AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

AdAge.com
Ovation TV is finally ready for its close-up. Ten years after its birth, and one year after a major overhaul and rebirth under new ownership, the now-national arts and culture TV channel has lined up marketing partnerships and integrated promotions to boost subscriber cable systems and attract more marketers by partnering with the [...]

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paidContent.org
William Morris Agency is launching a new branded content and marketing division, called Agency 3.0, working with former Amp’d Mobile CEO and founder Peter Adderton. The division, which will operate as a separate company, has most of the creative team behind Amp’d’s critically acclaimed content services, and has signed on Qualcomm and Clearwire as clients, [...]

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Silicon Alley Insider
After a brutal, 100-day writers strike, the networks promised shorter upfront presentations for advertisers this week. So what did they cut? All the talk about digital.
For the past two years the networks have waxed on about digital opportunities for advertisers. Many felt they dwelled too much on digital: this is about TV, after [...]

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Mashable
StumbleUpon’s video vertical, aptly named StumbleVideo, has just added six new content providers, including College Humor, Funny or Die, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Veoh and vbs.tv. Tack this onto existing content providers YouTube, MySpace and Metacafe, and it looks like the gang’s pretty much all here.
If you’ve ever used StumbleVideo, you know the experience is almost [...]

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The Los Angeles Times
The online entertainment store reels in one of the last holdouts among major channels, agreeing to a rare pricing concession to land hit shows like “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “The Wire.”
Apple Inc. has scooped up Time Warner Inc.’s HBO to feed television shows to its online iTunes store, reeling [...]

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The Wall Street Journal
It was another indication of the emerging paradigm shift in Internet comedy.
In a San Francisco nightclub this past Wednesday evening, a noisy crowd gathered for the weekly taping of “Internet Superstar,” an online-only TV show that chronicles goofball Web celebrities. Since the people behind the program have been plowing this field longer [...]

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Variety
Studio brass taking broad way to distribution
Media titans used to obsess about piracy. Nowadays, they are more likely to fixate on ubiquity.
News Corp. prexy-chief operating officer Peter Chernin repeatedly invoked the need to distribute content as widely as possible during Wednesday afternoon’s Milken Institute panel on the consequences of the digital revolution. Fellow panelists [...]

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Yahoo Press Release
Sony to buy digital media ID company Gracenote for $260 million
Sony Corp. of America said Tuesday it agreed to buy digital media identification company Gracenote Inc. for $260 million.
Gracenote’s database supplies song names for CDs in a computer. It is also working on building a movie library to identify DVDs and determine if [...]

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paidContent.org
Warner Bros. TV Group is partnering with its Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) sibling Essence magazine on a series of online and broadcast moves, starting with a revamped, video-heavy website for the pub this summer. Then, jumping off from the new Essence.com, WBTVG will work on turning the site’s broadband programming into series for television. [...]

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The Wall Street Journal
Producers of the Internet-video serial “lonelygirl15″ — once thought to be an amateur project but later revealed to be the product of professionals — have raised $5 million from prominent technology investors to expand and introduce new online shows.
The new funding for EQAL, the Los Angeles company behind “lonelygirl” and another popular [...]

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