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Forget Web 2.0.  Think twice about Internet video? Is gaming the next big frontier for investors and entertainment media companies alike?  It’s sure starting to look that way; even for those late to the party.  From Venture Investors to Big Media, gaming seems hot all over.

The sector has been hot for a while but in the past few months the temperature continues to rise.  Retail sales of consoles and games are returning consistently impressive results well ahead of the holiday season.  More than 68m people played a console game in June worldwide.  According to a report released Tuesday from market research firm DFC Intelligence, the cumulative worldwide “interactive entertainment industry” is on track to grow about 9% per year to reach $47b by 2009 (from $33billion in 2006).  Other market data firms are similarly bullish: Gartner has predicted mobile gaming revenue will hit $9.6b by 2011.  IDC predicts Internet connected consoles will generate revenue upwards of $10b by 2011, up from $981 in 2007.

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After spending eighteen months in “stealth mode,” and burning through a chunk of $17m in funding, a little Texas startup called Ripcode Monday came out of hiding with a bang.  The company, which has been developing a network appliance for encoding video data streams, formally introduced their product and also announced they’d signed a whale of a first customer: MySpace.

For every well run startup there is always one question, one market problem that they are aiming to fix.  For Ripcode it’s been about efficiency and cost effectiveness.  Their question was how can an enterprise which hosts Internet video re-encode the files in a cheaper and more efficient way. Click to Read More

In early August the NY Post ran a story citing “sources briefed on the matter” saying that rival NY paper, The Times would discontinue their paid subscription service Times Select.  The rumor fell into the category of “more likely true than not” but for the last month it languished without update or official comment. Now it’s official. Times Select is done. Effective midnight Tuesday Times Select will cease being selective and revert to freely available, publicly accessible content. 

The Select service began two years ago as a value added service. They charged $49.95 a year (or $7.95 a month) for online access to the work of some columnists.  Click to Read More

More and more well funded startups seem to be aimed at creating portals for internet video.  Brightcove, one of the best capitalized of video centric startups, is going the other way and distancing themselves.   While the company has been running their own video site for the past year, today it was reported they are shifting internal resources to instead focus on greater development of their technology platform and distribution services.  Their video portal, which has been up for a year,  will remain at Brightcove.TV as “something that runs itself” said Brightcove VP of marketing Adam Berrey but the company is “not trying to become the next YouTube.”   The companies priorities are elsewhere.

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Google has MySpace.  Microsoft has Facebook.   Now, at least in some markets, Yahoo has Bebo.
Yahoo today won a multi year deal to manage the bulk of display and video advertising on social networking site Bebo within certain geographies.

Yahoo already powered the site search functionality on Bebo but this new deal with give them management responsibilities for ad inventory for Bebo’s UK and Irish users.  The Yahoo Answers property will also get further integration into the social network and a new browser toolbar is in development.

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Sometimes there is greater value in the sum of a company’s parts, other times, breaking things up just leads to confusion and lost value (or lost customers).  Fearing the latter to be the case with their web strategy, MTV Networks is regrouping some of their slate of websites into a new consolidated property.

In a tip of the hat to the rapid growth of Spike TV, the new site will be called Spike.com.  It will be home to the former Spike TV website along with video site iFilm. Some content from gaming site GameTrailers and Xfire will also move over though those properties will retain their own URL’s.

The new site will target the same audiences in the 18-34 age group as they did when operated individually but as a consolidated effort, and with audience overlap erased, the company hopes they’ll now be better positioned for ad sales.  (And single ad team should mean lower cost overhead too) Click to Read More

Few brands have gone through more reinvention in less than a decade then Netscape.  Since it was acquired by AOL in 1999 (primarily for its browser technology) the online website seemed to be constantly in flux; used as something of an sandbox for testing new concepts.  In 2005, flash animation was the technology du jour.  By 2006 it was abandoned and replaced with social news format similar to the now popular Digg.  Now, another year later, they’ve scrapped that too and are backtracking and reinventing again.  

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