Digital Media

The television season is about to arrive full force.

Soon, most of your favorite television shows, as well as new series, will be making their way into your home. But if you're unsure when your show will come back, you want to catch up, or you simply want to track the show as the season progresses, I have you covered with some great sites.

Let's check them out.

Tracking TV

Hulu...There are few better ways to track your favorite shows than to watch them on Hulu, which is backed by NBC Universal, ABC, and Fox.

Thanks to strategic partnerships that Hulu inked with networks, finding and watching your favorite shows is quick and easy. And since the site is ad-supported, you won't need to worry about doling out cash to watch your shows.

I spend considerable time on Hulu. I caught up with last season's of "Family Guy" on the site. The videos run well. The ads, while a necessary evil, aren't that bad. And the quality is outstanding. Even better, you can embed Hulu videos into your blog, making it a great platform to share your favorite shows with friends.

Hulu has outstanding video quality.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

MyTVRSS...When you first get to MyTVRSS, you'll probably be a little sickened by its design. A black background sitting behind pink type makes the site an extremely unattractive target for your attention. But once you realize you'll spend very little time there, you'll get past it.

MyTVRSS lists every television show currently in production. When you click on one of the links on that site, you'll find a show summary, information on the last episode that aired (assuming it isn't a new show), and the series premiere's date and time. Unfortunately, not all the show listings are as informative as I would have liked. For instance, the site's "The Office" page was great. But its "30 Rock" page didn't feature nearly as much information. Your mileage will vary.

As you sift through all the shows on the site, you can pick those series that you watch most often by checking the box next to their titles. At the bottom of the page is a "Create Feed" option. When you click that button, you'll receive a unique RSS feed that you can add to your reader. That feed will alert you when your shows air. For someone like me who easily forgets a favorite show is on, it's a nice service to have.

MyTVRSS is certainly an ugly site.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

NEW YORK--Broadcast network CBS will be advertising its fall TV season with a video-chip ad embedded in an issue of Entertainment Weekly.

The September 18 issue of the Time Inc.-owned magazine will feature the first video ad to appear in print, George Schweitzer, CBS marketing president, said Wednesday at a press conference at the company's headquarters here.

The ad with embedded video.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

The ad will be launched in partnership with PepsiCo to promote Pepsi Max soda and the TV network's Monday prime-time lineup. Not everyone will be seeing it: the ad will appear in a magazine insert sent to subscribers in the New York and Los Angeles areas--an edition without the video chip will be sent to subscribers elsewhere and show up on newsstands.

The technology for the battery-powered ads was manufactured by a Los Angeles-based company called Americhip, and each ad can handle about 40 minutes of video.

Here are some more details about the Americhip technology: the screen, which is 2.7 millimeters thick, has a 320x240 resolution. The battery lasts for about 65 to 70 minutes, and can be recharged, believe it or not, with a mini USB cord--there's a jack on the back of it. The screen, which uses thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) technology, is enforced by protective polycarbonate. It's a product that has been in development at Americhip for about two years, spokesman Tim Clegg told CNET News via e-mail.

"It's leadership in innovation, which we really stress at CBS in every part of our company," Schweitzer said of the ads, which were developed with the collaboration of the Ignition Factory, a division of the Omnicom Group's OMD media agency.

PepsiCo has been experimenting with edgy, experimental ads for some time now, distributing millions of 3D glasses for its SoBe LifeWater Super Bowl ad earlier this year. It more recently launched a new Mountain Dew flavor by inviting prominent Twitter users to a party at a trendy Brooklyn venue.

Pepsi Max is the company's new diet soda geared toward men, advertised earlier this summer with bold print ads that declared, "Save the calories for bacon."

"The evolution of marketing television in the fall--it used to be as simple as this," Schweitzer said, holding up a vintage copy of TV Guide. "It was axiomatic in those days. If you took an ad in TV Guide, people watched your program. Not anymore."

Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.

This post was updated at 1:38 p.m. PT with more details about Americhip's technology.

In a move that makes him seem a bit like Dr. Evil wanting to be paid one hundred billion dollars for Austin Powers' ransom, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has said that he will charge for all the online content associated with the newspapers and television stations he owns.

Rupert Murdoch, media baron

(Credit: Dan Farber/CBS Interactive)

It's a goal that some in the digital-media space will bill as ludicrous--and some as inevitable.

The Financial Times reported the news Thursday, adding that Murdoch had spotted "some good signs of life" in the battered advertising sector.

He's already got most of The Wall Street Journal, which News Corp. acquired two years ago, behind a pay wall. But he also owns the rest of Dow Jones & Company, the Fox television and film empire, the New York Post, and the U.K.'s The Times. News Corp. is also a partner in Hulu, the joint video venture that offers a big chunk of Fox television content (as well as NBC and ABC) for free on the Web.

Robert Iger, the CEO of new Hulu partner Disney, said at a conference last month that he does not believe Web content needs to be offered for free, and that consumers will be willing to pay for it.

"We intend to charge for all our news Web sites," Murdoch said, according to the Financial Times. "If we're successful, we'll be followed by all media."

In late 2007, well before the market collapse last fall, Murdoch had said pretty much the exact opposite, claiming that a free and ad-supported model would be more beneficial than a subscription model for The Wall Street Journal.

Presumably the new paid-content strategy wouldn't apply to News Corp.'s digital-only assets, like social network MySpace.

Are you ready to go digital? Almost 3 million American homes may not be...yet.

Friday is the deadline for the country's move from analog to digital TV. At that point, most analog signals will be shut off. But 2.8 million homes still lack the necessary equipment to receive digital transmissions, says a report released Wednesday by Nielsen.

The number of homes not ready for DTV represents 2.5 percent of the TV market. The report notes that younger, African American, and Hispanic households are disproportionately unready, while the elderly are the most ready.

Geographically, the greatest number of unprepared homes are in the Western U.S., where cable isn't as prevalent as in other parts of the country, says Nielsen. The highest number of ready viewers are in the Eastern U.S.

The digital switchover was originally set for February. But with too many people still unprepared, the government delayed the move. Without a digital TV, cable or satellite connection, or a converter box, viewers won't be able to tune into their favorite shows.

Nielsen is optimistic, though, noting that the delay from February to June gave more people time to get ready. And those still not prepared are expected to catch up.

"Since February, when the U.S. government postponed the transition for three months, the number of households that are completely unready has been cut in half - from 5.8 million to 2.8 million homes," said Sara Erichson, president of media client services at Nielsen. "Given the importance that television plays in the day-to-day life of most people, we expect that the most of the remaining unready homes will take the necessary steps to get ready once the stations make the final switch to digital transmission. We will continue to follow this trend closely."

From the government's end, the Federal Communications Commission expects some bumps in the road, but is optimistic.

NEW YORK--According to former Vice President Al Gore, the importance of sustainability doesn't just apply to the environment. It also is key to the future of advertising.

"It really comes out of the environment, but in my opinion the key theme of this century really is sustainability," Gore said. "This theme of environmental sustainability has become a part of our culture, it's a part of our discourse, and I'm very optimistic that it will soon be a part of our policy."

Addressing the crowd of advertisers and online-media types at the Digital Content NewFront event put on by Digitas on Wednesday, Gore was speaking not as a "recovering politician" or a green-tech evangelist, but as the co-founder of Current Media, the experimental cable news channel that relies heavily on user-created content for both editorial and advertisements.

It's about time for our old views of advertising to die, he said.

"In the 20th century, the advertising model was based on the same principles that the Industrial Revolution was based on: scale," Gore said. "It was big, it was blunt, very expensive, and very intrusive, and audiences have now begun to resist that old advertising model even as the environment in which it is presented changes a great deal. The new model is very different because the media landscape is completely different."

More than half of the advertisements on Current are called "VCAMs," or "viewer-created advertising messages," Gore said. These are videos selected out of user submissions for brands interested in advertising on Current; the winner is paid by the advertiser, though it costs significantly less than the production budget of a traditional TV ad, and the winner receives an additional payment if the advertiser wants to use it outside of Current.

It's a model not unlike the wildly successful T-shirt company Threadless, which gets thousands of design submissions and gives a cash prize to the ones that it subsequently prints and sells.

Gore showed off a series of VCAMs proudly, as though they were home videos of his kids: One of them, created by two 24-year-olds, was a Mountain Dew ad about aspiring to be a professional hide-and-seek player. Another, created by a 29-year-old, was a T-Mobile ad showing people excitedly attempting to get picked for a "fave five" as though it were a dodgeball team. Gore mentioned another that was created by a 17-year-old who subsequently received a $50,000 check when the advertiser wanted to use it outside of Current.

There are problems, obviously, which some of the audience members brought up in questions. There are plenty of brands that wouldn't get aspiring filmmakers quite as jazzed as the car and gadget companies whose ads Gore showed off. And while the Flip-camera-toting young adults responsible for Current's VCAMs have the pluck and the free time to run around making commercials, it's easy to theorize that it would be tougher for a network with an older audience to pull it off.

Then there's the fact that while Current has been way ahead of the curve on some digital trends--displaying live Twitter messages onscreen, for example--it's still not a huge media powerhouse. The company canceled its scheduled initial public offering earlier this year, citing the bleak economic climate.

Gore, however, had an example of successful "sustainable advertising" beyond Current. What we can look at, he said, is his old job: politics.

"The most powerful new brand that we've all seen unveiled over the last two years is (Barack Obama)," Gore said, showing a slide of the "O" sunrise logo that became so well known during Obama's successful presidential campaign. "And what is it about this brand that made it so incredibly successful? It was all about empowerment, it was all about involving people to help deliver the message. It was very tuned into the new technologies and how people use them."

Just as the Obama campaign made efficient use of inexpensive marketing and publicity tools on the Web, Gore believes that the digital age has made it possible for high-quality ads to be ubiquitous, rather than just at the one time of the year when people get really pumped about what commercials will be on TV.

"During the Super Bowl, people leave during the game rather than the ads. They want to see the ads because they know something extra has gone into Super Bowl ads," Gore said. "(But) it's not sustainable to have that kind of ad budget and that kind of focused creativity that you find on those ads completely ubiquitous throughout the television year."

At the end of his talk, the former vice president was left speechless when one audience member asked him if he believed that the problem of carbon emissions could be solved by 2029 through the use of technology coming from UFOs.

"No," he said after a long pause. "I do not."

Social media is coming to Warner Bros. Television Group's online properties, thanks to a smallish AOL property called Socialthing.

A feed of members' activity across Warner Bros. entertainment sites--TheWB.com, KidsWB.com, DC Hero Zone, MomLogic, Essence, and TheCW.com--will be displayed on their Socialthing profiles. So, if you watch a "Gossip Girl" video on TheCW.com or play a game on DC Hero Zone, it'll show up in your feed, and you can keep tabs on what your friends are doing as well (and share bits of content with them). There will also be fictional Socialthing profiles for characters like the "Gossip Girl" cast as part of a broader promotional effort.

As some others have pointed out, it's nice to see AOL finally showing some synergy with parent company Time Warner. You know, before it gets spun off and all.

AOL purchased Socialthing, a would-be competitor to FriendFeed, last summer and integrated it into the "People Networks" division anchored by the company's earlier acquisition of Bebo. Last month, AOL relaunched Socialthing as "a revolutionary new platform that brings social-networking services to Web sites and enables publishers to attract new users and keep them engaged wherever they are on the Web" and announced that it would be working the service into its MediaGlow content network.

From what it sounds like, it won't be all that different to what Viacom has been doing with its own "social platform" technology, Flux. Right now, members can log in with AOL and AIM accounts, but it'll soon be expanded to include Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, and OpenID credentials with the help of the various data portability tools out there.

Disclosure: The CW television network is a joint venture between Warner Bros. and CBS. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.

Google is seeking to turn its TV advertising program into a one-stop shop.

The Internet search giant is currently testing Google TV Ads Online, an interface designed to enable advertisers to purchase ads through its nearly one-year-old Google TV Ads program, its YouTube site, and, eventually, Internet sites running video, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

A limited group of advertisers is currently testing the service, which could debut in the months to come, the Journal noted.

Google's move to develop a one-stop system for TV and video advertising comes at a time when consumers are increasingly using the Internet to view television shows and full-feature films. Where consumers go, advertisers tend to follow.

Last May, Google turned the switch on for its TV ad program, which is designed to enable advertisers to bid on TV ads, and pay for those ads when they are actually clicked on and delivered. In September, five months after its official debut of Google TV Ads, the company announced partnerships with Bloomberg TV, as well as NBC Universal, to supply television advertising over its system.

Media-center start-up Boxee, which aggregates Web video for television set-top boxes, has launched a new version that restores access to video hub Hulu. The NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture had pulled its content from Boxee after content partners took issue with it.

But it's not really the same: Boxee has brought back Hulu by extending its support for RSS feeds, and is pulling the video content in that way.

"Like IE, Firefox, or Google Reader, the RSS reader supports Google Video, Yahoo, YouTube and feeds from many other websites," a post on the Boxee blog by CEO Avner Ronen read. "While it's not as attractive or robust as our previous Hulu application, it will additionally support Hulu's public RSS feeds."

Industry talks continue, the post continued. "While we don't come from an entertainment or cable background, we are learning quickly. It is a complex business. Our meetings with Hulu and their content providers reinforced that point," Ronen wrote. "They are trying to adjust to a new reality, but they need time."

Anybody else sort of see this one coming?

It's a matter of weeks before the U.S. cuts out analog television signals entirely, switching to an all-digital market, but the fund established by the government to provide $40 subsidies to people who need to purchase digital converter boxes is out of money and has established a wait list. More than 100,000 people had already been wait-listed as of Monday, USA Today reported.

So, if you rely on "rabbit ears" and are still in need of that coupon, here's what to do. The application process on the TV converter box Web site is still the same, but now, you'll be put in line for the first-come, first-served waiting list as more funds become available. You'll also be given a reference number, much like a package-tracking number, that you can input into the Web site to check up on the status and check up on your estimated mailing date.

The all-digital transition is set for February 17, which means that more than 70 million analog televisions in the U.S. will be rendered useless unless they have the proper converter boxes to work with their indoor ("rabbit ears") or outdoor antennae. USA Today reported that the Department of Commerce's National Television and Information Administration isn't sure when more funds will be available, and attributed the shortage to a surge in coupon requests late in 2008 that exceeded expectations.

One option for the government is to delay the analog-to-digital transition--again. In the meantime, the Web site recommends some pricier alternatives: buy a converter box without the coupon, buy a digital TV, or subscribe to cable or satellite programming.

Or you could just ditch your TV and just go outside instead. The digital TV transition Web site, however, does not suggest that.