AP Gets It Wrong Again: Wants To Restrict Certain Reports To 500 Words

from the you're-not-bloggers dept

It seems that the Associated Press continues to struggle to figure out how to deal with this whole online thing. It's still trying to revamp its pricing structure after a bunch of newspapers canceled their contracts as they were pretty pissed off that the AP is effectively competing with its own member papers. The AP has also had a bit of a run-in with bloggers over its ridiculous fair use policies. Its latest move seems to, once again, be getting pretty much everything backwards. Famed film critic Roger Ebert is complaining that the AP has sent down word from on-high that all entertainment articles must be 500 words or shorter -- including film reviews, interviews, news stories, trend pieces and (best of all) "think pieces." Apparently, if you need more than 500 words to get people thinking, you're a bit too verbose. On top of that, the AP is asking those same entertainment writers to focus on more salacious, attention grabbing stories in picking what to write.

It's not difficult to see what's going on here. The AP is trying to be more "bloggy." Shorter, more attention grabbing pieces? Apparently, it's decided that people online only want to read the quick hits on salacious stories. Of course, despite what some may think, that's not really true. The AP has an opportunity to be better than all of that. It could draw serious attention by creating real content that people want, rather than running after the latest fad. But, apparently, that's not in the AP's plan. It has the resources to do what various small-time blogs can't do, but apparently, it's going in the other direction. Perhaps it's not too surprising, but it's no less a mistake.

Yes, short, attention grabbing stories get traffic, but that doesn't mean good, thorough journalism would get ignored. The problem the AP is having isn't that its stories are too long, or not attention-grabbing enough. It's that it still views itself as a gatekeeper of information, rather than an enabler of both news gathering and news distribution. Of course, with each misstep by the AP, others are quickly moving in to take its place.

Filed Under: blogging, entertainment, reporting, roger ebert
Companies: associated press

Kia Decides That It No Longer Wants Its TV Commercials To Be Entertaining

from the um...-why? dept

For a while now, we've been pointing out how, for advertising to be effective, it also needs to be good content that people don't just "not mind" seeing, but which they're willing to actively seek out. It appears that automaker Kia has decided to go with the exact opposite strategy. Reader Brooks writes in to point us to the news that Kia's new marketing director in the US doesn't want people entertained:

"We don't want to spend a good chunk of our time in a 30-second spot trying to entertain people."

That's part of his plan to move away from a series of rather entertaining commercials that have provided plenty of free advertising for the firm, as people passed them around virally. Apparently, Kia would prefer that no one help them advertise and, indeed, that no one actually watches their ads. Time to think again, Kia. If you want advertising to be effective, it does need to entertain people.

Filed Under: advertising, cars, content, entertainment
Companies: kia

Live Commercials Work Because They're Entertaining

from the advertising-is-content dept

One of the points we've been making for years is that advertising is content. That is, as people have more and more media options, advertisers can no longer assume they have a captive audience who will watch ads because they have nothing better to do. Rather, advertisers have to make their ads entertaining, so that people will want to watch them. The latest example of this is a New York Times article about how TV networks are bringing back the live commercial. For example, Jimmy Kimmel has been doing amusing live pitches for Nikon, Pontiac, and Quiznos on his late night show, and Jay Leno hosted a silly American Gladiators segment on his show to sell Klondike bars. Hollywood executives have a bad habit of viewing commercials as the spinach viewers have to eat in order to get the content they're actually interested in. But these examples illustrate that commercials don't have to be boring. With a little ingenuity, and funny pitchmen like Kimmel and Leno, commercials can be made interesting enough that consumers are actually interested in watching them. Part of the reason people hate commercials is that they're so repetitive, but live pitches can help break up the monotony by performing the pitch differently every time. And once commercials are actually interesting, the TiVo "problem" goes away, because even most consumers who have PVRs with commercial-skipping functions won't use them because they're actually interested in watching the commercials.

Filed Under: ads, advertising is content, commercials, entertainment, live commercials, television

Surprising Survey Results Reveal That Movie Download Sites Do, In Fact, Suck

from the how-much-clearer-can-we-be? dept

It's incredibly obvious -- to everybody but the Hollywood movie studios, apparently -- just how bad movie-download sites are. When the first studio-backed efforts launched several years ago, the problems were clear. In the following five years, they haven't been fixed, despite plenty of reviews pointing them out. The studios made "protecting" their content with ridiculously restrictive DRM their top priority; delivering a good user experience came in somewhere down towards the bottom. Now, a new study has yet again pointed out that consumers don't like these services, and yet again makes it clear why: poor selection, unreasonable prices, poor quality. Add in the general difficulty in getting video from the services to users' TVs, and you've got a recipe for failure. These are many of the same points that have been made over the download services' lifetime, but that the studios and companies running the services have largely failed to address. It's little wonder, then, to see a site like Movielink, the studios' own download site, get sold at a huge loss since it's going to take wholesale changes to give it any chance of success.

Filed Under: entertainment, media, movie downloads, movies
Companies: blockbuster, movielink

Universal Music To Test DRM-Free Sales, But Perhaps For The Wrong Reasons

from the nose-cut-spite-face dept

Following the lead of rival record label EMI, Universal Music says it will later this month begin selling DRM-free music downloads through a variety of sites -- but not through Apple's iTunes Music Store. Apple and Universal have a long-running spat which culminated in Universal's refusal last month to to renew its iTunes Music Store contract. While its music is still sold through the store, Universal could yank it at any time. Universal's decision not to give Apple the unprotected tracks seems like little more than an attempt to reduce its influence in the music market -- which is a little ironic, considering that it was the record labels' insistence on using DRM that made Apple so powerful in the space. Making the unprotected tracks available through other retailers is about the only way that Universal can fight back, but it's hard to see the benefit in not selling the product through iTMS, given its popularity. The problem for Universal is that few people pay attention to what label artists' records are on, so they're not going to go, "Oh, 50 Cent is on Universal, so I should go to Amazon to buy his unprotected MP3s." If they're an iTMS user, they're generally just going to look and see if the 50 Cent songs they want are available there, then download them. In that case, they're going to purchase the cheaper, DRM-encumbered track, since it's what's available, and Universal misses out on the chance to sell them a higher-priced unrestricted track. The core of the label's disagreement with Apple is pricing -- but their attempt to strike some sort of blow against the company will, in all likelihood, only end up hurting themselves.

Filed Under: entertainment, itunes, music, record labels
Companies: apple, emi, universal music

Blockbuster Takes Movielink Off Studios' Hands For A Pittance

from the on-the-cheap dept

Movielink, the movie download site started by major movie studios, has been up for sale for quite some time. The studios have had a hard time finding a buyer, though, because it's blindingly obvious (to everybody but the studios, apparently) just how badly the site sucks. The studios' desire to lock down the content with restrictive DRM, along with other flaws make the site wholly unattractive for users. It now looks like the studios have finally talked Blockbuster into buying Movielink at a fire-sale price -- less than $20 million, according to the WSJ, compared to the $100 million-plus the studios pumped into the site. Blockbuster may have picked up some download infrastructure on the cheap, but if it hopes to wring any sort of success out of Movielink, it's going to have to completely change the way the site works. But the studios wouldn't let that happen before, since controlling the content was their top priority; since they'll still be licensing the content to Blockbuster, it's unlikely that they'll let it remove any of the barriers to uptake they've put in place.

Filed Under: downloads, entertainment, movies
Companies: blockbuster, movielink

Harry Potter Will Conjure Up Big Sales, Despite Piracy

from the it's-a-magic-trick,-apparently dept

A few weeks back, Michael Moore's latest film, Sicko, was released and fared pretty decently at the box office, despite being available on P2P networks -- a situation one hyperbolic article described as "every film maker's worst marketing nightmare." That's a story that's played out time and time again, as the mere availability of pirated content hasn't held back the sales of legitimate content. Now, stories about the latest Harry Potter book being available on file-sharing networks are starting to come in, ahead of the book's release this weekend. This news isn't being met with the same level of media freakouts as when a reporter discovered Sicko online, with even the CEO of Barnes & Noble saying it "won't sell a single copy less" of the book despite it being available for free online. The biggest reason for this is the inconvenience of the pirated copies: they're huge PDFs, reportedly of low quality. To approximate the book-reading experience, users would have to print out all the pages, which could be time-consuming and expensive, while reading the book on a computer screen or monitor wouldn't be a lot of fun for many people. This draws parallels to other forms of piracy: for instance, while most new movies are available for free from file-sharing networks, plenty of people still want to pay to watch them in a theater, for a variety of reasons. Certainly there are people who will overlook any amount of drawbacks to get free content; chances are they wouldn't pay for legitimate content anyway. But there remains a large market of people who are perfectly willing to pay for content -- so long as content producers can provide them with sufficient value.

Filed Under: books, entertainment, piracy
Companies: barnes & noble

RIAA Says It Shouldn't Have To Pay Legal Fees Because Woman Didn't Settle; Judge Says Think Again

from the a-new-low dept

Despite the RIAA's astounding legal gymnastics and its questionable -- if not illegal -- investigative techniques, it typically finds a way to wiggle out of paying the legal bills of anybody it has sued in its misguided legal campaign against record labels' customers. Though there's been a few exceptions, the group's strategy of dropping cases when people notice their flimsy evidence seems to generally shield them from having to pay costs. That's a real problem, since it makes it very easy, and relatively cheap, for the RIAA to abuse the legal system by filing thousands of suits, then suffer no repercussions when it drops them after they're exposed as bogus. Hopefully, though, that's starting to change, as more judges become aware of the RIAA's tactics, or at least pay attention to the facts of its cases. A judge in Oklahoma has now ordered the RIAA to pay $70,000 in legal fees to an Oklahoma woman, after tossing out the group's suit against her earlier this year. In this case, the RIAA didn't make a very good impression on the judge by claiming that they shouldn't have to pay the defendant's legal bills because she could have avoided being sued, had she "appropriately assisted their copyright infringement investigation and litigation" -- which means had she given in to their bullying and accepting one of their generous settlement offers. That's absolutely ridiculous, as the judge noted, since it steamrolls a defendant's right to defend themselves against bogus suits. It's up there with the RIAA's promise in another case not to incorrectly sue a woman a second time, as long as they didn't have to pay her legal bills for the first time they wrongly sued her. The RIAA has gotten away for far too long with bending the legal system to fit its desires; hopefully those days are coming to an end.

Filed Under: entertainment, lawsuits, music
Companies: riaa

Russian Court Says Visa Can't Cut Off AllofMP3 Unit

from the denied dept

Earlier in the month, Russian authorities shut down the well-known Allofmp3.com site, following complaints from the US government -- and the implication that if they didn't do so, the US would make it hard for Russia to join the World Trade Organization. Of course, the people behind Allofmp3 quickly set up shop at another URL, and went about their business selling dirt-cheap digital music. It's today been reported that Alltunes, another site owned by Allofmp3's parent company, has won a court case against Visa's Russian agent, after Visa refused to process its payments. As the company points out, it's never been convicted of illegal activity, and Visa cut it off after complaints from the IFPI, the international equivalent of the RIAA. It's not clear to what extent Visa and its agents can be forced to =offer their services to a business, however the Allofmp3 folks are correct when they assert that it's not Visa's -- nor the IFPI's -- right to decide when copyright's been violated, particularly when they don't hold any of the copyrights in question.

Filed Under: copyright, entertainment, music
Companies: allofmp3, ifpi, visa

74 Percent Of Nothing Is Still Nothing

from the hot-air dept

The group behind the HD DVD format in Europe claims that it has 74 percent market share of the next-gen DVD market in a handful of western European countries. Of course, they're not including Sony PS3s, which have a Blu-ray drive, in their count, but the bigger point is that they're claiming 74 percent of a miniscule market. This contrived stat, like Toshiba's claim of 60 percent share of the US market, glosses over the problems that are holding it back: DRM that breaks legitimate customers' players, low perceived benefits and high prices. Apparently, though, the HD DVD folks would rather claim to have a big share of a tiny market than to have any share in a market that's actually meaningful. Update: Just in case anybody cares, the Blu-ray people say they're actually the market leaders.

Filed Under: dvd, entertainment
Companies: blu-ray, hd dvd, sony, toshiba