Joost has just announced a major licensing deal with Viacom which will see hundreds of hours of their TV programming and movies from Paramount Studios, available on the Web 2.0 Internet TV platform.

What will this mean for Joost customers? Here is an excerpt from the press release:

MTV Networks will provide premier content from several of its brands for launch. MTV will offer popular shows, both past and present, including Laguna Beach, Beavis & Butthead, Real World, Punk’d and My Super Sweet Sixteen, while COMEDY CENTRAL will feature episodes from Stella, CCP’s and Freak Show. Nickelodeon, CMT: Country Music Television, MTV2, Logo, Spike TV, mtvU, and Gametrailers.com will also provide content. VH1’s offerings will include episodes of Flavor of Love, Surreal Life, and I Love New York. BET’s Networks’ offerings will include some of its biggest shows, including Beef, DMX: Soul of a Man, Comic View and recent smash hit American Gangster. Also, Paramount Pictures, Paramount Vantage and Paramount Classics will be providing full-length feature films from their catalog of classics and recent releases.

“We’re interested in distribution of our content on as many platforms as possible, provided we can operate in a secure environment,” Viacom Chief Executive Philippe Dauman said in an interview. “This assures any potential partners that we’re open for business and that we’re able to enter into transactions with companies that respect our content and the considerations of our business.”

Meanwhile, YouTube has been ordered by Viacom to remove over 100,000 videos from the site that they claim contain Viacom copyright material.

It will be interesting to see how other players like Viacom react to this deal. It certainly seems like Joost is the answer they have been looking for in terms of getting their content online, but with IP protection and a revenue model. It could prove tough times ahead for Google and YouTube as they try to walk the thin line between commercial partnerships and legal action with these media companies.

Technorati Tags: google, joost, viacom, youtube

Joost, the interactive Internet TV start-up, from the founders of Skype, have just released a beta for Mac OS X (Intel). Fantastic, am downloading it now.

Technorati Tags: joost, skype, tv2.0

I couldn’t access my blog from China so I haven’t been able to post about my time in Shanghai until now.

What an amazing city. Here is my summary of what to expect in Shanghai.

Atmosphere

There is an amazing energy to the place that is difficult to explain.

Xintiandi

Two entire city blocks of traditional Shanhai houses completely restored and renovated into a smart area of shops, bars and restaurants. Avoid the German pub/restaurant though, food.

Laris

Beautiful fine dining restaurant overlooking the Bund. Right next door to the more famous M on Bund. Food is as good as anywhere in the world. There are also two very good bars attached for drinks before and after. We spent New Years Eve there and had an amazing time.

Shanghai Aqaurium

This is apparently the biggest in the world and is very cool. Allow plenty of time to get around as it takes awhile. I saw some crazy things I never knew existed. Check these guys out!

MagLev Train

The Magnetic Levitation Train from Shanghai Airport (Pu Dong) is the first of its kind and very fast. It got up to 426 KPH when I was on it. It unfortunately stops well short of the centre of town but you get the Metro the rest of the way which while not as fast is extremely easy and costs about US$0.40 for a single ticket.

Pearl City

I didn’t go but the missus came back with four handbags and was very happy.

South Bund Soft Spinning Market

Two tailor made suits for US$120 all ready within 5 days. Amazing value and much better quality than you get in Hong Kong and Thailand.

Crazy English Translations of Signs and Public Notices

Translation is just so literal that most of the time it doesn’t make sense even if it is in English.

Shanghai Taxis

Plentiful (except when it rains) and cheap. The first 2km costs about US $1.50 and they don’t seem to charge for waiting time. Just don’t expect working seatbelts.

1000 Faces Restaurant

This is a restaurant in Shanghai where these guys change their masks in a split second over and and over again. It is cool.

Crazy Chinese Bureaucracy

I guess it would drive you crazy if you lived there but I thought it was funny. Examples:

Electricity Bill Lady
The electricity company sends a lady around to your home who knocks on the door and hand delivers a reminder notice to pay your bill. You can’t pay the lady then and their, you have to pay the bill at specific outlets. She is just the reminder lady. Full employment makes for very creative positions.

Bund Underwater Sightseeing Tourist Tunnel
I assumed that this was under the water but it is actually under the ground and you don’t see any actual water. You board these wierd looking tram things that look like they should be in a ’60’s sci-fi movie and are then subjected to a bewilderingly awful light and sound show as you travel the 5 minutes under the Bund river. It is so bad and so ludicrous that this should be considered a tourist attraction that it makes it must for any visitor.

Consumerism

For a communist country, consumerism is rife! Budweiser is the biggest selling beer, every brand you can imagine is plastered everwhere you look.

Screens

Screens are everywhere. Huge LCD screens on buildings, on barges in the river, in taxis, on the metro (the subway/underground train), in shopping centers. Maybe this is where Kevin Roberts got his is Sisomo idea.

Shanghai Zoo

We went to see the Panda bears but this a drab very communist instution and we just left depressed and upset by the conditions the animals were kept in.

Technorati Tags: bund, shanghai

Andy Lark has just posted that Rupert Murdoch told the Digital Hollywood conference in New York last week about MySpace:

“It’s extraordinary, the advertising has gone from basically nothing to, on a net basis, $25 million a month and growing every month - almost 30 per cent every quarter,”

He added:

“Next year we’ll be kicking in with search revenue from Google so together with IGN, we’ll be getting close to a billion dollars of revenue.”

MySpace is huge, you have to be looking at this as a marketing option, especially if you are targeting the 15-25 demographic.

Technorati Tags: myspace

Here is my summary of Shawn Gold’s presentation at ad:tech Sydney today. Shawn is the Chief Marketing Officer for MySpace.com, the world’s biggest social network. How big you ask? Well;

• 0 - 150+ million registered users in less than 3 years.
• Number One in the US in terms of page impressions, downloads and average time spent (an indicator of how “sticky” the content is). Other sites have more unique visitors (those with much wider appeal such as CNN.com etc) but no one can match them in terms of actual content delivered.
• Number 5 in Australia of all websites, Number 1 based on the same metrics as in the US.
• 400 billion page views per month, over 100 billion ads served.
• Currently in 7 countries, with internationalised sites, and will be in 20 countries by year end 2007, including China.

What advertising options do they offer now to advertisers beyond just standard online ads?

• The movie industry were really the first to adopt MySpace seriously as an advertising option by setting up dedicated MySpace pages with video trailers and allow other users to comment on and become friends of the movie. A movie studio can spend between US$1 - 3 million in a period of a couple of weeks to promote a new release through targeted advertising on the network. They can get instant market feedback and research on a movie as soon as it is released via comments on their MySpace page.
• Bands and comedians have used MySpace to build and maintain a loyal fan base. It is becoming common for them to offer exclusive access to events to just their MySpace friends. The Beastie Boys recently did a show recently where only their MySpace friends could gain entry.
• MySpace creates originally branded video content that can then be promoted through the network.
• MySpace can promote original video content. Dove Skincare in Canada created a 1 minute video, did a very small TVC campaign and then pushed it entirely online, using MySpace and other tools. They got 20-30 million unique views for a fraction of the dollars it would have cost to get via traditional air time.
• They can offer highly targeted campaigns e.g. if you wanted to advertise to all hip hop DJ’s in the US market or just California, they can do this.
• If you have a MySpace page and have built up a significant number of friends, then MySpace can run demographic profiles on your friends, given you deep metrics on who is interested in your product/brand.

What’s next? Well like everyone, they are trying to figure out how to monetise consumer generated video content. I was interested to discover that MySpace delivers more video content than YouTube or Google Video. Videos with “hotspots” with hyperlinks, branded/”wrapped” video players and pre and post rolls are all being experimented with.

What are the key areas of focus for MySpace?

1. Self Expression Platform - Growing their toolkit of widgets and tools to allow more consumer generated content to be put up on MySpace. They really believe that this idea of self-expressionion, 21st century cyber-hippies if you will, are the key to their success. Other previous social networks, such as Friendster, which was the basis for their business model, failed because they were very restrictive on the content you could publish and in what format. For example they wouldn’t allow you to customise the look of your Friendster page.
2. Communications Platform - Various tools such as instant message, text, Voice over IP, video calling, to enable their users to communicate easily with one another.
3. Content Aggregation - They already have massive communities for movies, music and comedians, they intend to pool more content in specific communities such as fashion.
4. Marketer Platform - Tools for marketers and agencies to more easily advertise and run/analyse campaigns on their site. Importantly, all advertising and the type of advertising will always be elective to the user to avoid the impact being diluted over time.
5. Safety & Education - MySpace gets a bad rap from people about the dangers of meeting people online. Confidence in the site is critical to the site and they have a big team working on this area. Every photo (about 5 million per day!) and video(about 40,000 per day) posted to the site is looked at by a human being to screen out pornographic or hateful material.
6. Internationalization - Continuing to roll out MySpace to different countries in different languages with regional specialisations.

Here are some final soundbites:

Andy Worhol said “Everyone is famous for 15 minutes” well today “Everyone is famous for 15 people”

The arty kid in a small time who used to feel isolated because he coudn’t relate to the friends in his local school can now connect with thousands of like-minded people around the world. It’s a great time to be lonely on the Internet.

Technorati Tags: myspace