It’s got to be tough being in the advertising business these days. DVRs (digital video recorders) are allowing viewers to skip commercials, premium channels offer fewer advertising opportunities, circulation numbers for print publications continue to spiral downwards, and research shows that most users avoid anything that looks like a banner ad on a Web page.
Ugh, so what’s an advertiser to do?
This morning, I had the pleasure of seeing Dave Nelsen, President of Dialog, talk about social media for business. While discussing YouTube, Dave showed us a video that he called “the future of advertising.” The T-Mobile Dance is a 2:41 minute video of commuters at Liverpool Station in England dancing their hearts out. As more and more people join in, onlookers snap photos, take video and share the experience with their friends through their T-Mobile phones, of course.
Dave made the point that this video represents the future of advertising because:
The company got me to willingly watch a loooong ad. This would never happen on TV!
Because YouTube allows comments, over 16,000 people have commented on this video, creating incredible buzz and feedback for the company.
The video was so successful that T-Mobile created a YouTube channel for its “Life’s for Sharing” campaign. Fans can even create their own videos and T-Mobile posts the best of the bunch. There’s a video of a Korean baby singing Hey Jude and a singer jamming from atop a bus. How’s that for a user-generated content strategy?
The Washington DC area is expecting a huge snowstorm this weekend but I’m not worried. I have a fridge full of food and an endless supply of movies through my Apple TV and PS3.
Over the past year, content on demand has matured a lot. I can now rent and purchase movies, many of them in HD, using iTunes on my Mac, on my Apple TV, and my PS3. The Apple and Sony networks each have a large database of movies, although the Apple inventory seems larger and the shopping and viewing experience is far superior on iTunes and the Apple TV. Movies become available on my devices the same time they become available through Netflix and my neighborhood Hollywood Video.
Which makes me wonder if the Blu-Ray vs. HD battle almost missed the mark. Blu-Ray is a storage format and scripting platform and it’s fabulous. But when I purchase or rent an HD movie from a content on demand network, Blu-ray is irrelevant because I don’t need a storage format; I get the movie directly to my drive.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Blu-Ray. My new Sony VAIO laptop plays Blu-Ray discs and I love, love, love the clarity of the audio and video, as well as all the cool extras on the discs. So for now, I will continue to buy my favorite movies on Blu-Ray, but for the random movie rentals, I will likely go online and have my movies of choice downloaded to my Apple TV or PS3 in 20 minutes.
How about you? Are you buying or renting movies online? Who is your preferred vendor? Are you still buying movies on disc?
I was trying to schedule a time for my new biz team to come to the office on Sunday to finish a proposal. We were trying to work around church services when Jeniece said, “don’t worry about me, I go online. My favorite church is in Atlanta.” Online? She attends church online?
It turns out that even churches have adopted new media, and in a big way (why am I surprised by this?). After doing a bunch of Google searches, I realized that not only have many churches created extensive Web sites, many now have sermons and readings online, and yes, many now stream services live. Read the rest of this entry
High Definition (HD) is everywhere. The Blu-ray format has won the HD DVD war and I’m seeing a lot more Blu-ray movies at my local video store and retail stores. As I mentioned in a previous post, Apple TV and the PS3 now have HD videos on demand.
Earlier this year, Microsoft released Silverlight, their answer to Adobe’s Flash. The official Web site describes Silverlight as “a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.” I downloaded Silverlight in order to watch the Democratic National Convention live, in HD. The picture was unbelievably crisp and the audio was terrific. BTW, I checked; no HD feed on the official Republican Convention site.
I didn’t realize it, but the NBC Olympics Web site had videos powered by Silverlight (not in HD, however). Here’s a link to a video feed of the closing ceremony and a PC World article describing what Silverlight allowed the Web site developers to do.
Over the past couple of weeks, my family and I had the opportunity to check out the video on demand services from Apple and Sony. We found the services to be easy to use and competitively priced, but there are still a few kinks to work out in the business models.
Apple TV vs. Sony PS3
Let’s start with the Apple service. We have an Apple TV (we bought ours for $199), which is a device that hooks up to your TV and connects via wireless to your Macintosh computer. Using the Apple TV, we can stream photos, music and podcasts to our big screen TV. Perhaps most fun of all, Apple TV has a custom interface for surfing YouTube! Surfing YouTube as a family, on the big screen, from the comfort of my couch, is wonderful. And now, we can rent or purchase movies from Apple.
The Sony service is available on the PS3. I love our PS3 because I absolutely love Blu-ray. The Sony service has a good selection of movies, although you’d think that a company like Sony would have a much bigger selection than Apple because it is in the entertainment business, but what do I know about these things.
