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After a month of rumors, it was officially confirmed Monday that Google is acquiring consumer telephony/internet integration company Grand Central Communications.  Official terms have not been disclosed but widespread speculation is that the price was surprisingly high; above $50m.  That’s hard to believe, improbable seeming but not impossible.  Reports are the  two year old company had raised approximately $4m in venture funding from investors including Micro Ventures.

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With Facebook trying to steal audience and the hip-factor, with YouTube working on delivering more interactive social networking features, leading social network MySpace is today defending its territory with the launch of a renamed, newly improved video sharing site and service. 

As noted by MySpace CEO Chris DeWolf in the New York Times, an upgrade was over do.  He said “We [hadn’t] really freshened up our video offering since we launched it… We wanted to highlight the fact that we have a video destination on the Web with all this great content that we’ve acquired.”

MySpace TV will be operated as an independent website where users can watch or share videos whether they have a MySpace account or not.  Those with MySpace pages will be able to use embedded tools to make videos accessible from their personal pages.   Later in the year, though not part of the original offering, MySpace will also launch a video editing service based on technology it acquired in the purchase of Flektor.

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Last January comScore reported 70% of the total U.S. Internet audience watched at least one Internet video stream that month. It’s been reported that there are more than 12 million hours of video programming currently hosted online.  YouTube has been reported to have more than 5.1m hours of content.  With such an enormous, and rapidly increasing, pool of content one of the bigger challenges is how to effectively index and search the data.  Without organization, it is too easy as the old saying goes “to be swimming in information but thirsting for knowledge.”

A host of video search companies are lining up to try and address the problem. The approaches vary. Some are focusing on text-to speech technology, others are looking elsewhere. It’s a new market, but one with such potential, that advertisers, eager for contextual delivery, are salivating over the potential.

One of the primary cataloging and search standard used so far has been keywords and meta-tags.  They are user controlled.  To work someone has to manually identify the content and title it appropriately.  Social networking sites allow a wide range of people to share that responsibility (by adding unique “tags” as identifiers) but the trouble with user defined search is that it’s only effective when users use the same vocabulary.  If I say tom-ay-to and you say to –mah-to we could get different results.     Click to Read More

Last week PriceWaterhouse Coopers released its global entertainment and media outlook report. The sweeping, broad survey was filled with data, statistics and projections on the state of the media and entertainment industries. Some of the data was previously highlighted. Additionally, the survey predicts that the global entertainment and media business will grow at an average annual rate of 4.9% over the next several years, rising from $81.2 billion in 2006 to $103.3 billion in 2011.

Here is a sampling of related data taken from a variety of sources:

    The average US home has 2.5 people and 2.8 TV sets. 84 percent of US households have a DVD player. (source: Nielsen)

    37% of U.S. adults who go online own a video game console and 16% own a portable gaming device. (source: Nielsen/net ratings)

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While late to the party, Bill Gates’ owned photo stock agency, Corbis, is launching its  new microstock agency site Snap Village today.

As discussed in extensive detail on Metue earlier this month,  microstock is growing phenomena in the stock photo industry that takes advantage of user-generated content to create a pool of inexpensive images available for royalty-free license.  As a photographer, microstock services allow me to post my images and allow their use on websites, in product literature and elsewhere (even earning me, the amateur photographer, revenue).  As a web developer, through microstock, I can license images (non-exclusively) for display on Metue, or other sites.

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In the first of what may be many announcements regarding change in practice or personnel, Yahoo has announced further management restructuring; this time in its advertising sales organization.  In the works for many months, the organization will see the departure of current chief sales officer Wenda Harris Millard and the combination of Yahoo’s search and display ad businesses into a group led by a single executive.

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Sci Fi channel got slapped in 2004 when it publicized a supposed rift with film director M. Night Shyamalan over an un-authorized biography when in reality no biography existed, nor did the rift. Both were fictionally created by marketers.

In December 2006, Sony got itself in similar hot water when it created a fake fan website to support its PSP game platform.

Marketers have learned there is a fine line to walk between maintaining the trust of their customers and promoting their products with newly emerging online techniques.   In the Internet publishing world, an online world where everyone has a voice, where anyone can be an author, or a journalist, a videographer or otherwise, credibility is sometimes assumed before its earned but its ongoing maintenance is essential. 

Over the past few days the value systems of the developing blogosphere and Web 2.0 world have been thrown again in the spotlight as Internet Ad publisher Federated Media and some of its higher profile publishing clients from Tech Crunch to GigaOm  have been drawn into a heated  debate over related issues. (Though, this time, unlike with Sony or Sci Fi channel, its been the appearance of impropriety, and not any actual wrong doing, that’s raised discussion Click to Read More