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Posts Tagged ‘Hulu’

TV networks continue to resist iTunes price cuts

Filed under: Multimedia, Video, iTunes

Apple has been courting US TV networks recently in a bid to get them to drop episode pricing from its current level of $1.99 down to $0.99. The New York Times reports that, predictably, many TV networks are resisting Apple’s push for lower episode prices, even though iTunes’s initial $0.99 per song price point is arguably what made purchasing digital music palatable to consumers.

Music sales through the iTunes store have fallen off recently, at least partially because of record labels’ demands for a price hike to $1.29 per song for popular tracks. Meanwhile, though TV shows have been available for download in the iTunes Store since 2005, only 375 million shows have been downloaded in that time — compared to nearly 9.5 billion songs downloaded over the same period. With a reported 125 million iTunes Store accounts, that equates to an average of 76 song downloads per customer compared to a paltry 3 TV episodes downloaded.

Click the “Read More” link to find out more about the current state of TV on iTunes.
The Times states that “television production is expensive, and the networks are wary of selling shows for less.” However, analysts have stated that TV downloads through iTunes represent a “marginal” or “niche” portion of the market, and this is borne out by the relatively low download numbers. TV episodes are already available from a number of other (legal) sources, and all of them are less expensive than iTunes: free over the air, free over Hulu (in the US anyway), for-pay via a cable subscription, and for-pay via purchases of TV seasons on DVD.

As one example of iTunes’s extremely uncompetitive pricing for TV shows, Season 5 of House, M.D. costs $39.99 on iTunes in Standard Definition, and that’s for the TV shows alone; the same season currently costs $24.49 on Amazon for a DVD box set complete with many special features not available on the iTunes Store. Even if the studios still think charging an extra $15 for digital versions of the same season of the same show is worth it to consumers because of the convenience of one-click downloading, based on the relatively low number of downloads thus far, it’s pretty clear consumers don’t feel the same way.

Although TV networks are reportedly resistant to price reductions, unless they can find a more compelling way to sell digital versions of their shows based on content, the only way they’re going to get more people to download more shows is by budging on the price. Apple has reportedly pitched a $30 per month “subscription” model for popular shows, which could be a compelling alternative to cable TV for many consumers. TV networks haven’t dismissed this proposal outright, but they are experiencing “trepidation” over it according to the Times. However, considering that spread over five years the amount of money that all studios combined are making per year off iTunes Store downloads equates to less than the three-week gross of a popular summer theatrical release, it seems like they have very little to lose.

[Via MacRumors]

TUAWTV networks continue to resist iTunes price cuts originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Video ad network BrightRoll outreaches Hulu, closes $10M third round

BrightRoll co-founder and CEO Tod Sacerdoti — pronounced “satch er DOH tee” if you don’t speak Italian — has three reasons to be happy this week. First, video advertising network BrightRoll is, according to Quantcast’s stats, now bigger than Hulu in terms of reach to Internet-using humans. BrightRoll’s ads reach 53.3 million unique viewers a month, compared to the Hulu Network’s 31.6 million. (The Hulu.com site draws 20.7 million.)

Second,BrightRoll has scored $10 million in Series C financing led by Scale Venture Partners, bringing the company’s total venture funding to $16 million since its launch in July 2006. Previous investors True Ventures, Adams Street Capital and KPG Ventures also participated in the round. Rob Theis, Managing Director with Scale Venture Partners, has joined BrightRoll’s board of directors.

Wait, there’s more! BrightRoll also announced today that it has been profitable for nearly the entire last 12 months. Rather than burning through it, the company will use this round of financing to expand its technology platform, beef up worldwide advertiser and publisher operations, and hopefully increase its leadership position in America.

Sacerdoti told me in a long phone call today that it’s not just BrightRoll, it’s video advertising as a whole that’s taking off. “The biggest theme we’ve seen over the past 12 months,” he said, “is that video advertising is being served for any free content, not just video content. Anywhere someone can serve a video ad, you’ll see a video ad. Video ads are going to be much more broad than TV will be.”

That bodes well for video ad networks like BrightRoll, as well as its competitors such as YuMe and Tremor Media. The thing about video ad networks is, as an Internet user, you’re not really aware of their existence. You just see lots of video ads all over the place, without being told who’s serving them. “It’s like when you watch Project Runway,” Sacerdoti said. “You know you’re watching Bravo, but you don’t think about whether or not it’s Bravo that sold the ads. Often it’s not.”

“I think by this time next year the majority of the top five to ten video properties by any measure will be aggregator networks,” he said. “The best example for this is display advertising. They’re by far the largest in reach and spending — Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and 10 ad networks make up the top fourteen. But what we’re seeing pretty clearly from the advertising community is that the preferred ad medium is video. All things considered, advertisers would almost always prefer to run a video to talk to their customers.”

Why is Scale putting $10 million into BrightRoll? “The online video ad market will grow to billions of dollars over the next few years by disrupting the $70 billion television ad market,” Theis said in a prepared statement. That’s three and a half times the size of Google’s annual ad revenue, and more than twice the total $30 billion online ad market. The most strategic Internet investments are those that compete not with other Internet businesses, but with the much larger amount of money still being spent offline.

[Photo: BusinessWeek]

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Adobe speaks up about Flash on the iPad

Filed under: OS, Software, Internet Tools

The iPhone and iPod touch haven’t run Flash natively in the years since their respective debuts, and it’s pretty clear based on Steve Jobs’s presentation yesterday that the iPad won’t run Flash, either. When scrolling through the New York Times’s main page, for example, where Flash ads or video might have been there were instead broken LEGO icons, big as life on the screen at the keynote.

Predictably, Adobe isn’t happy about this, and is accusing Apple of “continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers.” They go on to say that without Flash support, “users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.”

Let’s work backwards from this. First of all, I’d be very interested to see where Adobe got those percentages. Apparently YouTube now accounts for a mere 25% of video on the internet? As for Hulu and a few of the other specific sites mentioned in Adobe’s rant, now that Apple is in the business of selling content, exactly how is it in the company’s best interest to provide access to that same content, through another company’s platform, for free? And as far as games are concerned, once again Apple has this covered, through the App Store. Far from being limited, content publishers and consumers will merely have to adjust to a new method of publishing and consuming content: one that doesn’t involve Adobe in any way.
I know anecdotal data is the worst kind there is, but in nearly a year of using my iPhone to connect to the internet, not only have I not missed Flash, I’ve been glad it isn’t there. Flash’s performance on Mac OS X is so abysmal that when YouTube announced an opt-in HTML5 beta to replace Flash, I bounced up and down in my office chair in glee. I can only imagine the bag of hurt that would be introduced if Apple let Flash run on its mobile devices.

If you want to know why Flash doesn’t run on the iPhone, the iPod touch, or the iPad, why Flash will never run on those devices, and why that’s a really good thing, check out this piece by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. One of the key points of Gruber’s argument is that Flash is, by far, the biggest source of application crashes in OS X. Flash crashes so often that Apple’s engineers went out of their way to create a new mechanism for running plugins in Snow Leopard; in 10.6, Flash runs as its own process rather than being lumped in with Safari, meaning than when (not if) Flash crashes, it doesn’t bring all of Safari down with it. Considering Flash’s poor stability and fan-blasting, CPU-hogging performance on the Mac, gee, why wouldn’t Apple want it running on their mobile devices?

Want to see something that “imposes restrictions on content publishers and consumers?” Look no farther than Flash itself. According to the company’s own (possibly made-up) numbers, 70% of games and 75% of video on the internet is all shuffled through one company’s proprietary plugin. I don’t know about you, but that sounds awfully restrictive to me. It seems like a really bad idea to let a single company have that much control over the creation and delivery of the internet’s content, don’t you think?.

With the iPhone and iPod touch we already have tens of millions of mobile devices owned by tens of millions of highly satisfied consumers, and not one of those devices runs Flash. With the advent of the iPad, we can expect millions more mobile devices to hit the market, and none of them will run Flash, either. Thanks to YouTube and vimeo, HTML5’s star is on the rise for delivering free video content on the internet, and the App Store has gaming covered. There’s no telling what the internet will look like in ten years, but one thing appears certain: if things continue as they have, Adobe will no longer have the stranglehold over video and gaming content that it enjoys today.

[Via Engadget]

TUAWAdobe speaks up about Flash on the iPad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe fires back at Apple on iPad

One of the more disappointing (if unsurprising) parts of Apple’s launch of its iPad tablet computer today was the absence of Flash, Adobe’s technology for web video and other media. Now Adobe has responded in two blog posts — one that’s diplomatic, and another that’s not.

In the first, Adobe says it’s excited about the iPad, and it reminds developers of its Packager for the iPhone announced last year, which allows someone to export an application built for Flash into a format that works on the iPhone. Like other iPhone apps, those apps created by the Packager will work on the iPad, and Adobe says it will also add features to support the tablet’s increased screen size.

Flash content still won’t work in the iPad’s Safari web browser, but it sounded like Adobe was trying to put a happy face on a situation it’s can’t be satisfied with. The tone changed in a second post by Adobe’s Adrian Ludwig, which went up a few hours later. There’s a bit of throat-clearing, once again about how the iPad is really exciting, but then he gets to the absence of Flash:

It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. Unlike many other ebook readers using the ePub file format, consumers will not be able to access ePub content with Apple’s DRM technology on devices made by other manufacturers. And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web

If I want to use the iPad to connect to Disney, Hulu, Miniclip, Farmville, ESPN, Kongregate, or JibJab — not to mention the millions of other sites on the web — I’ll be out of luck.

Okay, Ludwig doesn’t exactly tell Apple to go to hell. But there’s a real confrontational tone. That contrasts with Adobe’s previous comments on the issue, which tend to be relatively diplomatic statements to the effect that the ball is in Apple’s court. For example, Adobe chief executive Shantanu Narayen said last fall, “I’d love to work with Apple to make it happen.” Now the tensions between the two companies, which were visible if you looked for them, have moved to the surface.

And for what it’s worth, I think Ludwig has some good points. I know there are plenty of complaints about how Flash taxes hardware, about how it leads to crashes, and about the fact that an important technology powering the web is controlled by a single company. But as a consumer, the fact that when I turn on the iPad browser I won’t be able to view most of the video on the web creates is a big drawback, especially for a device that’s supposed to provide “the best” movie-watching experiencing.

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Hulu’s subscription service might run $5 for access to select shows

There was a mini-internet revolt the last time NBC Universal’s TV chief started talking about ways to actually turn a profit from Hulu and the search for a balance continues. People familiar with the matter — our favorite source by the way — told the LA Times that the search in question could take another six months before official pricing is announced, but the latest idea being thrown around is to charge a $5 per month subscription for access to older shows. A quick search of Hulu just showed that only the past four or five episodes of newer shows are currently available, so charging for older shows means new access to additional content. We have to say that offering additional programming above and beyond what is currently free is a pretty good strategy, but the other one we’d like to see is a premium option to view content commercial free — no word on if any of the paid content will still have commercials. The one thing this won’t change is the fact that the content creators already sold the rights to these shows on the TV, which of course means Hulu won’t be able to stop going out of its way to block things like Boxee and the PS3 — still kind of shocked that PlayOn isn’t effected.

Hulu’s subscription service might run $5 for access to select shows originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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2009 Year in Review

The year is fast winding down and everyone is no doubt looking forward to a break over Christmas. If you want some reading and pondering material over the holidays, during December we’ve been publishing a series of annual review posts. We’ve picked our best products of the year in 10 categories, analyzed the top companies and made our predictions for 2010. Click on the links below for more details.

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For our Best BigCo of 2009, we selected Google – due to its continued innovation throughout the year. For our Best LittleCo of 2009, we chose a startup that exemplifies the Real-Time Web. For Most Promising for 2010, we selected a company that aims to change the way we search.

In late December the ReadWriteWeb team made a set of predictions for 2010, which we encourage you to comment on and add to over the holidays. It’s always fun to look back on the previous year to see how well you did!

ReadWriteWeb Readers Pick The Top 10 Products of 2009

As voted by our readers in December, these were the ten best products of the year:

1. Twitter

2. Google Chrome

3. Google Maps

4. Facebook

5. WordPress

6. iPhone platform

7. Google Apps

8. Adobe AIR

9. Hulu

10. TweetDeck

The top 10 was voted on by our readers, based on the following lists of products:

1. Top 10 Mobile Web Products
2. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps
3. Top 10 Semantic Web Products
4. Top 10 International Web Products
5. Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies
6. Top 10 Enterprise Products
7. Top 10 Internet of Things Products
8. Top 10 Real-Time Technologies
9. Top 10 Startup Products
10. Top 10 Web Platforms

Happy holidays to all of our readers and supporters!

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NVIDIA Ion 2 coming in early 2010, compatible with Pine Trail

Well, here we go: NVIDIA just gave us the heads-up that the next generation of Ion chips (which we’ll be calling Ion 2 until it gets a proper name) will be compatible with Intel’s new Pine Trail platform and arriving in Q1 of 2010. That’s good news, seeing as the Pine Trail-based Eee PC 1005PE we just reviewed didn’t offer much of a performance benefit over the older Diamondville chips and definitely couldn’t bust through the first few seconds of a YouTube HD clip. Though we got NVIDIA to confirm that it’ll improve some of the battery life concerns we’ve had, we couldn’t get much out of them in terms of how Ion 2 will play with the Intel GMA 3150 GPU that’s now integrated into the Atom N450 die. NVIDIA also didn’t hold back when it came to Intel’s reliance on third-party HD accelerator chips for video duties — they think customers want richer gaming and multimedia experiences on netbooks than Atom alone can offer, and they don’t seem to care that Intel keeps calling Ion “overkill.” All drama aside we’re looking forward to just getting some YouTube and Hulu HD playback on our netbooks — we’ll see what NVIDIA has to show off at CES.

NVIDIA Ion 2 coming in early 2010, compatible with Pine Trail originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Vote Now For Your Favorite Web Products of 2009

Over December we have published ten Top 10 lists for the best products of 2009, in categories ranging from Consumer Web Apps to Real-Time Technologies. Now we’re opening up our selections for you to vote on. We’ve embedded a poll below, with all 100 products that the ReadWriteWeb team selected.

We invite you to vote for your favorite web products of 2009. You can select up to 10 products. If you don’t see one of your favorites in the list, note it in the comments and we’ll count that as a vote too.

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We will announce the top 10, along with the full results, at the end of this week.

Note: the poll is randomly ordered, but can can also view an alphabetical list below.

What are your best products of 2009? (multiple choice)(polling)

Top 100 Web Products of 2009, Alphabetical

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