The Social

This is sort of interesting. MTV Networks, which certainly has a lot of video content out there on the Web, on Wednesday released the results of an internal study to determine what kinds of advertisements are most effective and online-friendly matches for short-form online videos.

The conclusion? "Project Inform," the MTV survey, found that a five-second-long "pre-roll" ad in advance of the clip, combined with ten seconds of a semi-transparent ad unit that takes up the lower third of the video (and starts about ten seconds in), makes up "both the most effective and the most audience-friendly ad product for short-form online video," according to a release.

MTVN calls this the "lower one-third product suite." It was tested against two other ad packages, the "sideloader," which combines the five-second pre-roll with an ad that rolls out of the side of the video window; and a traditional 30-second pre-roll before the ad.

So, obviously, that's a limited number of options and certainly doesn't reflect the full range of possibilities for online ads. But it was thorough: Project Inform ran consumer survey tests across about 50 million video streams on the Web properties for media brands like MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon.

"Short-form online video consumption is exploding, but there's still a lot of confusion among marketers over which ad formats deliver for brands without compromising the user experience," Nada Stirratt, executive vice president of digital advertising at the Viacom-owned MTV Networks, said in the release. "By exploring the viability of new ad products around short-form online video, Project Inform provides the type of insights crucial to creating the innovative, custom solutions that this marketplace needs."

The catch is whether even the highest-performing varieties of online video ads still really rake in the dollars. Online video has been notoriously difficult for companies to monetize, but that's in part because the first variety of video to gain traction on the Web was amateur, user-created content (do top-notch advertisers really want their message next to a video of a squirrel on water skis?) and also because traditional, TV-style ads don't have the same impact alongside shorter Web clips.

There have been some promising signs, though. Video portal Hulu has investigated a couple of experimental video ad formats since launching last year, and has had good news to report on the advertising front--like that its inventory sold out a month after its public debut.

Viacom isn't a member of the Hulu joint venture, which now consists of NBC Universal, Disney's ABC Entertainment, and News Corp. But a limited number of episodes from Comedy Central talk shows "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" started playing on Hulu last year.

Disney's ABC Enterprises announced Thursday that it has entered into online-video joint venture Hulu, currently a partnership between NBC Universal, News Corp., and investor Providence Equity Partners.

This means that TV shows from Disney-owned channels like ABC, SoapNet, and ABC Family will be coming to Hulu. Among them are "Lost," "Grey's Anatomy," "Ugly Betty," and "Scrubs." There will also be Disney movies available on the ad-supported streaming video site, but a press release did not name any of them. Content will be available "soon," the press release explained.

Reports started to surface about a month ago that Disney was in talks to join Hulu.

Robert Iger, president and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, will take a seat on Hulu's board of directors, along with Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney/ABC Television Group, and Kevin Mayer, executive vice president of corporate strategy, business development, and technology at Disney.

ABC already streams a significant amount of television content on ABC.com, and Disney-owned television and video content was some of the first to make an appearance in the iTunes Store's video download section.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney's single biggest shareholder, having sold animation studio Pixar to the company in 2006.

This post was expanded at 8:15 a.m. PT.

Sony Pictures Television has signed a distribution deal with pioneering Web series Rocketboom, which has been producing a quirky daily newscast since 2004.

Under the terms of the agreement--which reports pin in the seven figures--Sony will handle all distribution and ad sales, as well as use its Crackle.com player on the Rocketboom.com Web site. (Until this point, Rocketboom has used a YouTube embed on its home page.) It'll also see additional distribution on Sony's network, which includes the PlayStation 3 console.

Sony bought Crackle, then known as Grouper, back in 2006.

Created by entrepreneur Andrew Baron, Rocketboom rose to fame with actress Amanda Congdon as host, but she left the show on unfavorable terms in 2006 and has since struggled to find a new niche in online media. Congdon's replacement, Joanne Colan, is still at the helm.

In a post on his blog, Baron explained why he chose to seek a distributor (a rarity in the Web video world) rather than raising the money through a venture round: he didn't want to sell out. Mentioning venture-funded video start-ups like Revision3 and Next New Networks, he wrote, "While these networks have provided immense value for the growing transitioning space, they are all controlled now by venture capitalists which tend to have as their primary objective, a sale."

Baron added that it often hasn't helped the quality. "Aside from the hit shows which have spawned the networks, most of the other shows on these networks have not lived up to their predecessors, content-wise, and new shows are often canceled soon after they are launched." Indeed, Revision3 and Next New Networks have both seen new programs debut only to peter out after only a few episodes--something that a major TV network can handle, but which can be a serious wound for a video start-up.

"Instead of gaining capital to burn while continuing to build or seek an advertising solution, we now have one of the most prominent advertising solutions out there," Baron wrote, "along with increased distribution, a road map for expansion and a guarantee that I believe is an unprecedented deal for this space."

What he was saying, albeit obliquely, is that Rocketboom did need a leg up. As more and more early Web video shows have either faded away (Lonelygirl15 just ended its run, and The Burg's creators ended the project to collaborate on a new show backed by former Disney chief Michael Eisner) or acquired (Wallstrip was bought by CBS Interactive, and Revision3 now syndicates Wine Library and Epic Fu) remaining "indie" operations need to stay afloat. Sony can provide Rocketboom with better exposure as well as a more streamlined advertising operation.

Baron is no stranger to shaking things up, having catalyzed one of the blogosphere's most navel-gazing debates when he briefly put his Twitter account up for sale on eBay.

Disclaimer: Wallstrip parent company CBS Interactive also publishes CNET News.com.

You know you love it: The CW Television Network has decided to start streaming its teen show Gossip Girl online again.

According to The New York Times, free ad-supported episodes of the program will soon reappear on The CW's Web site. They'd been taken down in April as an "experiment" to see how it affected viewership ratings.

(Credit: The CW)

Here's what happened: The melodrama about upper-crust high schoolers in Manhattan, based on a best-selling young-adult book series, had been blessed with the greatest of hype--the star power of creator Josh Schwartz, better known as the guy who brought us The O.C.; regular mentions in Gawker and New York magazine; scandalous sightings of its young cast partying all over the city; and racy ad campaigns featuring taglines like "OMFG" and "Every Parent's Nightmare."

But its ratings had been downright subpar, even as the show's subject matter grew more and more guilty-pleasure-fantastic with sex, drugs, gambling, murder, and the exploits of rakish antihero Chuck Bass.

The CW had said all along that because of Gossip Girl's young, tech-savvy audience--the title character is an anonymous blogger, after all--that traditional television ratings simply didn't apply. Nielsen ratings, the longstanding measure of broadcast popularity, don't measure episodes recorded on DVRs or watched on the Web, after all. But under pressure, the network pulled the show from its Web site to see if TV ratings would improve.

Any gain in ratings was negligible, the Times report said. That said, Gossip Girl episodes had been available for purchase in the iTunes Store throughout the "streaming ban," and it was certainly still possible to record them on set-top boxes.

But with the second season of Gossip Girl premiering September 1, this means that you'll once again be able to get your Upper East Side baby billionaire fix from the comfort of your procrastination-friendly office cubicle.

Chuck Bass would so approve.

Disclosure: The CW is a joint venture between Warner Bros. and CBS, parent company of CNET News.

NEW YORK--As head of Web video studio Vuguru, longtime entertainment exec Michael Eisner has been on a sort of tent-revival tour for the past few years, preaching the gospel of Internet video. On Thursday, his audience was the ad industry, and he was there to tell them not to be fazed by disappointing revenues on Web video.

"I'm seeding what I think will be a future business," Eisner explained. He's been vocal in admitting that online video isn't a profitable business yet. But it will be, he emphasized, and he wanted to position himself to be first in line when the money starts rolling in. "You have an option when you leave 40 years of a public company. You can continue being a dyspeptic, aging, wheelchaired, drooling, irrelevant executive, or you can put the word 'new' next to you."

Eisner was speaking at the Digital Content Newfront, ad group Digitas' take on the traditional television upfront event. The event, part of Internet Week New York, showcased online video content companies like 60 Frames, MySpaceTV, MTV New Media, Generate, Next New Networks, and Eisner's own Vuguru. In the audience were loads of ad-industry types; Eisner's goal was to convince them that video on the Web is worth the investment.

Michael Eisner

"The advertisers are recognizing how big the audience can be," Eisner said. "My interest is getting in there before they explode."

He was interviewed on stage by Dmitry Shapiro, founder of Veoh Networks, the online video site in which Eisner is an investor. And Eisner affirmed to the advertisers and marketers present that despite its reputation as a cesspool of dogs on skateboards and cats on treadmills, new media isn't all that new. "(Online video) has different dynamics in the technology, but it doesn't have different dynamics in the terms of story. The same rules from cavemen to obviously the Greeks and Shakespeare...the idea of the story as we all learn in high school English and theater, those really will prevail in new media."

Vuguru debuted in 2007 with Prom Queen, a scripted series syndicated on MySpaceTV, YouTube, Veoh, and a whole host of other platforms. Eisner has been open about the fact that financially, it was not a success. But he's kept going, with several new Veoh series including the Monkees-like The All-For-Nots, and a new comedy series centered on classic trading card brand Topps, which Eisner acquired. Called Back On Topps, it cast two comedians as fictional heirs to the Topps fortune and chronicles their run-ins with famous sports stars.

Creating promotional series is one option for brands to make a few bucks off online video, Eisner explained. So is sponsorship. "Almost everybody working inside is nervous that you're going to damage the brand," he warned. "You have to take risks, and you have to know the line which you cannot go over."

He also suggested that advertisers could build particularly creative advertising campaigns that tie specifically into the shows they're placed with, finding a middle ground between product placement and traditional commercials. "The commercials that I believe could follow (videos) as long as they're short, ten seconds...somehow had the ambiance of the same environment, the same story. The audience would get the point that the brand was somehow involved in the creative process," he described. "So that would be not product integration and not a straight dropping-in of a ten-second spot, but a sensitivity to the environment. That's something that's never been done before."

Eisner reiterated that big shifts in media historically don't rake in money at first. He compared the rise of online video to cable television versus broadcast: "The highest-quality programming is now on cable," he said, adding that basic cable is "no longer an ancillary market or a rerun market. The dollars are enough that it's a primary market."

He couldn't stress enough that advertisers should gear up and get ready to make big investments in the field. "It's just beginning to happen. We now call 'new media' obviously broadband, Internet, whatever, but there was a time that new media was home video. There was a time that new media was TV. There was a time that new media was motion pictures in the nickelodeon theater."

Eisner took a moment to ask Shapiro about what's next at Veoh, which just raised another round of venture funding. "I think the key is discovery," Shapiro replied. "In a world of 400 cable channels it's hard to find something good to watch. In a world of a million shows it's practically impossible."

All that time you waste at the office watching stupid cat videos on YouTube adds up: numbers released by ComScore on Wednesday indicate that U.S. Web users watched more than 10 billion online videos during the month of February. That's a 66 percent gain from the previous year.

Leading the pack, with a 35.4 percent share of videos viewed throughout the month, were Google-owned video sites--in other words, YouTube. The total video count for Google, according to ComScore, is about 3.6 billion, 3.42 billion of which were YouTube-specific. In a distant second place is News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media (MySpaceTV and its ilk) with 5.8 percent of the market.

Following Fox Interactive are a melange of big tech portals and media companies: Yahoo, Microsoft, Viacom, Time Warner (excluding AOL), Disney, AOL, ABC, and Comcast. Nowhere to be seen is Hulu, the joint video venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal--in February, it was still in private beta. It also doesn't include digital download marketplaces like iTunes.

But this could be the golden age of online video, in a sense: my colleague Greg Sandoval noted in his coverage of the National Association of Broadcasters conference that as digital video recorders and set-top boxes grow increasingly sophisticated, consumers may have more options for watching TV shows on demand and for watching content on TVs that's currently online-only.

On the other hand, ComScore's numbers don't seem to indicate that long-form TV shows make up a huge chunk of online video. The average video length, according to the statistics, was 2.7 minutes. And the average viewer watched 75 videos in the month of February, which seems to point to a lot of short clips.

What I want to know: How many of those YouTube videos had to do with Rick Astley?

This post was updated at 10:12 AM PT to correct the spelling of Joost CEO Mike Volpi's name.

Could a browser-based version of its peer-to-peer software save Joost, the heavily hyped video start-up founded by the creators of Skype and Kazaa?

Portfolio's Kevin Maney wrote a lengthy profile of the once-hot company, and buried inside is a juicy tidbit about a future development: "This year, viewers will be able to watch Joost videos in a browser window," the profile read. Right now, Joost requires a software download, which critics have said is one of its prime setbacks when just about every other online video start-up is browser-based. "Go to Joost's Web site, click on shows like Seth Green's edgy Robot Chicken or an old Rocky and Bullwinkle episode and you can watch them as easily as you'd watch a video on YouTube." Well, that all depends on the technology working as smoothly as YouTube, and the quality being up to par.

Representatives from Joost were not immediately available to confirm that a Web-based version of the video player is on track for later in 2008.

Joost could use a boost. Once touted as a "YouTube killer" that would address rampant online video piracy by offering professional content creators access to a high-quality video platform and revenue from top-notch advertisers, it fell from favor when the content proved tepid and more enticing competitors sprang up--namely Hulu, the joint video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.

Recently, CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith, whose company counts Joost among the partners in its "Audience Network" of online video outlets, said that he hasn't given up on it and that CEO Mike Volpi "knows what he's doing."

And perhaps Joost can resuscitate itself. While the Web-based Joost remains shadowy, the company has been making other moves: experimenting with live TV programming, for one, starting with the NCAA basketball championship. It's a good PR move, as the availability of "March Madness" games has, at least for now, put Joost back into the vocabulary of Web users--and onto the computer screens of workplace procrastinators.

Some would say that peer-to-peer video start-up Joost, created by the founders of Skype and Kazaa, failed to live up to the overwhelming hype that surrounded it. CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith, whose CBS Audience Network of online video sites includes a partnership with Joost, isn't one of them.

Speaking to a small gathering of tech and media reporters at CBS' New York headquarters Thursday, Smith gave a firm "no" when asked if Joost--which requires a software download and has slipped from the Web video radar since its buzzworthy debut--was dead in the water. "(Mike) Volpe knows what he's doing," Smith said of the Cisco Systems veteran who serves as the start-up's CEO. "It's got a good team."

Smith did add that he thinks Joost should be Web-based, not a download.

And with regard to Hulu, the joint Web-video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. that has turned out to be quite the pleasant surprise, Smith would not rule out the possibility that CBS might jump on board, presumably by adding Hulu to its list of Audience Network distribution partners--which include AOL, Bebo, Microsoft, Sling Media, Veoh, and CNET Networks, parent company of CNET News.com. He said that there are no technological barriers to bringing CBS' video content to Hulu and that CBS Interactive's "door is always open."

Regarding Hulu's team, Smith said, "We talk to them all the time.".

In an appeal to the coveted youth vote in the upcoming presidential elections, MySpace and MTV announced Thursday that they have joined forces for a series of "one-on-one dialogues" with all the major candidates from both political parties--televised and Webcast events in which presidential hopefuls will answer questions from MySpace members and MTV watchers. Formally, it's a collaboration between MySpace's "Impact" political channel and MTV's "Choose or Lose" election effort (which it has been operating since the dinosaur days of the 1992 election), and it's the first collaboration that the News Corp.-owned social networking site has had with the Viacom-owned pop culture conglomerate.

The conversations with individual presidential candidates will be held town-hall style on college campuses, webcast live on the MySpaceTV video platform (previous coverage here) and MTV.com, and broadcast later that evening on MTV as well as the MTVU college campus television network.

"These dialogues are not going to be a debate," Ian Rowe, MTV's vice president of strategic partnerships, said in an interview with CNET News.com. "They're going to be one-on-one, unfiltered conversations between a group of young people who are sitting inside a college campus auditorium (and) an audience online (that) will have the ability to submit questions in real-time." Rowe added that this will be a totally interactive experience. "They'll be able to literally respond to what the candidate is actually saying during the conversation. Even if you don't have the opportunity to physically be in the room, you can participate tangibly in the conversation."

MySpace had initially announced its plans to hold presidential town hall events in May, but no further developments were provided at the time. The social network also plans to hold a mock election early in 2008.

The first of the MTV-MySpace dialogues has been confirmed for September 27, with Democratic candidate John Edwards in the key primary state of New Hampshire. Future events will individually involve Democrats Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Christopher Dodd, and Bill Richardson; and Republicans Rudy Giuliani, Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Sam Brownback. The only missing candidate of note is arguably former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican whose surprising second-place finish in the Iowa straw polls suddenly catapulted him into the label of "dark horse."

If the prominence of blogs in the political process was the major digital media development of the 2004 presidential election and the "paper trail" of YouTube videos was what marked the 2006 midterms (recall former Sen. George Allen's "macaca moment"), it appears that "interactive" conversations with presidential candidates, thanks to new media platforms, are coming to define the '08 campaign. Earlier this summer, CNN and YouTube collaborated on a formal Democratic debate in which YouTube users could submit video questions in advance of the event. In the MTV-MySpace "dialogues," these questions may be submitted live--through either the MySpaceIM instant messaging platform, e-mail, or text messaging.

"We're offering participation through all the tools of new media," said Jeff Berman, MySpace's general manager of video operations. Representatives from both companies hinted that further details will become available throughout the next few weeks.