Dish and Blockbuster Keep the Retail Advantage Alive by Steve Smith

Netflix's oh-so public missteps and mea culpas regarding the split in DVD and streaming services has left a gaping window of opportunity for others to enter. Not only has the brand equity Netflix earned over the year been tarnished but there is enough confusion and recalculation going on among consumers about their monthly movie access to interrupt the inertia of subscription. In splitting its once-formidable value proposition in two, Netflix initiated on their own what most auto-renewable subscription services consider a nightmare scenario - having their members reconsidering a membership status that most people pay and forget about. ...Read the whole story

  • food Cheech & Chong Hype 'Magic' (Fiber One) Brownies by Karlene Lukovitz

    In a perhaps-inevitable latest iteration of marketers' use of '60s and '70s culture to woo Baby Boomers to food products with digestive and other health-oriented benefits, General Mills has launched videos featuring Cheech & Chong promoting its new Fiber One 90 Calorie Brownies.< ...Read the whole story

  • Visible Measures Advances, Conde Nast Owner Targets TV Ad Dollars For Social Video by Joe Mandese

    Social video analytics firm Visible Measures this morning said it closed on a $13 million round of financing led by DAG Ventures, but also including Advance Publications, the owner of consumer magazine publisher Conde Nast, which publishes titles such as Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue, and related websites as well as Epicurious.com and reddit.com. Other backers in the round included existing investors: General Catalyst Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Northgate Capital. ...Read the whole story

  • automotive Ford Brings Real People To New Sync Web Site by Karl Greenberg

    Ford is hoping a new website will help people "get" Sync, its multifarious voice-activated, in-vehicle connectivity system. The site is meant both to give owners a resource for the platform and to give people at the lower end of the purchase funnel a nudge toward Ford and Lincoln vehicles. ...Read the whole story

  • Vevo, Warner Music Lead YouTube Partner Rankings by Gavin O'Malley

    August marked the first month of official rankings for comScore YouTube Partner Reporting within its Video Metrix offering -- essentially offering a comparison of viewership across thousands of YouTube partner channels. Video music channels Vevo and Warner Music led all channels, with 60.6 million viewers and 30.9 million viewers, respectively. ...Read the whole story

The Ripple Effects Of 5Min's Exit To AOL by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan

This week marks the one-year anniversary of AOL's acquisition of 5Min for $65 million. The purchase was a big deal because it marked the first large acquisition in online video since Google's $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube. The divergent purchase figures capture not only the different sizes of the companies but also the frustration that investors have faced in online video despite lofty expectations and frothy forecasts over the past five years. ...More

  • Netflix Lobbies To Revise Video Privacy Law by Wendy Davis

    Netflix is continuing to lobby to modify a 1988 privacy law that protects the confidentiality of people's movie rental records. ...More

  • Four Common Mistakes When Using Video Online by Neil Perry

    Providing tips to fellow marketers on using video online is what I love to do, but sometimes, telling marketers what not to do can be just as important. To that end, this article will present four very common mistakes made in using video online. ...More

  • Pepsi Re-Rolls Out The Big Guns In 'X Factor' Debut Spots by Thom Forbes

    You weren't in a time warp, Bruce Horovitz assures us in USA Today, and pardon you if thinking you were while watching the likes of the late Michael Jackson and Ray Charles pitching Pepsi on the debut of Simon Cowell's "The X Factor" on Fox last night. There were other no-need-for-last names megastars of another generation in the 60-second spot, dubbed "Music Icons," such as Brittany, Mariah, Kanye. But it also features a "Pepsi-exclusive remix" of the song, "Tonight is the Night" by Yonkers-own Outasight. ...More

  • How Can I Run Ads On Connected TV When I Can't Figure Out How To Program My VCR? by Lewis Rothkopf

    Remember the 1980s meme about how hard it is to program a VCR? So insidious was this apparent difficulty that a system was developed to abstract out the whole "start, end, channel" business: a "Plus Code" was assigned to each show and published in programming guides. One simply entered the corresponding code into his VCR and boom, done. All that work, just so that consumers could watch what they wanted, when they wanted to. More than two decades later, people still grapple with the same core problem -- is the content I want to watch available? Is it free? How ...More