In the first session at the Future of Television Conference, held at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California, was full of stats and data from analysts at SmithGeiger, Parks Associates and Magid Associates.

The bottom line – the internet has caught up with TV for entertainment use. TV viewing is down by about 2 hours from last year, with most of the increase being in watching online video.

The interesting thing is that there is lots of data to suggest that TV and Internet media reinforce each other. Much of the online activity revolves around catching up with what’s going on with TV shows. Watching shows you missed is a highly popular use of online video.

There appears to be a future for TV, but one quite different from that of the past. TV won’t be the single dominant entertainment channel. It’s going to have to share prime time with the Internet.

You can follow what’s going on via Twitter search.  Just search for #FOTV.

UPDATE:

# Mike Vorhaus (Magid Advisors) Presentation:
Nielsen versus Consumers – They Say Canabilization Happening
# Seth Geiger (SmithGeiger) Presentation:
Digital Media Trends and the Future of Television

TubeMogul, a interesting company that helps you distribute videos around the web, recently asked that question to 11,919 video producers and 1,119 responded. 51% of those said yes they are making money with Internet video earning on average $12.39 per 1,000 views.

This money making group splits into 3 groups. Group one (47.4% of the money makers) relies entirely on third parties like YouTube to monetize their content. At the other extreme, group two (23.4% of the money makers) rely on their own exclusive direct sales. The rest use a blended approach. I asked TubeMogul if they could determine CPM by group, but have not yet heard back from them.

These money makers seem to use everything they can to make money. Here’s the breakdown by ad format:

So for those of you making videos online, what works best for you?

In what must have been some marvelous licensing legal wizardry, The Financial Times is reporting that Apple has signed a deal with News Corp’s 20th Century Fox studio to provide an online video-on-demand service. The service will allow consumers to rent the latest Fox DVD releases by downloading a digital copy from Apple’s iTunes platform for a limited time.

Both Apple and Fox are officially quiet about the deal and the Financial Times says that it is likely the deal will be announced at Macworld on January 14th.

The deal goes beyond movie rentals in that Apple will also for the first time extend its FairPlay digital rights management system beyond its own products.

A digital file protected by FairPlay will be included in new Fox DVD releases, enabling film content to be transferred or “ripped” from the disc to a computer and video iPod. DVD content can already be moved to an iPod but this requires special software and is considered piracy by some studios.

[tags]Apple, Fox, video, iTunes, Fairplay, DRM, online video rental[/tags]

This video from The Digital Lounge covers three different sources of free video for your portable player: TiVo, your own DVD collection, and Windows Media Center. Watch and learn how you can easily use the video content you already have to fill up your media library in either the Zune software or iTunes.

[tags]tivo, zune, ipod, video, dvd, ipod movie downloads, zune movie downloads[/tags]

Rex Wong, CEO of DAVE Networks, met with me at Digital Hollywood. DAVE Networks provides white label social networks. That means that DAVE Networks provides the infrastructure to power sites like America’s Funniest Home Videos, Stargate’s Community and Dave.TV. The users of the sites don’t see DAVE Networks, they see the customer’s brand. The customers get the benefits of offering a wide range of social community tools to their users.

 

 Digital Podcast 20 [11:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The system provides the tools to deploy a custom social broadcast network, including

• Self publishing
• Video upload, download, rating, comments
• Blog, video blog, moblog
• DAVE points system
• A modular player can be customized with your brand and embedded in user’s MySpace, blog or web page
• User contests

Rex also told me about an exciting new project that DAVE Networks has launched called Next.TV. NEXT.TV, a competitor to the much hyped Joost, is a new Internet TV service that delivers over 50 channels of high quality TV content. NEXT.TV’s content is sponsored by advertisers so that you can get premium TV content for free.

NEXT.TV will be available initially in October 2007 on HP consumer notebooks. A version will also be available to the general public shortly thereafter for download of which you can sign up to be part of the Private Beta Program by signing up at www.next.tv.

[tags]DAVE Networks, Rex Wong, Next.TV, IPTV, online video, video, Digital Hollywood[/tags]

ZML.com is positioning itself as the movie version of AllofMP3, a Russian service that provided downloadable music on the cheap. They claim over 1,500 movies, such as Transformers, Live Free or Die Hard, The Bourne Ulitimatum and lots of other big tiles with prices starting at $1.99. The service requires registration and a prepaid account using Visa or Mastercard. Downloads are billed against the prepaid account.

According to ZML, they have lots of hot movies that are playable on iPods and just about every device.

Over 1500 movies of premium DVD quality

Thousands of hot movies that you dare to watch. Movies are playable on various devices including iPod, PDA (HandHelds), PC, DVD & DivX players. Lowest prices on the web ever. Start downloading movies from $1.99 only! Absolutely no limits. You can download as much as you want with incredibly high speeds. No additional software required. Click on a link, download a movie and watch it on your favourite player.

Sounds good, but there’s a catch. The catch as reported by NewTeeVee

ZML.com isn’t licensed by any of the Hollywood studios. The site is selling hundreds of blockbusters anyway, referring to a collective licensing agreement with an obscure Russian rights holders agency.

And here are the details from ZML’s terms of service:

6 Copyrights
6.1 All materials presented on this site are available for the distribution over the Internet in accordance with the license of the Russian Organization for multimedia and Digital Systems (ROMS) and intended for personal use only. Further distribution, resale or broadcasting is strictly prohibited.
6.2 The Site remunerates the fees for every downloaded File in accordance with the license agreement.
6.3 All trade marks, trade names, company names, slogans, logos, and any other copyright items, which can be seen on the Site pages in various contexts, are the property of their respective owners. You have no right to copy, distribute or use them without written permission from the owners.
6.4 The Client has no right to download any Files from the Site if this violates the law of his country.
6.5 The Site Administration can not control actions of each Client therefore the Client is responsible for any illegitimate use of the Site’s materials or/and Services

Wow. This is a nightmare for Hollywood and another blow to the copyright. I’m sure there will be lawsuits filed, if they haven’t been filed already.

The problem is that this seems to be legal in Russia according to AllofMp3 who is reporting court room victories in their copyright infringement suit.

On 24 October a district court in Moscow has confirmed the “no copyright infringement” verdict.

Earlier this year, on 15 August 2007 AllofMP3.com was acquitted of all charges brought up by IFPI. Consequently the Federation filed a protest on behalf of the labels. This protest was declined last week. This time IFPI promised to go as far as the Supreme Court.

I wish the music industry and Hollywood good luck in protecting their copyrights. However, this is the sad, but unfortunately accurate reality of digital media. Movies, music, news all need new business models that allow content to flow openly AND money to be made by the creators of the content when it flows openly. There’s only way to fight blatant ripoffs like ZML in the long run, turn them into profit opportunities for the originators of the content.

[tags]movies, online video, drm, piracy, downloadable movies, ZML, AllofMP3[/tags]