The Digital Meteor

War Between Music Industry and YouTube?: Warner Music Walks

After talks to renew a licensing deal failed, Warner Music Group pulled its songs from YouTube in what could be an opening salvo in a battle between the music business and the world's largest video site...

The Warner dispute could be the first of many as the labels renegotiate deals struck back in YouTube's infancy. Since then, the video service has grown into the largest video site, accounting for nearly 40% of all video views in the U.S., the second-largest search engine, and the fourth-largest website in the world. 

YouTube Pulls Warner Music...

New Universal Online TV Remote Unveiled: Blinkx

Blinkx, a San Francisco-based video search engine, today is launching a universal online remote control for finding TV programs that are legally available online.

Blinkx Makes Watching TV Online Easy

Hollywood Warms to YouTube Ad-Delivery and Content Tracking Abilities

Google's YouTube is quickly shedding its reputation in Hollywood as a clearinghouse for pirated content and could soon be home to clips from popular movies and TV shows--all legally obtained...

Insiders say the search company has adopted a more accommodating approach toward Hollywood, and that it's finally starting to pay off. Google has also piqued the interest of some in Hollywood with new ad-delivery and content-tracking technology that the company is developing, according to three studio executives... Google could one day enable content owners to insert ads into unauthorized video clips wherever they might be posted online...

YouTube is struggling to make significant income. YouTube is also defending itself against a $1 billion copyright infringement suit filed by Viacom last year.

Could Peace Be Near for YouTube and Hollwyood?

Google Begins Using Your Seach Data to Tailor Ads

Google assigns every computer that visits its sites a unique identifying number — known as a cookie — and records searches and other activities in an unimaginably large file along with those cookies. The company has maintained that it hasn’t used any of that information to draw inferences about users to target ads.

Until now.

Google acknowledges that it is now testing ways to use some of the data it has been gathering to better aim search ads at Web surfers, although it won’t say how.

Google Tests Using Your Search Data...

Google Dominates Mobile Search

Google managed to spank the rest of the mobile search world during the first quarter of 2008, according to data from Nielsen Mobile. The search giant managed to capture 61 percent of the mobile search market in the first four months of the year, with Yahoo! taking a very distant second at 18 percent. MSN sat at third place with a measly 5 percent.

Google Easily Extending Dominance to Mobile Search Market

Are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Recession Proof?

That recession gripping the country and many of its biggest businesses is skirting around the internet. True, Google saw a slowdown in retail spending and Yahoo a softening in travel, finance and retail. Yet neither was enough to significantly dent the first-quarter earnings of these web giants, which both grew more than 30%. And while Microsoft's fiscal third quarter disappointed many, ad revenue was a bright spot, growing 29%.

Credit the fact that the internet is generally less expensive, more targeted and easier to track than most traditional media...

What Recession?  Online Giants Rake in Ad Bucks

90% Report: Amazon mp3 Customers Didn't Use iTunes Before

The finding is "a healthy indication that the digital music customer pool can expand into new consumer groups who have not yet joined the iTunes community," said Russ Crupnick, entertainment analyst for NPD.

It also means that the vast majority of Amazon MP3 customers, who are fine with the idea of buying digital music (since they're shopping at Amazon MP3), had previously refused to buy their music from Apple.

Some of these Amazon MP3 customers are probably regular Amazon shoppers who are going for the MP3 option instead of the CD, but a significant percentage of these shoppers could have been staying away from iTunes because of Apple's Fairplay DRM.

Study: 90 Percent of Amazon mP3's...

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"While it's still very early in the game, there's no evidence that Apple customers are deserting iTunes for a new alternative, either because of price or DRM restrictions," Crupnick said. "Amazon may simply be opening new markets from their existing consumer base and introductory promotions."

Apple Expanding Digital Music Sales without Eating into iTunes

All TV, All the Time, on the Net: PrimetimeRewind.tv

Here's a new service that "channels" all content from all the major studios' online sites onto a single easy to search site.

THE DREAM OF SOME TV network executives is to have one site where consumers can get all network programming--the original intent of Hulu.com, the NBC-Fox Internet TV platform. One recently launched Internet site has a better idea. PrimeTimeRewind.tv uses the free video links of every available full-length network program and presents those shows in an easier format for consumers to access.

PrimetimeRewind.tv: All TV, All the Time
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Digital Fingerprint to Reduce Online Fraud

People who cheat on online surveys could soon find themselves -- or at least their computers -- on an industrywide digital blacklist of respondents who are undermining the $4 billion online-research industry.

Peanut Labs has begun beta testing Optimus, a system that creates a digital fingerprint of each computer in a survey to pinpoint respondents who fake responses or professionals who game the industry by doing as many surveys as possible.

Chasing Online Cheaters
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Warner Bros. Preps for New TV Website Debut in April

Video search and targeting firm Digitalsmiths has signed a deal to provide video search for a new Web site that Warner Bros. Television plans to launch in early April.

The partnership with Warner Bros. is the first deal Digitalsmiths has struck to manage video search on a consumer Web site for a major media brand, and it demonstrates the growing need for media companies to make video content easy to find on their sites.

As consumers continue to devour Web video, media companies are developing new sites, services and online shows to meet that demand. As they do so, they need the tools to help their site visitors find the videos they want to see. More than 75% of Internet users watched online video in January, according to comScore.

Digitalsmiths-Warner Bros. Deal
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