Every major TV broadcast company seems to be exploring video on demand services but some are having a harder time than others. It appears the UK’s VOD joint venture between BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4 has been delayed again.
The Project Kangaroo offering, which has been called the UK’s replication of Hulu (a joint venture between News Corp and NBC Universal, was stalled in June to allow for an antitrust review by the Competition Commission (“CC”).
From market research firms and trade groups, there are so many projections, forecasts and numbers thrown to the airwaves that it can become really difficult to keep track. To ease the burden, we periodically consolidate the info to one report. We’ve done comparative stats that put numbers in a context , and we’ve industry specific data dumps. This latest editionof the occasional "Metue: By The Numbers" report is a buffet from across the media, entertainment and technology sector. There’s a little on publishing, a little on web usage, some gaming data, TV… something for all interests. Metue By the Numbers:
Market research firm NPD Group is known for systematically tracking retail sales. Among other things, they periodically report on gaming and music. This week, the company announced their compiled list of the top five U.S. music retailers for the first half of the year.
Assembled from six months of MusicWatch surveys, the list measures the best selling retail stores in the U.S. across the combined digital and brick & mortar landscape. By methodology, twelve downloaded singles are counted as the equivalent to one CD.
With most of the big names in the media/tech space reported, it’s been an up and down earnings season. There have been some hits and some misses. There’s been some positive guidance and some suspect. Now three of the remaining big names have reported their performances. Summing them up, here’s the tally from News Corp., Marvel Entertainment and Time Warner:
Copyright law is a funny beast. Even in its most recent incarnations, freshly stamped with Congressional approval, it rarely keeps pace with changing business models and new invention. It’s evolutionary law subject to seemingly constant interpretation (and re-interpretation) to match legislative intent to new market paradigms. A case in point: in March 2007, the U.S. District Court in New York ruled a digital video recorder (DVR) that used remote storage instead of a local hard drive violated copyright laws. Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals (2nd Circuit) reversed the ruling and said Cablevision’s planned remote storage DVR (RS-DVR) is legal.
There are indexes tracking just about any business metric you can think of. For 4.5 a half years, University of San Francisco professor Mark Cannice has been tracking venture capitalist confidence. In early July he reported the second quarter result for his index was down to 3.07 on a 5 point scale. It was the third consecutive new low in the Index’ history. Still, despite VC’s concerns about the economy and the state of their investments, there’s no shortage of companies getting funded. In the media world, Heat Wave, Clickable, Crowd Fusion and NGMoco have all recently closed new rounds. Here are the details in the Metue Venture Wrap Up:
Apple’s iPhone is on sale in 23 countries. In the first 72 hours more than one million units sold. August 22n around twenty more countries are expected to come online.
So the question is: how many units does Apple need to manufacture to keep ahead of demand and to satisfy a three to six week channel inventory need?
The initial reports, and early analyst expectations, seemed to set the answer at about 25 million units. A report from tech blog, Tech Crunch, speculated Monday the number could be much higher.
