Marketing and Technology News

Amazon’s IMDb wants in on the streaming-video business in a big way: founder Col Needham said the company, which dominates the movie-database business, wants to be able to give users one-click access to the 1.3 million titles in its index.

Of course, that’s a mammoth task—Needham said it was a goal for 2009 “and beyond,” per [...]

Listen to this article
TV.com, a unit of CBS Corp., said Thursday that it has begun beta testing a high-definition video gallery that allows users to watch ad-supported repurposed network programming online in 1080p resolution.
Supported by Adobe System’s Flash platform, the 1080p video gallery (www.tv.com/1080p) will augment the site’s current HD gallery, photos, news, interactive forum [...]

Listen to this article
Over the past 20 years, there’s been much speculation about what the convergence of computers and TV would ultimately look like. Paul Graham says that we now know the answer: computers.
“Convergence” is turning out to essentially be “replacement.” Why did TV lose? Graham identifies four forces: 1. The Internet’s open platform fosters [...]

Listen to this article
Update: CBS (NYSE: CBS) says that Hulu pulled its videos from the site. A spokeswoman said the video JV didn’t give a reason. No response yet from Hulu.
Original: So TV.com’s relaunch as a possible competitor to Hulu may not be sitting right with the News Corp-NBCU joint venture after all. The CBS-owned [...]

Listen to this article
Giving rival Web TV portals a run for their money, TV.com posted a 263% increase in unique viewers in January, according to new data from Nielsen VideoCensus.To boot, during that month, the CBS-owned destination for full-length video recorded a 1,261% increase in streams, and a 4,435% increase in minutes viewed.
Internet TV streaming [...]

After only five months since going live, Hulu has reached 105 million streams in July, according to numbers released by Nielsen’s VideoCensus. The NBC Universal-News Corp (NYSE: NWS). joint venture’s streaming numbers were fairly strong early on. In April, Nielsen reported that it had 63 million. Still, Nielsen is a little wary of offering any [...]

The Hollywood union strike between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is turning into an all-out war. Last week, the WGA made more threatening demands, but the Alliance refused to budge, choosing instead to reply with rhetoric aimed at turning rank-and-file writers against the union’s “power-hungry” leaders. [...]

Little has been written about yesterdays announcement that Yahoo would be selling display and video ads for Comcast’s websites, in particular, Comcast.net.
What’s so special about this deal beyond the shear size of Comcast and the inventory it makes available to Yahoo to sell ? its the network stupid.
The one thing that Google doesn’t have is [...]

What exactly did Google do to create such a fervent enemy-combatant in the media company Viacom? Ever since we learned of the collapse of discussions over carrying Viacom cable content on YouTube, Viacom has been on an apparent crusade to bring Google to its knees.
After months of negotiations to give Google’s YouTube permission to display [...]

The majority of people who buy insurance do online research first — but that doesn’t mean they only want to read.
Interactive tools engage people with your website, and create a more positive user experience. Marketing folks like to call a website that encourages people to spend more time on it “sticky.”
Some super-sticky websites that do [...]