Entertainment, which appears to have a hit on its hands with the Web-only animated series, "The LeBrons."
by Steve Smith on Aug 12, 12:22 PM
Among the many other things I wish I had paid closer attention to in school was Spanish class. Especially now that we finally have a Spanish-language branded video series on YouTube. Madres y Comadres is an eight-part mini-series sponsored by Kmart. And it looks like fun. Two moms chat it up while their kids are off at school. The banter is brisk and light-hearted, the editing just as crisp with a fun soundtrack. The motif seems inspired by the TV telenovellas as well as the faux-reality show stylings of "Modern Family." Kmart maintains a very light branding touch here, with …
by Steve Smith on Aug 11, 12:54 PM
No problem is too big for Google to try to solve with an algorithm and a template. Its ambitions to get every shred of content old and new online and then slap a search box and crappy layout atop it continues to work because we are still a little dazzled by what is available online. My father, an old comedy fan of vintage performers, is amazed whenever I show him what a simple "Who's On First" or "Your Show of Shows" will render on YouTube. I can leave him for hours to get lost in the nostalgic rush and his …
by Steve Smith on Aug 10, 12:32 PM
How do you find that guy who starred in the movie about the thing at the place in the other country? You know the scene, right? The hunt for just the right film scene can start with such vagaries, as we all know. Memory being what it is, a film search can hang on small shards of information. And yet we recall movies from their great scenes. Do a search on YouTube for this sort of thing and you likely will turn up a mess of crudely ripped scenes at a range of resolutions. Understanding how movies really work in …
by Steve Smith on Aug 9, 1:06 PM
Arguments about the most effective length for digital video ads and consumer tolerance for ad-to-content ratios have been going on for as long as I have been organizing panels of agency creatives complaining about the need for discrete online spots. And that is a long time, my friends. I never understood why more marketers weren't experimenting with the various combinations of creative, frequency and length digital video allowed. In my experience being on the receiving end of countless multimedia ads (to which I am paid to pay attention, by the way) the ones that stick in my memory are not …
by Steve Smith on Aug 8, 12:22 PM
At the outset, let me cop to the fact that I am too old for this. I have directly experienced only one of the three topics involved in today's blog entry, because, again, I am too old. The new and inventive "Saved By the Bell Interactive Game" by the Fine Brothers that launched on YouTube last week banks on multiple levels of pop cult nostalgia, to which I was oblivious when they occurred in real time. When the "choose your own adventure" game books craze in youth lit was ascendant in the 80s I was already in grad school trying …
by Steve Smith on Aug 5, 12:22 PM
As the recent uprisings in the Middle East attest, the cell phone has become a powerful new player in media creation and in politics. Anyone with a smartphone anywhere in the world can bear witness to atrocities occurring right before them and have that evidence on the Web in seconds. The power of this is not to be underestimated. According to many historians, U.S. involvement in Vietnam during the 1960s sparked such public division in part because the war was being televised to a degree and at a level of explicitness never seen before. What happens to our politics, our …
by Steve Smith on Aug 4, 11:46 AM
The age of the app is upon us, and it is creeping to the TV set. Even as we wait for Google TV and Apple TV finally to activate Android and iOS app on their respective devices, connected TV sets are picking up momentum and may be capturing viewers' hearts with their built-in apps. According to a new ethnographic study by Strategy Analytics of a dozen owners of connected TVs in the U.S. and UK, app love actually does creep up on you in the living room. None of the people studied in this intensive, in-home research had purchased their …