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Media Decoder: A CBS Deal Bolsters Amazon’s Challenge to Netflix

February 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Slowly but confidently, Amazon is building a library of television shows and movies to rival that of Netflix, much to the satisfaction of media companies like Time Warner and CBS, whose executives love to see the competition.

Although Amazon will not unveil its own original television shows until the fall at the earliest, it is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to have the exclusive Web rights to shows it can brag about on its Amazon Prime streaming service, like “Downton Abbey,” from PBS, and “Falling Skies,” from TNT.

The latest example came on Monday, when Amazon announced an unusual arrangement with CBS, the country’s most-watched television network, to carry episodes of “Under the Dome” just days after the series makes its debut on TV in June.

“This deal is yet another sign that the streaming marketplace is becoming more and more robust,” said Scott Koondel, the chief content licensing officer for CBS, a position that was created two months ago. “Advances in user-friendly technology from companies like Amazon and Netflix are a boon for premium content owners.”

Amazon has a long way to go to rival Netflix in terms of TV and movie selection. But in some corners of the media business, it is already perceived to be Pepsi to Netflix’s Coke. And many other companies — among them Google, Sony, Intel and a new joint venture between Redbox and Verizon — are trying to come up with a Red Bull or a Snapple they can call their own.

While Netflix has won attention for unveiling a high quality show, “House of Cards,” on its streaming service, “it is increasingly hard to ignore the progress Amazon has made in a relatively short amount of time,” Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research, wrote two weeks ago. He predicted that Amazon would quietly spend more than $500 million on video this year.

Amazon declined to comment on that figure. Its nearly two-year-old streaming service, called Prime Instant Video, is bundled as part of its $79 annual Amazon Prime membership, which also provides two-day free shipping and a monthly Kindle e-book rental. The company says it has millions of Amazon Prime subscribers, but it will not disclose the precise number. Netflix has about 27 million streaming subscribers in the United States.

Instant Video started simply enough about two years ago, with relatively cheap acquisitions of older television shows from networks like CBS and nonexclusive rights to older films from studios like Universal. But Amazon’s recent deals have revealed the company’s ambitions.

When Netflix dropped the rights to some cable series like “Pawn Stars” last fall, Amazon swooped in and started streaming them. When Time Warner wanted to sell streams of some of its cable dramas, Amazon bought the exclusive rights to “The Closer” and “Falling Skies,” while Netflix bought “Dallas.”

“This emerging back end for cable originals is a very promising sign,” Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chief executive of Time Warner, told investors last week, “since it should result in production values for cable originals getting even better over time.”

Perhaps its biggest deal yet came last week, when it clinched the rights to past and future seasons of the PBS hit “Downton Abbey.” By July, “Downton” will be gone from Netflix.

Both streaming services mine the data of their users to determine what kinds of shows to license, and what not to. The first two seasons of “Downton” were the “most-streamed TV show on Prime Instant Video,” said Brad Beale, who oversees video acquisitions for Amazon, so it was a “pretty easy decision” to bid for seasons three and four (and five, if it is produced).

“Data is a great proxy for what our customers love,” Mr. Beale added in a telephone interview. “We’re blessed to have a platform that gives us a lot of insight into what our customers love.”

“Under the Dome” — based on the Stephen King novel and produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television — will be unique because each episode will go onto Amazon four days after its premiere on TV. CBS stands to make more money this way than it now does by streaming shows on CBS.com and attaching ads.

Analysts expect to see more such deals as broadcasters move away from the free online model made popular by Hulu. Hulu has a subscription component as well, but it has not announced any notable licensing deals the way Netflix and Amazon have done. Its owners are at odds over the future of the service, and its founding chief executive, Jason Kilar, will leave later this winter.

Netflix says it expects to compete with Amazon the way HBO and Showtime compete — with TV dramas and comedies of their own. “When it comes to competition, we not only have a superior content offering due to our larger budget, but we are further along the experience curve,” Netflix told investors last month. In other words, Amazon is cheap, off-brand Cola.

While Netflix has four more original series on tap this year, Amazon is trying out test episodes of six comedies and five children’s series. This year, Amazon will stream them and, after hearing from viewers, decide which ones will become series.

Roy Price, the head of Amazon Studios, said the pilot process will ensure quality, just as it does for traditional television networks, and make viewers and producers pay attention to Amazon’s video projects.

“All that matters is being great,” he said. “There’s no great benefit in being good; people don’t change their habits for good.”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/amazon-and-cbs-announce-deal-on-rights-to-under-the-dome/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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MSNBC, Its Ratings Rising, Gains Ground on Fox News

November 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

“I think that’s pretty significant,” Mr. Matthews said, optimistically, as a commercial break wrapped up. Virginia, a state that had voted to elect a Democratic presidential candidate only once in 40 years — Barack Obama in 2008 — was not leaning toward Mitt Romney as some Republicans had predicted it would.

Inside the NBC “Sunday Night Football” studio that MSNBC was borrowing for the night, the stage manager loudly called out, “Here we go.” Ms. Maddow softly repeated, “Here we go,” and reported the news to three million viewers.

When President Obama won Virginia and most of the other battleground states on Tuesday night, ensuring himself a second term as president, some at MSNBC felt as if they had won as well.

During Mr. Obama’s first term, MSNBC underwent a metamorphosis from a CNN also-ran to the anti-Fox, and handily beat CNN in the ratings along the way. Now that it is known, at least to those who cannot get enough politics, as the nation’s liberal television network, the challenge in the next four years will be to capitalize on that identity.

MSNBC, a unit of NBCUniversal, has a long way to go to overtake the Fox News Channel, a unit of News Corporation: on most nights this year, Fox had two million more viewers than MSNBC.

But the two channels, which skew toward an audience that is 55 or older, are on average separated by fewer than 300,000 viewers in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers desire. On three nights in a row after the election last week, MSNBC — whose hosts reveled in Mr. Obama’s victory — had more viewers than Fox in that demographic.

“We’re closer to Fox than we’ve ever been,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, who has been trying to overtake Fox for years. “All of this is great for 2013, 2014 to keep building.”

In some ways MSNBC, which until 2005 was partly owned by Microsoft, is where Fox was a decade ago — in the early stages of profiting from its popularity. The channel receives a per-subscriber fee of 30 cents a month from cable operators; CNN receives twice that, and Fox News at least three times as much.

“When Microsoft was involved with MSNBC, it was viewed as kind of lacking in direction; I don’t think the channel had much leverage raising rates,” said Derek Baine, a senior analyst for SNL Kagan. “Maybe they will have some more leverage on this postelection.”

If Fox sees itself as the voice of the opposition to the president, MSNBC sees itself as the voice of Mr. Obama’s America. Its story resembles that of so many other cable channels. It hit on a winning strategy (antiwar liberalism led by Keith Olbermann at 8 p.m.), added similar shows (like Ms. Maddow’s at 9 p.m., which became the channel’s tent pole when Mr. Olbermann left in 2011) and then sold its audience as something more: a community of passionate, like-minded people.

Many progressives (and conservatives) now view the channel as a megaphone for liberal politicians, ideas and attacks against those who disagree. Such a megaphone — clearly marked, always on — has never existed before on television.

It has all happened rather suddenly. During the presidential election in 2008, Ms. Maddow was so new that she was still getting lost in the labyrinth of Rockefeller Center. And MSNBC was so timid about applying a political point of view that it paired an NBC News anchor, David Gregory, with the outspoken Mr. Olbermann on election night. The awkward pairing symbolized the split in American journalism between those who embodied a political point of view and those who said they did not.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/business/media/msnbc-its-ratings-rising-gains-ground-on-fox-news.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

‘Diggnation,’ Popular Web Talk Show, to End in December

October 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Together, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht are akin to Oprah for a certain class of tech enthusiasts.

The weekly beta-testing and beer-guzzling show they have hosted for six years, “Diggnation,” adapted the television talk show format for the Web and helped prove that there was a business model beneath the anything-goes veneer of online video. Thousands of fans have attended live shows; some even crowd-surfed during a taping at the SXSW conference last spring.

Like Oprah, though, Mr. Rose and Mr. Albrecht have decided to direct their energies elsewhere. They will announce on Wednesday that “Diggnation” will cease production in December, ending one of the Web’s most popular regularly scheduled series.

Their explanation for ending it: They’ve grown up, just like the Web has. “We started this show as kids,” said Mr. Albrecht, now 35. “Both of us came into Web video at a time when ‘Web video’ wasn’t even a word.”

Said Mr. Rose, 34: “There are other things, creatively, that we’ve started to do that are a little more fresh and exciting.”

A Web video network, Revision3, was built in large part on the back of “Diggnation,” and like a traditional television network, it is carefully managing the announcement about the show’s end. “We’ve built the company to the point where, when a show goes through its natural life cycle, that’s fine,” the Revision3 chief executive, Jim Louderback, said in an interview last week.

While “Diggnation” remains one of the company’s top five shows — Revision3 says it counts roughly 250,000 views each week — it represents under 10 percent of video views and under 10 percent of revenue for the company, said David Prager, a producer of the show and a co-founder of the company. He cited three topical shows that have more monthly views than “Diggnation” now: “Epic Meal Time,” “Tekzilla” and “Film Riot.”

“We’ve been able to use ‘Diggnation’ to grow the network,” Mr. Prager said.

“Diggnation” had its online premiere in July 2005. Then, as now, Mr. Rose and Mr. Albrecht sat on a couch with computers and beers and reviewed both. The iPhone, the Windows operating system and out-of-this-world gadgets were three recurring topics. Some of the topics are derived from the trends on Digg, a social news Web site that Mr. Rose co-founded.

Mr. Rose’s and Mr. Albrecht’s conversations — accessible as podcasts and as video streams — attracted an ardent fan base, demonstrating the tendency of people to organize around niche online brands. “It really did feel like being part of a club,” Mr. Albrecht said. And “Diggnation” inspired other Web shows to do the same.

So far, there have been 327 episodes of the show, ranging from 20 to 60 minutes in length. It was an early indication that viewers would be willing to watch long videos on their computers. “If you make it a place that people want to hang out,” Mr. Louderback said, “it can be as long as it needs to be.”

Early advertisers were domain name registrars, but later, bigger brands like Ford and Old Spice came on board. The co-hosts read the advertiser information out loud during the shows.

“Diggnation” was always an entertaining part-time job for Mr. Rose and Mr. Albrecht, who said they had contemplated an end to the show for more than a year as they found it increasingly hard to find time to tape the episodes. Echoing Mr. Albrecht, Mr. Rose said, “It feels like the right time. We don’t want to wake up one morning and think ‘Wow, we spent the last 20 years on the couch.’ ”

Mr. Rose is now spending most of his time on Milk, a development lab in Silicon Valley that he founded last spring after departing Digg.

Mr. Albrecht is creating and directing other Web shows and short films. But much to Revision3’s liking, they will continue to host other shows: Mr. Albrecht will remain a co-host of “The Totally Rad Show,” a daily chat about pop culture, and Mr. Rose will remain the host of “Foundation,” a monthly series about entrepreneurs and start-ups.

In a conversation last week, they laughed off the comparison to Oprah, even for a small subset of online fans. “We’re the Martha Stewart, maybe,” Mr. Rose said.

“I make a mean Bundt cake,” Mr. Albrecht added. “A tech Bundt cake.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ea0edc01d1652b232b81bc56b7fd5903

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

DealBook: Martha Stewart Living in Play

May 25, 2011 by Leave a Comment

All anyone can seem to discuss this week is Oprah. But here at DealBook on Wednesday morning, we can’t stop talking about Martha.

Shares of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia surged more than 20 percent on Wednesday after the company announced that it had retained Blackstone Advisory Partners to explore strategic partnerships.

Blackstone will “review and respond to various parties that have expressed interest in potentially partnering with or investing in the company,” the company said in a statement.

“As the founder and largest stockholder, I fully support this initiative to take our business and iconic brand to the next level,” said Martha Stewart, who also announced that she was rejoining the board of directors.

Ms. Stewart has continued to play a significant role in the company that bears her name after serving a prison sentence in 2005 for lying to federal investigators about a stock sale. She was banned for five years from serving as an officer or director at the company.

Along with the announcement that the company is in play, Martha Stewart Living named Lisa Gersh president and chief operating officer. Ms. Gersh, a co-founder of the women-focused television network Oxygen Media, joins the company from NBC, which acquired Oxygen in 2007. Martha Stewart Living, which has struggled to fill the ranks of its executive suite in recent years, said that Ms. Gersh would assume the chief executive post within the next 12 to 20 months.

The company has struggled in recent years amid a downturn in advertising and Ms. Stewart’s legal problems.

Even with the surge on Wednesday, Martha Stewart’s market capitalization is only about $250 million.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d42ac03435d8dd68496551959455b533

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