www.dpingram.com

Gracenote (www.gracenote.com) is pioneering the way forward in digital rights management (DRM) with software which is capable (it is said) of detecting signatures in copyrighted music and flagging a potential infringement.

MySpace.com is said to be about to install the new technologyto stop its 120m users from posting unauthorised copyrighted music on their myspace pages, and will ban frequent offenders. This move comes after pressure from the music industry heavyweights. MySpace said it is also trying to find technology that would check and block copyright infringing videos on its site.

Legally UGC and social networking sites claim they need only remove infringing material when asked to do so by copyright owners, this puts an enourmous (and possibly unmanagable) burden on copyright owners.

A number of other websites are pursuing similar plans, last week Bolt.com announced it would try to install filtering technology after it was sued for copyright infringement by Universal Music.

YouTube is also said to be rolling out a similar system, and Guba already has one up and running.

Last week at the Digital Hollywood conference in LA film and music execs rubbed shoulders with software execs as video sharing websites strutted their stuff, all vying to be seen as the next YouTube, the video sharing site that was acquired by Google last month for $1.65bn.
Like YouTube most have yet to demonstrate profits, but that wasn’t deterring anyone.

Prominent was Revver, the site that offers UGC creators the change to earn cash for their work via an advertising revenue share (the diet coke and mentos video makers are said to have made over $35m from their video).

Others have tried a different tack, for example Vmix which, as well as having user generated content on its site, has struck deals with TV networks and film studios including Warber Bros, Discovery Channel, and Lionsgate Entertainment so its users can watch TV shows as well as download movies.

My conclusion: Digital Media is a powerful unstoppable force, and the fact that there is a show even called Digital Hollywood shows its penetration into the traditional media/ents space. Add UGC to the mix and you get this amazing tipping point which is causing traditional media and entertainments companies to reevaluate their own core businesses. How long will it be before TV ‘programmimg’ is a thing of the past: when all the entertainment I could desire can be delivered on demand, when I want it, how can ‘broadcast’ compete???

The question is how effective is UGC linked advertising compared with, say, traditional TV advertising?

Well….
….The Wall Street Journal reports that Coca-Cola recently teamed with hip-hop entertainer Jay-Z to release a clip of a June concert over file-sharing networks.So far, Coke says the clip has been downloaded 2.5 million times, which makes it arguably as effective as any TV ad in terms of brand building, but for a much cheaper price.
This article came from The Motley Fool and is

Post YouTube, is Metacafe the Next Big Thing?
Now that Google has puchased YouTube, what’s an online video pundit to do? Talk to the next most popular site on the Web, I guess. Have you heard of Metacafe?
Metacafe the Web site was launched in May 2005 in Tel Aviv, seven months before Chad Hurley and Steve Chen flipped the switch in California on YouTube.com. The company has 85 employees and recently began moving its offices to the Bay Area. Metacafe also has $23 million in venture capital.

The site’s traffic stats, while nowhere near YouTube’s, are impressive, and Metacafe leads the pack of video-sharing sites vying for attention. According to comScore, Metacafe received about 525M page views in August, about 350M more than its closest contender, Dailymotion.
To borrow a Web 1.0 phrase, Metacafe is also very sticky. The site ranks third in average minutes per visitor (64.3), right behind YouTube (66.7). Both trail long-form TV destination Veoh (247.1). Metacafe is also third in average pages per visitor, with 41. YouTube has 65 and Veoh 68 according to comScore.

The amount of time spent on Metacafe is interesting. Readers who follow social networks may recall that Facebook was famously touted as the only social network where 93% of users returned every month, with most staying online all day long. Those usage stats were used, albeit briefly, to justify Facebook’s rumored asking price of $2 billion.
Metacafe CEO Arik Czerniak doesn’t shy away from the comparison. “Metacafe is to YouTube like what Facebook is to MySpace,” he says.

But purists beware: Metacafe isn’t a pure video-sharing play. Rather, it’s something Czerniak dubs “a top entertainment destination,” a one-stop shop for sharing videos, games and ringtones.

Metacafe isn’t a purely Web-based creation either. The site has its genesis in a desktop application that was originally launched in 2003.

For a video to make it onto the site, it first goes through a quick but extensive filtering process, courtesy of volunteer editors using the desktop app. The editors’ ranking is then combined with what Czerniak calls a “behavioral ranking” — data culled from monitoring how users interact with clips on the desktop app.

According to Czerniak, the application is the key to Metacafe’s success.
“Metacafe was originally conceived as a desktop app,” says CEO Arik Czerniak, who says the app is for video-sharing power users who are addicted to video. “We have about 2 million dedicated users of the client [compared to 20M users of the site], and they consume about five to ten times as much video. The client generates a massive amount of usage data that you can’t get from just the Web…for instance, if someone replays a video ten times or deletes it without finishing the first view. So we use the client as a control group for video-ranking and grading.”
According to Czerniak, that filtering process ensures only high-quality videos make it to the site.
“How users vote [on other sites] is not a good proxy for quality,” he says, “because only two to three percent of people bother to vote.”

Metacafe’s behavioral ranking and filtering technology may also make the company attractive to content owners. Czerniak says Metacafe’s filters can determine when duplicate content is uploaded, even if the bit rate or length of the videos are different. Now that Google and YouTube are setting the bar by adding fingerprinting filters to their sites, Metacafe may be in a position to woo partners.

Czerniak says his site has some partnerships in the works, but of course he can’t reveal anything yet.

SummaryPersonally, I’m not sold on the desktop application. I understand its value to Metacafe, but I can’t see a generation trained on Web apps adopting a thin client. I’m also enamored of the idea that quality emerges through attention data, not explicit rankings, so I think Metacafe’s filtering process is an unnecessary impediment to rapid user adoption.
But the traffic stats say I’m wrong. Both Metacafe and Veoh (which has a different business model, but that’s another story) use desktop clients, and both sites are trouncing their closest competitors, which are mostly purely web-based. The exception is Dailymotion, a French site with a very broad reach outside the United States.

At any rate, keep an eye on Metacafe. They’re in the valley now. They’re coming for your eyeballs.

Original article is here

Meet the Next Media Mogul: Jeremy Allaire. His Brightcove Threatens to Bring Order to the Chaos of the Broadband-Video World

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — One day this guy’s company is going to be worth more than the $1.6 billion Google will pay for YouTube. Jeremy Allaire’s Brightcove is launching a consumer-facing video portal with thousands of professionally and semiprofessionally made videos.
That’s a bold prediction for an unpredictable marketing world, but it’d be a brave man who’d bet against Jeremy Allaire’s Brightcove becoming a media powerhouse to rival any out there. Just today the company, which raised a humble $32 million in series B funding a year ago from the likes of AOL, IAC Corp., Hearst and Allen & Co., launches a consumer-facing video portal, complete with thousands of professionally and semiprofessionally made videos, an ad network, a distribution deal with AOL, and an e-commerce portal.

Fully licensed contentThe specifics of each of those products aside, however, here’s what you need to know: Major media and entertainment content owners — including movie studios, almost every leading music company, the Big Four broadcasters, cablers and a host of the country’s leading publishers — have made or are poised to make Brightcove their broadband-video-distribution and monetization platform of choice. And unlike, say, YouTube, Brightcove’s model from the get-go incorporated fully licensed content from these players, and doesn’t rely heavily on the long-tail of consumer-posts.

Mr. Allaire, who founded Brightcove in 2004 after spending the better part of a decade helping to turn Flash into a ubiquitous web application at the CTO for Macromedia, has always wanted to create something “disruptive” that would truly enable anyone, anywhere to challenge the media companies. So it is ironic that, while Brightcove’s offerings are certainly designed, … la YouTube, to allow anyone to publish broadband-video content, they also dovetail with many existing media companies’ models. For example, allowing them to use their sales teams to sell ads against their broadband offerings, or allowing them to offer their video content for syndication to anyone who wants it through a simple “click of a button” type tool.
Content syndicationBrightcove offers a marketplace where media owners can syndicate their content to affiliates across the web, a flexible ad model that lets publishers sell their own advertising or, starting today, use a Brightcove ad network and e-commerce solutions. When content is syndicated, the distributor, media owner and Brightcove all get a cut of the ad revenue. If Natpe and Mipcom are the real-world syndication markets, Brightcove aims to be a self-service replication of their offerings.

Evan Fleischer, director-marketing and promotions at the Rainbow Media-owned IFC, said the model is a practical one for his small cable network. “Syndication is what’s going to make or break companies like IFC,” he said. “We can’t all be YouTube. We can’t all be MySpace. … Brightcove’s a mirror of how we work in cable industry. We provide content to [cable operators], they send that content out.”

He’s not the only one feeling a level of comfort with the Brightcove model. Discovery, Sony BMG, Dow Jones, Reuters and Warner Bros. have already made it a cornerstone of their online video plays.

Make media owners comfortableThe way to make media owners comfortable is to give them control over “how the content is branded and the user experience, where distribution takes place and who can syndicate it and monetization — how they price it for download, how they sell ads around it,” Mr. Allaire said.

“It’s increasingly clear in a market dominated by YouTube and its focus very much on consumer-generated content, there’s also a big emerging opportunity with semiprofessional and professional media companies that might not have the scale or expertise to build a self-made online-video initiative,” said Joe Laszlo, senior analyst at Jupiter Research.

Lee Westerfield, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets, has been following web 2.0 companies and thinks whoever figures out how to reaggregate the splintered audiences will be a big winner. “Fragmenting or sliver-casting on the web breaks apart the idea of mass media for general-market brands,” he said. “But consumer brands need to impact large audiences with impressions. Companies that can put the pieces of that broken eggshell back together stand to gain.”

Aggragating audiencesAnd that’s exactly what Brightcove aims to do. “In a traditional world you basically have these companies that aggregate content but you might think of Brightcove as aggregating audiences,” said Jeff Marshall, senior VP-managing director of Starcom IP.
Of course, there are lots of broadband video enablers chasing content creators and an audience. And the other big questions are: How much money can media make from the model? Will major media companies decide to create their own broadband technology in-house rather than pay companies such as Brightcove a fee or a cut of ad revenue? Along with Brightcove, other broadband-solutions companies such as Roo, Maven Networks, Permission TV and Narrowstep are chasing medium-to-large content creators, and companies such as Revver and, of course, YouTube, are chasing the prosumer and consumer, respectively.

“There’s going to be so much slicing and dicing,” said Mitch Oscar, exec VP-Carat Digital. Asks Jupiter’s Mr. Laszlo: “How big is the advertising pot going to be and when all these people take their slices out of it is it enough for a content creator to make a real business?”
Mr. Allaire thinks that’s a no-brainer: While the online-video business isn’t a great one yet, it will be. According to BMO, broadband video will be a $3.3 billion market by 2009, and paid online video will be a $3.5 billion business. “There’s no question that we’re out-innovating media companies in creating platforms for distributing TV on the internet,” Mr. Allaire said. “The question is: What’s the core competency of a media company? To put birds in the sky or lay fiber optic cables or create and brand content?”

By Abbey KlaassenOriginal article is here

New User-Generated Content Campaign To Be Launched For X Factor

LYCOS.co.uk, FremantleMedia and talkbackTHAMES are teaming up to launch a new user-generated content campaign around the hit TV series on ITV1, The X Factor.

The latest activity to launch on Fan Central, the dedicated community section on The X Factor website, will allow fans of the show the opportunity to upload their own performances as clips.Each week, the most entertaining ten clips, selected by The X Factor production team, will be put on the show’s official website and users will be encouraged to vote for their favourite clips. As a result of these votes, weekly winners will be selected. Following six weeks of the campaign, all of the weekly winners will go into a final round and an overall winner will be chosen by popular vote. Prizes will be awarded to some of the best clips submitted.

In addition, LYCOS Chat will host webchats with evictees on a fortnightly basis. The sessions, which will also be filmed for use on The Xtra Factor – The Aftermath on ITV2, will enable fans to ask the evictees questions live online.

Jeffrey Lee, Managing Director of LYCOS UK commented: “This enables The X Factor fans to get even more involved in the show and – most importantly – with each other. By allowing everyone to upload their clips and have them judged by fellow fans, we are creating a new way to involve the show’s viewers. Anyone can get involved and show off their talents to friends and fans alike.”

Dominic Burns, Vice President, Licensing, UK, FremantleMedia Licensing Worldwide, licensor of The X Factor brand added: “We were keen to find a way to offer fans of The X Factor a community where they can interact directly with each other and share their experiences whenever and wherever they like. We’re confident that this new element of the website will be a huge hit with audiences of all ages and really enhance and extend their experience of the show.”
“User generated content is a massive trend right now and The X Factor lends itself perfectly to the medium. It’s a way of engaging viewers even further with The X Factor experience and we are always keen to experiment in this area”, said Alex Mahon, Chief Operating Officer, talkbackTHAMES.The X Factor is produced by talkbackTHAMES, the UK production company owned by FremantleMedia, one of the largest international creators and producers of programme brands in the world, and Syco TV for ITV1.
original story

This article was sent to me by a friend…

Can Facebook Save Face?Source: Laura Behrens, Principal Research Analyst at GartnerIt seems the kids care about privacy after all.

Social-networking site Facebook is taking a beating from its own members after making changes to the way it displays and syndicates information. A significant number of users feel more exposed and vulnerable than they’d like, and betrayed by the company. Facebook retorts that its privacy safeguards are the same as ever, and hey, it’s all among friends, right?
Please.

How many minutes (okay, seconds) did it take you, fair reader, to wrangle an invitation to join Facebook? Perhaps you wrested it from your teenager as a condition of using the family computer at all, and now you’re astonished at all the information available to his or her dozens or hundreds of “friends.” At least some Facebook users are drawing a line between what they’re willing to have available to someone who’s looking, and what they’re willing to have pushed to anyone who has ever looked.

Facebook may have broken through thinning ice on this one. Its early base of loyal college student users grumbled when the site opened up to high school students earlier this year. Some grumbled louder about selling out to corporate interests when Facebook began accepting other organizational users.

Facebook is not alone here. Such user-relations issues will beset most or all social networking sites as they look for ways to make more money than headlines - which means those issues will cascade to companies appearing on these sites. We’ll deal with several dimensions of Web 2.0 relationships at our Media & Technology Summit in October.
Full article here

Here is a chap from Gartner, sound familiar?

Consider that the top video on MySpace, with more than 2.7 million views, is a 29-second clip called “Fast and Furious - Arabian Drifting,” which shows a man in Arab garb riding his bike around in a circle. I am no expert, but the clip appears to be “lifted” from TV or some other copyrighted source and overdubbed with hip-hop music. Now that’s entertainment. All cynicism aside, this brings into relief a major issue facing the consumer-generated media (CGM) space.
CGM sites are, for the most part, unable to detect copyrighted content or porn. This is a major problem for sites that see millions of videos flow through their channels on a daily basis. That flaw is a stumbling block along the path to inserting potentially lucrative ads in this content bucket. No brand advertiser wants to take a chance that his ad will appear in, well, a video clip of some fool riding his bike in a circle.

…. take the path to real money by creating an actual business that advertisers will embrace.

Full article: here

It seems there are mutterings in cyberspace about users’ desire for more privacy in their blogging and social networking activities. Though this seems to fly in the face of the whole blogging and SN concept its really just a maturing of the scene.

Makers of Vox, Six Apart are promoting their Private blogging and social networking capabilities, but they’re not the only ones.

MySpace has been offering private profiles to its users since the summer, and competitor Facebook is doing something similar.

But the whole private/public debate is much more complex in reality. My own company Izimi has rather more advanced features due for release in the new year, including profiles and user groups that can be listed or unlisted, private or public, and open or closed.

I’ll need to elaborate a little to explain the finer points:Its no use just saying ‘my profile is private’ or ‘its public’ unless you have a bit more control. After all, SN is about connecting not blocking out. There will always be the extremes: one person wanting to broadcast totally publically to all, and the other person keeping a tight lid on what they say and whom has access. Whats more important in any SN offering is that the CHOICE is there to do these and any graduation in between.

Here’s what this means to Izimi:

- Users can be Listed or Unlisted - controls whether my profile appears in search results or not- A User can have multiple User Profiles - allows me to present different public faces to different circles of people, and to complete more or less detail for the different groups.

- Groups: can be Public or private - public allows anyone to ‘join’ my group, private requires a handshake (either an invite from the Owner and acceptance from the joinee, or a request to join from the joinee and acceptance from the Owner) which gives the Group Owner a chance to view the joinees profile to decide whether to approve.

- Groups: can be Visible or Invisible - allows me to determine if Groups I own are seen by casual viewers or not. Making a Group invisible renders it unfound in any search, and when a user is viewing my profile the Group is hidden. This allows me ultimate privacy for any groups I may not wish my other conacts to see (maybe something I’m ambarassed about).

- Groups: can be free or paid - hidden in version 1, but to be anabled later to allow users to charge for memberships of their groups. This will go hand in hand with allowing users to charge for their premium content.

So privacy it seems is on everyone’s horizon, no surprise there, its just maturing of the offerings.

I friend of mine has noticed something odd happening with her Google Adwords campaign. Over the last 4 months she has had to raise her Adwords budget 100 fold (yes, 100 time what it used to be) to maintain high page positions in the paid for results. BUT, she is getting absolutely NO MORE leads than she used to get with 100th of the budget. Now, she is getting more clicks, but no more leads. Thats odd. Most businesses know or at least have a good feel for their conversion rations, every good salesman knows this, and with Adwords its so accountable that you cant fail to notice the ratios.

So why, after spending 100 times the budget she used to 4 months ago, is she getting more clicks, but no more business. NOthing else has changed, and her business sector certainly hasnt changed that dramatically that quickly.

Here’s my theory: someone (or some bot) automating clicking her ads, therefore using up her budget with no resulting enquiries and so her ad then fails to display for the rest of the day. I will do more research on this, but it sounds like a good (but perhaps illegal) technique for a competitor to do this to their competition: use up all your competitors adwords budget each day, then your own ads get displayed at th etop of the pile for the genuine search enquiries.
Here are a few interesting articles I found:InteraktonlineStopScumhttp://blog.merjis.com/2006/10/13/adwords-click-fraud-reduction-competitor-clicks/

Or you can just do a Google search:google for “adwords scam”