Content Deals

US Xbox 360 Gets HD Films and TV Downloads
Starting 22 November, US Xbox 360 owners will be able to download TV programmes and films to their Xboxes to rent and watch.
The film content will only be available for a limited amount of time. They’ll have to be watched within 14 days of getting it and, once the viewing session starts, will have to be completely watched within 24 hours.
Downloaded TV content will be available to be watched as many times as you like – and you’re able to keep it. Just like a video recording …. except you have to pay for it!
The content will be stored on the 360’s built-in 20Gb hard drive.
Microsoft are launching the service with a couple of magic numbers – 1,000 hours of programming, with 200 of those being in HD (720p).
The cost? Well, not content to use one of the current 167 currencies around the world, Microsoft have invented their own – MS Points (they’re also using it with the Zune). In MS Points, HD films will be 480 MS Points and SD films, 320. TV shows will be 240. Those wanting to partake in the service will need to have an Xbox Live account.
No definite European plans as yet, but it’s expected once they sign the content deals.
By the end of the year US Xbox 360 owners will be able to see:
Aqua Teen Hunger Force (Adult Swim)
Avatar: The Last Airbender (Nickelodeon)
Batman Forever (Warner Bros Home Entertainment)
Breaking Bonaduce (VH1)
Carpocalypse (Spike TV)
Chappelle’s Show (Comedy Central)
CSI (CBS)
Hogan Knows Best (VH1)
Jackass: The Movie (Paramount Pictures)
The Matrix (Warner Bros Home Entertainment)
M:i:III (Paramount Pictures)
Nacho Libre (Paramount Pictures)
The Nicktoons Network Animation Festival (Nicktoons Network)
Pimp My Ride (MTV)
Race Rewind (provided by Nascar.com)
Raising the Roofs (Spike TV)
The Real World (MTV)
Robot Chicken (Adult Swim)
Skyland (Nicktoons Network)
South Park (Comedy Central)
SpongeBob SquarePants (Nickelodeon)
Star Trek (CBS)
Superman Returns (Warner Bros Home Entertainment)
Survivor (CBS) UFC: All Access (the UFC)
The Ultimate Fighter (selected episodes from the UFC)
7 November, 2006
VideoJug And The Sun Does Video Content Deal
Video howto site VideoJug has signed a deal with UK tabloid, The Sun, to provide ten video clips to them weekly.
This will be a big traffic boost for VideoJug who has been publicly available for the last two and a half months.
The owners of The Sun, Rupert Murdoch, has been embracing video and bring it together with his other publications like MySpace is now well known.
Background on VideoJug VideoJug’s strap line is Life Explained on Film and have been labelled “YouTube for HowTos,” and was launched in August.
Much of the production of the video is carried out in Spain where they aim to produce up to 500 clips per month. They are also soliciting members of the public to upload their videos to add to the pile.
The clips cover from the useful (How to Make a Hangover Juice) to the frivolous (How To Pull A Tablecloth From Beneath A Dinner Service). They can be viewed either from the VideoJug site or downloaded to portable video players like iPod or PSP.
One neat addition to other services is the option to print out instructions.
VideoJug
The Sun
27 October, 2006
Extreme Sports Channel Added to Sky Mobile TV
UK satellite operator, Sky is building on their video offerings on the Sky Mobile service, by adding the Extreme Sports Channel.
Sky and Vodafone have been offering video content on their 3G network since October last year.
The latest addition will offer made-for-mobile content including a series covering the best and worst slams and profiles on the ultimate extreme sports legends as well as existing content such as the acclaimed Tips & Tricks series.
Sports has been popular content on Sky Mobile TV, so as Stephen Nuttall, Director of Business Development at Sky says, “we’re giving customers even more of what they enjoy.”
We suspect that Sky is adding the extreme sports to attract a different sort of subscriber to the service, which they’re not increasing the price of, leaving it at £5/month for unlimited access.
All of this content is currently only available to Vodafone 3G subscribers, but it is expected that other networks are in discussions with Sky and it’s expected that they may offer it on their networks.
Sky Mobile TV
17 August, 2006
Viacom’s Big Shift to Digital: Summarised
Viacom have been making further moves to secure their future in digital media. Given all of the moves they’ve made this week, we thought it was worth summarising it.
The first recent deal was the one with Viacom doing a multi-part deal with Google. Viacom will provide Google with video clips and commercials for syndication through Google’s AdSense network, with income being split three ways, Viacom; Google; and the Web site owner. Videos from the Viacom group of companies will also sell their videos on Google Video for $1.99.
The day after this Viacom announced that they were going to buy Atom Entertainment (AtomShockwave as was, made up of Shockwave.com, AddictingGames.com, AtomFilms.com and AddictingClips.com). Viacom put $200m on the table for this one.
They’re be adding this to their other recent purchases, XFIRE, Y2M, GameTrailers.com, IFILM and Neopets, placing them all under MTV Networks.
Viacom are experts at delivering messages (TV, films and adverts to you and me) on television and films, and as we can see from the above deals, they’ve caught on that they really ought to be able to do this online too. To try and simplify this, they were looking for a way to smooth the transition of their content to the digital realm.
This brings us to the latest deal, between Viacom and Adobe, where Adobe’s Engagement Platform will be the preferred tool to digitise the content. The two will also ‘work together in developing new media applications,’ which sounds like an interesting idea, sadly no further detail was available.
The upshot of this is pretty bad news for Microsoft and Real as Viacom will be serving all of the online video adverts using Flash Video. Another nail in the coffin for a use of Microsoft’s Windows Media.
Viacom
Google
Atom Entertainment
Adobe
11 August, 2006
Cricket Mobisodes On The Ashes To Launch
The mobile division of TV production company Twofour and Player One Sports are working together to create a weekly short form TV show covering the Australian portion of the Ashes tour for portable devices.
The six minute shows will be formatted for mobile phones, iPods, or PSP’s. They’ll be chunked into one to two minute blocks, “for ease of use on different delivery mediums.”
Coming this Winter, sports presenter, Mark Durden-Smith (no we haven’t heard of him either, but when it comes to sport, that’s doesn’t mean anything) will be fronting the show where they plan to cover analysis of the action and try to give an understanding of life on tour in Australia.
It appears that they’re hoping to pull in the interest of posh types who like cricket, and more than likely don’t care how much it’s going to cost them to keep up to date. It may be of course turn out that these are the sort of people who don’t currently have the kit to play the content.
Twofour are clearly planning to flog the maximum amount of ‘media’ to lighten with heavy-wallets of their punters. Alongside the mobisode (and we suspect, cross-promoted during it), there will be a range of associated content including Freddie Flintoff’s Allround Cricket, a Web and mobile fantasy cricket game and a range of other downloadable content such as wallpapers, ring tones and video blog.
A rather over-excited Mr Philip Bourchier O’Ferrall, Director of Twofour Mobile gushed, “We are in the midst of a media revolution and I’m excited that Twofour is leading the way.”
Twofour mobile
4 August, 2006
Win A Copy Of The Long Tail Book
We’ve just published a review of The Long Tail, Chris Anderson’s new book
The Long Tail is an important manual for the new economics of the Internet and digital culture. As well as demystifying the numbers it provides an essential guide to how to navigate a world where everything is available, all the time.
High praise and we think that it’s a sufficiently important book that you should have your own copy.
We chatted to the lovely people at Random House and they’ve kindly furnished us with five copies.
All you need to do is run through our Readers survey, which should only take on 5-7 minutes of clicking.
We will of course also be so very grateful – which should give you a lovely glow inside.
28 July, 2006
Yahoo! Scoops Motorola Deal
Yahoo! and Motorola have cuddled up in their synergetic beds and fluffed up their co-branding pillows to announce a new deal that will see Yahoo! Go pre-installed on millions of Motorola handsets next year.
The deal sees the search engine further consolidate their market-leading position, with the company already having a deal with Nokia under their belts.
Thanks to an exchange of besuited handshakes earlier this year, Yahoo’s mobile services will also come pre-installed on many of Nokia’s new 60 series and “N” class multimedia phones.
With two of the mobile phone big boys onboard, we reckon there’s been a fair amount of backside-kicking going on at arch-rivals Google, who must be well miffed to see Yahoo grab such a huge chunk of the market.
With the two dominant mobile handset players now signed up to Yahoo, Google will have no choice but to seek out second tier manufacturers, or dream up a new take on the mobile market.
With more and more phones offering internet access, punters want to be able to easily access services, search the web and grab their mail on the move.
The Yahoo! Go software includes Yahoo! email, search and address book with a simplified interface designed for small screens.
With Yahoo! having their mobile software pre-installed on the two biggest handset manufacturers, the company are set to dominate the market, if only for the short term while the likes of Google and MSN work out a response.
Yahoo! Go
24 July, 2006
Virgin First With Mobile TV
Virgin Mobile looks set to launch the UK’s first true mobile broadcast TV service in the autumn, with the beardy one’s empire releasing a rebadged version of BT’s Movio product.
A recent big pilot of BT’s broadcast digital TV to mobile service revealed that punters *hearted* the service with two thirds willing to fork out up to £8 per month to have the service on their network.
BT Movio – formerly known as BT Livetime – broadcasts on the same frequencies as the digital audio broadcasting (DAB) network radio, but does a bit of techie jiggery-pokery to let multiple users access the service simultaneously without a reduction in quality.
Earlier offerings of mobile TV in the UK streamed the signal as Internet protocol (IP) packets, a method which burnt up bandwidth like it was going out of fashion, leaving users with fat bills or having to put up with a capped service.
Movio uses a system known as DAB-IP, which has emerged ahead of the rival technology, DVB-H, because the required radio spectrum is already available.
Although DVB-H should be able to offer more channels than DAB-IP, there are question marks over a timetable for its availability in the UK.
Exclusive
Virgin’s new deal with BT is expected to include a three month period of exclusivity, with Movio content providers announced within the next four weeks.
Hipsters wanting to be the first in town to use the service will have to fork out for a new WM5 phone based on HTC’s Trilogy design.
The curious looking phone has been co-designed by BT and UK company The Technology Partnership and will form part of Virgin’s Lobster range of mobiles.
10 July, 2006
YouTube Brookers Signs TV Deal
OK, you’re used to us breaking news here, but here’s one that slipped through without us noticing. We think it’s sufficiently important for us to swallow our pride and report it anyway.
In an inevitable move, an LA production company, Carson Daly Prods, has signed talent/development deal with Brooke “Brookers” Brodack, who has made quite a name for herself on YouTube. We’re sure you do, but just in case you don’t know what YouTube is, it’s a phenomenally popular Web site that holds videos watched at the rate of about 40m per day.
While it is predictable (yes, we’re surprised this type of deal hasn’t happened sooner too), it doesn’t make it any less significant. What was previously known as ‘the entertainment industry’ (music, films, tv, etc) has been very slow on the uptake to even notice that the ‘people’ have been madly creating their own entertainment and sharing it online. It finally looks like they’ve started to notice … and not only that, but guess what? It’s a pool of cheap talent to plunder, one without agents and prima-donna salaries and demands. That should get them listening.
Brookers, as she’s known as by tens of millions of YouTube viewers has been posting videos for about nine months, mostly featuring her doing pieces to camera, often miming to sound tracks.
The one that brought her to wide attention was her homage to Gary Brolsma’s Numa Numa.
It’s clear that Brookers has gone a number of steps beyond just plonking herself in front of her Web cam (as many homages do), they’re more of a production, using changing camera angles and locations.
Of course it’s not all about TV deals, realising the size of her audience, she’s recently posted an entry asking for people to donate to her car fund. Very cheeky.
How many people will continue to be able to show their talent like this in the future isn’t clear as various music industry voices have been talking about stopping ‘their music’ in personal videos. Strange – we thought it actually promoted the music.
Variety cover the story
5 July, 2006
NTL, BT Nowhere In Premier League Football Bids
There had been some excitement, well amongst UK media analysts at least, that BSkyB might loose its dominance of the control of UK football’s Premier League.
Today we learned who the winners were.
Following pressure from the European Union (EU), who had stated that all matches couldn’t be controlled by the same broadcaster, the games for this round of bidding were split into six packages of 23 games each. The EU threatened legal action against the Premier League if their will wasn’t complied with. Not surprisingly, they did.
Clearly BSkyB bid. Having exclusive right to the football was one of the cornerstones that built the success of Sky in the UK.
Other bidders included NTL, fronted by the bearded-wonder – Richard Branson, who had been acting the big I AM, threatening to out bid Sky for the available six packages. BT made some noises too.
Finally the other company, Irish broadcaster Setanta, had thrown its hat into the ring, originally saying they were going to bid for two of the packages. Those not in the broadcast world wouldn’t necessarily know who Setanta are, but most people will know of their 40% owners, Benchmark Capital.
The results of the bidding? Sky got four of them and Setanta the other two. With only six on offer, the other pretenders got nothing.
For the UK Football Association, it’s a giant payday with the total amount paid rising from £1Bn three years ago, to £1.7Bn covering the next three years. Not bad work if you can get it. Expect many more overpaid footballers and lurid stories in the tabloids. The Cristal champagne will be flowing tonight.
Premier League
5 May, 2006