Category: Content Deals

Content Deals

Yahoo Hires Former ABC TV Exec

What better person to appoint to head your media and entertainment division than a Hollywood executive with shows like ‘The Sopranos’, ‘Lost’, ‘Desperate Housewives’, ‘Wife Swap’ and ‘Boston Legal’ under his belt? Prior to this, he served as co-chairman of the division with responsibility for all creative, programming and business areas of the division, which encompassed Touchstone Television and ABC Entertainment.

The man in question is former ABC Entertainment Television chairman Lloyd Braum, and he will oversee Yahoo’s movies, TV, entertainment, music, games, finance, news and weather, sports, health and kids businesses. He will also do the negotiating with Hollywood to release exclusive content on Yahoo, as well as developing original new content within the company. It has been reported that he was fired from his ABC post in April following disagreements over the direction and management of the network, which had fallen to fourth place in the ratings.

His main task will be to convince movie, TV and music companies to distribute more content exclusively on Yahoo. His impressive pre-ABC resume reads like he is tailor-made to do some convincing – chairman of Disney’s Buena Vista Television Productions, president of Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, and partner at the law firm of Silverberg, Katz, Thompson & Braun.

Yahoo already took the Hollywood route a few years ago when it appointed former Warner Bros. chairman Terry Semel as its CEO in 2001. In recent months, the company has signed several deals to provide related Web content for popular television shows such as NBC’s “The Apprentice” and CBS’ “Survivor”.

It’s all about getting exclusive content. In September, Yahoo announced that it would produce, host and sell advertising for the official Web site of reality TV show, “The Apprentice,” in which contestants battle to win a job working for real-estate mogul Donald Trump.

Preminet: Nokia’s Mobile Content Move

Courtesy of Nokia, mobile content distribution and transaction will reside in a one-stop-shop, making life easier for mobile networks and perhaps more interesting for the owners of some 350 million Java-enabled handsets (at last count.)

Preminet is a hosted open service model that streamlines all the steps involved in delivering content for smart phones through a single channel.

As a result of an agreement announced yesterday between Nokia and Starcut, a Finland-based mobile media publisher, content from Universal Studios and Warner Music Group Content will be made available to operators and consumers through the one-stop content shop.  Preminet and Starcut will provide operators with pre-certified content such as life-style and sports, ringtones, graphics, games and video that they can brand and offer over the Web, or via Java or Symbian OS enabled mobile phones.

Here’s how it works.  Preminet sources premium Java and Symbian OS software from leading developers and content aggregators worldwide to give operators a master catalogue of certified applications, games and other mobile content. A chain supply experts dream system – the sequence includes the Preminet Master Catalogue, Preminet Service Delivery Platform and Preminet Purchasing Client, an innovative software application that make it easy for end-users to trial run mobile applications, content and services before buying. Operators can integrate Preminet content into their own download delivery systems or have Nokia provide a complete hosted solution.

Until now, each operator was responsible for maintaining hundreds of relationships with individual Java and Symbian OS developers as well as sourcing and testing each application before bringing them to the end-user. Now they have a single channel – the Preminet Master Catalogue containing a whole range of Java and Symbian OS software as well as a framework for delivering billing and distributing revenues.

In February, Nokia took one of its first steps towards Preminet when it joined with Sun Microsystems, Motorola, Siemens and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications to create the Java Verified Process for testing and certifying Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) applications for wireless handheld devices.

Preminet is not a new concept though, coming after the Brew development platform for mobile devices from Qualcomm.  Preminet has been launched worldwide and Nokia expects a complete commercial deployment by the end of November.

Time will tell as to how the mobile and content industries will react to Nokia taking this role on, and taking a percentage for each transaction in the process.

Preminet
Starcut

Netflix’s Subscriber Growth

Netflix have released their latest subscriber numbers, and whilst the company’s user base has certainly grown, the future is certainly in online movie delivery.

Netflix had 2.23 million subscribers at the end of Q3 2004 – up 73% from 1.29 million on its books at the end of Q3 2003. Only 4% of its current subscriber base are on free trials, and those 96% of paying subs brought in a projected US$21 million in Q3 2004.

Netflix’s current business model is to rent up to three DVDs at a time to customers via the postal service. With the growth of home broadband, sending films out in the mail evidently has a limited lifespan, and so the company recently partnered with TiVo in a venture to designed to switch the delivery mechanism to online – finally putting the “Net” in “Netflix”.

However, the company believes that their 25,000 title DVD library still has some legs on it – CFO Barry McCarthy commented in a statement: “Three years ago we shortened the estimated useful life for our DVD rental library from three years to one year. For a young company with limited operating experience, that accounting estimate was management’s best judgement of the useful life of catalogue content at that time. However, with several years of operating history behind us and based on analysis of this historical data, management’s current best judgement of the useful life of catalogue content is three years.”

SG Cowen and Co. report that things won’t be so simple for Netflix, and that they will face stiff competition from Blockbuster when they go online – Blockbuster’s brand and market share will impact Netflix’s subscriber base, both in its DVD by post and online rental business, over the next few quarters.

Netflix

Disney and Intel to Launch “Mickey Symphony”

Disney and Intel are to launch an interesting broadband content service in Japan – an interactive version of some segments form Fantasia 2000. The three initial sections are “Pomp and Circumstances”. “Rhapsody in Blue” and, always a favourite, “Carnival of Animals”.

Users will be able to enjoy interactive special effects, arrange the scenes’ backgrounds, and dance with Donald and Daisy. Which can’t be too bad. There’s a preview that I’ve linked to below – though when they say broadband, they mean broadband: it takes ages to load.

Though currently rather limited in scope, the product hints at what Disney might be able to offer in the future with its rich range of intellectual property.

Koji Hoshino, President of Walt Disney Japan said: “As a leading media company, Disney is committed to delivering content which satisfies a broad range of consumer demands utilizing new technologies … The achievement with Mickey Symphony has taken us to a new level of content creation and distribution. Intel and Disney, leaders in technology and media respectively, joined forces to create this milestone product in Japan and expect to continue further expansion of our collaborative relationship.”

Disney believe that this will be just the first of many such products, and that it will act as a catalyst for increasing public demand for broadband content and services.

Have a look at Mickey Symphony

CinemaNow Signs separate Content and Distribution deals

CinemaNow, an Internet video-on-demand service, has announced a couple of deals recently. They have brought Sony Pictures Television International (SPTI) in to their portfolio of content that they can distribute. As part of the agreement, CinemaNow will offer Sony’s new release films the same day they become available in their traditional pay-per-view window along with previously released movies from Sony’s vast film library. All movies are offered on a 24 hour rental basis and priced at $3.99 for first-run films and $2.99 for library titles. Sony is the latest addition to the current roster of 20th Century Fox, Disney, Lions Gate, MGM, Miramax, Sony and Warner Bros.

They have also signed their first European distribution deal with Tiscali, giving users in the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy streaming and downloading access to CinemaNow’s content.

CinemaNow

RIAA squeeze audio Webcastsers

There was some significant news at the end of last week that will affect/restrict the breadth of music you can listen in the future.

The dispute that’s been rumbling on since 1998 between the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and audio Webcasters, widely know as Internet radio station. The RIAA wanted all Internet radio station to pay a fee to playing music, which most felt was reasonable. The major dispute has been about the level of the fee that is paid. On 20 June, 2002 the US Library of Congress set fee rates for playing music tracks over the Internet. The levels summarised on their site leads one of the many station that has been affected, somaFM, calculate that their DAILY fees would be $500 or $180,000 a year. somFM also say “Don’t listen to the RIAA press release that says most small webcasters will only pay the minimum $500 a year. Any station with more than an average of 5 concurrent listeners will be paying more than that minimum.”

Many of these stations are run by enthusiasts, many of whom made no money and others who spent money from their own pocket. Using their specialist musical knowledge and lead by their enthusiasm, they put collections of tracks together that exposed their wide audiences to music they were excited to hear.

While collect high royalties from Internet radio stations, allegedly more than 100% of their current collective revenues, the RIAA is using the argument that “Internet radio airplay hurts CD sales”.

This is opposite case for both me and many other listeners. By having my choices widened and I have bought more –one of the problems may be that these purchases have been from non-major labels and they don’t like it. The major labels must be frustrated by the fact the people are not interested in their ‘product’ and through lobby pressure they have forced a situation where the small originators find it financially impossible to survive. I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to fill the void this leaves.

There are two killing blows, the fees mentioned here apply to non-subscription services, subscription services have to be negotiated separately and the second is the fees are back date-able to 1998 making the successful, long term stations the hardest hit. With the shock of Internet radio stations being turned off now and not waiting until 1 September, 2002 when the actual rates become effective, they hope to force the listeners to take action by contacting their representative urging them to act.

Sadly the most recent ruling and apparent conclusion don’t do anyone any favours long term. A broad and vital source of exposure to different types of music has been halted.

I don’t think we’ve seen the end of Internet radio, it’s just that the choice we will be given will be significantly limited – diametrically opposed to the philosophy of the Internet.