ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA
This year’s American Idol finale not only excelled in eyeballs this year – 32 million viewers, up 3% from last year - but winner David Cook was able to parlay his win into a sales coup on the iTunes platform. He had the top 4 selling songs as of last night. (The no longer available for free Gossip Girl is still the top selling TV show.) Also a record 97.5 million viewer votes were cast. Imagine how many would vote if non-AT&T subscribers could text in their choices? (Cynopsis 5/23)
Am I the only one who finds this picture terrifying?
There’s a flurry coming out of Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) this afternoon. Besides announcing the departure of director Ed Kozel, the company says it is delaying its annual meeting. (http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-yahoo-annual-meeting-delayed-preliminary-proxy-filed 5/22)
Big news from the ABC camp. The network, which led the industry in making programs available for iTunes and developed one of the best HD-quality video players on the net, is at last loosening its hold on its content to allow users to embed clips of its shows on blogs and personal profiles. ABC.com’s newly-enhanced video player, coming this fall, will also feature true full screen viewing, enhanced navigation and video search capabilities allowing users to search for series graphically, alphabetically, by genre or popularity, content recommendation functions, closed captioning and parental ratings information for all full episode content. (Cynopsis 5/23)
Jeff Zucker, the CEO of NBC Universal, was on Charlie Rose the night before, and talked about, among other things, the company’s digital businesses. Count the number of time he uses the word “viable”, when talking about digital media side of his company’s business. He said it will be at least five years until the industry and his company has developed “viable” economic systems to replace traditional dollars with the digital dollars. He also talked about Hulu, the company’s relationship with Apple, and digital distribution of content. (http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-zucker-viable-viable-viable 5/22)
Joost expects to finally release the beta version of a web-based viewing interface this summer, reports Silicon Alley Insider. Users have been reluctant to download the client-based application to their desktops. (Cynopsis 5/23)
Increasingly legit P2P video platform BitTorrent completed an integration with software company Orb Networks allowing users to stream their music, movies or other media to their PCs, phones and other devices. Download the app here. (Cynopsis 5/23)
The Facebook craze may finally be waning as traffic to the social networking portal declined 10% during April, according to the latest metrics from Nielsen Online. Traffic to the second ranked U.S. social network fell from 24.9 to 22.4 million unique visitors last month while professionally-themed LinkedIn continued its growth spurt climbing from 7.8M uniques in March to 8.6M in April. (Cynopsis 5/23)
Top 10 Social Networking Sites for April 2008 (U.S., Home and Work)
Site Apr-08 UA (000) Apr-07 UA (000) YOY Growth
Myspace.com 58,754 57,003 3%
Facebook 22,482 14,403 56%
Classmates Online 14,514 12,913 12%
LinkedIn 8,695 1,886 361%
Windows Live Spaces 7,869 8,349 -6%
AOL Hometown 6,362 8,497 -25%
Reunion.com 6,041 5,020 20%
Club Penguin 3,806 4,073 -7%
Buzznet.com 3,229 1,585 104%
Imeem 2,856 1,491 92%
Source: Nielsen Online
