The Ten Spot: Oct 30, 2009
via HuffPost Game Changers: Who Is The Ultimate Game Changer In Philanthropy: The Extraordinaries
Making it effortless to add brief volunteer activities to your busy day. The Extraordinaries delivers information via mobile phone about micro-volunteer opportunities that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot. Standing in line at the DMV? Sure you can listen to music on your iPhone, but won’t you feel better about yourself if you use that iPhone to spend those stray minutes adding identifying tags to museum photos, or translating a Spanish document into English? With over 700 million smartphones expected to be in use by 2012, these innovators see billions of hours of spare time ready to be tapped into for the greater good.
Killer Quote: “We hope people might look differently at that ride on the bus and not just play video games. Micro-volunteerism is perfectly suited for the Millennial Generation. They are used to text messaging, MySpace, Facebook, get-in, get-out, instant gratification.” Must Click Link: BeExtra.org
via Sony Posts Fourth Consecutive Quarterly Loss SNE | SAI
Sony SNE lost $292 million in the quarter ending in September, the company announced this morning. This marks the fourth consecutive loss for Sony. It is now predicting that losses for the year will total ¥95 billion ($1 billion).
via The New York Times’ Coming Jihad Against The Huffington Post | 24/7 Wall St
There has been a great deal of speculation about what the basis of a suit of The Huffington Post by The New York Times would look like in legal terms. First Amendment attorney David Marburger has said in widely circulated comments that the best legal leverage that the old media has is to get Congress to amend the Copyright Act to restore the common law as a way to fight unfair enrichment that aggregators get by utilizing content created by other media.
The Huffington Post recently passed The Washington Post and LA Times in terms of the visitors each has to its website each month. Huffington’s revenue is rumored to be small, perhaps as little as $8 million this year. As that number grows, it will take more advertising share from its old media rivals.
Update: Several sources have told 24/7 that a suit by old media may be brought under the Interstate Commerce Act.
via Can Nintendo Rebuild? – BusinessWeek
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told financial analysts and journalists that the company had been unprepared for the sudden drop in sales of its Wii living-room game console. “We sensed that the market mood was cooling off in the spring,” he said. “But frankly, we hadn’t expected to get as bad as it did by summer.” In the past six months the stock has slid 22%.
In the July-September quarter, Nintendo’s operating profit dropped 52%, while sales slid 28%. Nintendo now expects full-year profits of $4 billion on $10.9 billion in sales, instead of $5.4 billion in profits and $19.7 billion in revenues. Last fiscal year, the company had its best year ever, raking in profits of $6.1 billion on revenues of $20.1 billion. Read more >>
The Ten Spot: Oct 29, 2009
via ‘Paranormal’ Now the Most Profitable Film Ever | The Wrap
“Blair Witch’s” $248.6 million worldwide haul a decade ago – juxtaposed against its $60,000 production costs – represented an almost unthinkable 414,233 percent return on investment. Doing the same basic ROI math on “Paranormal” (65.1 million minus 15,000 divided by 15,000 times 100) yields an equally unfathomable result of 433,900 percent.
via Jackson has earned $72 mil since death| THR
Even before the “This Is It” opening, Michael Jackson had earned $90 million in the past year, with most of it coming since his death five months ago. That sizable sum put him third on the Forbes list of dead celebrities making the most money.
via CBS Digital Exec Quincy Smith Eyes New Role in Investment Banking | AllThingsD
[Posted May 11, 2009] Quincy Smith, who guided CBS through a series of big transactions during the Web 2.0 era, is planning his next deal: a move to start his own boutique investment bank or consultancy. Smith is still running the CBS Interactive unit, a job he took in November 2006. But he has been telling associates recently that he plans to start his own company, possibly as soon as this summer. Read more >>
The Ten Spot: Oct 27, 2009
It’s Diller-Day in terms of a quarterly IAC earnings. His creative collective with Ben Silverman (formerly of NBC and Reveille is “Electus” – cool ‘Digitas’ type newco name), updates from Dreamworks Animation, Hulu, Circle of 8 on Myspace, 3D TV penetration, TV Everywhere … and the trailer premiere of “The Green Zone” (Matt Damon’s more authentic Jason Bourne war-thriller film), will be interesting to see how it avoids the stop-loss effect of Gulf war films. AND we’re planning thetenspot.com launch in December – looking for user-generated logos – send to logos@newmedici.com!
via IAC Reports 3Q Profit But Ad Revenue Down | Huffington Post
Counting one-time events such as a large gain on a stock sale and the sale of Match’s European operations, IAC earned $21.7 million, or 16 cents per share, on $337 million in revenue. In the same period a year ago it lost $14.8 million, or 11 cents per share. IAC did not give a substantive update on its new media venture with former NBC Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman, other than to say it will be called “Electus.” The venture was announced in July and will let advertisers have a say in the development process for TV shows and Web videos. Read more >>
New Medici: Media “Ten Spot”
Deadline / #1 ‘Paranormal Activity’ Scares Away Weekend Rivals
[Nikki Finke] can report that, as it expands for next Halloween weekend, the studio is starting to think the thriller has a shot at $100M. Which would make this the most profitable pic in modern Paramount history. After all, the project was acquired for a mere $300K, and the studio spent under $10M total on prints and advertising, “so this will be the best return Paramount has ever had,” an insider tells me. Amazing, since Paramount had been playing the movie mostly at midnight shows and in just a 100 or so dates. Then again, the hype has been so successful — right down to the claim that Steven Spielberg screened it and returned it in a trash bag.
Circle of Eight tells the story of a young woman who moves into an historic building, The Dante, where she encounters an assortment of neighbors harboring a mysterious secret that unravels in a chain of deaths and supernatural interactions. Multiple levels of interactive content enhance the audience’s connection with Circle of Eight, including hidden clues, an online and mobile game, and exclusive material that can be unlocked through game play.
Viewers can tune into MySpace at www.myspace.com/circleof8 now to watch the first three episodes of the series. Following the online run on MySpace, Circle of Eight will be available for rent exclusively at participating BLOCKBUSTER® stores, as well as by mail and through BLOCKBUSTER On Demand®. The full-length film will have additional scenes and a surprise alternate ending.
FT.com / UK – Hollywood told to rewrite script
Mr Iger advocates a thorough re-examination of costs associated with marketing and film production. The solution, he said, required “research and development, risk-taking . . . real focus on changing the status quo”. Next month Disney plans to unveil Keychest, a new technology that will allow digital copies of films to be stored remotely and then viewed and moved across several platforms, such as smartphones, or games consoles such as Microsoft’s Xbox.
Yahoo! News / Disney CEO calls for rethink of movie model
Iger advocated a fundamental rethink of the costs associated with movie production and marketing. Disney’s movies studios, which account for about 15 percent of the media conglomerate’s revenue, suffered a 12 percent fall in sales in the quarter to June 27 and swung to an operating loss of $12 million.
Broadcasting & Cable / Rupert’s Main Man: Q&A With News Corp.’s Chase Carey
[Chase Carey] I think cable networks are a great business; they have a lot of room to grow. The areas that would be at the top of the list would be international, which is a place to which we bring a unique set of strengths. In some ways, the international market is uniquely appealing. You always want to be an opportunist with the content businesses. There are ways to really expand that content portfolio. If I look at our cable group, it’s not where I’d like it to be today. I look at Discovery, it’s a road map of where I’d like to be.
NYTimes / Eisner’s Web Video Studio, Vuguru, to Emerge With Backing
Bolstered by an investment from Rogers Communications, one of Canada’s largest media companies, the budding new-media mogul Michael Eisner is expanding his Web video studio.
Mr. Eisner [...] intended to increase production of the programming that he started financing two and a half years ago. Under a dozen series have been released by Vuguru to date, but he would like the company years from now to be producing 30 series a year. “The most important thing is volume, honestly,” he said. Mr. Eisner said he expected Vuguru to generate 10 to 12 series in 2010, gradually building up to the goal of 30 a year. Read more >>
Part I: The Curse of the Mogul
A must-read for followers of Big Media – or would it be High Media given the mogul personalities involved(?) – The Curse of the The Mogul delivers an academic treatment on how digital media is forcing the studio or communication mogul’s work to be more transparent and hence more competitive. It’s argued that in the past, the lure or image of Hollywood allowed more mogul leeway as running a studio, handing the creative industry, “managing a Jennifer Lopez,” etc. was harder to quantify. With digital both making the studio returns or numbers easier to read, public and shareable, creating transparency; and, lowering the cost of entry for new digital companies to immediately step into publishing, video and home entertainment, creating more competition, the mogul is more and more clearly “wearing the emperor’s clothes” in a quickly diminishing empire or moguldom. Read more >>
Note to Media: Get Mobile Quick!
As Media & Entertainment continues to try to innovate to support new platforms like Facebook, Twitter (and Google), there continues to be new research that resurrects mobility, i.e., cell phones.
It’s not just the iPhones that are driving your studio I.T. divisions insane, but if you really want to go global with your media footprint, you no longer can ignore developing hard for mobile platforms.
The mobile runway is open, but will be getting very crowded; which is okay, because there’s no longer a walled garden – or to use my ‘runway’ metaphor, a secured airport – so there’s plenty of room to take-off with mobile.
- 10x number of new mobile devices each computing cycle (smatphones, Kindles, Nooks, Couriers, tablets, netbooks)
- Mobile adoption curve is 8x steeper than desktop
- iPhone + iTouch ecosystem fastest hardware user growth in tech history
After the jump, the Morgan Stanley presentation from Mary Meeker’s Web 2.0 presentation…
Imagenation: Hybrid Marketing & Distribution
These players certainly don’t need “help” in the global economic sense. Imagenation out of Abu Dhabi – with $1B in film capital – continues to create ties in the world of cross-culture film financing. In a recent expansion with early partner Hyde Park Entertainment ($250M in Imagenation funding) into Singapore with $75M towards four films, Imagenation looks keen to transition its financing into Asia, which many say is the next big Hollywood donor after the Middle East and India (Reliance and Dreamworks).
It’s an intelligent play to bridge capital between markets, i.e., share risk globally. Per Imagenation CEO: “It give us a focus east – Singapore, China, India – which is something that we want to do. And as Abu Dhabi and Singapore have a very close relationship, as city states, this strengthens our bonds with Singapore.” It also opens up their early production resources to digital effects, animation and gaming, including EA and Ubisoft. Read more >>