Digital TV Mandate Set for April 7, 2009

Your rabbit ears won't work after that date. But the Feds have cooked up plans for putting a set top box in every pot! (Ha!)

• Here's a great, fun commentary from Fast Company's blog.
• And here's today's news item from the New York Times.

BitTorrent Lands $8.75MM In Funding
Associated Press c/o Forbes.com
The creator of the popular online file-swapping software BitTorrent has lined up $8.75 million in financing from a venture capital firm in a bid to build his software into a commercial distribution tool for media companies.

Bram Cohen created BitTorrent in 2001 as a hobby after the dot-com crash left him unemployed. Since then, it has become a favorite tool for computer users to swap large files - particularly movies and other video - because it grabs bits from various computer users simultaneously as they send and receive a file. That speeds up transfers.

Nintendo DS + McDonalds Announce WiFi Agreement
Free wireless Internet access in the US starts Nov 14, and then in Europe beginning Nov 25. Access points supplied by US firm Wayport, which is to be paid an "undisclosed sum" by Nintendo. The deal covers nealy 6,000 McD's restaurants. More from the BBC News.

Siemens Closest Yet for Digital Paper Packaging
c/o The Melbourne Age newspaper

Siemens has announced a new colour display screen so thin and flexible it can be printed on to paper or foil, and so cheap it can be used on throw-away packaging.

Podcasters Get Ready for Videocasting Era
Reuters c/o Yahoo News

God Bloggers Hold National Conference
AP Newswire c/o Yahoo! News

This is important: Agencies and clients need to stop thinking of blogs, RSS, the Web, Podcasts and the rest as being appropriate solely for young adult males. Other segments are hyper-active in cyberspace -- evangelicals, tree-huggers, political activists (left and right) and more.

Hollywood Wants A Piece of Video iPod
AP Newswire c/o Yahoo! News

Ad Age Reports - Americans Watch More TV Than Ever
(Is a rash of uncontrollable hair-pulling among agency execs far behind?)

Research conducted by Neilsen Media Research between September 2004 to September 2005 revealed the average American family watched TV eight hours and eleven mintues a day. That's up 2.7%. Ten years ago the average was only seven hours and fifteen minutes.

So why all this chatter about integrated marketing? First of all, there are hundreds of channels and choices that simply didn't exist before. And on-demand services are only beginning to appear. Also, people leave the tube on while surfing the Net, playing games or what not.

More at Adage.com (subscription required after 14 days)

Digital Music Accounts For Growing Piece Of Global Market

• The digital music market has more than tripled in a year
• Sales totaled $790 million in the first half of this year, equivalent to 6 percent of industry sales
• That compared to $220 million in the same period last year
• Recorded music sales fell 1.9 percent to a retail value of $13.2 billion in the first half of this year, compared with $13.4 billion in the same period last year
• The digital boom, which now exceeds the value of the global singles market, was largely driven by sales in the top five markets--the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany, and France
• Sales of physical formats fell 6.3 percent by value in the period to $12.4 billion, it said
• Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes online music store accounts for 82 percent of legal downloads in the United States.
• The company has sold more than 500 million songs online
  
• And about 22 million iPod digital music players

Esther Dyson calls Blogs Overrated
Quoted from article in DIRECT magazine
The author of Release 2.0 and editor-at-large of CNET Networks, Dyson says blogs get way too much press and should only be used by companies under the right circumstances. "Blogs are just one more way to put things up on the Web,"said Dyson while speaking at the Shop.org conference in Las Vegas, "just a set of words, sometimes with links."
She estimated there are 20 million blogs. But they're not right for every company. "If no one volunteers, don't assign it. If you have to assign it, forget it."

"Dell Takes One Hell of a Blogging"
from Direct magazine

A blogger named Jeff Jarvis has been "calling out" Dell for providing loussy customer service and worse. It's tipped off a bloggers' storm of resentment.

Study - In-Game Ads Boost Brand Awareness
c/o MIT Adverlab
"In-game advertising generated a 60 percent lift in awareness for new products in a study conducted by Nielsen Interactive Entertainment for in-game ad agency Double Fusion. The study also found that animated 3D ads were twice as effective at creating recall as compared to static billboards within the games." -- originally reported on Clickz

152 Million US Adults Own a "Mobile Entertainment Device"
c/o The Wireless Weblog

About 70 percent of the total U.S. adult population (over 152 million) owns some type of portable entertainment device including laptops, music players, and enhanced wireless phones, according to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). Of course, this is a huge pool of potential customers for content developers to market their goods and services to. The CEA estimates that consumers will spend over $8 billion dollars in mobile entertainment content over the next 12 months. However, this pool of people is not downloading digital files directly to their PCs or players in large numbers, but you would think that total will rise in the next 12 months as well, if not sooner.

U.K.-retailer, Downtown, broadcasts in-store television from an in-store studio
OCTOBER 03, 2005 -- U.K.-based Downtown, the largest single-site garden center and department store in Europe has this month launched Downtown Superstore TV, a shopping channel, which will broadcast live on Sky channel 640 from a 2000-sq.-ft. glass-sided studio located inside the store's 25-acre complex at Gonerby Moor near Grantham. Downtown attracts 2 million visitors a year, and the channel is estimated to give the retailer access to an additional 2 million shoppers a day. The channel will sell identical products to those available in the Downtown store including furniture, home wares, cosmetics, fashion, gardening tools, hardware and sportswear. It will combine a range of popular programming formats such as reality TV, gaming, chat shows and "shop opera" to make it more than just a shopping medium, but an all-round entertainment channel. Steve Whatley, MD of Superstore TV and joint MD of Downtown Superstore TV, said in a statement: "This is the future for retail offering true multi-channel convergence: on-air, on-line and in-store. As a family owned business Oldrids has the flexibility and vision to invest in this potentially hugely profitable sales mechanism. That they have done so by taking a whole channel is testament to their belief in the potential that TV shopping holds." [ Link to this story here. ]

Mashing Up the Media - Powerpoint Don't Suck!

Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne began experimenting with Powerpoint in the early 2000s. His work turned serious quickly, and he's exhibited his Powerpoint-based work in galleries, corporate HQs and a book-with-DVD.

• "EEEI" book + DVD at Amazon.com
• David Byrne's Official Site - Powerpoint Page
  
• CNN Article on Byrne's Powerpoint Art
• NPR Story with Audio and Photo Gallery Links
• Wired Magazine Article with Images