Amazon Expands its Catalog with Viacom

The online retailer has a deal with the media group Viacom that allows it to expand its range of videos available to stream on the internet, and represents the final steps in a plan to launch a subscription service to compete with Netflix.

The online video market, currently dominated by Netflix, should become increasingly competitive in the coming years as large companies are entering this segment.  Netflix currently streams service with nearly 22 million subscribers in the United States.

Subscribers to Amazon Prime, benefiting from both improved delivery times for their free online shipping and web-based video streaming, will have access to a total catalog of 15,000 movies and TV television programs, with the addition of Viacom programs covered by this new deal.

Viacom, which claims MTV, Nickelodeon and Paramount Studios in its conglomerate, will now be available on Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service. Until now, major media companies like CBS, Warner Bros. Time Warner, News Corp Fox, Sony, Comcast, NBC Universal and Walt Disney have licensed programming to Amazon.

The improvement of this catalog also allows Amazon to provide even more attractive content to its multimedia Kindle Fire tablet.  Amazon wants to open its collection of licensed films and television programs as a separate service for clients outside the prime segment, and use it to boost the Kindle Fire tablet.

Analysts estimate that Amazon sold about five million Kindle Fire tablets in the fourth quarter, and the company can sell more than double that in 2012. An essential part of Amazon’s strategy is to have lots of content, including video, music and applications for tablets users.

Blip Raises $12-Million Round of Funding

Online video network Blip.tv announced a $12-million round of funding. The company is also re-branding its name from Blip.tv to simply Blip.

Blip will use the new cash to develop more sophisticated tools and products for web content providers. Blip will also utilize the funding to enrich its advertising and distribution platforms.

The new round of funding includes investment from Bain Capital and Canaan Parters. The company earlier had raised an equal amount of debt funding from Silicon Valley Bank.

Blips currently has more than 13 million unique monthly visitors in the US. The company provides 330 million video views per month to its 30 million users globally, counting one fourth of these are paying subscribers. It also streams video content to a number of other platforms such as iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Roku, Verizon FiOS, TiVo and Sony TV.

Redbox Acquires Blockbuster Express

Movie and video game rental kiosk provider, Redbox (parent company Coinstar), has entered into an agreement to buy NCR Blockbuster Express kiosks and related assets for $100 million. The acquisition includes the purchase of the DVD kiosks, certain retailer contracts, and DVD inventory from NCR’s entertainment line of business.

The latest move comes just after Redbox entered a deal with Verizon to offer a new movie streaming service similar to Netflix. Redbox, which currently has 35,400 kiosks installed nationwide and roughly 9,000 existing Blockbuster kiosks will rebrand the acquired Blockbuster kiosks with its Redbox label.

“We are very pleased to enter into this agreement with NCR,” said Scott Di Valerio, chief financial officer of Coinstar, Inc. and interim president of Redbox. “As the global self-service solutions leader, NCR has strong technology, manufacturing and servicing capabilities, and we look forward to leveraging their expertise as Coinstar continues to grow its core automated retail businesses and expands its offerings.”

YouTube still leads the online video market.  But the majority of big and small players are now looking to create more video inventory and a range of services around premium content to attract more users and create a new online video advertising ecosystem.

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“It’s no doubt that each year the Super Bowl attracts an abundance of fans from all over the country. JiWire looked across its entire network of the on-the-go audience connecting to cafes, hotels and airports, to determine the top 20 places that fans traveled from to attend Super Bowl XLVI and watch the New York Giants play the New England Patriots live.”

The tops 5 cities were Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Dallas, and Philadelphia. Among the devices that were used by the on-the-go audience, smartphones top the chart with 47 percent market share, followed by laptops and tablets at 29 percent and 24 percent respectively. Overall, connectivity in Indianapolis alone increased by 18 percent during the event.

While fans travel across America just to catch the game, brands and advertisers are all about marketing and leveraging the world of social-mobile-local. Instead of paying large sums of money for a 30-second cable ad slot, they might as well take advantage of fans’ heavy mobile usage. Mobile marketing company Velti says users connect beyond their in-person friends and are likely to check their phones 10 times more during the game.

Even popular quarterbacks Eli Manning and Tom Brady didn’t escape analytics, as Twitter sentiment compared their positive impressions, putting Manning ahead with 65 percent over Brady’s 62 percent. Here’s also a thought-provoking article from Sandvine about the plunge of internet traffic and Netflix’s viewership during the event. For more on social-mobile, check out this roundup.

image credit: nj.com

Traveling Super Bowl Fans Inflated Indy’s WiFi Nearly 20% is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Since schoolFeed launched in July 2011, the networking site dedicated to connecting high school classmates has gained over 7 million users, and their userbase is growing every second.  The target crowd of schoolFeed are those aged 35-55 who didn’t have social networking sites “in their day” to keep them in touch.

“It’s amazing how many alumni have wanted to find old classmates.  We’re creating over 15 new connections per second.” said Lance Tokuda, co-founder of schoolFeed. “There is a huge market for people that would really want to interact with old classmates. We are excited to offer them a network that meets their needs which is complimentary to Facebook’s social graph.”

schoolFeed features:

• Find and connect with hundreds of old classmates in just one click
• Share an online yearbook with your graduating class
• Follow classmates based on interests
• Earn virtual currency as you engage with other users

And the best part about schoolFeed, apart from reconnecting with high school classmates, is that it’s free and it connects with Facebook.  This leveraging of Facebook’s existing social graph has been key for schoolFeed’s growth, enabling a faster rate of expansion than even RockYou saw during its early days, and later as an initial supporter of the Facebook platform.

But as schoolFeed competes with the likes of Classmates.com more so than Facebook, the newcomer will have to utilize a different monetization scheme for a demographic well accustomed to paying out for direct connections on social networks.  Tokuda thinks it’s high time direct monetization schemes were changed.  schoolFeed will be using its fresh funds to build out new features, as well as its marketing efforts.

“With RockYou there wasn’t a clear way to monetize social media,” Tokuda explains.  ”MySpace was big but advertisers didn’t want to advertise there initially.  Now there’s a clear route for monetization on social media.

“We’re targeting the same people that often used RockYou–a lot of soccer moms, those that play social games.  And even on the brand side, they’re valuable, with a lot of consumer brands targeting them as well, so we think it’s a good fit.  We find that mature demographics have higher monetization rates–they’re the more nostalgic.”

One new feature schoolFeed will offer this mature demographic is event-planning, specifically for school reunions.  They’ll also be building out their search functions, which are still relatively limited at this time.  They’ve already dipped into the highly monetizable social gaming pool with a version of Bingo already engaging users on the site.

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Obviously, brands and advertisers these days are geared more towards the social aspects of Super Bowl than the actual game itself. Here’s some interesting insight from SiliconAngle founder John Furrier about how social means business for some of the world’s largest brands. Super Bowl, being the biggest game of the year, is also the biggest event for brand and content marketing.

Get Tweetin’

Now, on to the social aspect that focuses directly to the game, Twitter Sentiment Analysis determines people’s impression of the opposing teams’ quarterbacks: New York Giants’ Eli Manning vs. New England Patriots’ Tom Brady. The analysis group analyzed 600,000 tweets and found out Manning has more positive sentiment with 65 percent market share, compared to Brady’s 62 percent.

Moreover, Techland Time reported that tweets peaked at 12,233 per second during the game last night. This figure emerged towards the end of the game. The second influx happened sometime during Madonna’s halftime performance with 10,245 tweets per second.  But the figure isn’t even very close to that of a Japanese TV screening of a movie called Castle in the Sky, which earned 25,000 tweets per second. But the largest number of microblogging was claimed by China’s Sina Weibo, which alleged to have peaked at 32,412 during Chinese New Year.

Mobile Made It

The Super Bowl has also given the social mobile world a great deal of traction. A study by mobile marketing company Velti reveals that fans are connecting beyond in-person friends, and expected a third of the spectator to watch the game with device in hand.

Because of mobile’s gaining traction, it has become a good alternative for brands to advertise in place of the insanely pricey $3.5 million 30-second ad slot during the game, focusing on heavy mobile usage and the social presence of fans instead.

We also have some interesting pre-game Super Bowl ad data from Clearspring. Sharing via mobile was up 500 percent from last year and overall sharing was up 143 percent from last year. Shares to and clicks from Twitter were up 116 percent from last year, while Tumblr’s and Facebook’s were up 615 percent and 18 percent respectively from last year. Share-to-click from email were down 16 percent last year, which is the only social sharing aspect to show a decline.

AddThis gave us some post-game data as well. According to the report, most of the country is supporting the New York Giants’ win, and this matches what we are seeing in prognostications and in the sports books. Honda and Priceline both crushed it when it came to awareness of their ad and brand. GoDaddy was completely flat, which indicates that perhaps their ads are getting played out.  VW launched their ad too early, and did not capture the same attention that Honda and Priceline did.

Moreover, InMobi’s Super Bowl XLVI Mobile Consumption Survey and revealed that nearly 40 percent of respondents used mobile devices in response to TV ads, and 45 percent estimated they would spend 30 minutes or more on their mobile devices during the game. Check out InMobi Research for the full report.

How Social, Mobile was Super Bowl 2012? A Brand’s Dream Come True is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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But Facebook’s strategies and whims aside, what do people think about the new Facebook Timeline? To find out, Sodahead  polled its users.

 “Timeline is a massive visual and organizational overhaul that could potentially change the way Facebook is used. At a time when the media is already reporting a drop in U.S. membership, it seems like an incredibly risky move to make. We polled SodaHeads on the incorporation of Timeline to find out who likes it — if anyone.”

Unfortunately for Facebook, the result was frustration en masse. Only 20 percent of the respondents like Timeline and 70 percent wants Facebook to “lose it.” And despite Facebook’s massive reach, 10 percent of the poll participants don’t have a Facebook account.

Highlighting the susceptibility of youngsters to change, 30 percent of those ages 18-24 said they like Timeline, while only 10 percent of those over 65 years old enjoyed the new look. Age-wise, men and women have the same ration of like and dislike: 23 percent like, 70 percent like.

It’s not just Sodahead’s poll that amassed naysayers over the new Facebook Timeline. Security researcher Sophos also conducted a survey where 83.65 percent of the respondents gave the new look a thumbs down.

To alleviate public hysteria, Facebook releases yet another cool app called Timeline Movie Maker. It automatically analyzes your new Facebook profile to put together a 55-second movie with your Facebook history on it.

Facebook Timeline first went live in New Zealand on December 6, and it started to gradually spread across the world a week later.  The new looks also comes with over 60 new apps categorized according to Music, New, Giving, Travel, Food, Shopping, Fashion etc., which brought Facebook a few more privacy concerns. Facebook justified that each app will require individual permissions to give users the liberty to share what they wish for a given application.

The Timeline objectors isn’t the only problem Facebook is facing. They’ve got a lot of work to do about their recent IPO, and there is an alleged Anonymous propaganda encouraging people all over the world to organize a worldwide internet blackout, initially targeting Facebook.

Moreover, Google is rubbing them the wrong way by showing Google+ data on Google’s search engine when Facebook thinks their social results are far more relevant. However, Facebook and Google aren’t entirely each other’s adversaries, as they band together along with 11 others to form an alliance called Domain-based Message Authentication (DMARC) to stop phishing attacks.

image credit: Reuters

70% of Facebook Users Hate Timeline is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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To personalize a caller ID, provide YouMail with your phone number and you can update it by connecting to Facebook and/or filling out a simple form. After which, the personalized caller ID will appear when you make calls and leave messages.

“It is high time users weren’t pigeonholed by a 15 character name entered within a telco’s database somewhere,” said YouMail CEO Alex Quilici. “Our apps focus on providing visual information, such as a picture and location, and being a one-click gateway to deeper information about the caller, such as where they work, their job title and more. Our http://who.youmail.com website makes it easy for users to get out ahead and control how they appear.”

Currently, YouMail has over 2 million users using YouMail Visual Voicemail Plus and WhoAreYou applications. All in all, the two services cater to 100 million unique callers, handling over 50 million calls on a monthly basis. These users all have ‘Visual Caller ID,” which identifies callers with a name, city/state information, and a representative image, such as a Facebook photo or business logo, even when the calling number is not found in the user’s address book.

YouMail’s new offering has sprung from caller demand. As caller ID becomes community-based, business and consumers should be able to control how they appear in caller IDs with the image they wish to bear. Otherwise, it would be very misleading, since users are allowed to publish information about any phone number into a public directory used by the service, and it’s also what powers Visual Voicemail Plus and WhoAreYou apps that provides information on over 200 million unique number which makes 2 billion searcher per month.

YouMail has been finding new ways to customize the caller experience, taking advantage of social profile and an increasing number of data thanks to this community approach circling smartphones and VoIP services.  Big data is a key component of YouMail’s efforts, enabling more features and products from the company.

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Watch ads or check your phone?

The research furthers that a third of Super Bowl users will watch the game “with device in hand.” This will enable mobile users to check their phones 10 times more during the game. Over 80 percent of viewers said they will use their mobile device as much as they did during the same event last year.

Fans are also likely to check their mobile devices for status updates on Facebook or Twitter during commercial breaks. “People have to do something while the teams are in the huddle or during timeouts, so their phones are a good activity,” Zencka said. And to think, a 30-second Super Bowl ad slot comes with a $3.5 million price tag.

“Viewers are sitting in front of the television with a mobile device in their hand and they’ll likely check that ‘second’ screen often,” Velti Executive Krishna Subramanian said in a press release. “There’s no going back now from the fact that the Super Bowl is truly a two-screen experience. Mobile is the second screen that completes the full circle of user engagement – turning advertising into content.”

In retrospect, here are mobile users’ engagements during last year’s Super Bowl (courtesy of iProspect via):

- 61% of Facebook users who identified as Super Bowl fans posted status updates during the game in 2011.

- 28% of users who identified as fans directly chatted or messaged with friends. – On Twitter, the record for most sports-related posts per second was broken six times, culminating at game’s end with 4,064 tweets per second.

- Overall, last year’s Super Bowl generated more than 4.5 million tweets in six hours. – In the United States, Twitter traffic during the game increased by 50% over the previous day.

- 2011 Super Bowl ads have been viewed more than 360 million times online.

- 39% of Super Bowl related searches from mobile devices in the week surrounding last year’s game came on Super Bowl Sunday itself.

- Traffic to Yahoo‘s mobile homepage jumped by as much as 34% over normal during breaks in the action.

- Sports-focused mobile traffic on Yahoo jumped by as much as 387% over normal during commercial breaks.

Brand’s mobile focus gains BI

With this much focus on mobile during the event, brands may as well target the hefty mobile usage and social presence of fans through engaging marketing campaigns and viral videos on YouTube. Twitter and Facebook are getting more and more traction as conversation hubs over the last few years’ major live events. These, on top of the exploding tablet and smartphone usage, will need some heavy thinking from marketers as the figures are becoming harder and harder to ignore. They need to have some strategy to take advantage of this Super Bowl’s mobile craze.

“With millions of people using their mobile phones today for brand interaction in addition to traditional communication, the Super Bowl offers companies a significant opportunity to socialize their marketing campaigns,” said Mark Reino, CEO of Merit Mile Communications. “What’s more, companies that leverage cloud marketing for precision targeting, automation that keeps costs low and enhanced ROI metrics will be the clear winners during the Super Bowl.”

The real value of mobile connections is the direct access to consumers and the potential for business intelligence that follows as a result.  Mobile is the segue between the intangibility of a television broadcast and the physical access of a handset.  Mobile devices are individualized and can establish a long-lasting connection between a brand and a consumer.  We’re seeing this concept evolve within mobile ad standards, with Millennial Media’s latest product update for targeting consumers that have already demonstrated interest in a brand.

Mobile also adds an edge of urgency with the perk of web access.  This immediacy is what brands are picking up on, making the “on-demand” trend a two-way street for content marketers and end users.

“The power of mobile is that it’s immediate–a merchant has the ability to make an announcement with regards to the Super Bowl, or even a time-sensitive discount during half time, and hook them with their loyalty program, incentivising customers to come back,” says Adam Weizer, CEO of Servistree.

“What’s starting to gain traction is the realization that mobile is immediate.  The people that really get this is the younger generation.  I believe email marketing will fade out and mobile will take precedence as people become more familiar with how to use text on their mobile devices.”

Should you actually decide to interact with Super Bowl 2012 on your mobile device, here are some top apps to follow the big game online.

Contributors: Kristina Farrah

Social Mobile’s True Value for Super Bowl 2012? Business Intelligence is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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[Thanks, Daisy.]

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With rumors of an IPO coming as early as this week, Facebook is, for once, making headlines for something other than mandatory profile updates and privacy concerns.  While there’s fear an IPO could ruin Facebook’s “startup” appeal and slow down innovation, an initial public offering could raise enough capital for Facebook to more aggressively grow its verticals.  Two areas of importance for Facebook moving forward include mobile and social television.  It’s part of a larger “connected device” trend that’s delivering content through more channels, and as this space expands, Facebook will need to monetize the social aspects of these channels as well.

Facebook Mobile

Facebook’s mobile strategy has been pretty limited to apps so far, favoring iOS in terms of launch schedules and feature updates.  And Facebook’s actual apps center around social interaction and accessing account information, doing little to extend their platform’s ecosystem for Facebook apps, particularly games.  This is where Facebook will really need to build out its ecosystem if it hopes to gain ground in the mobile sector, where Google, Apple and even Microsoft are already ahead.

Looking at the latest rumors, Facebook’s plans for mobile include a handset of its own.  This isn’t likely the way to win in the mobile arena–there’s enough devices on the market, and plenty of competing operating systems.  Even Android is diversifying across niche devices like the Kindle Fire, which has a stripped down version of Google’s mobile OS, adding to the fragmentation woes that plague developers, retailers, carriers and consumers alike.

What Facebook needs is a solid mobile extension of its own platform, that will enable better points of integration for the companies building apps for Facebook’s site and/or mobile marketplaces.  Sure, you can tap Facebook contacts for a round of Words with Friends, but this is still a segmented initiative on the part of the game publisher. Unifying a web and mobile presence will be a key software development for Facebook moving forward.

We’re already seeing the necessity of this with Zynga, which is making its appeal to mobile gamers and forced to leave Facebook behind in the process.  Increasing gamers on tablets and smartphones in today’s market means diversifying away from the very platform that brought Zynga to the point of success to launch its own IPO, especially with Facebook imposing a 30 percent tax on revenue made on its website.  In order to retain the value of its ecosystem, Facebook will have to support the mobile transition for its developer community, and possibly better incorporate its offerings with the mobile market mainstays, like Android and iOS.

Facebook already has a budding relationship with Microsoft, one of its high profile investors, which has already integrated Facbook’s social graph into its search results and facilitated deals like Skype’s video calls on the network.  As Microsoft continues to layer up its own platform, tying efforts with Windows 8, Windows Phone and Xbox, Facebook could make room for an easier transition on this front.

Facebook on TV

Facebook is a term associated with nearly all things social, whether online or off.  The worldwide network has set national revolutions in motion, held firm as a platform for religious and political debate and enabled a new sense of globalization as far as culture and access are concerned.  So when we think of TV’s future as being a social one, it’s hard to avert a discussion about Facebook as well.  But even more than mobile, Facebook’s absent from the social TV trend in many regards, though it presents a grand opportunity for extended channel distribution as well.

You don’t have to look further than the first month of 2012 to realize the growing importance of socializing the tube.  The Super Bowl is rank with advertisers seeking ways beyond Facebook Pages and tweets to engage viewers, reeling in participation from General Motors, Coca Cola and Shazam.  These brands in particular are leveraging mobile devices to send viewers directly to a website where they can gain more information about a product, unlock free content and qualify for prizes.  With approximately 60 percent of all Super Bowl viewers expected to be within arm’s reach of a smartphone or tablet, mobility is becoming an important avenue for television to become more interactive and social.

The first week of 2012 also brought a slew of connected device expectations from TV set makers like Sony and LG.  Not only are they building out their own integrated system, but many are looking to Google TV as a platform to extend the newest social TV trends.  At CES this year we saw the future of TV, and it’s a highly social one, with in-screen chats, recommendations, sharing functions and rewards systems.  And Google’s much further ahead on this initiative than Facebook, given its Android platform and default social interactions that are cataloged every time you use a Google-powered app or service.  Apple, too, has demonstrated initiative in this space, though its personal media cloud approach is lacking social capabilities.

Leave it to apps, and even cable providers to fill in the missing gaps here.  Even Comcast’s jumping on this bandwagon, testing a social TV experience dubbed Xcalibur in Georgia.  It involves a recommendation engine and “friend trends” powered by Facebook.  Companies like GetGlue have also run with the social TV trend, building insight around marketing trends while rewarding viewers all the while.

Facebook’s ads = social monetization

Beyond merely powering existing gaming and TV efforts, Facebook will namely benefit from these extended channels by finding a way to loop things back into its own ecosystem.  Facebook’s true value lies in its ability to access users and their preferences, creating hoards of useful marketing data alongside an audience that can be monetized in a series of socially oriented ways.  It’s true that marketing has become very social, but above all, accessibility matters.  Facebook’s building a presence in the mobile and TV space, but it hasn’t reached a major point of influence for its own monetization or ad distribution.

There’s a new age dawning for socially driven marketing, and TV is a great way to attract the biggest budgets in media to the socially situated.  Social content management provider thismoment recognizes the convergence of connected devices and the future of marketing, a challenge that their new CMO John Bara will take head on.  Thismoment is building the technology for big ad shops, simplifying the transition for brands like Coca Cola, and bridging gaps for the likes of Google.  This all effectively leverages thismoment’s Digital Engagement Channel, a platform where brands and agencies can create, distribute and optimize branded and UGC content across Facebook, YouTube and beyond.

Facebook’s IPO will create jobs for the company, no doubt.  And those jobs will likely further Facebook’s goals around mobile and TV verticals as part of a larger scale approach to new media marketing.  Social is one of many considerations encompassed in new media marketing, and Facebook will have to find away to continuously ad value to its social platform amidst the growing network of associated platforms currently overlapping its space.

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The catalog includes some of Yahoo’s popular brands and services that were not being embraced by consumers enough to continue in the mobile sector. Yahoo said the app reduction is part of its effort “to continuously measure and scrutinize what’s working and what isn’t” as part of their “mobile first” strategy. Here is what Paid Content thinks about Yahoo’s decision:

“This latest move seems like a particularly damning admission in the case of popular online brands such as Yahoo’s news and finance portals: it is yet another demonstration that Yahoo has failed to find mobile traction with consumers in some more obvious areas.”

For the meantime, Yahoo offers temporary support for other apps, such as News and Finance on iOS, Sports, Mail, Messenger and Flickr.  They are also pushing two new apps that were launched last year: Into Now, a check-in for TV and other entertainment viewing, and Livestand, a Flipboard-like aggregated magazine. While Yahoo said they will faze out some of their apps, the technology behind them is not in vain, as they make their way into the new apps Yahoo plans to continue to offer.

Thompson continues to believe in Yahoo’s culture of innovation–mentioning this during a conference call after taking his new position, and last week during his first quarterly earnings call– as he strengthens the company’s audience-base, expediency and standing. Yahoo said they are making space to be able to implement new ideas in mobile products that they intend to release this year.

While the move makes sense, there’s so much to do in convincing users in the sea of competing apps. Still, watching a former titan claw back to its former glory is a must-see. But in the end, we can only wonder if their strategy will take off.

Yahoo is not the only company who has troubles in winning consumer preference. Even an enterprise as powerful such as Google had to shutdown offerings every now and then as they fail to gain traction. The most recent app decommissioned by the search giant is Picnik.

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