As all eyes turn to the pending launch of Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii, Microsoft Corp. has completed stage 1 of its Xbox 360 sales strategy: getting the console to hardcore gamers. After selling 6 million units worldwide, the software giant announced earlier this week that it's introducing television and movie downloads to Xbox Live, Microsoft's online gaming hub for its consoles, which has 4 million subscribers. Peter Moore, vice president of Microsoft entertainment and devices, says such moves represent the next step of getting to the moderate gamer. Before Xbox 360's launch, Bill Gates and other …

Mobile marketing is an area of Internet-based advertising expected to be a driving force in the ad business for years to come. But right now, the new medium is experiencing growing pains. For example, if you've got a phone that can play video, go to YouTube.com and you'll see a list of unusable text links and absolutely no video. The viral video site, like so many others, isn't formatted to fit on small cell phone screens. But that may soon change--for YouTube anyway, as the Google unit is in the midst of negotiating a deal with Verizon Wireless that …

In a recent poll, the American Association of Advertising Agencies said overwhelmingly that online video would show the greatest growth among new media in 2006. Some 50% of the group's ad agency reps said online video would show the most growth--followed by podcasting, with 30%, and blogs, the remaining 20%. Stats from eMarketer back those claims: According to the research aggregator, spending on online video will reach $410 million this year--an 82% gain over last year's $225 million. In two years, eMarketer says spending should top $1 billion--and by 2010, as bandwidth becomes cheaper and content delivery speeds are …

Search giant Google, Inc. warned that Australia has introduced copyright legislation that could catapult the country back to the dot-com Stone Age. The Australian Government this week introduced legislation aimed at modernizing copyright laws governing new media, such as MP3 players, video and DVD recorders. But Google claims the move, which essentially defers intellectual property obligations to Australia's Free Trade Agreement with the U.S., will have the opposite effect. It won't allow search engines to reproduce and store digital copies of books and other material as long as the reproduction was being used for research or private use. In …

A couple of weeks ago, Internet media mogul Mark Cuban published an anonymous post on his Blog Maverick Web site alleging that Google set aside $500 million to settle copyright claims as part of its $1.65 billion takeover of YouTube. On Tuesday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt refuted those claims. Schmidt's denial came during an interview conducted by renowned search specialist John Battelle at a Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. He said the deal did not include a reserve for legal claims, but he was quick to add that progress was being made in getting media companies to sign …

With Tim Armstrong, Google's vice president of sales, in court all week and the promised "go-to-guide" to interactive media from the Advertising Research Foundation still in production, the Ad:Tech panel that was supposed to launch the Internet's next growth wave was a bust. It was full of sweeping pronouncements like "the media will be the Internet," which we're sure has been said at every Ad:Tech since 1999. Hardly trendsetting stuff. But there were moments of insight, too. Tom Lynch, the vice president of marketing for ING, stated that his company wants to see ad agencies using the Internet as …

AOL execs have once again come out smiling, as their comeback plan is working. Maybe all this positive talk is a major reason why shares of parent Time Warner continue its meteoric rise. If you look at the numbers, AOL lost 2.5 million subscribers in the third quarter, yet it managed to keep 2 million of them as customers of the new free service. In addition, the company added 1 million new members, a small net gain. AOL CEO Jonathan Miller says AOL should continue to post overall revenue declines for several quarters. The really good news is …

YouTube is this year's winner of Time magazine's "Invention of the Year." The "supereconomical" car and a soldier-saving robot are among the other inventions it beat out for the honor. "Only YouTube created a new way for millions of people to entertain, educate, shock, rock and grok one another on a scale we've never seen before," the editors wrote in the issue honoring the viral video site. They added that rules of media and the Web fundamentally changed as a result of YouTube. This is true to a degree. But we should keep in mind that it is …

Yahoo is moving into selling ads on mobile phones. The Sunnyvale, Calif. Web giant, whose stock has slumped this year, will begin delivering graphical ads to mobile phones as part of a test to bring Web-based brand marketing to a wireless market. Many believe advertising on mobile phones could be the next big land grab for content producers hungry for ad revenue. Later this week, Yahoo will begin evaluating slimmed-down banner and button ads to the growing number of users of Yahoo's Mobile Web service. To be sure, it's a far trickier task to create ad inventory on a …

If social networks are the new Web portals, then perhaps MySpace could become vulnerable to the user churn that's plagued Yahoo of late. MySpace isn't the only place on the Web for Gen Y to hang out, and for many users, it's no longer the only social network they use. Multi-social networkers are becoming the norm, which is a bad thing for MySpace and Facebook, which depend on their "stickiness" to attract advertisers. The talk now is about whether the top two have reached their peak after faltering usage in the last month. MySpace can't be all things to …