Just when you thought the battle would get really ugly:

The format war around next generation DVDs may be over before it has begun, thanks to a breakthrough from a British media technology company.

Britain-based New Medium Enterprises (NME) said on Tuesday it had solved a technical production problem that makes it possible to produce a cheap multiple-layer DVD disk containing one film in different, competing formats.

People who think that the slow uptake of HD-DVD and BluRay is only because of the format war are missing the big picture. High cost and high bandwidth means that the age of the expensive shiny disc are coming to a close.

After a decades of speculation it seems convergence is finally starting to appear:

The service, called Yahoo Sports for TV, will let users get detailed statistics for ongoing games through a menu overlaid on a television screen and operated with a remote control.

We’ve seen a demo of the system and its quite impressive but we’ll have to see what happens when it hits the real world. Menus are great on a computer but take on an entirely different feeling when you are relaxing on the couch with a simple remote.

Whenever we pointed our sharp stick of wit at YouTube (a frequent target here on BBB) many people would criticize us saying that YouTube was the inevitable future of media.

Yesterday, for the first time, third party metrics on how many videos are being watched from these types of sites was released and the results may astound you:

According to a new video report that comScore Media Metrix will begin offering starting Tuesday morning, 37.4 million unique individuals watched a video on MySpace in July. All told, they collectively watched 1.4 billion videos.

By comparison, the audience on Yahoo watched 812 million video streams, making Yahoo the No. 2 most popular video site as measured by video streams. Yahoo ranks No. 1 as measured by unique streamers (similar to unique visitors), but barely beats out MySpace.

YouTube ranks No. 3, having generated 649 million video streams in July.

Not only is YouTube not number 1, it is actually number 3. As if to rub it in, the number 1 site is less than six months old (congrats Rupert).

Naturally YouTube will cry foul and argue that the methodology for measuring traffic was flawed but regardless of their protests, the myth that YouTube is an unassailable juggernaut is dead.

He may be stating what has been obvious to everyone for years but at least he is admitting it:

NBC Universal Chief Executive Bob Wright on Monday predicted more advertising will occur within television shows in the coming years—through sponsorship or product placement—as ad-skipping devices become more popular.

“The skipping issue is going to have a lot of different dimensions,” said Wright, speaking at an Advertising Week event in New York. One outcome, he said, would be that “advertisements will move more into the program.”

He goes on to tout “event programming” just like the Olympics that NBC has the rights to this year (what a coincidence). It seems that NBC is on a tear to embrace the inevitable this week.

Competition does a funny thing to corporations, sometimes it even makes them consider changing their ancient patterns:

If you work at NBC Universal, beware the ides of September. Peacock staffers are sweating bullets over the impending release of what the company is calling TV 2.0, a proposed top-to-bottom reorganization of the network to streamline it for the Internet age.

Still ranked in last place among the TV networks, NBC is now deciding that some urgency has entered into the Internet-TV equation. We’ll wait and see whether they see the light or are merely adding new window dressing.

Many of you have probably already heard about the new Nielsen stats out today:

The total average time per household in 2005-06 was eight hours and 14 minutes per day, a three-minute increase from 2004-05. Also resetting the record was total individual time, up three minutes from the previous year to four hours and 35 minutes.

Many have asked us if this is inconsistent with our death-of-tv point of view. What many fail to understand here is that TV is at its peak,and it is a long way down. Three minutes hardly the double and triple digit growth rates of the other media. Just plot out your graph for a couple years and see what happens. Still, some don’t get the message:

“These results demonstrate that television still holds its position as the most popular entertainment platform,” said Patricia McDonough, senior vp planning policy and analysis at Nielsen. “At this point, consumption of emerging forms of entertainment, including Internet television and video on personal devices, seems not to be making an impact on traditional television viewing.”

Even she is hedging her bets with “at this point.”

Then again, no one believed us when we said California would ban talking on cellphones while driving.

Hold on to your hats, 3D TV is here!

The heart of the system is the digital light processing micro-mirror chip, made by Texas Instruments and currently used in television, video and movie projectors.

These devices incorporate a computer that processes an incoming digital signal several thousand times a second, changing the angle of each micro-mirror to reflect light from a regular light bulb. The resulting image is a two-dimensional video projected onto a screen.

One of Garner’s innovations was to replace regular light with laser light. Such light is coherent, meaning that it comprise light of a single wavelength, with all light waves travelling ‘in phase’ with one another. Light from a white light bulb comprises many different wavelengths that are out of phase.

Interesting that essentially they are using off-the-shelf technology with some modifications. They still predict that we won’t see commercial 3D TVs until 2020 (and if the adoption of HDTV is used as a guide it will probably take 100 years longer than that).

We know that we just got through trashing cellphones just in time for CTIA but this article should warm the hearts of our wireless industry readers:

Some 51 percent of all 10-year-olds in Britain own a mobile phone, but that figure rises to 91 percent by the time children hit the age of 12, according to a survey.

[...]

On average, 11- to 17-year-olds send 9.6 text messages a day, almost three times as many as their parents and makes or receives on average 3.5 calls a day. Adults make or receive 2.8 calls and send 3.6 texts on a daily basis.

While the U.S. cellphone market is always technologically stuck in the Paleozoic era it is always worth remembering that even the limeys have more advanced wireless tech than we do. One day we might eventually catch up but it is this kind of social upheaval that have many investors betting big on wireless. [via Unwired]

A few postings ago we thanked our lucky stars that the FCC doesn’t regulate the Internet. We should be careful what we wish for:

Martin said he didn’t think the FCC had the authority to regulate online content, as it does with broadcast, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t like to. He told Senator Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) that he thought “all policymakers should try to make the Internet a more decent place,” but said that was a challenge, pointing out that it had been challenging enough in the broadcast space, where the FCC does have authority to regulate decency.

1. He admits they have no right to regulate the net.
2. He admits that they’ve done a terrible job regulating TV & Cable.
3. He still wants to regulate the net.

Scared yet?

From the who-thought-this-was-a-good-idea department:

The advert for its new drama “Brotherhood” will show a single image on the screen for the entire 30-second slot, and therefore retain its “sales message” when viewed even at the 12-times speeds enabled by Sky and other digital recorders, also known as personal video recorders, or PVRs.

Making an advert unbearably boring for the vast majority of viewers to enhance the experience for a small minority will just drive more people into the arms of PVRs.

As if filmschools weren’t pathetic enough, ASU has decided to outdo them all. They are starting a Masters film program that they call “EnterTech” that is a combo of entertainment and technology (what a brilliant idea):

David A. Young, vice president and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said the university was moving in the direction of mixing disciplines. ‘’We live in a trans-discipline world,’’ he said. ‘’If you look at the big issues facing society, like curing cancer, it won’t be cured from a one-discipline approach.’’

The EnterTech certificate follows on the heels of another new hybrid program, an earth- and space-exploration degree that combines engineering with science.

Dr. Young and Dr. Lehman pitched the EnterTech idea in the spring to a group of industry professionals at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, but also listened to what Hollywood had to say.

‘’They’re saying, ‘We have a problem,’ ‘’ Dr. Young recalled. ‘’ ‘Convergence is happening, but we’re not turning out people who understand it.’ And all the production people were saying: ‘Don’t start another production program. That’s not what we need.’ ‘’

There is actually commonalities between Engineering and Science. However, this touchy-feely “entertainment + tech” crap is just a new way to exploit those desperate 18 year olds with visions of Hollywood glamour dancing in their heads. Hollywood always finds a way to spit on academia’s feeble film student output and now they are going to take it to a whole new level. Would you hire one of them? (The correct answer is “only if they read BBB").

Good luck kids, we’ll be looking out for you in the CAA mailroom.

We roll our eyes at these stories:

Having fans type “Desperate sex” into their Web browsers was apparently not the sort of grassroots marketing campaign ABC was hoping for to hype one of its top shows.

The Alphabet Net is calling foul after a rough cut of a sex scene from the upcoming season of Desperate Housewives was leaked on YouTube, nearly a month before the steamy footage was
slated to air.

Is anyone really surprised by this anymore? Seriously, how long will it take intellectual property owners to sue the pants off of YouTube?

We know we’ve said it before but sometimes it bears repeating. 

Disney has listened to its local affiliates and found a way to compromise on internet video:

Local ads now appear only when viewers access the player from a local affiliate’s Web site, but by next fall, the ABC.com site will seamlessly redirect users to their home markets, said Ray Cole, chairman of the ABC Affiliate Relations Board of Governors.

Cole said that, in addition to local ad participation, affiliates had wanted future broadband players to preserve each station’s designated market area for advertising.

“We are working through the technical challenges, but we are satisfied the network is sensitive to those issues and working on them,” Cole said on Wednesday.

Affiliates have agreed to promote the player software online and on air, and the ABC Affiliate Board has endorsed the program, Cole said.

Episodes now will contain up to four interactive ads rather then the test’s three spots. Up to three of the ads will feature a single national advertiser and one ad will be local.

If you hear a faint cackling in the background, that is the BBB staff laughing. The entire point of the internet is to render geography obsolete. Any attempts to introduce a “locality” to content always creates problems (both social and technological). 

These graphs sure don’t look pretty but they get really ugly when you realize they are five year graphs:

Sinclair Broadcast Group and Granite Broadcasting continued the trend of broadcast companies reporting weak 2nd quarter revenues this week, due primarily to a drop in the big automotive advertising category and falling network compensation. While everybody tends to look at and write about trends in programming, distribution and advertising, underneath it all is the volatility of broadcast stock prices. Wall Street is plenty nervous, and here’s why.

They throw in a bunch of other media stocks as well, like the New York Times just so that your heart can be warmed by all media stocks tumbling simultaneously. [via Buzzmachine]

Yet another reason for the TV Network mothership to abandon her whining affiliate children:

CBS Corp. said on Saturday it would broadcast the documentary “9/11” on the Internet as well as the airwaves after several affiliates said they would delay or forgo the award-winning film because it includes profanity.

Isn’t it nice that the FCC cannot regulate the internet? The Christian family groups will still continue to file complaints of “profanity” but those kvetches will fall on deaf ears. Now we can truly return the internet to the cesspool of TV Movies-of-the-Week that it was always meant to be.

For those of you in LA for the CTIA madness, we have a little wireless update. And we do mean ‘little.’

Bad ideas are legendary in the cell phone world but this one takes the cake:

The technology allows people to record a TV program on their mobile phone and then watch it later, on the train on the way to work, for example. The TI package also provides “picture-in-picture” capabilities, allowing a person to watch a prerecorded program and also track a live sports event in a smaller, on-screen window.

Picture-in-Picture? On a two-inch screen? Are they serious?

Unfortunately, while watching short clips on your cell when you are bored seems like such an obviously good idea, competing tech standards, hardware incompatibilities and wireless provider micro-management, tv-on-cell has largely been stillborn. Even the cellphone industry press is skeptical of the huge numbers projected by the vendors.

It seems the latest Death-of-TV trend is to premiere programming online before TV:

Time Warner Inc.’s AOL on Monday plans to announce that it will offer two new NBC programs on its Web site a week before their broadcast TVpremiere.

...

AOL’s move follows on the heels of other experiments by U.S. television networks and show producers to promote new shows and lure new categories of viewers who may shun traditional TV viewing.

Earlier in September, CBS Corp. teamed up with digital video recorder pioneer TiVo Inc. in a similar experiment. TiVo subscribers will be able to watch the pilot episode of CBS’s “The Class” a week before the TV broadcast.

Interestingly the article makes no mention of network affiliates crying foul. They certainly can’t think web-first programming is a positive trend for their revenues. On the other hand, we have never heard of these “new catergories of viewers who shun traditional TV viewing.” That sounds like marketroid speak to soften the blow for the aforementioned network affiliates.

“We’re not cannibalizing our TV audience, we’re just luring internet-only TV viewers!”

Who’s gonna buy that claim?

Today’s LA Times has a piece on the ensuing Lonelygirl15 controversy, one of Youtube’s best known starlets may in fact be a brilliant viral marketing ploy:

No one has publicly come forward to lay claim to her work, but she is starting to look as connected in Hollywood as any starlet. Three lonelygirl15-obsessed amateur Web sleuths set up a sting using tracking software that appears to show that e-mails sent from a lonelygirl15 account came from inside the offices of the Beverly Hills-based talent agency Creative Artists Agency.

Now that User Generated Content has lowered acceptable standards for entertainment, content can be created for incredibly cheap amounts and distributed for free off the backs of free ‘net video providers like Youtube.

This week can be summarized as:

The movie business is about to change: Apple Computer Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. are in the final stages of building online services that allow easy, legal access to potentially thousands of movies on demand.

Isn’t it amazing that people (especially journalists) fail to take the lessons from one arena and apply it to another?

Example: when iTunes introduced TV downloads for the video iPod everyone heralded it as a revolution. Now within months, all the TV networks realized that they didn’t need Apple to sell their content for them. They cut out the middleman and allowed people to download content from their own sites, and sometimes the let the public have it for free with ADVERTISING. What a novel concept!

How long do you think it will take the studios to realize they don’t need Apple or Yahoo to sell their content?

Actually, they already have. Remember MovieLink and CinemaNow (if you are a regular BBB reader you do)? People, you can download movies LEGALLY off the ‘net for almost six years now. Get over it.

UPDATE: We tried to use Amazon’s service but got bitchslapped:

OPERATING SYSTEM: The Unbox Video player application is only compatible with Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2 (SP2), Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition SP2, or Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Update Rollup 2. The Unbox Video player is not compatible with Apple/Macintosh operating systems.

We here at BBB live in Linux land.