Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
NVALEO Presentation
In case you missed it, here's last night's presentation. http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=batch_download&send_id=845543561&email=3d6de1e2fc8166f831d7421f69417a31
Friday, March 26, 2010
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Forbes talks about media storage
Storage Hits the Family Room
Lee Gomes, 02.05.10, 02:00 PM EST
Forbes Asia Magazine dated February 08, 2010
Disk-drive companies are betting on a new breed of gadgets.
image
Seagate's FreeAgent Theater media player links your PC to the TV.
Compared with Samsung, Sony and Apple, disk drive makers are hardly glamorous players in the consumer electronics world. Yet as they stood smiling at their display booths and executive suites at the gigantic Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January, executives of storage providers like Seagate and Western Digital could feel right at home. Ordinarily storage products attract little of the excitement surrounding the iPods they make possible. Now, though, Seagate, Western Digital and the others have their own entries in the sweepstakes of cool. They are selling living room products called media players.
It's doubtful whether vendors of these $150 items will ever match Apple's success, since the world of consumer electronics requires the sorts of resources in design and marketing that a magnetic platter company is not likely to have. But merely adding them to the lineup is a reminder of how the biggest trends with consumers--notably, the fascination with video, both the Hollywood and cell phone variety--play to the strengths of the storage industry.
Article Controls
It's a big reason storage companies have roared out of last year's slump. Disk drives--which keep your data stored in your computer when it's turned off--remain a cyclical business. At the moment we're in the positive part of the cycle. Shares of industry leader Seagate have quadrupled in the last year to $17.90; it posted a net loss of $3.1 billion on $9.8 billion in revenues in the year through July 3. Western Digital, the third-largest disk drive maker, saw its shares quadruple since November 2008.
These companies, along with storage box maker Iomega (which was bought by EMC in 2008), have all recently introduced media players designed to pair with the big high-definition TV sets that are showing up in family rooms. The media players are the size of a tissue box and attach to a TV much like a DVD player does. Inside the casing they are essentially Linux computers, with their geeky innards hidden by a user-friendly interface and operated with a remote control.
While these media players can connect to Internet sites like YouTube and Netflix to access streaming video, their main purpose is to give customers a way to play on their living room TVs all the movies that they happen to have handy in digital form on their PCs.
Much of the demand for new devices comes from young Web-savvy users who get their movies from illegal download sites like Pirate Bay instead of Netflix or Redbox. (The same is true for Apple, since the iPod wouldn't have been nearly as big a hit if its users had purchased music only legally.) The new media players haven't yet fully caught on in the U.S. "But if you walk around big stores like FNAC in Europe, you see stacks and stacks of them," says Jonathan Huberman, chief executive of Iomega, which is marketing a $150 player. "It's a very interesting business for us." (The products are now being rolled out in Asia; the Seagate entry, for instance, is arriving soon in China.)
Lee Gomes, 02.05.10, 02:00 PM EST
Forbes Asia Magazine dated February 08, 2010
Disk-drive companies are betting on a new breed of gadgets.
image
Seagate's FreeAgent Theater media player links your PC to the TV.
Compared with Samsung, Sony and Apple, disk drive makers are hardly glamorous players in the consumer electronics world. Yet as they stood smiling at their display booths and executive suites at the gigantic Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January, executives of storage providers like Seagate and Western Digital could feel right at home. Ordinarily storage products attract little of the excitement surrounding the iPods they make possible. Now, though, Seagate, Western Digital and the others have their own entries in the sweepstakes of cool. They are selling living room products called media players.
It's doubtful whether vendors of these $150 items will ever match Apple's success, since the world of consumer electronics requires the sorts of resources in design and marketing that a magnetic platter company is not likely to have. But merely adding them to the lineup is a reminder of how the biggest trends with consumers--notably, the fascination with video, both the Hollywood and cell phone variety--play to the strengths of the storage industry.
Article Controls
It's a big reason storage companies have roared out of last year's slump. Disk drives--which keep your data stored in your computer when it's turned off--remain a cyclical business. At the moment we're in the positive part of the cycle. Shares of industry leader Seagate have quadrupled in the last year to $17.90; it posted a net loss of $3.1 billion on $9.8 billion in revenues in the year through July 3. Western Digital, the third-largest disk drive maker, saw its shares quadruple since November 2008.
These companies, along with storage box maker Iomega (which was bought by EMC in 2008), have all recently introduced media players designed to pair with the big high-definition TV sets that are showing up in family rooms. The media players are the size of a tissue box and attach to a TV much like a DVD player does. Inside the casing they are essentially Linux computers, with their geeky innards hidden by a user-friendly interface and operated with a remote control.
While these media players can connect to Internet sites like YouTube and Netflix to access streaming video, their main purpose is to give customers a way to play on their living room TVs all the movies that they happen to have handy in digital form on their PCs.
Much of the demand for new devices comes from young Web-savvy users who get their movies from illegal download sites like Pirate Bay instead of Netflix or Redbox. (The same is true for Apple, since the iPod wouldn't have been nearly as big a hit if its users had purchased music only legally.) The new media players haven't yet fully caught on in the U.S. "But if you walk around big stores like FNAC in Europe, you see stacks and stacks of them," says Jonathan Huberman, chief executive of Iomega, which is marketing a $150 player. "It's a very interesting business for us." (The products are now being rolled out in Asia; the Seagate entry, for instance, is arriving soon in China.)
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Your ideas are still valid, your hopes are still justified, and your dreams are still alive. Pick yourself up, adjust your approach based on what you've learned, and make another attempt.
Feel the joy of knowing that you can persevere. Transform the power of the challenge into your own inner strength.
Grow your way forward, through the triumphs and the setbacks. Persist, and anything is within your reach.
Feel the joy of knowing that you can persevere. Transform the power of the challenge into your own inner strength.
Grow your way forward, through the triumphs and the setbacks. Persist, and anything is within your reach.
Sometimes what you think will work great, doesn't work at all. But that doesn't mean that nothing will work.
Sometimes you build your hopes up, only to be disappointed. But that doesn't mean that your hopes have lost their value.
On the contrary, your hopes and ideas have great value, even though they may expose you to great frustration. Though it may be over difficult and uneven terrain, they do push you forward.
Your ideas are still valid, your hopes are still justified, and your dreams are still alive. Pick yourself up, adjust your approach based on what you've learned, and make another attempt.
Feel the joy of knowing that you can persevere. Transform the power of the challenge into your own inner strength.
Grow your way forward, through the triumphs and the setbacks. Persist, and anything is within your reach.
Ralph Marston
Sometimes you build your hopes up, only to be disappointed. But that doesn't mean that your hopes have lost their value.
On the contrary, your hopes and ideas have great value, even though they may expose you to great frustration. Though it may be over difficult and uneven terrain, they do push you forward.
Your ideas are still valid, your hopes are still justified, and your dreams are still alive. Pick yourself up, adjust your approach based on what you've learned, and make another attempt.
Feel the joy of knowing that you can persevere. Transform the power of the challenge into your own inner strength.
Grow your way forward, through the triumphs and the setbacks. Persist, and anything is within your reach.
Ralph Marston
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
CEO Space Assists NVALEO
In the 2000 film "Pay It Forward," people change their expectations about giving. Instead of getting "paid back" when they do something for or give something to somebody else, they tell the person to "pay it forward." The expression catches on nationwide, changing how people look at giving to others.
In Mahayana Buddhism, the bodhisattva vow is an individual's pledge not to fully attain Nirvana until all of humanity attains similar enlightenment. This contagious ethic aims for a chain-reaction in enlightenment.
So what do idealistic films and Eastern religion have to do with Capitalism? Nothing - and everything.
CEOSpace founder Berny Dohrmann does not seem to have either the movie or the bodhisattva vow in mind in his concept of "collaborative capitalism." But the broad principal is the same: when you serve others and nourish the principal of advancing the community first, you begin a movement that returns much more than if you had pursued your own interest to the exclusion of all others.
Dohrmann explains how collaborative capitalism differs from competitive capitalism, and maintains that his notion of collaborative capitalism inherently favors transparency.
In competition-based capitalism the founding principal of business is "The less you know the more I make." The more your endeavor is commoditized by price comparison of known characteristics, the greater your need to reject transparency and thereby preserve pricing flexibility.
In collaboration-based capitalism the founding principal is the creation of value. Value is the catalyst of hyper growth and innovation in markets.
If that sounds a lot more like good old-fashioned honest pricing for honest value than a revolutionary concept, it is. But when Dohrmann first examined the road Capitalism was taking, he realized that honesty and transparency had become unusual under the existing model of the day.
So in 1981, he created CEOSpace, the "original social network," to implement a collaborative capitalist model, eventually expanding to 140 clubs around the world. All members eventually went to one or more of Dohrmann's intensive 10-day seminars, held five times a year.
And that's where a business leader's concept of capitalism gets flipped upside-down.
Each participant shows up with a SNAP, or "human commercial," a clear, concise (30 seconds or less) description of what he can provide--but that "commercial" is at first only background information.
Upon meeting another member, a CEOSpace participant does not ask how he can get help in peddling his product and services. Rather, he immediately asks, "How can I help you?"
Participants work collaboratively, networking to create additional value, matching others' real needs with their own capabilities and resources. If there is "competition" in the model, it is competition to be highly regarded as helpful to other members. The guiding concern is that others flourish; if you are creating value for the CEOSpace community, all the incentives are structured for your own business to flourish as well. The more you help others, the more your own services are "advertised".
If you're tempted to write off Collaborative Capitalism as "Kumbayah Capitalism," a quick look at the program's testimonials [ http://www.ceospace.net/testimonial_celeb.htm] should give you pause. Lifelong conservative business leaders, CEOs from the tech field to restaurant management, and authors and trainers agree: CEOSpace gets results.
While Dohrmann's model has common-sense advantages in any economic climate, the events since late 2008 put a fine point on what we mean by "value." The principles at issue can be traced across decades, bearing out the divergence of the modern-day financial system from a value approach. Value is whatever the market will pay for a given product or service; but value becomes purely notional and unmoored from reality, when transparency is evaded or simply foiled outright.
In the midst of the "Great Recession," entrepreneurial capitalism is not only holding its own, it is even (slightly) expanding. Industry and government leaders agree that recovery will depend on the continued and growing expansion of the entrepreneurial sector.
A confluence of easily available social media and a new recognition of the role of value and transparency certainly augur well for Dohrmann's collaborative approach. Sitting at the crossroads of social networking and transparent entrepreneurial capitalism, CEOSpace's "Pay-It-Forward" networking may just be the wave of the future.
In Mahayana Buddhism, the bodhisattva vow is an individual's pledge not to fully attain Nirvana until all of humanity attains similar enlightenment. This contagious ethic aims for a chain-reaction in enlightenment.
So what do idealistic films and Eastern religion have to do with Capitalism? Nothing - and everything.
CEOSpace founder Berny Dohrmann does not seem to have either the movie or the bodhisattva vow in mind in his concept of "collaborative capitalism." But the broad principal is the same: when you serve others and nourish the principal of advancing the community first, you begin a movement that returns much more than if you had pursued your own interest to the exclusion of all others.
Dohrmann explains how collaborative capitalism differs from competitive capitalism, and maintains that his notion of collaborative capitalism inherently favors transparency.
In competition-based capitalism the founding principal of business is "The less you know the more I make." The more your endeavor is commoditized by price comparison of known characteristics, the greater your need to reject transparency and thereby preserve pricing flexibility.
In collaboration-based capitalism the founding principal is the creation of value. Value is the catalyst of hyper growth and innovation in markets.
If that sounds a lot more like good old-fashioned honest pricing for honest value than a revolutionary concept, it is. But when Dohrmann first examined the road Capitalism was taking, he realized that honesty and transparency had become unusual under the existing model of the day.
So in 1981, he created CEOSpace, the "original social network," to implement a collaborative capitalist model, eventually expanding to 140 clubs around the world. All members eventually went to one or more of Dohrmann's intensive 10-day seminars, held five times a year.
And that's where a business leader's concept of capitalism gets flipped upside-down.
Each participant shows up with a SNAP, or "human commercial," a clear, concise (30 seconds or less) description of what he can provide--but that "commercial" is at first only background information.
Upon meeting another member, a CEOSpace participant does not ask how he can get help in peddling his product and services. Rather, he immediately asks, "How can I help you?"
Participants work collaboratively, networking to create additional value, matching others' real needs with their own capabilities and resources. If there is "competition" in the model, it is competition to be highly regarded as helpful to other members. The guiding concern is that others flourish; if you are creating value for the CEOSpace community, all the incentives are structured for your own business to flourish as well. The more you help others, the more your own services are "advertised".
If you're tempted to write off Collaborative Capitalism as "Kumbayah Capitalism," a quick look at the program's testimonials [ http://www.ceospace.net/testimonial_celeb.htm] should give you pause. Lifelong conservative business leaders, CEOs from the tech field to restaurant management, and authors and trainers agree: CEOSpace gets results.
While Dohrmann's model has common-sense advantages in any economic climate, the events since late 2008 put a fine point on what we mean by "value." The principles at issue can be traced across decades, bearing out the divergence of the modern-day financial system from a value approach. Value is whatever the market will pay for a given product or service; but value becomes purely notional and unmoored from reality, when transparency is evaded or simply foiled outright.
In the midst of the "Great Recession," entrepreneurial capitalism is not only holding its own, it is even (slightly) expanding. Industry and government leaders agree that recovery will depend on the continued and growing expansion of the entrepreneurial sector.
A confluence of easily available social media and a new recognition of the role of value and transparency certainly augur well for Dohrmann's collaborative approach. Sitting at the crossroads of social networking and transparent entrepreneurial capitalism, CEOSpace's "Pay-It-Forward" networking may just be the wave of the future.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Newsweek agrees with NVALEO about IPTV
SPONSORED BY:
Daniel Lyons
Why Comcast Bought NBC
Cable TV pictures an Internet future.
Published Dec 10, 2009
Force of habit is a powerful thing. How else can I explain why I spend $200 per month for a package of Internet, TV, and telephone—most of which I don't really need? My wife and I make most calls on our cell phones; pretty much the only people who call our landline are telemarketers. An even bigger waste of money is TV, which accounts for $125 of the $200 package. We don't watch much, and nearly everything we want we could get online. So why not just pay for the Internet and forget the rest?
SUBSCRIBE Click Here to subscribe to NEWSWEEK and save up to 88% >>
My answers are totally lame: I'm 49 years old; this is how I've always done things; change is hard. Also, I still find it easier to watch some things on TV, like news and sports. I'm not a big sports junkie, but I'll watch an occasional football game, and this winter we'll follow the Olympics in Vancouver, because I like ski racing and my wife likes figure skating. But are those events worth the $1,500 we'll spend on TV this year? No way. And yet we dither and dawdle and keep on paying.
That's true for most people. Nielsen recently reported that although online video viewing has risen 35 percent in the past year, 99 percent of TV viewing is still done on a traditional TV. But that's not the case for younger people, like my pal Dan Frommer. He's 27 years old and works as a writer for a technology Web site. Frommer pulled the plug on cable TV in May 2008 and instead gets shows from the Internet via a Macintosh computer hooked to his LCD television. He can't get everything he'd like to see, but he's saved $1,500 on cable-TV fees. "I'm not going to let myself get ripped off for a bunch of garbage that I don't watch anyway," he says. Many of his 20-something friends have also pulled the plug. The next generation—today's teenagers—will likely never sign up for cable TV at all.
This is dreadful news for cable companies. For decades they've had a glorious business model, running the tollbooth that stood between you and the shows. Now the Internet provides a way to get around that tollbooth, and cable companies are faced with a dilemma: do they embrace the Internet and try to make money online, or do they fight the Internet and try to hold off the destruction? The answer is to do both—holding off the rising tide with one hand while racing to devise workable Internet business models with the other.
This is the context for the recent $15 billion deal between Comcast and GE, whereby Comcast, the leading U.S. cable company, acquired 51 percent of NBC Universal. There are many reasons Comcast made the deal, but one is to prepare for a world in which people stop paying for cable TV and instead get everything over the Internet. It's the same reason telephone companies like Verizon and AT&T went into the mobile-phone business.
Until recently it was easy for Comcast to hang on to cable-TV subscribers, because watching TV over the Internet was pretty painful. But that's changing, fast. The best example is Hulu, an ad-supported Web site whose owners include NBC, ABC, and Fox. Hulu is TV the way TV should be. There's great content: The Office, 30 Rock, The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live. You watch whatever you want to watch, whenever you want. You can watch highlight clips. You can search archives. You can even hook your computer to a big-screen TV. Launched two years ago, Hulu now delivers nearly 1 billion video streams each month.
Supposedly Hulu is meant only to complement regular TV, not replace it. Still, it's a threat. Now, by owning part of NBC, Comcast will exert some control over the site. Whether Comcast will hobble Hulu or ruin it, either accidentally or on purpose, remains to be seen. (The company says it has no plans to change it.) Comcast operates an ad-supported site called Fancast that is similar to Hulu, and soon it will launch a site on which people who subscribe to premium channels like HBO will be able to watch those channels online. "Online video is our friend, not our enemy," Comcast CEO Brian Roberts likes to say.
Cynically translated, I think that means Comcast doesn't care what road the video travels down, so long as Comcast can operate the tollbooth. Owning a big content company gives Comcast some leverage in that struggle. Problem is, even if the tollbooth stays up, it probably won't rake in as much money as it used to. The rule is that when the Internet hits an industry, wherever you used to make dollars, you now make dimes. Or pennies. So for cable companies, the good old days may soon be over. For the rest of us, however, they may be just around the corner.
Daniel Lyons
Why Comcast Bought NBC
Cable TV pictures an Internet future.
Published Dec 10, 2009
Force of habit is a powerful thing. How else can I explain why I spend $200 per month for a package of Internet, TV, and telephone—most of which I don't really need? My wife and I make most calls on our cell phones; pretty much the only people who call our landline are telemarketers. An even bigger waste of money is TV, which accounts for $125 of the $200 package. We don't watch much, and nearly everything we want we could get online. So why not just pay for the Internet and forget the rest?
SUBSCRIBE Click Here to subscribe to NEWSWEEK and save up to 88% >>
My answers are totally lame: I'm 49 years old; this is how I've always done things; change is hard. Also, I still find it easier to watch some things on TV, like news and sports. I'm not a big sports junkie, but I'll watch an occasional football game, and this winter we'll follow the Olympics in Vancouver, because I like ski racing and my wife likes figure skating. But are those events worth the $1,500 we'll spend on TV this year? No way. And yet we dither and dawdle and keep on paying.
That's true for most people. Nielsen recently reported that although online video viewing has risen 35 percent in the past year, 99 percent of TV viewing is still done on a traditional TV. But that's not the case for younger people, like my pal Dan Frommer. He's 27 years old and works as a writer for a technology Web site. Frommer pulled the plug on cable TV in May 2008 and instead gets shows from the Internet via a Macintosh computer hooked to his LCD television. He can't get everything he'd like to see, but he's saved $1,500 on cable-TV fees. "I'm not going to let myself get ripped off for a bunch of garbage that I don't watch anyway," he says. Many of his 20-something friends have also pulled the plug. The next generation—today's teenagers—will likely never sign up for cable TV at all.
This is dreadful news for cable companies. For decades they've had a glorious business model, running the tollbooth that stood between you and the shows. Now the Internet provides a way to get around that tollbooth, and cable companies are faced with a dilemma: do they embrace the Internet and try to make money online, or do they fight the Internet and try to hold off the destruction? The answer is to do both—holding off the rising tide with one hand while racing to devise workable Internet business models with the other.
This is the context for the recent $15 billion deal between Comcast and GE, whereby Comcast, the leading U.S. cable company, acquired 51 percent of NBC Universal. There are many reasons Comcast made the deal, but one is to prepare for a world in which people stop paying for cable TV and instead get everything over the Internet. It's the same reason telephone companies like Verizon and AT&T went into the mobile-phone business.
Until recently it was easy for Comcast to hang on to cable-TV subscribers, because watching TV over the Internet was pretty painful. But that's changing, fast. The best example is Hulu, an ad-supported Web site whose owners include NBC, ABC, and Fox. Hulu is TV the way TV should be. There's great content: The Office, 30 Rock, The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live. You watch whatever you want to watch, whenever you want. You can watch highlight clips. You can search archives. You can even hook your computer to a big-screen TV. Launched two years ago, Hulu now delivers nearly 1 billion video streams each month.
Supposedly Hulu is meant only to complement regular TV, not replace it. Still, it's a threat. Now, by owning part of NBC, Comcast will exert some control over the site. Whether Comcast will hobble Hulu or ruin it, either accidentally or on purpose, remains to be seen. (The company says it has no plans to change it.) Comcast operates an ad-supported site called Fancast that is similar to Hulu, and soon it will launch a site on which people who subscribe to premium channels like HBO will be able to watch those channels online. "Online video is our friend, not our enemy," Comcast CEO Brian Roberts likes to say.
Cynically translated, I think that means Comcast doesn't care what road the video travels down, so long as Comcast can operate the tollbooth. Owning a big content company gives Comcast some leverage in that struggle. Problem is, even if the tollbooth stays up, it probably won't rake in as much money as it used to. The rule is that when the Internet hits an industry, wherever you used to make dollars, you now make dimes. Or pennies. So for cable companies, the good old days may soon be over. For the rest of us, however, they may be just around the corner.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Great cause that NVALEO supports...Project Active...helping to unite children from war-torn countries throught SPORTS! http://ping.fm/oXgUq
Monday, February 15, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
My Favorite Quote
"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank among those poor spirits who neither enjoy much, nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat." Theodore Roosevelt
Friday, February 12, 2010
Sounds like they're talking about NVALEO
The Future of TV
We'll Be Ordering Up Our Own Video, Ads and Products on a Web Convergence Device. But Who Will Reap the Revenue?
by Brian Steinberg
Published: November 30, 2009
Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Submit to Digg Add to Google Share on StumbleUpon Submit to LinkedIn Add to Newsvine Bookmark on Del.icio.us Submit to Reddit
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- In its heyday, "This is Your Life" was seen by a broad swath of viewers tuned into their Philcos all at once, never dreaming that someday it could be rebroadcast, paused live, accessed on another gadget, or that its entire run could be contained on a thin metal disc.
Alex Ostroy
Almost 50 years later, we're almost similarly in the dark. Those Samsung flatscreens in our living room might still be the go-to device, but they are fast being joined by computer monitors, laptops, gaming consoles, iPods and mobile phones distributing content once solely accessed by TV, or in some cases, content that competes with TV. It's conceivable -- and probably inevitable -- that TV/web convergence will lead to us ordering up movies, pizza and even advertising while watching custom-tailored content and interacting with social-network buddies at the same time.
Related Stories
Addressable TV: an FAQ
Answering Questions About an Emerging Concept
The question is how these services will work together and who will manage and monetize them in a world where the TV networks operate with a mass-media mentality and are anxious to keep $60.5 billion in ad revenue from going the way of Philco.
A host of companies are already salivating for some of the billions pumped by marketers into advertising on broadcast and cable outlets, syndicated TV programs and local-TV stations.
But there simply can't be enough money around to profitably support video on YouTube, Hulu, Xbox, Apple's iPhone and other platforms as well as on Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC and the rest.
TV dominance "is certainly up for grabs," said Bobby Tulsiani, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, "and there are a lot of hands in the cookie jar."
Fact: Traditional TV viewership is waning, while other kinds of video entertainment consumption rise. The top 20 shows on broadcast TV during the 1979-1980 TV season -- including "Three's Company," "That's Incredible" and "M*A*S*H" -- individually had a household rating of at least 21.7. These days, the titans of broadcast TV -- CBS's "NCIS" and NBC's "Sunday Night Football" -- notched an average household rating of 13.0 and 11.4 between the start of the 2009-2010 TV season and Nov 1. Total viewership for the top four broadcast networks in the current season through mid-November has slumped 42% since the same period in 1994, according to statistics provided by Brad Adgate, senior VP-research at Horizon Media. Including the CW, total viewership for the period is off about 38.5%, he said.
In the meantime, other technologies that provide access to video keep growing. More than one in four U.S. households contained digital video recorders (31 million TV households, or 27% of the total) at the end of the first quarter of 2009, according to Interpublic Group of Cos.' Mediabrands; the figure is expected to rise to almost half (51.1 million, or 42%), by 2014. Video on demand was used in 43.1 million TV households, or 42% of 2009 TV households, and is likely to reach 66.6 million, or 64% -- nearly two-thirds of households -- by 2014. And these are just the TV-viewing experiences that involve the traditional living-room apparatus.
When the big screen in our living room finally converges into one that can deliver both TV and internet content, the game will certainly change. It doesn't take too much imagining to foresee that in five to 10 years, many consumers will be able to access their online life with a TV remote, and the big screen will behave more like a touchscreen: It will know what shows we like, what music to offer us, and which social network sites and e-mail to feed us.
A realization has already begun to emerge that the TV screen is really just a monitor, said Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media, a Tampa, Fla. market research consultant. "Whether it be a monitor for video games, DVD players or even a laptop computer. ... The TV is functioning essentially as a giant window into the internet cloud," he said.
And when content can be filtered through one big screen, those who know how to command an audience can choose to feed those consumers directly. Witness Oprah Winfrey's decision earlier this month to end her top syndicated talk show on broadcast TV, and instead develop her own 24-hour cable network. Sports leagues and, for that matter, movie studios, could arrange to have their own channels and sell directly to the audiences they amass directly, or sell those audiences to marketers. The National Football League currently has several deals in place with broadcast and cable partners, but it also has already put its own cable network in place.
And there's little impediment for marketers to set up their own video streams constantly at the ready to pitch consumers with their latest goods, or set up interactive options that allow you to order a movie, pizza, or anything that Amazon sells with the push of a button. Social-media sites will allow consumers to chat with friends about the shows they are watching, or direct one another to videos, movies or content to view.
Forrester's Mr. Tulsiani sees a day when TV viewers will be able to watch a show on TV for a while, then "pick it up at the same point on their PC or mobile phone." TV users will be able to use their phone to program their DVR and do so much more, analysts predict. "The variety of content itself will just be exponentially greater, from the networks to cable to digital cable and even more ... more content choices and the quality content will be coming from not only studios but many independent creators," Mr. Tulsiani said.
Who's Watching Where chartEnlarge
Who's Watching Where
What's To Come
This holiday season's hot new gadgets and entertainment services offer a clue to what's coming next, and who's looking to get a piece of that ad money. Netflix selections are available for streaming on everything from Microsoft's Xbox 360 to TiVos, as well as TVs made by LG Electronics and Sony and the Roku video-streaming device. Best Buy recently took a stake in a company that produces CinemaNow, a video-downloading technology that the electronics retailer plans to make available in the goods it sells that can connect to the web. Of course, there's also Apple's TV, which could over time allow viewers to order up programming on demand.
Already, rivals are dipping their beaks into the water. At Microsoft, executives hope to see the popular Xbox evolve into "a very all-purpose media consumption device in the living room for 100 million, 200 million people," said Mark Kroese, general manager-entertainment and devices for Microsoft's advertising business group. The gaming device also functions as a venue for watching content on-demand from Netflix, but one idea is to boost its potential to reach live audiences as well, he said. Rather than suffering through ads that interrupt the entertainment, users can opt to explore marketers' entreaties that are part of Xbox's "home" platform, and in exchange see entertaining videos or movie trailers. "Xbox can definitely support a live TV environment," Mr. Kroese said. "Whether the business model evolves for us to do so remains to be seen."
Others are working to weave advertising into emerging viewer behavior. TV users will do more fast-forwarding, pausing and searching for content with their remotes, and advertising can surface during those interactions, said Tara Maitra, VP-general manager, content services and ad sales, TiVo.
Imagine seeing a full-motion ad pop up when you pause a show, that "may be contextual to the content: "'Your pause was brought to you by Audi,'" suggested Steve Tranter, VP-interactive and broadband, at TV-technology concern NDS. Another idea: sponsorship of fast-forwards and rewinds.
And there's lots of talk about addressable advertising, a technology that could prove destabilizing or lucrative, depending on who's doing the talking. Soon, ads for hot dogs could be dispatched to one home and ads for Pampers to another, depending on available consumer data. Networks might charge a premium for such ad inventory because it's targeted more finely. And because multiple advertisers could appear in the same 30-second space, networks would also be able to do business with a broader range of clients.
Some of the money, however, could be up for grabs, with cable systems or even media buyers inserting themselves into the process. Media agencies have considered buying up inventory and reselling it to their marketer clients. Experimentation has been underway for the last few years. In Huntsville, Ala., Comcast worked with Publicis's Starcom MediaVest Group, sending ads from marketers such as General Motors, Discover Card, Hallmark, Kraft Foods, Mars, Miller Brewing Company and Procter & Gamble to viewers who matched up with pre-defined demographic segments. The companies found that homes receiving addressable advertising tuned away from the commercials 38% less than homes that received non-addressable advertising. Even so, the industry has been slow to put technology in place, and web-connected TVs could render this idea obsolete.
New way of selling
TV networks, meanwhile, will work to retain control over the advertising that has for years bolstered their fortunes. But many TV executives acknowledge a day is coming when some of that revenue will be shared.
CBS Corp. already envisions selling ads in a somewhat new fashion: An ad might run in "CSI," the TV episode, but also in all streams of the show online for one week, suggested David Poltrack, CBS's chief research officer. In the future, "we'll sell you 'CSI' across platforms. You will get your advertising in the episode that goes on TV that week, and you'll get your ad running in all streams of any episode of 'CSI' online for that one week," he said. "Now you're building up more of a significant amount of internet coverage and then the same thing could apply to mobile."
At the same time, a realization has begun to set in that in an on-demand world, others will insert advertising into the process. Widgets and interactive-TV services will be able to advertise around programs in some ways, said Mr. Poltrack, but CBS will try to make the best of the situation by leveraging its ownership of the content. "If they are adding value, they've got to get compensated for that, so it's probably a revenue-sharing project as opposed to something we would not totally control," he said. As for new-media players who "bring an enhancement and are looking for revenue-sharing models, certainly, we're open to the conversation."
New technology and the upheaval it will cause are fascinating to discuss. What's not so much fun to talk about is severity. TV has always been an advertiser's tool of preference to reach giant audiences, goose fast-food sales, launch movie openings and push foot traffic into retail outlets. Imagine the difficulty in doing just that when ads will have to be tailored not only for specific viewers—a cooking show is quite different from an adventure drama—but also for how each of those genres is being viewed on a big screen, a mobile device, or on a DVR. Ads, too, will have to evolve, designed more at eliciting an active response—or even indication of purchase—from an active viewer, rather than merely dazzling a couch potato. Yes, it's true: In the future, TV will survive. But mass marketing may not.
How we watch
These days, the majority of viewers of ABC's "Desperate Housewives" watch the program when it airs on the network, Sundays at 9 p.m. But an increasing number of people have begun to watch and keep track of it in new and diverse ways. So, yes, for instance, approximately 4.2 million households watched the ads slotted into this season's debut of "Desperate Housewives," according to Nielsen, but approximately another 700,000 watched those ads within three days of the program's original air-date, thanks to playback on a digital video recorder. Meanwhile, the program had 217,255 Facebook fans as of Nov. 23. As technology gives rise to other means of accessing entertainment, those smaller numbers will grow more important to TV networks -- and the advertisers who support them.
TIME-SHIFTED TV
Digital video recorders were in 31 million TV households, or 27% of the total, at the end of the first quarter of 2009, according to Interpublic Group's Mediabrands; the figure is expected to rise to 51.1 million, or 42%, by 2014. Video on demand was in 43.1 million TV households, or 42% of TV households at the end of the first quarter of 2009, and is likely to reach 66.6 million, or 64%, by 2014. Look for marketers to start tailoring more of their ads to the specific programs in which they air, such as Sprint did this past season on "Desperate Housewives"--the better to entice viewers who tune in because of the show, not the network or the time the program aired live.
MOBILE
Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones in its recently completed fourth quarter, each capable of playing video representing 7% unit growth over the year-earlier period--just one indication of the potential growth of mobile video.
COMPUTER SCREEN
Nielsen says video streams online rose from more than 95.3 billion in 2008 to more than 104.3 billion between January and October of 2009. The year, of course, is not yet over. Mediabrands sees households with broadband access growing to 87.4 million households by the end of 2014, compared with 71 million households at the end of the first quarter of 2009.
HULU
Overall streams per month at Hulu, the video-sharing site owned jointly by Walt Disney, News Corp. and NBC Universal, stood at 583.2 million in September of 2009, according to comScore Video Metrix. Overall streams at the site for the year-earlier period stood at 145.8 million.
FACEBOOK, MYSPACE
Nielsen says time spent viewing video on social networking sites increased 98% year over year, from 503.8 million minutes in October 2008 to 999.4 million minutes in October 2009. In conjunction, the number of online video streams viewed on social-networking and blog sites increased 45% year-over-year, from 240.8 million streams in October 2008 to 349.5 million in October 2009.
AND COMING SOON...
STREAMERS
A host of gadgets will start to function as ersatz set-top boxes, allowing us to find content and stream it to the screen we want. Blu-ray, Microsoft's Xbox, Roku, and Apple TV are just some of the devices that stream movies and other web-ready content, but in the future, users might just rely on them to watch TV series as well.
NEW SCREENS
This Christmas, a new category of internet-connected TV set is due out in stores from such manufacturers as Sony and Samsung. Retailer Best Buy will be including the CinemaNow service that allows users to download movies and other content through the TV they purchase. While these are likely to be aimed at early technology adopters, they mark a first step towards the ultimate goal: A TV that streams high quality content while allowing for interactivity.
For more information, go to www.nvaleo1.com.
We'll Be Ordering Up Our Own Video, Ads and Products on a Web Convergence Device. But Who Will Reap the Revenue?
by Brian Steinberg
Published: November 30, 2009
Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Submit to Digg Add to Google Share on StumbleUpon Submit to LinkedIn Add to Newsvine Bookmark on Del.icio.us Submit to Reddit
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- In its heyday, "This is Your Life" was seen by a broad swath of viewers tuned into their Philcos all at once, never dreaming that someday it could be rebroadcast, paused live, accessed on another gadget, or that its entire run could be contained on a thin metal disc.
Alex Ostroy
Almost 50 years later, we're almost similarly in the dark. Those Samsung flatscreens in our living room might still be the go-to device, but they are fast being joined by computer monitors, laptops, gaming consoles, iPods and mobile phones distributing content once solely accessed by TV, or in some cases, content that competes with TV. It's conceivable -- and probably inevitable -- that TV/web convergence will lead to us ordering up movies, pizza and even advertising while watching custom-tailored content and interacting with social-network buddies at the same time.
Related Stories
Addressable TV: an FAQ
Answering Questions About an Emerging Concept
The question is how these services will work together and who will manage and monetize them in a world where the TV networks operate with a mass-media mentality and are anxious to keep $60.5 billion in ad revenue from going the way of Philco.
A host of companies are already salivating for some of the billions pumped by marketers into advertising on broadcast and cable outlets, syndicated TV programs and local-TV stations.
But there simply can't be enough money around to profitably support video on YouTube, Hulu, Xbox, Apple's iPhone and other platforms as well as on Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC and the rest.
TV dominance "is certainly up for grabs," said Bobby Tulsiani, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, "and there are a lot of hands in the cookie jar."
Fact: Traditional TV viewership is waning, while other kinds of video entertainment consumption rise. The top 20 shows on broadcast TV during the 1979-1980 TV season -- including "Three's Company," "That's Incredible" and "M*A*S*H" -- individually had a household rating of at least 21.7. These days, the titans of broadcast TV -- CBS's "NCIS" and NBC's "Sunday Night Football" -- notched an average household rating of 13.0 and 11.4 between the start of the 2009-2010 TV season and Nov 1. Total viewership for the top four broadcast networks in the current season through mid-November has slumped 42% since the same period in 1994, according to statistics provided by Brad Adgate, senior VP-research at Horizon Media. Including the CW, total viewership for the period is off about 38.5%, he said.
In the meantime, other technologies that provide access to video keep growing. More than one in four U.S. households contained digital video recorders (31 million TV households, or 27% of the total) at the end of the first quarter of 2009, according to Interpublic Group of Cos.' Mediabrands; the figure is expected to rise to almost half (51.1 million, or 42%), by 2014. Video on demand was used in 43.1 million TV households, or 42% of 2009 TV households, and is likely to reach 66.6 million, or 64% -- nearly two-thirds of households -- by 2014. And these are just the TV-viewing experiences that involve the traditional living-room apparatus.
When the big screen in our living room finally converges into one that can deliver both TV and internet content, the game will certainly change. It doesn't take too much imagining to foresee that in five to 10 years, many consumers will be able to access their online life with a TV remote, and the big screen will behave more like a touchscreen: It will know what shows we like, what music to offer us, and which social network sites and e-mail to feed us.
A realization has already begun to emerge that the TV screen is really just a monitor, said Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media, a Tampa, Fla. market research consultant. "Whether it be a monitor for video games, DVD players or even a laptop computer. ... The TV is functioning essentially as a giant window into the internet cloud," he said.
And when content can be filtered through one big screen, those who know how to command an audience can choose to feed those consumers directly. Witness Oprah Winfrey's decision earlier this month to end her top syndicated talk show on broadcast TV, and instead develop her own 24-hour cable network. Sports leagues and, for that matter, movie studios, could arrange to have their own channels and sell directly to the audiences they amass directly, or sell those audiences to marketers. The National Football League currently has several deals in place with broadcast and cable partners, but it also has already put its own cable network in place.
And there's little impediment for marketers to set up their own video streams constantly at the ready to pitch consumers with their latest goods, or set up interactive options that allow you to order a movie, pizza, or anything that Amazon sells with the push of a button. Social-media sites will allow consumers to chat with friends about the shows they are watching, or direct one another to videos, movies or content to view.
Forrester's Mr. Tulsiani sees a day when TV viewers will be able to watch a show on TV for a while, then "pick it up at the same point on their PC or mobile phone." TV users will be able to use their phone to program their DVR and do so much more, analysts predict. "The variety of content itself will just be exponentially greater, from the networks to cable to digital cable and even more ... more content choices and the quality content will be coming from not only studios but many independent creators," Mr. Tulsiani said.
Who's Watching Where chartEnlarge
Who's Watching Where
What's To Come
This holiday season's hot new gadgets and entertainment services offer a clue to what's coming next, and who's looking to get a piece of that ad money. Netflix selections are available for streaming on everything from Microsoft's Xbox 360 to TiVos, as well as TVs made by LG Electronics and Sony and the Roku video-streaming device. Best Buy recently took a stake in a company that produces CinemaNow, a video-downloading technology that the electronics retailer plans to make available in the goods it sells that can connect to the web. Of course, there's also Apple's TV, which could over time allow viewers to order up programming on demand.
Already, rivals are dipping their beaks into the water. At Microsoft, executives hope to see the popular Xbox evolve into "a very all-purpose media consumption device in the living room for 100 million, 200 million people," said Mark Kroese, general manager-entertainment and devices for Microsoft's advertising business group. The gaming device also functions as a venue for watching content on-demand from Netflix, but one idea is to boost its potential to reach live audiences as well, he said. Rather than suffering through ads that interrupt the entertainment, users can opt to explore marketers' entreaties that are part of Xbox's "home" platform, and in exchange see entertaining videos or movie trailers. "Xbox can definitely support a live TV environment," Mr. Kroese said. "Whether the business model evolves for us to do so remains to be seen."
Others are working to weave advertising into emerging viewer behavior. TV users will do more fast-forwarding, pausing and searching for content with their remotes, and advertising can surface during those interactions, said Tara Maitra, VP-general manager, content services and ad sales, TiVo.
Imagine seeing a full-motion ad pop up when you pause a show, that "may be contextual to the content: "'Your pause was brought to you by Audi,'" suggested Steve Tranter, VP-interactive and broadband, at TV-technology concern NDS. Another idea: sponsorship of fast-forwards and rewinds.
And there's lots of talk about addressable advertising, a technology that could prove destabilizing or lucrative, depending on who's doing the talking. Soon, ads for hot dogs could be dispatched to one home and ads for Pampers to another, depending on available consumer data. Networks might charge a premium for such ad inventory because it's targeted more finely. And because multiple advertisers could appear in the same 30-second space, networks would also be able to do business with a broader range of clients.
Some of the money, however, could be up for grabs, with cable systems or even media buyers inserting themselves into the process. Media agencies have considered buying up inventory and reselling it to their marketer clients. Experimentation has been underway for the last few years. In Huntsville, Ala., Comcast worked with Publicis's Starcom MediaVest Group, sending ads from marketers such as General Motors, Discover Card, Hallmark, Kraft Foods, Mars, Miller Brewing Company and Procter & Gamble to viewers who matched up with pre-defined demographic segments. The companies found that homes receiving addressable advertising tuned away from the commercials 38% less than homes that received non-addressable advertising. Even so, the industry has been slow to put technology in place, and web-connected TVs could render this idea obsolete.
New way of selling
TV networks, meanwhile, will work to retain control over the advertising that has for years bolstered their fortunes. But many TV executives acknowledge a day is coming when some of that revenue will be shared.
CBS Corp. already envisions selling ads in a somewhat new fashion: An ad might run in "CSI," the TV episode, but also in all streams of the show online for one week, suggested David Poltrack, CBS's chief research officer. In the future, "we'll sell you 'CSI' across platforms. You will get your advertising in the episode that goes on TV that week, and you'll get your ad running in all streams of any episode of 'CSI' online for that one week," he said. "Now you're building up more of a significant amount of internet coverage and then the same thing could apply to mobile."
At the same time, a realization has begun to set in that in an on-demand world, others will insert advertising into the process. Widgets and interactive-TV services will be able to advertise around programs in some ways, said Mr. Poltrack, but CBS will try to make the best of the situation by leveraging its ownership of the content. "If they are adding value, they've got to get compensated for that, so it's probably a revenue-sharing project as opposed to something we would not totally control," he said. As for new-media players who "bring an enhancement and are looking for revenue-sharing models, certainly, we're open to the conversation."
New technology and the upheaval it will cause are fascinating to discuss. What's not so much fun to talk about is severity. TV has always been an advertiser's tool of preference to reach giant audiences, goose fast-food sales, launch movie openings and push foot traffic into retail outlets. Imagine the difficulty in doing just that when ads will have to be tailored not only for specific viewers—a cooking show is quite different from an adventure drama—but also for how each of those genres is being viewed on a big screen, a mobile device, or on a DVR. Ads, too, will have to evolve, designed more at eliciting an active response—or even indication of purchase—from an active viewer, rather than merely dazzling a couch potato. Yes, it's true: In the future, TV will survive. But mass marketing may not.
How we watch
These days, the majority of viewers of ABC's "Desperate Housewives" watch the program when it airs on the network, Sundays at 9 p.m. But an increasing number of people have begun to watch and keep track of it in new and diverse ways. So, yes, for instance, approximately 4.2 million households watched the ads slotted into this season's debut of "Desperate Housewives," according to Nielsen, but approximately another 700,000 watched those ads within three days of the program's original air-date, thanks to playback on a digital video recorder. Meanwhile, the program had 217,255 Facebook fans as of Nov. 23. As technology gives rise to other means of accessing entertainment, those smaller numbers will grow more important to TV networks -- and the advertisers who support them.
TIME-SHIFTED TV
Digital video recorders were in 31 million TV households, or 27% of the total, at the end of the first quarter of 2009, according to Interpublic Group's Mediabrands; the figure is expected to rise to 51.1 million, or 42%, by 2014. Video on demand was in 43.1 million TV households, or 42% of TV households at the end of the first quarter of 2009, and is likely to reach 66.6 million, or 64%, by 2014. Look for marketers to start tailoring more of their ads to the specific programs in which they air, such as Sprint did this past season on "Desperate Housewives"--the better to entice viewers who tune in because of the show, not the network or the time the program aired live.
MOBILE
Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones in its recently completed fourth quarter, each capable of playing video representing 7% unit growth over the year-earlier period--just one indication of the potential growth of mobile video.
COMPUTER SCREEN
Nielsen says video streams online rose from more than 95.3 billion in 2008 to more than 104.3 billion between January and October of 2009. The year, of course, is not yet over. Mediabrands sees households with broadband access growing to 87.4 million households by the end of 2014, compared with 71 million households at the end of the first quarter of 2009.
HULU
Overall streams per month at Hulu, the video-sharing site owned jointly by Walt Disney, News Corp. and NBC Universal, stood at 583.2 million in September of 2009, according to comScore Video Metrix. Overall streams at the site for the year-earlier period stood at 145.8 million.
FACEBOOK, MYSPACE
Nielsen says time spent viewing video on social networking sites increased 98% year over year, from 503.8 million minutes in October 2008 to 999.4 million minutes in October 2009. In conjunction, the number of online video streams viewed on social-networking and blog sites increased 45% year-over-year, from 240.8 million streams in October 2008 to 349.5 million in October 2009.
AND COMING SOON...
STREAMERS
A host of gadgets will start to function as ersatz set-top boxes, allowing us to find content and stream it to the screen we want. Blu-ray, Microsoft's Xbox, Roku, and Apple TV are just some of the devices that stream movies and other web-ready content, but in the future, users might just rely on them to watch TV series as well.
NEW SCREENS
This Christmas, a new category of internet-connected TV set is due out in stores from such manufacturers as Sony and Samsung. Retailer Best Buy will be including the CinemaNow service that allows users to download movies and other content through the TV they purchase. While these are likely to be aimed at early technology adopters, they mark a first step towards the ultimate goal: A TV that streams high quality content while allowing for interactivity.
For more information, go to www.nvaleo1.com.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Verizmo powers NVALEO
Verismo Powers the NVALEO Enrichment System
NVALEO Selects Verismo's Internet TV Platform to Deliver Personal and Professional Development Training Into Living Rooms Everywhere
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - June 30, 2009) - Verismo Networks and NVALEO are bringing the future of business training and distance learning to today's living room. Powered by Verismo's award-winning Internet TV platform, the NVALEO Enrichment System offers training videos for personal and professional development, wealth creation, investing, entrepreneurship, marketing, and more.
NVALEO empowers people to learn from some of the world's greatest minds, with instant access to a wide range of self-enrichment content in the comfort of their homes. Business and training events are brought directly to the television -- so people can continue to learn and develop without spending time and money on travel and conferences. And unlike static DVD-based training, NVALEO can continually update its library with hours of topical and varied live and on-demand content.
NVALEO customers receive a palm-sized set-top box that connects to their television and lets them easily browse for self-enrichment content over their broadband connection. The set-top box "NVALEO HD" is based on Verismo's cutting-edge VuNow Internet TV platform that brings millions of online videos to the TV without the need for a computer.
"After evaluating various solutions in the market, we chose the award-winning VuNow Internet TV platform for its compact set-top box, TV friendly user interface, and ease of content integration," said Jeff Ritchie, CEO of NVALEO.
Beyond self enrichment training content, the Verismo solution lets NVALEO customers watch a wide range of entertaining Internet videos directly on their TV. The platform offers the widest selection of online content for the TV including videos from YouTube™, videos from popular web sites, live TV channels, movies, as well as access to personal media (such as video, music, and photos) from the home network or USB-enabled storage devices.
"The NVALEO Enrichment System is a perfect example of what our OEM partners can do with the VuNow platform. Leveraging the VuNow Internet TV platform, NVALEO differentiates themselves from other training providers by delivering self-enrichment video content right to the TV in the comfort of the living room," said Dhaval Ajmera EVP of Verismo Networks.
Verismo offers an open platform that enables OEM partners to rapidly bring to market differentiated versions of its Internet TV platform, including private labeling, hardware licensing for high-volume manufacturing, and the embedding of Verismo technology into consumer appliances.
About Verismo Networks
Verismo's VuNow platform transforms the TV set into a powerful multi-media hub with an unbelievable level of choice and ease in accessing digital entertainment. You've never seen your television like this before. The privately held company is based in Mountain View, California with offices in Bangalore, India. For more information, please visit www.verismonetworks.com.
NVALEO Selects Verismo's Internet TV Platform to Deliver Personal and Professional Development Training Into Living Rooms Everywhere
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - June 30, 2009) - Verismo Networks and NVALEO are bringing the future of business training and distance learning to today's living room. Powered by Verismo's award-winning Internet TV platform, the NVALEO Enrichment System offers training videos for personal and professional development, wealth creation, investing, entrepreneurship, marketing, and more.
NVALEO empowers people to learn from some of the world's greatest minds, with instant access to a wide range of self-enrichment content in the comfort of their homes. Business and training events are brought directly to the television -- so people can continue to learn and develop without spending time and money on travel and conferences. And unlike static DVD-based training, NVALEO can continually update its library with hours of topical and varied live and on-demand content.
NVALEO customers receive a palm-sized set-top box that connects to their television and lets them easily browse for self-enrichment content over their broadband connection. The set-top box "NVALEO HD" is based on Verismo's cutting-edge VuNow Internet TV platform that brings millions of online videos to the TV without the need for a computer.
"After evaluating various solutions in the market, we chose the award-winning VuNow Internet TV platform for its compact set-top box, TV friendly user interface, and ease of content integration," said Jeff Ritchie, CEO of NVALEO.
Beyond self enrichment training content, the Verismo solution lets NVALEO customers watch a wide range of entertaining Internet videos directly on their TV. The platform offers the widest selection of online content for the TV including videos from YouTube™, videos from popular web sites, live TV channels, movies, as well as access to personal media (such as video, music, and photos) from the home network or USB-enabled storage devices.
"The NVALEO Enrichment System is a perfect example of what our OEM partners can do with the VuNow platform. Leveraging the VuNow Internet TV platform, NVALEO differentiates themselves from other training providers by delivering self-enrichment video content right to the TV in the comfort of the living room," said Dhaval Ajmera EVP of Verismo Networks.
Verismo offers an open platform that enables OEM partners to rapidly bring to market differentiated versions of its Internet TV platform, including private labeling, hardware licensing for high-volume manufacturing, and the embedding of Verismo technology into consumer appliances.
About Verismo Networks
Verismo's VuNow platform transforms the TV set into a powerful multi-media hub with an unbelievable level of choice and ease in accessing digital entertainment. You've never seen your television like this before. The privately held company is based in Mountain View, California with offices in Bangalore, India. For more information, please visit www.verismonetworks.com.
The Future On TV
This may not be the year America cuts the cable cord and drops its subscription to pay TV. But it will likely be a year of sublime creative destruction in the home-video entertainment business.
Comcast's proposed acquisition of NBC has elicited the usual panic from the usual worrywarts wondering who will possibly be able to compete with the new cable-cum-programming giant.
A better question is: Who won't?
Dozens of players (including retailers and gadget makers) are entering what's called the "over the top" TV market, with nothing to lose and every reason to innovate in competition with each other.
The toughest hurdle has been connecting the television to a potentially bottomless supply of Internet programming in a way not daunting to the average viewer. Coming this year are TVs with direct Internet connections, which could change things fast. Of note is Best Buy's recent announcement that every Web-connected TV it sells will soon come with a subscription to a Best Buy library of entertainment. Sony has similar plans. Think Wal-Mart, Blockbuster and Disney won't be in the hunt?
Ditto the cablers themselves, who are burnishing a concept called "TV Everywhere" in hopes of satisfying your appetite for on-demand TV (while somehow keeping you paying your cable bills at the same time).
View Full Image
bw0106
Getty Images
bw0106
bw0106
Yeah, right. The losers won't just be cable and satellite's existing business models. The losers will be Verizon and AT&T, whose Internet-powered television this column cheerleaded for. Too little, too late, too cablelike. Likewise, Sony and Microsoft, which have spent billions developing high-powered, Internet-connected game machines as Trojan horses in the living room, only to find the set-top box market suddenly crowded and perhaps obsolescing.
In this world, Fox Broadcasting's victory Friday in winning retransmission fees from Time Warner Cable might seem a case of one corpse feeding on another, slightly healthier corpse. Broadcasters are supposed to be on suicide watch because they lack even cable's dual revenue streams (advertising and subscription). But the free-to-air TV distributors may yet have a card up their sleeves.
Nobody would mistake Qwest Communications, the former Baby Bell, for one of the winners of the telecom war of the '90s, but having not followed AT&T and Verizon into the TV business, its executives now are able to say freely that live-transmission TV doesn't make much sense in an on-demand world—that is, except news and sports, the only programming that large numbers of people are likely to want to consume at exactly the same moment.
It just so happens that over-the-air broadcasters, now that they have multiple, crystalline hi-def digital channels at their disposal, may prove the best way to deliver live programming over a given geographical area. After a recent column on this subject, several readers emailed to say they've already dropped cable and now get their video from a combination of free HDTV plus on-demand downloads from the likes of Netflix, iTunes or Amazon.
And surely one of Ben Bernanke's unenumerated greenshoots lately has been the unexpected surge in HDTV antenna sales since last year's digital switch. Look to Western Europe, where the digital transition began earlier. Viewers willing to rely on over-the-air digital broadcast TV have grown to 42 million from 31 million in three years, according to the International Television Expert Group. They are expected to hit 59 million in 2013. A new European standard-setting body called HbbTV (for hybrid broadcast-broadband TV) has even been launched to consecrate the wedding of on-demand and over-the-air.
One future wild card will be the strategies adopted by program creators. Will the established networks and studios fight to preserve cable's business model (while cutting themselves in for a bigger share of subscriber fees) or will they seize the broadband opportunity? To wit, the proposed tie-up between Comcast and NBC gives Comcast an ownership stake in Hulu, through which NBC, ABC and Fox jointly have experimented with bypassing cable to stream their shows directly to viewers. Now regulators will have to decide what Comcast's motivation is likely to be: snuffing a proto-cable competitor in its crib or developing Hulu's full potential? (Even Comcast probably doesn't know at this point.)
In the long run, we wouldn't care to bet which programming aggregator will be a winner, but here's a guess at what TV viewing will look in five years: You will point an iPhone-like device at the nearest screen in order to play any kind of video, whether stored on the device's own memory, downloaded from a third-party site or plucked from an over-the-air signal.
Somehow, too, programmers will get paid, or there won't be programming. One thing is also clear: If you're playing in this sandbox, there is no better leverage than owning rights to college and professional football, especially during bowl season.
Comcast's proposed acquisition of NBC has elicited the usual panic from the usual worrywarts wondering who will possibly be able to compete with the new cable-cum-programming giant.
A better question is: Who won't?
Dozens of players (including retailers and gadget makers) are entering what's called the "over the top" TV market, with nothing to lose and every reason to innovate in competition with each other.
The toughest hurdle has been connecting the television to a potentially bottomless supply of Internet programming in a way not daunting to the average viewer. Coming this year are TVs with direct Internet connections, which could change things fast. Of note is Best Buy's recent announcement that every Web-connected TV it sells will soon come with a subscription to a Best Buy library of entertainment. Sony has similar plans. Think Wal-Mart, Blockbuster and Disney won't be in the hunt?
Ditto the cablers themselves, who are burnishing a concept called "TV Everywhere" in hopes of satisfying your appetite for on-demand TV (while somehow keeping you paying your cable bills at the same time).
View Full Image
bw0106
Getty Images
bw0106
bw0106
Yeah, right. The losers won't just be cable and satellite's existing business models. The losers will be Verizon and AT&T, whose Internet-powered television this column cheerleaded for. Too little, too late, too cablelike. Likewise, Sony and Microsoft, which have spent billions developing high-powered, Internet-connected game machines as Trojan horses in the living room, only to find the set-top box market suddenly crowded and perhaps obsolescing.
In this world, Fox Broadcasting's victory Friday in winning retransmission fees from Time Warner Cable might seem a case of one corpse feeding on another, slightly healthier corpse. Broadcasters are supposed to be on suicide watch because they lack even cable's dual revenue streams (advertising and subscription). But the free-to-air TV distributors may yet have a card up their sleeves.
Nobody would mistake Qwest Communications, the former Baby Bell, for one of the winners of the telecom war of the '90s, but having not followed AT&T and Verizon into the TV business, its executives now are able to say freely that live-transmission TV doesn't make much sense in an on-demand world—that is, except news and sports, the only programming that large numbers of people are likely to want to consume at exactly the same moment.
It just so happens that over-the-air broadcasters, now that they have multiple, crystalline hi-def digital channels at their disposal, may prove the best way to deliver live programming over a given geographical area. After a recent column on this subject, several readers emailed to say they've already dropped cable and now get their video from a combination of free HDTV plus on-demand downloads from the likes of Netflix, iTunes or Amazon.
And surely one of Ben Bernanke's unenumerated greenshoots lately has been the unexpected surge in HDTV antenna sales since last year's digital switch. Look to Western Europe, where the digital transition began earlier. Viewers willing to rely on over-the-air digital broadcast TV have grown to 42 million from 31 million in three years, according to the International Television Expert Group. They are expected to hit 59 million in 2013. A new European standard-setting body called HbbTV (for hybrid broadcast-broadband TV) has even been launched to consecrate the wedding of on-demand and over-the-air.
One future wild card will be the strategies adopted by program creators. Will the established networks and studios fight to preserve cable's business model (while cutting themselves in for a bigger share of subscriber fees) or will they seize the broadband opportunity? To wit, the proposed tie-up between Comcast and NBC gives Comcast an ownership stake in Hulu, through which NBC, ABC and Fox jointly have experimented with bypassing cable to stream their shows directly to viewers. Now regulators will have to decide what Comcast's motivation is likely to be: snuffing a proto-cable competitor in its crib or developing Hulu's full potential? (Even Comcast probably doesn't know at this point.)
In the long run, we wouldn't care to bet which programming aggregator will be a winner, but here's a guess at what TV viewing will look in five years: You will point an iPhone-like device at the nearest screen in order to play any kind of video, whether stored on the device's own memory, downloaded from a third-party site or plucked from an over-the-air signal.
Somehow, too, programmers will get paid, or there won't be programming. One thing is also clear: If you're playing in this sandbox, there is no better leverage than owning rights to college and professional football, especially during bowl season.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
NVALEO and Hope4MentalHealth.org
Hope4MentalHealth.org Made Its Debut at Sundance
Hope4MentalHealth.org Served Up Celebrities and Tweeted Up for Haiti at the Tweet House Presented By Smashbox Studios in Park City January 23-24
AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 3 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Hope4MentalHealth.org made its debut in Park City, Utah as a sponsor of the "Tweet House" presented by Smashbox Studios during the 2010 Sundance Film Festival(TM). A multi tiered event that showcased Twitter's global influence in entertainment, Hope4MentalHealth.org shined as conference goers enjoyed its high end bottled water, and with its participation in the Celebrity TweetUp For Haiti, a charitable component of the event in which celebrities sent out live "tweets" to raise funds to aid Haiti.
Acclaimed actor LeVar Burton of Burton /Wolfe Entertainment and co-host of the event called out to the crowd, "I don't think you realize what just happened," as he reiterated Hope4MentalHealth.org Founder and Executive Director, Craig Huxford's announcement to donate $1000 to the cause. "This is a charity that came here to get assistance and they are donating one half of it back to Haiti," said Burton.
"We are extremely grateful to Nvaleo for their contribution," said Huxford. "We need the support of everyone here today, but Haiti needs all of us now. I hope that at some point, Hope4MentalHealth.org will be able to do even more by helping to provide mental health assistance to some of the children of Haiti who have endured this terrible disaster," he said. Jeff Ritchie of Nvaleo presented the $2000 donation to Hope4MentalHealth.org.
Those in attendance at "Tweet House" included Burton, actor Adrian Grenier, actor Wilmer Valderrama, designer Daymond John, NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, actor Beau Bridges, TV personality Jill Zarin and daughter Allyson Shapiro Zarin, director Jay Duplass, actor Joseph Gordon Levitt, and actor Camille Mana, among others.
A 501(c) 3 nonprofit corporation, Hope4MentalHealth.org is devoted to helping children to combat mental health disorders, including obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, and ADHD, among others. With 100 percent of the proceeds of its private label bottled water, Hope4MentalHealth.org Natural Spring Water, the organization's goal is to help children "one bottle at a time" by offering programs and assistance in receiving effective services and treatment which will allow these children to grow and succeed in a competitive environment.
For more information, log onto www.hope4mentalhealth.org, or to schedule an interview with Craig Huxford, contact Kristen Wright at 404.641.7195 or email at kristen.wright@hope4mentalhealth.org.
SOURCE Hope4MentalHealth.org
Hope4MentalHealth.org Served Up Celebrities and Tweeted Up for Haiti at the Tweet House Presented By Smashbox Studios in Park City January 23-24
AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 3 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Hope4MentalHealth.org made its debut in Park City, Utah as a sponsor of the "Tweet House" presented by Smashbox Studios during the 2010 Sundance Film Festival(TM). A multi tiered event that showcased Twitter's global influence in entertainment, Hope4MentalHealth.org shined as conference goers enjoyed its high end bottled water, and with its participation in the Celebrity TweetUp For Haiti, a charitable component of the event in which celebrities sent out live "tweets" to raise funds to aid Haiti.
Acclaimed actor LeVar Burton of Burton /Wolfe Entertainment and co-host of the event called out to the crowd, "I don't think you realize what just happened," as he reiterated Hope4MentalHealth.org Founder and Executive Director, Craig Huxford's announcement to donate $1000 to the cause. "This is a charity that came here to get assistance and they are donating one half of it back to Haiti," said Burton.
"We are extremely grateful to Nvaleo for their contribution," said Huxford. "We need the support of everyone here today, but Haiti needs all of us now. I hope that at some point, Hope4MentalHealth.org will be able to do even more by helping to provide mental health assistance to some of the children of Haiti who have endured this terrible disaster," he said. Jeff Ritchie of Nvaleo presented the $2000 donation to Hope4MentalHealth.org.
Those in attendance at "Tweet House" included Burton, actor Adrian Grenier, actor Wilmer Valderrama, designer Daymond John, NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, actor Beau Bridges, TV personality Jill Zarin and daughter Allyson Shapiro Zarin, director Jay Duplass, actor Joseph Gordon Levitt, and actor Camille Mana, among others.
A 501(c) 3 nonprofit corporation, Hope4MentalHealth.org is devoted to helping children to combat mental health disorders, including obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, and ADHD, among others. With 100 percent of the proceeds of its private label bottled water, Hope4MentalHealth.org Natural Spring Water, the organization's goal is to help children "one bottle at a time" by offering programs and assistance in receiving effective services and treatment which will allow these children to grow and succeed in a competitive environment.
For more information, log onto www.hope4mentalhealth.org, or to schedule an interview with Craig Huxford, contact Kristen Wright at 404.641.7195 or email at kristen.wright@hope4mentalhealth.org.
SOURCE Hope4MentalHealth.org
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Wall Street Journal - NVALEO is leading this movement...
This may not be the year America cuts the cable cord and drops its subscription to pay TV. But it will likely be a year of sublime creative destruction in the home-video entertainment business.
Comcast's proposed acquisition of NBC has elicited the usual panic from the usual worrywarts wondering who will possibly be able to compete with the new cable-cum-programming giant.
A better question is: Who won't?
Dozens of players (including retailers and gadget makers) are entering what's called the "over the top" TV market, with nothing to lose and every reason to innovate in competition with each other.
The toughest hurdle has been connecting the television to a potentially bottomless supply of Internet programming in a way not daunting to the average viewer. Coming this year are TVs with direct Internet connections, which could change things fast. Of note is Best Buy's recent announcement that every Web-connected TV it sells will soon come with a subscription to a Best Buy library of entertainment. Sony has similar plans. Think Wal-Mart, Blockbuster and Disney won't be in the hunt?
Ditto the cablers themselves, who are burnishing a concept called "TV Everywhere" in hopes of satisfying your appetite for on-demand TV (while somehow keeping you paying your cable bills at the same time).
View Full Image
bw0106
Getty Images
bw0106
bw0106
Yeah, right. The losers won't just be cable and satellite's existing business models. The losers will be Verizon and AT&T, whose Internet-powered television this column cheerleaded for. Too little, too late, too cablelike. Likewise, Sony and Microsoft, which have spent billions developing high-powered, Internet-connected game machines as Trojan horses in the living room, only to find the set-top box market suddenly crowded and perhaps obsolescing.
In this world, Fox Broadcasting's victory Friday in winning retransmission fees from Time Warner Cable might seem a case of one corpse feeding on another, slightly healthier corpse. Broadcasters are supposed to be on suicide watch because they lack even cable's dual revenue streams (advertising and subscription). But the free-to-air TV distributors may yet have a card up their sleeves.
Nobody would mistake Qwest Communications, the former Baby Bell, for one of the winners of the telecom war of the '90s, but having not followed AT&T and Verizon into the TV business, its executives now are able to say freely that live-transmission TV doesn't make much sense in an on-demand world—that is, except news and sports, the only programming that large numbers of people are likely to want to consume at exactly the same moment.
It just so happens that over-the-air broadcasters, now that they have multiple, crystalline hi-def digital channels at their disposal, may prove the best way to deliver live programming over a given geographical area. After a recent column on this subject, several readers emailed to say they've already dropped cable and now get their video from a combination of free HDTV plus on-demand downloads from the likes of Netflix, iTunes or Amazon.
And surely one of Ben Bernanke's unenumerated greenshoots lately has been the unexpected surge in HDTV antenna sales since last year's digital switch. Look to Western Europe, where the digital transition began earlier. Viewers willing to rely on over-the-air digital broadcast TV have grown to 42 million from 31 million in three years, according to the International Television Expert Group. They are expected to hit 59 million in 2013. A new European standard-setting body called HbbTV (for hybrid broadcast-broadband TV) has even been launched to consecrate the wedding of on-demand and over-the-air.
One future wild card will be the strategies adopted by program creators. Will the established networks and studios fight to preserve cable's business model (while cutting themselves in for a bigger share of subscriber fees) or will they seize the broadband opportunity? To wit, the proposed tie-up between Comcast and NBC gives Comcast an ownership stake in Hulu, through which NBC, ABC and Fox jointly have experimented with bypassing cable to stream their shows directly to viewers. Now regulators will have to decide what Comcast's motivation is likely to be: snuffing a proto-cable competitor in its crib or developing Hulu's full potential? (Even Comcast probably doesn't know at this point.)
In the long run, we wouldn't care to bet which programming aggregator will be a winner, but here's a guess at what TV viewing will look in five years: You will point an iPhone-like device at the nearest screen in order to play any kind of video, whether stored on the device's own memory, downloaded from a third-party site or plucked from an over-the-air signal.
Somehow, too, programmers will get paid, or there won't be programming. One thing is also clear: If you're playing in this sandbox, there is no better leverage than owning rights to college and professional football, especially during bowl season.
Comcast's proposed acquisition of NBC has elicited the usual panic from the usual worrywarts wondering who will possibly be able to compete with the new cable-cum-programming giant.
A better question is: Who won't?
Dozens of players (including retailers and gadget makers) are entering what's called the "over the top" TV market, with nothing to lose and every reason to innovate in competition with each other.
The toughest hurdle has been connecting the television to a potentially bottomless supply of Internet programming in a way not daunting to the average viewer. Coming this year are TVs with direct Internet connections, which could change things fast. Of note is Best Buy's recent announcement that every Web-connected TV it sells will soon come with a subscription to a Best Buy library of entertainment. Sony has similar plans. Think Wal-Mart, Blockbuster and Disney won't be in the hunt?
Ditto the cablers themselves, who are burnishing a concept called "TV Everywhere" in hopes of satisfying your appetite for on-demand TV (while somehow keeping you paying your cable bills at the same time).
View Full Image
bw0106
Getty Images
bw0106
bw0106
Yeah, right. The losers won't just be cable and satellite's existing business models. The losers will be Verizon and AT&T, whose Internet-powered television this column cheerleaded for. Too little, too late, too cablelike. Likewise, Sony and Microsoft, which have spent billions developing high-powered, Internet-connected game machines as Trojan horses in the living room, only to find the set-top box market suddenly crowded and perhaps obsolescing.
In this world, Fox Broadcasting's victory Friday in winning retransmission fees from Time Warner Cable might seem a case of one corpse feeding on another, slightly healthier corpse. Broadcasters are supposed to be on suicide watch because they lack even cable's dual revenue streams (advertising and subscription). But the free-to-air TV distributors may yet have a card up their sleeves.
Nobody would mistake Qwest Communications, the former Baby Bell, for one of the winners of the telecom war of the '90s, but having not followed AT&T and Verizon into the TV business, its executives now are able to say freely that live-transmission TV doesn't make much sense in an on-demand world—that is, except news and sports, the only programming that large numbers of people are likely to want to consume at exactly the same moment.
It just so happens that over-the-air broadcasters, now that they have multiple, crystalline hi-def digital channels at their disposal, may prove the best way to deliver live programming over a given geographical area. After a recent column on this subject, several readers emailed to say they've already dropped cable and now get their video from a combination of free HDTV plus on-demand downloads from the likes of Netflix, iTunes or Amazon.
And surely one of Ben Bernanke's unenumerated greenshoots lately has been the unexpected surge in HDTV antenna sales since last year's digital switch. Look to Western Europe, where the digital transition began earlier. Viewers willing to rely on over-the-air digital broadcast TV have grown to 42 million from 31 million in three years, according to the International Television Expert Group. They are expected to hit 59 million in 2013. A new European standard-setting body called HbbTV (for hybrid broadcast-broadband TV) has even been launched to consecrate the wedding of on-demand and over-the-air.
One future wild card will be the strategies adopted by program creators. Will the established networks and studios fight to preserve cable's business model (while cutting themselves in for a bigger share of subscriber fees) or will they seize the broadband opportunity? To wit, the proposed tie-up between Comcast and NBC gives Comcast an ownership stake in Hulu, through which NBC, ABC and Fox jointly have experimented with bypassing cable to stream their shows directly to viewers. Now regulators will have to decide what Comcast's motivation is likely to be: snuffing a proto-cable competitor in its crib or developing Hulu's full potential? (Even Comcast probably doesn't know at this point.)
In the long run, we wouldn't care to bet which programming aggregator will be a winner, but here's a guess at what TV viewing will look in five years: You will point an iPhone-like device at the nearest screen in order to play any kind of video, whether stored on the device's own memory, downloaded from a third-party site or plucked from an over-the-air signal.
Somehow, too, programmers will get paid, or there won't be programming. One thing is also clear: If you're playing in this sandbox, there is no better leverage than owning rights to college and professional football, especially during bowl season.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
Sundance Film Festival
The 2010 Sundance Film Festival kicked off Thursday night, promising a more low-key feel, with a focus on more low-budget films and new directors. There are a lot of films at this year’s festival, all in all, representing filmmakers from 41 different countries.
NVALEO is on location in Park City, setting up shop to webcast interviews and capture some of the star-studded events from this year's festival with our talented film crew.
NVALEO will begin webcasting on LIVE 1 and LIVE 2 Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. Mountain Standard Time. Both feeds can be viewed on your NVALEO box or on-line. (UPDATED)
Follow NVALEO on twitter to receive event and schedule updates.
NVALEO is on location in Park City, setting up shop to webcast interviews and capture some of the star-studded events from this year's festival with our talented film crew.
NVALEO will begin webcasting on LIVE 1 and LIVE 2 Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. Mountain Standard Time. Both feeds can be viewed on your NVALEO box or on-line. (UPDATED)
Follow NVALEO on twitter to receive event and schedule updates.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Monday, January 11, 2010
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Friday, January 8, 2010
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Monday, January 4, 2010
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
