Federated Media have teamed up with Univeral Pictures to provide a new site built around movies and twitter. CinemaTweets, sponsored by Funny People and Universal Studios, taps in to what is hot and now in the world of movies. Be in-the-know about the latest releases, and chime in using Twitter. Let everyone know what you are watching!
The site itself is very simple, it shows a column down the left hand side which are tweets from your favourite funny people on the internet, and the column in the middle shows tweets from any users who has hashed #cinematweets. Everyone at the moment is tweeting about their favourite funny movie.
This is another great marketing service from Federated Media. Federated Media say they are a conversational advertising network, and in this case it seems as though they had an advertising campaign that needed traction, so in order to gain traction they built a new site which is supposed to build a community around the site pushing a specific movie. Great idea as long as the community actually find and uses the site and gets involved.
I’m sure the majority of our readers have already heard about the new music video partnership between Universal Music Group and Google (Youtube). I thought I would just quickly recap and add in the press release and then discuss why this is a great idea.
The full press release is below for you to digest, and naturally we’ll have more analysis next week.
UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP AND YOUTUBE TO LAUNCH REVOLUTIONARY PREMIUM MUSIC AND VIDEO SERVICE
VEVO – UMG’s Premium Music Service Powered By YouTube To Launch In Coming Months
NEW YORK, NY and SAN BRUNO, CA, April 9, 2009 – Doug Morris, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Universal Music Group (UMG), the world’s leading music company and Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer of Google Inc., today announced that UMG and YouTube, a Google subsidiary, are working together to launch VEVO, a music and video entertainment service that will feature UMG’s premium video content.
In addition to VEVO, YouTube has renewed and extended its successful partnership with UMG that allows users to continue creating and watching user-generated videos containing UMG sound recordings and Universal Music Publishing Group’s compositions on YouTube through various territories around the world. The two companies will also share advertising revenue on YouTube and VEVO.
Launching later this year, VEVO will be a premium online music video hub built for consumers, advertisers and content owners that will blend UMG’s broad catalog of top artists and content with YouTube’s leading edge video technology and user community. YouTube will provide the technology infrastructure that will power VEVO and host UMG’s extensive library of professionally-created music videos on the new site. On YouTube, this content will be exclusively available through VEVO.com and a new VEVO channel through a special VEVO branded embedded player.
“VEVO will bring the most compelling premium music video content and services to the world’s single largest online video audience,” stated Mr. Morris. “We believe that at launch, VEVO will already have more traffic than any other music video site in the United States and in the world. And this traffic represents the most sought after demographic for advertisers, especially as advertising dollars continue their shift from old media to new. VEVO will be uniquely positioned to monetize this opportunity and a host of others as we grow it to become “the” destination for premium music video content online. For music lovers who want the best in music videos, the VEVO experience will be second to none. At the same time, VEVO will expand the premium video marketplace, generate new revenue streams for content creators, and provide brand advertisers an unprecedented opportunity to get in front of a highly engaged audience. We couldn’t be more excited about the huge potential we see in the VEVO service.”
“Technology has allowed fans to discover music in endless ways while creating new business opportunities for artists and labels alike,” said Mr. Schmidt. “At Google, we are committed to promoting greater innovation and choice and are thrilled to be working with UMG in what will surely be an exciting new service for consumers, advertisers, content creators and the music industry at large.”
At launch, people will be able to access UMG’s entire catalog of premium music video content, including professionally-created and full-length videos on VEVO, as well as artist-generated content and user-generated content hosted on YouTube. VEVO will also serve as a syndication platform, expanding the reach of the VEVO brand. This innovative platform is aimed at providing consumers the very best in digital music content while further extending UMG’s lead in the direct-to-consumer market.
Presently, UMG’s YouTube video channel has more than 3.5 billion views, making the UMG channel the most watched on YouTube.
Google has been struggling for a long time about how to actually monetize YouTube affective. Most advertisers aren’t happy about their ads being shown next to user generated content, while at the same time YouTube costs are skyrocketing and they cant afford to keep going the way they are.
Thus, Google has acknowledged that it is much easier to sell advertising next to controlled quality content, and that is why they have now partnered with Universal Music Group and is about to launch this new music video service. A music video portal is much needed on the internet and Universal don’t have the technology skills needed, but they do have the content, so that is where Google comes in. Additionally, Google is an advertising company, that is what they do and they do it very well.
The verdict is that Vevo is a great idea and it has been much needed for some time now. Hosting and bandwidth costs associated with Universal on YouTube will now be moved over to Vevo and because advertising revenues are going to be much higher, it will be more efficient for Google to offset costs with these videos. Revenues will increase and bandwidth will be moved away from YouTube and into Vevo, but this isn’t going to help monetize YouTube videos more effectively, it is just a diversification tactic.
After spending months in public beta and lots of changes to the ad supports music service, We7 is about to launch out of beta with a bang.
We7 have launched with a “Big Listen” campaign. This new service has some great new features including Free on-demand, unlimited access to full tracks and albums, “Search, Click & Play”, A ‘Celestial Jukebox’ with several million track, ‘Play Anywhere’ – a link and play system for blogs and websites, Users can create playlists, share with friends and buy mp3’s, Payments to rights owners and artists.
The first thing you will notice with the new site is that they have a completely new design. Other new additions include a Magazine, Blog and a much improved list of advertisers. Im sure we will be hearing a lot more from We7 in 2009!
Qtrax, the P2P music service that about four months ago claimed to have signed deals with all four major record labels, has finally signed their first major label. Universal Music Group are the first major label to sign up to Qtrax. This is the company’s first major label licensing deal, although it does have several publishing agreements with the likes of EMI Music Publishing and Sony/ATV, among others.
The service itself allows users to share DRM protected music. The DRM is obviously there to keep the music off other networks, but at the same time is helps Qtrax to establish the play counts in which they will use to pay royalties to artists and labels. Qtrax also has display ads in certain sections of the process, and users have the option to purchase music and merchandise through the service. Hang on one sec, they are a startup with an actual business model that might work, thats crazy!
