Replies to post #61270 on NeoMedia Technologies, Inc (NEOM)

[inforit1]

Here is a question. Why wouldn't people use the "go window" from there home computer for general searches? They can either punch words or barcodes in. How come there is 0 talk of this?

[sonofgodzilla]

DD: News Corp. exploring high-def film rentals

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002076585

By Georg Szalai March 01, 2006

NEW YORK -- News Corp. is betting that people will pay $25-$30 to watch Fox films at home in high-definition quality via cable and satellite TV 60 days after their theatrical release.

Speaking during the second day of the annual Bear Stearns Media Conference in Palm Beach, Fla., in a session available via webcast, News Corp. president and chief operating officer Peter Chernin said Tuesday the conglomerate has been "talking to the cable operators and satellite operators about the idea of a 60-day, high-priced high-def rental" offer costing $25-$30.

He later repeated the $25 price range as a possible model in a hint that this could be closer to the final price point but didn't specify what kind of revenue split was likely for the HD-to-home product.

At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Chernin first mentioned that Fox was working on a plan for HD-to-home video on-demand offers 60 days after theatrical releases to establish a new HD window between theatrical and DVD runs amid a recent trend of shrinking distribution windows. However, pricing and other details of the planned HD service had not been clear.

Chernin on Tuesday indirectly admitted that $25-plus might sound like a high price point, but he argued that more than 1 million Americans spent more than $25,000 last year on a home cinema setup, and they would be "desperate consumers" of such offers.

Sources also said Tuesday that the HD window would target consumption by families and groups. For example, consumers could get some friends together, have food and drinks and enjoy a home premiere, one source suggested. With movie tickets in New York costing well above $10, the pricing actually could be attractive to high-end users, another industry observer suggested.

Asked about the new-technology revolution in the industry, Chernin told investors that it will allow News Corp. and others to also monetize content in the broadband, wireless, set-top box storage and other fields beyond HD-to-home.

Saying he was "happy" News Corp. doesn't own a music company, Chernin argued that the film business is in a stronger position to benefit from the current digital tidal wave partly thanks to its different distribution windows and price points.

Discussing DVD market trends, the executive said pessimists sometimes overdo their concern for the home entertainment business. "The DVD business is not declining, but the rate of growth is slowing," Chernin said.

Asked about News Corp.'s TV operations, he said he is "probably more bullish on our overall TV business than any other assets" in terms of future growth outlook, predicting that it will remain the fastest-growing part of the conglomerate.

The distribution opportunities for TV product was much more limited in the past, but the digital age is proving to be "a real liberation," Chernin said.

The executive shot down suggestions that all major media conglomerates must be broken up, arguing that News Corp. has been more active and successful than any of its peers during the past decade in launching new businesses based on core assets.

He again touted continued growth opportunities for the online social network MySpace, arguing that after News Corp. took it over, advertisements on its homepage began moving into the $500,000-$700,000 range, closing the gap with Yahoo! Inc., which has a price of about $1 million.

Simultaneous with the Bear Stearns event, shares of Internet giant Google Inc. were falling as much as 14% on Tuesday after chief financial officer George Reyes told a Merrill Lynch investor conference that growth in its core Web search business will slow.

The stock fell more than $50 to $338.51 in intraday trading before closing down 7.1% at $362.62 as some analysts came out in support of the stock.

Taking questions Tuesday at the Bear Stearns conference, Yahoo! chief financial officer Sue Decker said, "Please don't ask about Google stock."

Yahoo! chairman and CEO Terry Semel had a message similar to Google's, that being that the company he runs "is quite large," so it must "go deeper" to look for the huge growth to which investors have been accustomed.

On the international front, Semel said: "We're holding our own in Europe. I'd like to say we're growing dramatically. We're not."

Yahoo! shares declined 2.1% on Tuesday to $32.06.

Semel said one of Yahoo!'s priorities is to make rich-media advertising easier to do at Yahoo! while Decker praised automakers for their creative use of online advertising. Case in point: While Ford ran a Super Bowl ad that featured Kermit the Frog, it was General Motors that initially bought the various search ads featuring the keyword "Kermit."

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, also speaking at the conference, dismissed video-on-demand and Internet download services as worthy competitors, in part because of the limited selection of movies they offer.

He said Netflix, which pioneered the DVD-by-mail subscription model, will enjoy growth of 50% year-over-year for the next five years, beginning this year with projected earnings of $30 million-$35 million.

Sales and rentals of DVDs in the U.S. will grow from a $24 billion industry to $30 billion by decade's end, spurred by high-definition technologies, Hastings said.

Warner Music Group chairman and CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., meanwhile, again shrugged off suggestions that his firm has to merge with fellow music firm EMI Group. "We want to run our own race," he told the conference.

Asked where his team might have gone wrong so far, he said he feels good about WMG's recent momentum but wished he had started focusing earlier on a turnaround of its music publishing unit, to which he remains committed.

In a late session with CBS Corp. president and CEO Leslie Moonves, the executive said his company was close to announcing its first deal with an unspecified cable operator to get retransmission-consent dollars for CBS.

"We are going to begin to get paid for our signal in a very short period of time," said Moonves, who later elaborated that a deal would be announced in the next six weeks.

Since CBS' split from the rest of the Viacom cable networks, which leveraged CBS and other brands to get carriage for newer channels, Moonves has been pledging to get new revenue on retransmission consent as a stand-alone property. He would not offer details but hinted that its value would be comparative with license fees paid to cable services that eventually could "amount to hundreds of millions in revenues to the CBS network."

Paul Bond and Andrew Wallenstein in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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Bear Sterans Annual Media Conference
Peter Chernin
Pres. & COO
News Corporation

Windows Media Version
http://customer.talkpoint.com/BEAR002/022706a_cy/media.asp?speakernum=3887&media=WMP

Real Player Version
http://customer.talkpoint.com/BEAR002/022706a_cy/media.asp?speakernum=3887&media=REAL

[sonofgodzilla]

DD: WILL VIEWERS LIKE ADS FOR THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE?
Sony, L'Oreal and Toyota Join Current TV in Consumer-Created Ad Experiment


Last November a 19-year-old Minneapolis animator created a fake Sony commercial that became a Web hit. Al Gore's Current TV and its new advertisers hope the same thing will happen for them.

SOG COMMENT : Interesting in light of What "Uncle Rupert" and company are doing with Mobizzo imho and the user generated content/art etc.....this all reminds me of history repeating itself as the old saying goes...IE; Many successful performers and artists for eons have always been more successful by getting the audience they address more involved so they "stand out", IE comedians, bands, Artists, Artistic performers, Marketers, mobile marketers, Brand managers, Mom & Pop small business owners,etc...so now, ironic many Media companies who are really entertainment companies in disguise at their core are creating content that consumers like and are doing so imho because now they can simply tap into and utilize convergence as a means to garnish more incremental profitable revenue streams and also as a way to build interest in their content equity and brands (marrying of content with technology, listen to some of the Bear Sterns Media conference interviews, they all talk of this or refer to this) to finally get taregted audience participation and reward the audience to stay involved....what a ancient concept!....and PC Platform is just the right platform to help out here imho...As Picasso once said "All Art Is A Lie Which Helps Us To See The Truth More Clearly"....

March 02, 2006
QwikFIND ID: AAR46P
By Abbey Klaassen Edited by: Ann Marie Kerwin
Related Stories:
IPG MEDIA OPENS EMERGING MEDIA LAB
Current TV’s Al Gore Helps Take the Wraps Off
AL GORE STUMPS COUNTRY FOR HIS NEW TV CHANNEL
Eyes Using Consumer-Created Commercials

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- What if ordinary TV viewers went from watching commercials to creating them? We’re about to find out.

Last November a 19-year-old Minneapolis animator created a fake Sony commercial that became a Web hit. Al Gore's Current TV and its new advertisers hope the same thing will happen for them. (Ps, I wonder if Mr. Dan Pink consults or helps wiht this venture)

Sony Electronics, Toyota Motor Sales USA and L’Oreal Paris have cut deals with Al Gore’s Current TV that will usher the beleaguered 30-second spot into the age of consumer-generated content and send shivers down the spines of agency creatives. The marketers will enlist the network’s viewers to produce commercials and will pay to air the best of those spots.

An online phenomenon
User-generated content is all the rage on the Internet -- YouTube.com attracted 4.9 million unique visitors in January and reports 20,000 video uploads a day -- and Current is exporting the phenomenon to TV.

The youth-oriented network, launched last summer with the backing of former Vice President Gore, aims to “democratize” TV by letting viewers create programming. At launch, it aimed for 5% to 10% of its content to be created by viewers, but the actual amount is closer to 30%.

The ad deals are a natural evolution of that, although they put advertisers -- who are used to controlling messages right up until they hit viewers’ eyeballs -- in an unnatural, and potentially unnerving, position.

“Marketers grow up being brand guardians -- here’s the handbook, here’s the logo, here’s how we use it,” said Anne Zehren, president-sales and marketing for Current TV. “Marketers now have to be brand hosts.”

Giving up control
That reflects the view of many proponents of user-created content, who believe brands will have to learn to give up control, that creative agencies will see their role reduced and that consumers will have as much of a say as marketers in defining a brand’s image.

“Agencies beware,” said Sony's chief marketing officer, Mike Fasulo, who might have been joking. “It’s a great reinvention. ... These are the folks we want to tap into speaking to each other -- let’s put them to work on their terms, not ours.”

Sony will seek ads for several products, including its Bean MP3 player, while L’Oreal will ask viewers to submit promotional spots for its “Women of Worth” campaign and Toyota will solicit ideas for its new Yaris subcompact. Current TV did not disclose prices, but the deals are believed to each be in the range of $1 million to $1.5 million.

'Inspiring'
L’Oreal President Carol Hamilton said she thinks it will be “inspiring” to see the L’Oreal brand through consumers’ eyes: “It clearly puts the control into consumers’ hands, but in an interesting way. We have enough confidence in Current TV that the people involved aren’t going to misrepresent our brand.”

Whether or not marketers like it, it’s already happening.

Tyson Ibele, a 19-year-old self-taught animator in Minneapolis, created a fake Sony spot last November that he posted to his personal Web site. The clip was quickly passed around the Web and became a hit; at one point Mr. Ibele had to yank it from his site when the traffic overwhelmed his server.

Current TV got in touch shortly after the holidays, telling Mr. Ibele his spot was a great example of what the network hoped to do with advertising. “We showed it to 15 Sony executives and they were speechless,” Ms. Zehren said. The spot will be the first submission for the viewer-created ad program.

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IPG MEDIA OPENS EMERGING MEDIA LAB
Current TV’s Al Gore Helps Take the Wraps Off
February 03, 2006
QwikFIND ID: AAR37U
By Matthew Creamer
http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=47746#

LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) -- Interpublic Group of Cos. last night took the wraps off a new hi-tech showroom for marketers to experiment with the latest in digital technology.
Interpublic Chairman-CEO Michael Roth (left) and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.


Interpublic Chairman-CEO Michael Roth (left) and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

Former U.S. vice president and aspiring media mogul Al Gore helped Interpublic Chairman-CEO Michael Roth and a who’s who of media bigs and marketers cut the ribbon on the Emerging Media Lab -- a digital home of the future, complete with a plasma TV, a Microsoft Media Center PC and a Samsung refrigerator that lets you check your e-mail.

Figuring out the technology
The idea is to help agencies and marketers figure out how to incorporate the proliferation of gadgets that change the way content is distributed and consumed into their strategies and executions. “I just came back from [the World Economic Forum at] Davos,” Mr. Roth said. “All they did was talk about digital media.”

Mr. Gore, now chairman of Current TV, put the rise of digital media in historical terms. “We easily overlook the role of media in the destiny we choose as a nation,” he said. “The kind of experimenting that will be explored and designed here will be absolutely crucial.”

The lab, located at the Interpublic offices on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, is run by Greg Johnson, also exec VP-global director of innovations for MRM Worldwide. A second one is being developed in New York. Both will be part of the IPG Media group, a new corporate structure run by Mark Rosenthal (who didn’t attend the event because a recent surgery is limiting his travel.)

Mr. Rosenthal’s role in introducing the lab was filled by one of his first important appointments, Universal McCann CEO Nick Brien.

VIPs
Among the VIPs on hand: Sony Corp. CMO Andrew House; Magna Global chief Bill Cella; Draft CEO Howard Draft; Mark Burnett Productions’ Conrad Riggs; Endeavor’s Mark Dowley; Home Depot’s Roger Adams; HuffingtonPost.com’s Arianna Huffington; MRM Worldwide’s Ruben Hendell; Initiative CEO Alec Gerster; and new Interpublic Media Chief Financial Officer Terri Santisi.

Also in attendance in one of her first public appearances in a new IPG Media role was Mary Gerzema, recently promoted by Mr. Brien to president of Universal McCann's U.S. region from exec VP-communications planning director. Ms. Gerzema joined the media agency, part of the Interpublic, in 2003. Before that, she was media director at Publicis Groupe’s Fallon, New York.

Filling roles at Universal MacCann
Filling that vacant role is another important step for Mr. Brien as he seeks to help the agency recover from a long stretch of client losses and talent defection.

Last week, he named Carat Deepblue head Wayne Fletcher as global head of communications planning, a new position, as well as naming former ITV sales executive Graham Duff as president of Europe, Middle East and Africa.