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online video
NBC mocks Web 2.0 with 17.6 Nielsen rating, $1 billion in ads
The network's online lockdown of Olympics video coverage, ridiculed as old-Web thinking, has paid off: A captive audience drove television ratings for NBC's Beijing coverage higher than the 2000 Sydney and 2004 Athens games. Advertisers who bought a billion bucks' worth of spots from NBC are probably happy. Oh well, maybe next time. [Wired]
gemini division
NBC bungling Rosario Dawson's Web show
Electric Farm Entertainment, the production company behind NBC's new Web-only show Gemini Division, has already earned themselves a profit on the production. How? By lacing the show with consumer-electronics product placement from Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft, and striking distribution deals with NBC and Sony. NBC, however, might have a harder time making the project pay — the ads currently running on the site look like cheap, run-of network trash. Whose idea was it to advertise a fiber supplement alongside a sci-fi romp with Rosario Dawson that's clearly targeted to young, male viewers? More »
online video
Legal, illegal Olympics clips rule Web
Traffic to NBCOlympics.com has likely already surpassed the 229 million pageviews garnered by the entire 2004 Athens Games, according to the network. Even so, users frustrated with the lack of full-screen video have already started to figure out workarounds. So where are people turning for better-quality Olympics video? More »
online video
The definitive guide to watching the Olympics online
The folks who are bringing you the Olympics online don't actually want you to watch their coverage. NBC and Microsoft are delaying the most popular events by three hours so that it won't interfere with more profitable TV broadcasts. And you'll have to download Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in to watch in your browser. But a bird's nest of geography and time-delay restrictions worthy of China's Communist Party government is in place. Thankfully, the anarchy of the Web offers plenty of options for having a crowd of curious coworkers surround your computer as you watch live handball, with varying degrees of expense and difficulty. Rather than being the coming-out party for Silverlight Microsoft hopes for, it may instead be the year sports fans learn a few new online-video tricks. More »
censorship
Reporters find presumed privileges revoked behind China's Great Firewall
The Chinese government may have assured the International Olympic Committee that reporters would enjoy Western freedoms while covering the Olympic games, such as unfettered access to the Internet. Once on the ground, however, journalists have discovered that's not exactly the case. The IOC has been busy backtracking. Olympics reps now have clarified that open Web access is only for sites about "Olympic competitions" — not, say, Amnesty International, one of many sites that has been blocked. The question no one has asked, however, is why China should feel compelled to act in any other way? More »
downtime
Hulu widgets let you watch TV while pretending to use Internet
Finally a widget I can get behind: TV and movie site Hulu has built a set of highly configurable widgets that can preview or even play full episodes in the middle of a Web page. Now if only they'd carry the entire Season 4 backlog of Battlestar Galactica.
online advertising
NBC almost sold out of video ads for Olympics
With a little help from brands McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson, Hilton, Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch, NBC Universal is 85 percent sold out of its expected inventory of ads to play at the beginning ofOlympics Web videos. All of the ads will be 15- and 30-second "prerolls" — because that's the only kind the International Olympic Committee currently allows. Hate prerolls? Go ahead and set up your own broadcast, then, bub. (Photo by striatic)
great moments in journalism
NBC contractor not fired for posting Tim Russert's death to Wikipedia
Did you read our post that said a contractor at NBC had been fired for updating Tim Russert's Wikipedia page with news of the Meet the Press moderator's death? Um, never mind: Silicon Alley Insider reporter Michael Learmonth has confirmed with NBC executives that "the dude," as he puts it, wasn't fired, although he was briefly suspended. Since the earlier New York Times report was credibly reported from NBC employees, I emailed Learmonth to double-check his sources. Turns out he'd had the correct story all along, but we all liked "fired" better.
NBC Universal buys Weather Channel
NBC Universal and two private equity firms, Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group, acquired the Weather Channel and Weather.com from Landmark Communications over the weekend for a rumored $3.5 billion. Yes, we're not shocked either that NBC figured out Weather Plus wasn't taking over the meteorological universe. [PaidContent]
NBC Universal and two private equity firms, Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group, acquired the Weather Channel and Weather.com from Landmark Communications over the weekend for a rumored $3.5 billion. Yes, we're not shocked either that NBC figured out Weather Plus wasn't taking over the meteorological universe. [PaidContent]
Internet Broadcasting Services
Employee at NBC contractor fired for network on Russert death
When Meet The Press host Tim Russert died, NBC held the news so it could inform Russert's family first. An employee at Internet Broadcasting Services, which provides web services for some of NBC affiliates, went ahead and updated Russert's Wikipedia page anyway. Then the New York Times saw the update and broke the news before NBC itself. NBC executives heard about the slip, got upset and now, IBS has responded by firing the employee who updated the page. Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka and Henry Blodget say IBS shouldn't have fired the employee and that NBC should get with the times. Citizen journalism happens, Blodget writes, "and the genie isn't going back in the bottle." Except what the IBS employee did wasn't "citizen journalism." More »
online video
YouTube moves to counter Hulu by offering full-length movies and shows
Mark Cuban says Hulu is kicking ass because of a simple marketing device: The NBC and News Corp.-backed site is advertising full-length programs on YouTube to get traffic to shows on which they can sell real advertising. YouTube, rather than ban Hulu, is now angling to keep that traffic in-house by allowing partners to upload shows up to 1 gigabyte in size, enough room for full-length film and television programming (though not at great quality). More »
media
NBC contractor broke Tim Russert death on Wikipedia first
A half-hour before the news broadcast on NBC, a Wikipedia user hailing from IP address 66.187.200.74 updated NBC's Tim Russert's page to report the newsman's death. Scooped by the world's most authoritative guide to Idaho wine? How embarrassing for NBC. How worrisome for one of its contractors. See, the IP address 66.187.200.74 belongs to a company called Internet Broadcasting, which maintains some of NBC's local news websites. Not a very good way to keep a news organization as a customer.
stats
ABC tops online, with CBS a comer
ABC has the most popular television network website, just a shade more popular than NBC.com among the six broadcasters sampled by HitWise. But both websites are down in their relative share of the online audience, while CBS has greatly increased visits. Why? Well, for starters, CBS is ahead in the year-to-date ratings race for actual television. The top draws to the network sites are, once again, competitions and other game shows — American Idol was the top draw for Fox, Deal or No Deal for NBC and Dancing With the Stars for ABC. Almost every site, however, kept users on longer, with the average user spending three more minutes on CBS. Only visits to NBC got shorter, probably because some users are going to Hulu to watch full episodes of shows like The Office and 30 Rock
acquisitions
Report: NBC Universal and private equity bid $3.5 billion for Weather Channel and Weather.com
Joining with private equity firms Blackstone and Bain Capital, NBC Universal bid $3.5 billion to acquire the Weather Channel and Weather.com. The cable channel is available in 97 percent of all cable TV home and has 96 million U.S. subscribers. With its local coverage and the always popular schadenfreude-laced disaster porn excerpted in the video above, Weather.com can claim a "people count" of 19 million in the U.S., according to Compete.
acquisitions
Sugar Publishing ventures into "as seen on TV" product-pushing market
San Francisco-based blog network Sugar Publishing has bought StarBrand Media, a company that works with television producers to highlight and sell clothing and furnishings that appear in popular shows such as Gossip Girl, making every moment in every show an opportunity to place a product. One network it doesn't work with yet is NBC, which just happens to have invested in Sugar Publishing.
Microsoft confirms company abides by imaginary broadcast-flag law
Users of Microsoft's Windows Media Center began having trouble using the software to copy NBC shows for later viewing like any DVR would. The reason? The network had marked copying the show as verboten under the terms of the FCC's proposed, but never implemented, broadcast-flag rules. In other words, Microsoft is enforcing a law that does not exist. (An EFF video, "The Corruptibles," provides a good, if activist-biased, explanation of the broadcast-flag controversy.) [News.com]
online advertising
