iShowrunner

Martin Scorsese & Thelma Schoonmaker

‘True Blood’ HBO hyped the Season 4 premiere of “True Blood” by creating a Facebook app, “Immortalize Yourself,” which enabled fans to produce videos of themselves with real characters and Facebook friends. The app pulled in data from users’ profiles to generate the videos, which could feature random or specific Facebook friends. It was developed for HBO by Definition 6.

The idea behind this new venture is to allow advertisers a more brand-safe alternative to video networks, which deliver ads on thousands of sites across the Web and often turn to exchanges and other networks to source inventory. That can lead to ads running on questionable sites, or below the fold, or delivered via auto-start video players — all things many big brands wish to avoid. Among the publishers participating are ABC, AOL and MSN, along with several cable networks as well as select properties within Specific Media, per sources. Each company is selling unsold video inventory through the new GroupM product, per sources. NBC Universal, Fox and Yahoo have declined participation at this point. GroupM, which is part of WPP Group, has partnered with TidalTV, ironically one of the top video ad networks in the business, to launch the new consortium, which started operating over the past few months. TidalTV’s Videology platform is the technology behind the new offering.

In the years since, BigChampagne has expanded its work to develop its Ultimate Chart, which takes account of an array of consumption on social media, as an alternative to the Billboard pop charts.

For the first time, Super Bowl, Pro Bowl and NBC's Wild Card Saturday doubleheader will be available to fans on television, online and on select mobile phones, the NFL announced today. NBC's postseason games will be broadcast on NBC as well as streamed live on NFL.com and NBCSports.com, and will be available on NFL Mobile only from Verizon. This marks the first time postseason games will be available in the U.S. via live online streaming and via a mobile app.

My Reincarnation shows how a well-executed crowdfunding campaign can be used to maximize distribution. In addition to enabling the funding of the theatrical rollout, the campaign increased awareness among core audiences, generated substantial press coverage, and facilitated partnerships.

I wanted to create a spaceship where myself and my children could go into space, and our friends could go into space,” exclaims billionaire CEO Richard Branson with his trademark toothy grin. Coming from someone else, this kind of talk might be considered mildly delusional. But in Mr. Branson’s telling it’s hard not to believe in the creativity of capitalism to better the world in ways you might not expect. Mr. Branson is in the Steve Jobs category of entrepreneurs—he believes that if he builds it, they will come.

“Newlyweds” is being sold for $6.99 via On Demand, the video-on-demand service available through most major cable and satellite operators. Burns said if “Newlyweds” can bring in between $500,000 and $900,000,it will be a “very healthy profit.”

Ken Auletta

Even as all this is happening, the choices available online, and the ability to watch them via connected devices, is improving. It’s a situation that OTT providers will almost certainly capitalize on.

A network like HBO, however, doesn’t need to attract large audiences; rather, it aims to persuade a much smaller population of subscribers that it’s worth paying a little extra every month to see better programming. With “The Sopranos,” HBO ushered in the idea that serialized drama can aspire to an excellence (particularly in writing and performance) comparable to that of film, and with “The Wire,” critics got in the habit of comparing such series to novels. The fact that established crime novelists like Richard Price and George Pelecanos wrote for “The Wire” surely fostered that notion. Other cable networks expanded the possibilities of the genre with such serial dramas as “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men.”

The recommendation would be to stop and think about the latent value in all that data that’s there to be collected and that’s fairly easy to store now. That’s the challenge and the opportunity for all of us.

Skaugen said although there are currently 4 billion connected devices around the world, Intel expects that number to increase to 15 billion by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020.

The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.

It turns out there were a lot of players like him: Minecraft enthusiasts fell in love with the game’s charmingly retro aesthetic and the easy-to-use toolkit that gave them the freedom to create whatever they could imagine.

Is that really what Chris Dodd wants the US government to aspire to? To setting up its own Great Firewall?

Although cable channels continue to be the most profitable divisions of their parent media companies Disney, Time Warner Inc., NBCUniversal, News Corp. and Viacom Inc., the trend is worrisome. Consumers eventually will feel the sting of the higher costs.