This is my room

Re-Discovered Apple

….just wanted to take a quick moment and dish out some thoughts on the ShopDiscover program for Discover credit card members. Back in March I was consulting in the Bay Area and realized it was time to prep the old Apple laptop for burial and spend some cash getting a new(er) one. After much debate, I decided to go with a refurbished 15″ MacBook Pro — the new ones are quite abysmal in my opinion; limitations include no matte screen option, and only miniport support for external displays (and w/o dvi adapter!).

Before buying the computer online, I jumped into the ShopDiscover “mall.” I’ve used it before for the odd gift here and there, but a few percent savings on a $30 gift isn’t something to brag about (just a nice little discount). But when it came to the laptop, I couldn’t pass the offer up. I saved a $100 on the laptop just by visiting the online Apple Store through the ShopDiscover website; factor in the free printer promotion from Apple, and it was a pretty good deal all around.

What does all this have to do with new media? Well, it has more to do with my new job and a Discover Card promotion than anything else. I recently joined the Product Management team at DG FastChannel where I was greeted with a Dell laptop. But given that I’ve got this pretty much brand new Apple, I’m tempted to decline the offer and just use the superior product (ha!) ….as for the Discover promotion, this entry puts me in the running for a $50 gift card. I figure that if I’m lucky enough to get it, i can use it combination with that ShopDiscover Apple discount again and get a new iPhone!

Hmm… just noticed I can get 5% off Six Flags over Texas with ShopDiscover too… not bad. Here’s to hoping it’s at least somewhat comparable to Cedar Point.

Nielsen is wrong.

Forget the intro, I’m jumping right in -

Contrary to some recent popular media coverage suggesting that more Americans are rediscovering “free TV” via the Internet, computer video tends to be quite small with an average time of just two minutes (a little more than 0.5 percent) a day.

WRONG.  There is a major fallacy in the logic.  I’m surprised it hasn’t been picked up, and even more surprised that it’s being somewhat propagated by NewTeeVee. The problem with this statement is that television distributed via the Internet is an extremely SMALL portion of all the video available on the web.  Drawing conclusions from averages say nothing of the growth that exists within the Internet Television (ITV) domain.  Here’s the original Nielsen/CRE press release.

From the archives of the ITVT Newsletter:

ABC.com users watched a record 815 million minutes of full-length episodes on the player during the month, representing a 53% increase over the previous month and a 110% increase over May, 2007. In addition, ABC says, viewers watched 37 million episodes, representing an increase of 27% over the previous month, and each viewer generally watched multiple episodes during the month.

…and further down in the same release:

Since launching in 2006, approximately 400 million episodes have been initiated through the ABC.com Full Episode Player.

So what’s wrong with this picture?  It’s a fundamental problem that the industry has been avoiding for the past few years.  There is a clear difference between “video being distributed over the public Internet” and “long form episodic content being distributed over the public Internet, for consumption on computers, laptops, mobile devices and (gasp) televisions!”

The real shame in all of this is the industry’s lack of attention to this playout environment.  There is a lot of opportunity for advertising in 400m episodes.  To be more precise, there are over 1 billion opportunities for ads in ~400m episodes.

Update:  In all fairnes to Chris and the NewTeeVee staff, they do call out concern for that data point.  However, it’s not done until the very last paragraph, while the front page summary leaves the claim unchallenged.

Hulu Grew 33% in February, I think.

I’m quite fed up with the latest Hulu viewership report.  Why is it that the title of NewTeeVee’s latest article is “Hulu Grew 33% in February,” and not “comScore and Nielsen differ by a factor of 4″ ???

If I can’t actualy count on the numbers (no pun intended), I don’t care about how much anyone apparently grew.    I suppose that the 33% is a consistent increase across the different reporting systems, but it’s lost on me why the numbers are so dramatically different in the first place.  Streams are close, but still look to be ~10% different.  Unique viewer counts exhibit a horrendous difference.  And viewing times don’t appear to exhibit any consistent correlation.

What is the actual problem with capturing accurate information?  Is it the platform’s ability to capture information?  Is it the methodology behind the reporting services’ calculations?  Or is it the implementation of all the different pieces of technology by the content provider?

I suppose it’s good that we’ve essentially got two different ratings agencies’ numbers.  But it’s a disappointment that NewTeeVee isn’t ushering in an era of reliability.  Urging comScore and Hulu to sync up on their data release schedule isn’t enough; and to be honest, it’s not even that important.

Not Buying the Rainbow

So Skittles handed over their homepage to twitter.  Ok.  Cool.  I guess.  But after reading what Alisa Leonard-Hansen had to say, I can’t help but add my own commentary to a few things:

A L-H: “Pageless, seamless brand touch points that are inherently embedded in the social web”
My response: Over-blown, dramatized reasoning for something that was done because 1) it will create its own press and 2) appeal to the target audience

A L-H: “It bypasses those crappy flash micro-sites that no one likes anyways”
My response: Preach on, sister!

A L-H: “…’we get it.  you the consumer define our brand, so we are making you the central point of the brand experience.’ ”
My response: Ok.  I changed my mind. Please stop.

This looks to be a bunch of mumbo-jumbo voodoo phrases.  Whatever happened to being straight forward?  And if anything, I would think brevity would be preferred over all else when doing an interview via iChat.  There’s really no need to upsell what’s already been sold, right?