AllThingsD » Mad Men

Hollywood Goes Digital -- But Not Too Digital. Sony Boss Michael Lynton's Candid Dive Into Media Interview.

Peter Kafka — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 21:55:06 +0000

Technology is driving huge shifts in the way we consume media. But some parts of the media world aren’t changing much, or soon.

The only way you’re going to see a blockbuster movie like “Skyfall,” for instance, is if a studio like Sony foots the bill. And once they do, they’re not going to let you see it anywhere but in a theater in the first few months it’s out.

Sony boss Michael Lynton made that clear during his interview at D: Dive into Media. There are plenty of reasons why people like me (and maybe you) would like to see “Skyfall” at home while it’s still in the theaters. But Sony has very good reasons for keeping things the way they are.

That said, Lynton is happy to experiment when it comes time for other windows — perhaps there’s a way to charge viewers a premium for home viewing before the movie makes it to DVD, for instance. Hollywood has tried this before and failed, but Lynton says it will likely come back.

And Lynton, who is thoughtful and candid onstage, has lots to say about the other ways technology is affecting his business, from the rise of cable dramas like “Mad Men” — if you love Don Draper, you have Netflix and the DVR to thank — to the way it is grappling with the gabbers on Twitter and Facebook, who can sink a mediocre movie in record time.

This one was a lot of fun to do live. Now you can enjoy it on your own time:

[ See post to watch video ]

The New Yorker Lands on the iPhone, With Help From Lena Dunham and Jon Hamm

Peter Kafka — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:05:25 +0000

Here’s another way to crack the “big stack of old New Yorkers you don’t have time to get to” problem: You can now read the magazine on your iPhone, via a new app.

If you’ve used the New Yorker’s iPad app, then you’ll have a very good sense of what you’re getting here: All of the magazine’s content, along with a small handful of digital goodies, delivered to your device via Apple’s Newsstand.

Access is free for print subscribers, or you can buy a digital-only subscription that includes iPad and iPhone access; you can also buy individual issues. Publisher Conde Nast is giving away this week’s edition free, so you can try it out yourself.

Putting a magazine on the iPhone makes perfect sense for people like me, who do a ton of reading on the handset (our family iPad is pretty much relegated to Netflix delivery/babysitting duties). But it’s a departure for Conde Nast, which has generally tried to keep its digital replicas confined to iPads and other tablets.*

Beyond the obvious news, there is something interesting happening behind the scenes for people who track app development. After nearly two years, Conde and Adobe, who built the publisher’s app platform, have finally figured out how to handle “paginated HTML,” which means the app can now handle text as … text. Instead of giant image files.

Short version: The iPhone version of the New Yorker will be a lot easier to download than the iPad version.

This week’s edition, for instance, will weigh in at 23 megabytes, while the iPad versions have been going well over 100MB a pop. And the New Yorker will now be able to use the same tech to give the iPad version a slim-down, says Deputy Editor Pam McCarthy, who handles the apps.

Meanwhile, if you’re reading this, you really don’t need a video explaining how or why you should use the app. (It’s not 2010.) But I’m so glad that the New Yorker commissioned Lena Dunham to make one, anyway. Here’s the “Girls” auteur, along with Mad Man Jon Hamm, and some awesome pants.

*The same goes for most of the publishing business, though I think that’s changing, and will certainly accelerate if phones get bigger and/or tablets shrink.

"Mad Men" (Ad) Spoiler: Sex, Violence, Display Advertising Technology

Peter Kafka — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 02:00:07 +0000

The advertising technology landscape is so confusing that lots of people in the industry are confused about who does what. So here’s one way to stand out: Run a 30-second ad on the season finale of “Mad Men,” like Turn is doing tonight.

So now that you’ve seen it, do you understand who Turn is, or what they do? If you’re in ad tech, you probably already did. They’re one of a handful of very-well-funded “demand-side platforms” that help ad buyers negotiate various ad exchanges. Google bought one of these a couple of years ago, and everyone is trying to figure out what will happen to the rest.

But if you’re not in ad tech, like nearly everyone who watches “Mad Men,” Turn’s ad won’t mean anything to you.

I guess that makes it like the ads that conglomerates like ADM or Lockheed used to run on Sunday-morning political shows. They were only relevant for a handful of viewers — the people who write or influence laws — but the ad guys were reasonably assured that most of that handful would be watching.

Presumably, this is exactly the kind of imprecise targeting that Turn is supposed to fix. But, whatever, I’m writing about it here.

Totally unrelated note: I’m not a huge “Mad Men” fan*, but even a quick glance at this ad shows you just how seriously the “Mad Men” casting and production people take their jobs. The Turn ad instantly evokes “Mad Men,” but it also looks nothing like “Mad Men,” and if I was in production, I could articulate why. So I can just say that it looks … off. Definitely not period. Especially the blonde.

Still reading? You like this stuff. Go see more here, including an “alternate ending” version that’s pretty clever.

*I like reading about “Mad Men” more than I enjoy watching it. Meanwhile, I’m pretty psyched for just about any kind of reality-TV cooking competition, no matter how silly (see: MasterChef Season 3**). But I have zero desire to read about those shows.

**Best TV villain of the summer: Joe Bastianich, again.

Dish Network Doesn't Want to Blow Up TV. It Wants to Pay Less for It.

Peter Kafka — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:48:36 +0000

Does Charlie Ergen really want to blow up the TV business, using his ad-skipping “Auto Hop” feature?

You can make that case, and if you want to hear an entertaining rendition of it, check out Peter Lauria’s live-on-tape report from Times Square here.

But here’s a less-dramatic reading of Ergen’s ambitions: Like everyone else in America, Ergen likes TV, a lot. He just wants to pay less to watch it.

TV programmers have been able to push up the price for their shows, year after year, even as the audience for those shows gets smaller and smaller. Their latest move: Convincing pay-TV operators to pay them “retrans” fees for the four broadcast networks, which are theoretically supposed to be available to anyone in the country, free of charge.

The pay-TV operators have been taking those fees and passing them along to consumers, because it’s easier to do that than anything else.

And in that context, Ergen’s ad-skipping feature makes a lot of sense, because it freaks the networks out, for obvious reasons. So if the courts let it stand, then Ergen finally has real leverage when it comes to fees: If the networks won’t lower them, he’ll torch their ads.

There is another way to negotiate with the programmers: Just don’t carry their stuff at all. And that’s what Ergen is threatening to do with AMC TV, the people who bring us “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” While a bunch of us really love those shows, the majority of pay-TV viewers don’t watch them, so Ergen’s bet is that he can live longer without AMC than it can do without his fees. But he can’t afford to do that with the broadcasters, who still have mass reach.

Still, note that even in that case, Ergen isn’t saying that he doesn’t want to carry “Mad Men,” et al, on his service — he just wants to pay less for it.

“Obviously there’s a price where an [AMC Networks] product makes sense. We just don’t think that’s where we are today,” he told investors earlier this month.

My hunch: That’s what he’s saying to NBC, Fox, CBS and ABC, too. He’s just using technology and the courts to deliver the message.

Zou Bisou! Netflix Says It Brought a Million New Viewers to "Mad Men."

Peter Kafka — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:01:06 +0000

“Mad Men” is in its fifth season, and the AMC show is more popular than ever. This year’s debut episode attracted 3.5 million viewers, up more than a million from last’s season’s 2.4 million average.

You’re welcome, says Netflix content boss Ted Sarandos.

Sarandos, speaking at a panel at the cable industry’s annual convention in Boston, took credit for the bump, citing Netflix viewership for the show’s repeats.

“These are people who had four years to watch the show, and didn’t,” he said. But after catching up on the earlier seasons, they tuned in for the fifth.

Netflix wants to boast about stories like this, because it highlights the fact that it still has in-demand content, and because it bolsters its argument that it can help TV networks, not hurt them. And there may well be evidence to support that.

But it’s important to note that Sarandos’ comments came when he was defending Netflix from the flip side of that argument — that some networks, like Viacom’s Nickelodeon, may be hurt by Netflix. Both Viacom and Netflix say that’s not the case, but the critique has traction with various Netflix skeptics.

Meanwhile, here’s another data point from the panel that indicates that Netflix customers are watching something on the service: Cox Communications President Pat Esser said 40 percent of his four million broadband customers generated a Netflix stream in March.

Cable Fee Fight Takes Another Turn as Dish Networks Uses iTunes, Netflix and Amazon as Weapons

Peter Kafka — Mon, 07 May 2012 19:07:00 +0000

The basic contours of the TV programmer versus pay-TV provider fight are fundamental and unchanging: The programmer tries to get more money for his stuff, the pay-TV provider says that’s too much, and the two sides chest-bump for a while.

Eventually they settle, and you, the pay-TV customer, ends up paying more.

And that’s what’s happening in the latest dustup between Dish Networks, the satellite TV service, and AMC Networks, the programmers now best known as the guys who bring you “Mad Men,” “The Walking Dead” and “Breaking Bad.”

The slight twist here: For argument’s sake, at least, Dish is saying that because AMC is selling digital versions of those shows to other outlets, its hit shows are worth less to Dish subscribers. “It’s actually devalued,” says Dish chairman Charlie Ergen.

The fact that networks are selling or giving away their stuff online has been a minor but growing issue in carriage fights for a while now. But this is the biggest stink that a cable/pay TV provider has made about it, at least in public.*

Dish first brought this up via a press statement last week, but Ergen went on about it at length today during the Dish earnings call.

It’s worth reading. I’ve cleaned up his comments just a bit for clarity (note that AMC Networks includes multiple channels, including AMC, IFC and Sundance):

We have very, very specific viewer measurement. Much more granular than somebody like Nielsen might have. So we’re able to watch our customer base and — we realize we skew a bit more rural — between [AMC Networks] programming, they have very, very low viewership, outside of a few obviously popular [shows] on AMC.

But those particular channels are also available to our customers on a variety of other sources, like iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and so on.

One of the things that programmers have done is that they’ve devalued their programming content by making it available in many multiple outlets. So, when someone asks for price increases …

We just look at it. Our customers are not really saying “We want to pay more money,” they’re saying, “We want more flexibility in our programming, and we don’t want to pay more.”

And when you look at that from a timing perspective, that’s just a contract that we can change. And we believe that the product is actually devalued. Not that there’s not some good programs, but that they’ve been devalued, because you can get it in multiple ways. And customers are asking for more flexibility, or have more flexibility to get the programming. So it’s not quite the same as something that was exclusive.

So we look at it and say, “This is a good opportunity to make a good business judgment call.” And obviously there’s a price where an [AMC Networks] product makes sense. We just don’t think that’s where we are today.

First things first: Obviously it makes the most sense to dump all of this into the “posturing” bucket, and treat it accordingly. The easy money here is to bet that, yet again, Dish and AMC will strike a deal, which Ergen, at the end of his remarks, explicitly says is on the table.

That said, a couple of points:

Most of the big TV programmers seem to agree with Ergen’s point when it comes to free repeats of recent shows. Which is why they have been taking stuff that they’ve been giving away via outlets like Hulu, and either pulling them off the Web entirely, or requiring that customers “authenticate” — prove that they’re paying for cable or satellite TV — in order to see them without delay. Note that Dish was the first pay-TV service to participate in the Fox authentication plan last summer. (Fox is owned by News Corp., as is this Web site.)
TV programmers don’t seem to think that iTunes’ and Amazon’s a la carte sales of shows that aired the night before are devaluing their product. Because they’re still selling them, and by all accounts there doesn’t seem to be a ton of volume for those episodes. If there was, advertisers would squawk long before pay-TV providers would.
The really touchy subject here is what happens to prior-season episodes of AMC hits like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” on Netflix. Netflix has been arguing that these episodes are big draws for its customers, and that this is good for networks like AMC, because people discover the old shows on Netflix and then watch the new ones as they air. There is some evidence for this, too.
But there is also evidence that Netflix repeats hurt some cable programming — like kids’ shows — too. And that leads to speculation that Viacom and Disney will pull back their shows from the service or raise prices when their contracts expire — even though Netflix is already paying big dollars for them. Netflix will have its hands on “Mad Men” and other AMC shows for at least a couple of years more. But it will be interesting to see what Dish’s complaint means for the renegotiations.

*There is also a wrinkle involving a lawsuit between Dish and a former AMC subsidiary, but that’s par for the course, too. All of these guys sue all of these guys, all the time. No recession, ever, for TV attorneys.

You Really Can Blame the Web for Shrinking TV Ratings -- But You Have to Credit It for Boosting TV, Too

Peter Kafka — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:40:42 +0000

Why are lots of TV networks’ ratings down? The most obvious answer is that people are watching stuff on the Web instead.

But people are still watching a whole lot of TV — perhaps as much as ever. So the more nuanced answer is that some people are swapping out the Web for TV, some of the time. And other times Web video consumption may end up leading to more TV-watching.

Here’s some evidence supporting that idea: New data from Bernstein Research that tracks TV viewing habits for Netflix streaming subscribers. It shows a drop in kids’ TV viewing — but an increase for networks like AMC and FX. Presumably that’s because Netflix users are discovering old episodes of shows like “Mad Men” and “Sons of Anarchy” on Netflix, which is prompting them to watch new episodes of those shows on cable.

This chart shows a dropoff for programming on kids’ networks like Disney and Nickelodeon:

And this chart shows spikes for AMC whenever the network shows new episodes of shows that have old episodes on Netflix:

Bernstein put its research together using data from TiVo users. So on the one hand the numbers are pinpoint accurate, since they’re tracking actual TV usage. And, on the other hand, it may not be representative of the entire country.

Still, it makes intuitive sense, and certainly syncs up with the way the Web gets used in our house: Our kids are unaware you can do anything with an iPad other than watch “Backyardigans” and “Dinosaur Train.”

Meanwhile, I just plowed through the first four seasons of “Breaking Bad” on Netflix (and iTunes) last month — and am going out of my mind waiting for the fifth season to start on AMC this summer. Let’s cook!

Want to Know What Consumers Think? Check Their Gut.

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:30:27 +0000

I don’t watch it, but perhaps it’s suitable that the TV series “Mad Men” is back on the air, because it allows me to reintroduce you to Matt Warta, the CEO of GutCheck, a Denver-based start-up. Warta bears a passing resemblance to a character on the show, Roger Sterling.

GutCheck, you may remember, is set on upending the decades-old institutions of consumer research. Ad agencies and research companies spend $7 billion a year rounding up focus groups and asking roomfuls of consumers a bunch of questions and paying them for their time. Basically, it leverages the power of the Internet to reach out to consumers directly and ask them the questions that advertisers need to ask as they build out their campaigns. No need to gather them all in a meeting room and pay someone thousands of dollars to survey them in person, then gather up the results weeks later.

It’s a small shop that has some pretty big customers: Intel, General Mills and Hallmark are among its corporate clients. And some big ad agencies use it, too, including Kaplan Thaler and GSD&M.

Today, Gutcheck is launching a new service called Instant Research Communities. In a world where people are often willing to become fans of a product or a brand, or “Like” it on Facebook and Twitter, or express public opinions about a brand in dozens of ways, the one-on-one opinions of those people are often valuable. GutCheck can quickly gather a bunch of qualified respondents from this pool of “brand advocates,” as they are often called in the ad business.

For what? Testing out early versions of an ad campaign that’s in development, or asking them what they think about a new product or a potential business move. The same recruitment engine the company developed for its virtual focus group service works here, too. You get you group together in a matter of hours, and have your research ready in days instead of weeks. The company is unveiling the service at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Re:think conference in New York.

Warta, a former venture capitalist, raised $2 million in funding from Highway 12 Ventures, a Boise, Idaho-based venture capital fund. Given the clients the outfit has landed in the last year, it has been running fine on that funding since then. Warta told me, however, that he’ll probably be looking to raise another round before 2012 is over.

I asked Warta yesterday whose business GutCheck aims to disrupt, expecting it to be some network of big agencies that specialize in wrangling and convening consumers into groups where they can be probed for opinions and attitudes. He told me it’s really a much more informal network of small local and regional companies that do the wrangling and the polling, under contract to the large ad agencies and consumer goods companies. “It’s really just a bunch of small mom-and-pop shops,” he said.

I’m no expert on the advertising business, but it sounds a little messy and ad hoc. Certainly, Roger Sterling would have something snappy and incisive to say about that. But I don’t watch the show, so you’ll have to just imagine it.

The "Mad Men" Years Are Giving Way to the "Math Men" Era

Chris Moore — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:50:28 +0000

“Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing … It’s okay. You are okay.”

Don Draper, “Mad Men,” Season 1, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”

I wonder what Don Draper would think today when the 23-year-old digital media buying whiz quips back, “Maybe, but let’s load it up into the system, along with 5,000 other versions of copy, and measure how many Facebook ‘Likes’ it drives within our target demo.”

I love the “Mad Men” version of the ad business. The storytelling. The simplicity. The glasses of scotch at 10 am. But these days in digital, it feels like the Math Men media buyers (with their terabytes of data) are taking over for the Mad Men creatives. It may not make for great TV drama, but they’ve got the performance data to prove that it’s their turn in the driver’s seat.

For years, digital ads were bought and sold by young media buyers from ad agencies and smooth salesmen from online publishers and networks, sealed over the modern version of the “three-martini lunch.” But with the steady advancement in online advertising technology over the last ten years, the geeks — I mean the Math Men — have gained the upper hand in determining how to spend these digital marketing dollars. Today, ad buying and selling is automated across nearly every digital channel, driven by complex algorithms crunching terabytes of data, all employed to meet rigorous ROI objectives — typically measured by new customer acquisition, profit margin, or revenues.

It all started in search, where Overture introduced (and Google perfected) a keyword ad marketplace for search pages. We take that marketer proposition for granted now, but it was heretical at the time — only pay us when a user clicks on your ad (versus every time we show your ad), and you decide how much to pay for that click (versus the same price for every advertiser). And sophisticated marketers took full advantage by leveraging technology platforms from Math Men companies like Efficient Frontier to maximize the efficiency of their search ad spend across millions of keywords, bids and text ad copy.

Since then, several major advances in advertising technology have further enabled the Math Men:

Six years ago, Right Media introduced the first ad exchange for display ads, enabling the Math Men and their algorithms to buy and sell banner ads and skyscrapers across the Web. Google subsequently perfected the display exchange via their DoubleClick acquisition as well.
Three years ago, Blue Kai introduced the first ad targeting-data marketplace, enabling the Math Men to leverage anonymous audience targeting data to further enhance marketers’ campaign performance.
A year ago, Facebook launched its own ad platform API to enable Math Men and their algorithms to bid for Facebook ads based on user attributes. It seems likely that Facebook will eventually extend its monetization platform to third-party publishers, similar to what Google did with AdSense, as Facebook already has a strong distribution foothold via Facebook Connect.

It feels like we are witnessing the tipping point in digital media buying. Measured by dollars or by impressions, greater than 50 percent of online advertising is bought via APIs today (granted, most of this is still search). In a few years, I believe that 90 percent of all digital ad impressions, and more than 75 percent of digital ad dollars, will be bought and sold programmatically.

As we witnessed with search marketing, once a) marketers get a taste of the increased spend efficiency offered by these emerging platforms, and b) these platforms (and the associated marketer tools) become sufficiently easy to use, the dollars will flow, and quickly. The Math Men at Efficient Frontier are leveraging these display, data and social platforms to deliver superior ad spend performance for marketers across all digital channels today. It’s no longer just about search.

And the Mad Men are taking note. In the last few years, the ad agency holding companies have rolled out their own technology-driven digital ad “trading desks” to help their clients take advantage of these ad trading platforms. I wonder if they’ve replaced the scotch in the mini bars with the Math Men’s drink of choice, Red Bull.

Chris Moore is a partner with Redpoint Ventures and has been enabling the digital Math Men with investments in Efficient Frontier, Right Media, Blue Kai, Auditude, Inadco, Extole, Intent Media and eBureau. Follow him on Twitter @Redpointvc and @Moorski.

Netflix Killer? Try Netflix Promoter: Amazon Talks Up a Rival Video Service.

Peter Kafka — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 10:00:29 +0000

If you were looking for another reason to be bearish about Netflix, Amazon helped out yesterday, by unveiling a cheap, attractive tablet designed to work with Amazon’s own video service.

But here’s a reason to be bullish (or just less bearish) about Netflix: Amazon’s new tablet is also going to promote Netflix.

The video service is one of four big developers — along with Pandora, Facebook and Twitter — that should have apps ready for the Kindle Fire at launch, Amazon has said over and over again.

Here, in this Bloomberg Businessweek curtain-raiser, for instance. And throughout yesterday’s press event, like during my interview with Kindle content boss Russ Grandinetti.

Why would Amazon welcome Netflix when it’s building a competing video service? That one’s easy: Because even after all the blowback, lots of people like Netflix.

Reed Hastings and company should have 24 million customers at the end of this quarter, and 22 million of them will be streaming video. If you’re trying to sell a new gadget, you want to make sure you can include those folks as potential customers, by making sure they can use the service they like after they give you $200.

There’s also a larger question about how directly the Amazon video service will end up competing with Netflix, anyway. The two services seem similar enough at first glance, but lots of smart folks seem to think Amazon is most interested in using its service as an incentive to sign up for Amazon Prime, its express shipping service.

That is: Amazon wants to use digital video to sell physical goods, while Netflix wants to be in the digital video business, period.

In the video industry, Amazon has a rep for being unwilling to pay top dollar for content. For now, at least, it seems instead satisfied to fill its virtual shelves with not just old stuff, but very old stuff — stuff that’s from shows that don’t appear on TV at all anymore.

Netflix has plenty of that stuff, too, but it has has recently made a point of paying up for much fresher stuff — like episodes of “Mad Men” — and stuff that’s so fresh it hasn’t aired yet, like Kevin Spacey’s “House of Cards.”

To be fair, Amazon’s aims could change. It could happen over time, as it cobbles together enough assets and subscribers to make a real run at Netflix. Or it could be overnight: The company is one of the handful of serious bidders still looking at Hulu, and if it landed that service, things could get very interesting very fast.

But for now, Amazon is going to have enough work convincing people who’ve spent a lot of time and money on Apple’s platform to switch to its own cloud service. No reason to make it harder by pissing off millions of Netflix customers, too.

Missed the Emmys (and "Mad Men" + Jane Lynch)? YouTube Has You Covered. (Video)

Peter Kafka — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:52:07 +0000

Normally after a big televised live event, like the Oscars or MTV’s Video Music Awards, I can tell you what the Internet thinks was most interesting about said event.

And usually I can provide a YouTube clip that replays the event, which both illustrates said event and the difficulty that TV still has in keeping this stuff off YouTube. Meta!

Alas, my glimpse of the Web this morning tells me very little about last night’s Emmys. Could be because so many people in my peer group are gnashing their teeth into pulp over Netflix/Qwikster. Or it could be because while everyone I like to follow on Twitter likes to tweet about the Emmys, no one was actually watching it.

So in lieu of a consensus answer, here’s the easiest answer: This is the first result from last night’s show that YouTube gives you when you type in “Emmy.”

It doesn’t appear to be official, but it is nice quality, and Jane Lynch is awesome (disclosures below) and the Fox folks (disclosures below) don’t seem to be that upset about it — it’s been up more than half a day.

Also, luckily, it’s pretty amusing. Best part is the “Mad Men” bit, which kicks in around 4:20.

This would have been even better, I’m quite sure, had the Leonard Nimoy part been played by Alec Baldwin, which was the plan until the Fox folks axed a PhoneGate joke and Baldwin bailed. Speaking of which: Disclosures!

Fox is owned by News Corp. Which also owns this Web site. At least as important:
At least one person who works at this Web site is BFFs with Jane. At least one more wishes he/she were BFFs with Jane. Jane Lynch showed up at the start of our D9 conference in May, and she was great then, too.

[ See post to watch video ]

Netflix to Stream "Mad Men"

Lauren A.E. Schuker and Jessica E. Vascellaro — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 11:00:52 +0000

Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., which produces the hit television series “Mad Men,” struck a deal with Netflix Inc. to stream all seven seasons of the critically acclaimed show about a 1960s advertising agency.

The deal is worth between $75 million and $100 million, people close to the situation said. That means Netflix is paying close to $1 million per episode of the series, which “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner said last week would run seven seasons. Each season has 13 episodes, which Lions Gate licenses to cable network AMC.

The new agreement marks the latest deal that Netflix has struck with a film and television studio. The company has recently inked a slew of deals to add new content to its streaming site, including one with Miramax, which includes “Pulp Fiction” and other iconic independent movies.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Back in the Day With Woz: A Sneak Peek Inside the New and Improved Computer History Museum

Drake Martinet — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 17:51:56 +0000

What could be better than listening to legendary Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak wax poetic about his first and favorite gadget–which turns out to be a transistor radio?

Well, doing it inside the newly renovated Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., certainly raises the geek factor to 10.

The museum has spent the last five years planning and installing “Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing” and will open the doors to the public on January 10, 2011. That’s “011011,” Woz reminded the small crowd of journalists invited for an early tour of the new Silicon Valley facility.

The museum has more than doubled its public space to accommodate the new exhibit, which includes an impressive collection of the rare, revolutionary and ridiculous–mostly relating to computing from the 1950s onward.

The whole shebang was largely funded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, whose name features prominently in the signage.

Woz led a tour that highlighted some of the machines that meant most to him. He recounted hours spent at the IBM Model 026 punch card machine, and fawned over a Honeywell Kitchen Computer.

That device was originally sold by Neiman Marcus, complete with mod ’60s styling and bearing the “Mad Men”-esque slogan: “If only she could cook as well as the Honeywell computes.”

Woz said it was the machine that inspired him to believe computers could be attractive things for the home.

After a long meander through many, many more Woz-ly musings, the tour ended at the Homebrew Computer Club exhibit, complete with an Apple 1–signed by Woz–basically identical to the one that recently sold at Christie’s of London for $210,000. (Woz flew there and signed that one too.)

Once open, the expanded museum promises to be the perfect spot to take that über-geeky date, or just wander and reflect amidst hundreds of miles of wire and mountains of transistors.

No word on whether Woz will also be on permanent display.

He seemed to enjoy it, but you can judge for yourself by checking out our highlight video reel from the tour, complete with an interview about Woz’s first and favorite gadget, the coming robopocalypse and the iPhone as a future historical artifact.

Enjoy:

[ See post to watch video ]

Viral Video: Team Coco Is Back (Though Bullet-Riddled)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 08:10:52 +0000

Here is the very funny opening video for the premiere of late-night host Conan O’Brien’s new talk show on TBS.

It’s got a “Godfather”/”Mad Men”/Larry King tone.

Exactly.

The first line of O’Brien’s monologue was about his Web popularity: “Thank you and welcome to my second annual first show. Yes, I know what you guys are thinking–’Hey, it’s the guy from Twitter.’”

It is indeed, and BoomTown could not be more thrilled he is back on television:

The "Mad Men" Spoofs NBC Doesn't Want You to See (Anymore)

Peter Kafka — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 22:46:31 +0000

Jimmy Fallon put together these “Mad Men” spoofs to promote his upcoming gig hosting the Emmys on NBC. Now–prompted by complaints from “Mad Men”‘s Emmy rivals–NBC is reportedly having second thoughts about the clips and won’t be running them anymore.

Which means they’ll likely disappear from the Web sooner than later*, so watch ’em while you can:

*Guess it’s possible this is a clever hoax, too. It’s on the Web, right? But who would go out of their way to tell a reporter a lie?

Meta Men: Yahoo Advertises Advertising to Advertisers

Peter Kafka — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:00:41 +0000

What if somebody made a version of “Mad Men,” but replaced the nostalgia and sex appeal with timeliness and accuracy? It would be sort of amusing, in small doses. Like this clip Yahoo (YHOO) made with other pitchmen in mind:

Personally, I think this stuff needs to be a lot shorter, like the industry satire that CollegeHumor put together a while back. But whatever. It’s amusing enough, and it’s not aimed at me, anyway.

Which is a good reminder that despite what armchair ad critics like me have to say, a lot of the rebranding efforts that Yahoo, and now, AOL, have underway aren’t aimed at us anyway: They’re aimed at a relatively small number of ad buyers, planners and other pros who decide where marketing money goes. But we’re still going to enjoy assessing them.

And yes, while we’re at it, let’s note that this video is running on YouTube, which is owned by Google (GOOG). What does Carol Bartz plan to do about video, anyway?

Viral Video: Mad (Wo)Men

Kara Swisher — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:10:28 +0000

Suddenly, it seems the AMC original series, “Mad Men,” is having its “Sopranos” moment–with its stars all over the media, its fans more obsessive than ever and its ratings doubled in the third season.

And, just today, the potboiler television show about a 1960s advertising agency in New York was renewed for a fourth season by AMC, which is owned by Cablevision Systems (CVC).

So, of course, there are also spoofs galore online too, some pretty elaborate, such as this one with a gender switcheroo.

Fascinatingly, it still works.

Here’s the video:

"I'm Peggy Olson and I Want to Smoke Some Marijuana."

John Paczkowski — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:36:57 +0000

That line of dialogue from the upcoming episode of AMC drama “Mad Men” is destined to be repeated over and over again when the program officially airs on Aug. 30, though it has begun making the rounds already thanks to Apple’s iTunes. Seems a glitch with the service delivered the unaired third episode, called “My Old Kentucky Home,” to “Mad Men” Season Pass subscribers just before midnight on Tuesday. That’s a full 13 days before it was scheduled to air. And five days before the air date of the second episode intended to precede it.

Apple (AAPL) was quick to correct the error and an irked AMC issued the following statement about it:

“The third episode of ‘Mad Men’’s new season was made available prematurely to some iTunes Season Pass holders for a short time late last night. We urge those who received this episode in error to please refrain from spoiling plot lines out of respect to other ‘Mad Men’ fans who are looking forward to watching the story unfold.”

"I'm Peggy Olson and I Want to Smoke Some Marijuana."

John Paczkowski — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:36:57 +0000

Apple (AAPL) was quick to correct the error and an irked AMC issued the following statement about it:

Scripps, Rainbow Join the Authentication Bandwagon

Peter Kafka — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:17:09 +0000

I wasn’t expecting a whole lot of information out of Time Warner and Comcast at their joint press conference today, but the two still underdelivered. They formalized the old news that Time Warner (TWX) would offer up some shows from its TNT and TBS channels for Comcast’s (CMCSA) coming “OnDemand Online” trial and…well, that was it, really.

Time Warner did announce a set of principles for its “TV Everywhere” program, and if you’d like, you can read those at the bottom of this post. And Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts did get into some philosophical/optical discussions with us reporters.

For instance, was the cable industry being “defensive” or “offensive” as it rolled out its authentication plan, which is supposed to give pay TV customers–but only pay TV customers–Web access to all the shows they get on TV? Offensive, declared Bewkes. He also decreed that authentication was a “free gift” to TV watchers.

But authentication is going to involve a whole lot of coordinated effort by a lot of different players, and that means details matter at least as much as philosophy.

For instance: Who else is joining Time Warner when Comcast rolls out its first authentication trial next month? Roberts wouldn’t talk about that–”today’s about Time Warner,” he said–but word is still leaking out. Scripps Networks, for instance, said today that it would play along. Here’s the statement from Lynne Costantini, who runs affiliates sales for the network.

“Scripps Networks’ media brands, such as Food Network and HGTV, enjoy a strong connection with a passionate base of consumers who likely would find value in this type of service. We are committed to providing viewers with content on the platforms on which they engage with our brands, in a manner that adds value to the viewing experience and enhances our current business relationships with distributors. Our participation in the Comcast authentication pilot will help us make some initial assessments regarding this innovative platform.

Also confirmed: Cablevision’s (CVC) Rainbow Media, which owns networks like AMC and Sundance. This one makes particular sense because Cablevision has been more vocal than other networks about not putting its programming on the Web without getting paid for it. I’m also told that A&E Television networks, co-owned by Hearst, Disney (DIS) and GE’s (GE) NBCU, is expected to participate, but haven’t heard back from those folks yet.

None of these buy-ins are huge moves by themselves, of course. They’re commitments for the trial only, and it’s unlikely that any of the companies are going to offer up their best shows at the start. For instance, I’d be (happily) surprised if AMC’s “Mad Men” makes the cut. And we’re likely to see a dribble of announcements over the rest of the year as more programmers dip their toes in and as competing/parallel authentication efforts that the likes of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and the telcos roll out.

In the meantime, in lieu of hard facts, here’s what Time Warner has to say about its intentions:

PRINCIPLES FOR TV EVERYWHERE MODEL
These principles were developed to ensure the TV Everywhere model is consumer-friendly; pro-competitive and non-exclusive.

•    Bring more TV content, more easily to more people across platforms.

•    Video subscribers can watch programming from their favorite TV networks online for no additional charge.

•    Video subscribers can access this content using any broadband connection.

•    Programmers should make their best and highest rated programming available online.

•    Both networks and video distributors should provide high quality, consumer-friendly sites for viewing broadband content with easy authentication.

•    A new process should be created to measure ratings for online viewing. The goal should be to extend the current viewer measurement system to include advertiser ratings for TV content viewed on all platforms.

•    TV Everywhere is open and non-exclusive; cable, satellite or telco video distributors can enter into similar agreements with other programmers.

Not Coming to Hulu: Last Week's "Saturday Night Live" Highlight*

Peter Kafka — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:36:00 +0000

I didn’t see “Saturday Night Live” last week, but NewTeeVee informs me that there was one highlight: Former “Doogie Howser, M.D.” star Neil Patrick Harris and a cast of of dozens performing the theme song to “Doogie Howser, M.D.”

So why didn’t I embed a clip of the sketch from NBC.com or Hulu, the joint venture between GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox? Because NBC didn’t have permission from whoever actually owns the rights to the theme song, NBC confirms. (News Corp is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.)

Bummer! Especially since the clip was one of the show’s “Digital Shorts,” which are designed to be viewed on the Web, à la “Lazy Sunday.”

You can still find versions of it on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, though NBC’s lawyers are busy hunting them down–don’t be surprised if the following clip doesn’t work by the time you get to it:

If you can’t see it, don’t despair: These music clearance issues have tripped up “Saturday Night Live”/NBC before, and the clip in question–Andy Samberg and the dude from Maroon 5 doing “Iran So Far”–eventually made it back on the official Web.* (Another reason not to despair, at least in my humble opinion: The Doogie clip isn’t going to make you laugh outloud, anyway.)

The bigger point: Even when TV/Hollywood “get it,” they still can’t always serve up their best stuff to Web viewers because copyright laws and digital distribution still don’t synch up.

And much more often, the people who make TV shows and movies aren’t interested in serving that stuff up–legally, for free–anyway. Hulu was only able to show one full episode of “Mad Men,” AMC’s much discussed but little watched show about advertising. And it’s only going to be able to show “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia,” a cult sitcom from FX that owes some of its success to the video site, for a few more weeks.

So maybe that’s a cautionary tale for companies like Boxee that envision a future where you get all your TV shows and movies from the Web with the support of the TV networks and Hollywood. Or more likely, a cautionary tale for TV and Hollywood, which still aren’t ready to let their customers watch their stuff when and where they want to see it.

[UPDATE: As I'd hoped, NBC legal worked it out. See below]

Two New Devices Give Presentations Some Portability

Nick Wingfield — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:08:05 +0000

Digital projectors are the best way to get the biggest possible image for a PowerPoint presentation or a movie. But the projectors are often pretty big themselves, with even most “pocket projectors” too big to stuff into the typical pocket or laptop bag.

That is changing. A new miniature-chip technology from Texas Instruments (TXN) called pico is making digital projectors truly portable, instead of merely luggable. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been using two of the first pico-based projectors on the market, Dell‘s M109S and Optoma’s Pico PK-101.

The products are designed for different customers with different needs. Dell (DELL) positions the 13-ounce M109S as a notebook companion, best suited for work presentations. The four-ounce Optoma projector is designed more as an iPod or digital-camera accessory for watching movies and slide shows on the go.

The Dell M109S

Their portability requires compromises, most obviously in brightness and image resolution. The Dell and Optoma projectors, respectively, support 11 and 50 lumens — a standard measure of projector brightness. That’s far dimmer than top-notch projectors that offer several thousand lumens. So neither product excels in well-lighted rooms, where overhead and ambient lighting overpower their images. You can compensate somewhat for this weakness by placing the devices closer to the surfaces onto which they’re projecting — for example, a wall. But the darker the room you use, the better.

At about the size of a candy bar, the $399 Optoma device is the smaller of the two projectors and the one with the most intriguing possibilities for expanding the tiny screen sizes of mobile devices like the iPod.

It’s powered by a rechargeable battery that Optoma says lasts for an hour on full brightness or two hours on a power-saving setting (the projector comes with two batteries). The projector has a tiny speaker, but people who want decent sound will need to use headphones or external speakers.

In theory, the Optoma device is small enough to bring along on a camping trip to show a film on the side of a tent, or to a restaurant, where you could inflict a vacation slide show on dinner mates by projecting onto a napkin or tablecloth.

I tested it on a recent airplane flight by projecting an episode of “Mad Men” from an iPod touch onto the back of the seat in front of me. The seat was a dark blue with embossing on it, so it didn’t work very well. It’s best to project onto an unmarked, light-colored surface. The quality of the image was better when I lay in bed one night, projecting a video onto a white ceiling.

Even under the most favorable circumstances, however, I found the images from the Optoma projector very dark, muddling the outlines of characters and action on screen. Although Optoma says you can get up to a 60-inch image from the projector, 45 inches was about as big as I could make the image before it got too fuzzy.

Optoma says the projector will ship with an iPod-compatible connector cable when it goes on sale in the U.S. on Dec. 15, though the unit I tested didn’t come with one. I connected the device to my iPod touch using a $50 cable from Apple (AAPL).

Compared with the Optoma device, the $449 Dell M109S is a behemoth, yet it’s still only about the size of a short stack of drink coasters. Most projectors weigh at least a few pounds, if not more, which is big enough to make them a hassle to carry around. I barely noticed the Dell projector inside my laptop bag.

Unlike the Optoma projector, the Dell M109S has to be plugged into an electrical outlet to work. It comes with an unsightly set of connectors for plugging the projector into a video source, such as the VGA port found on most laptops and a composite video plug that is standard on DVD players. I was, however, able to plug my iPod touch into the Dell projector using the $50 Apple cable.

And unlike the Optoma, the Dell doesn’t have speakers. To get sound for a movie, you’ll need headphones or speakers, like those on a laptop.

Despite its extra bulk, the Dell M109S literally outshines the Optoma projector. It produces a bright image that I found very watchable, even if it wasn’t high-definition. I projected the movie “James and the Giant Peach” onto an interior wall of my house, creating an image that was about 7 feet, measured diagonally.

The Dell M109S includes a capability called keystone correction, a standard feature in most projectors that adjusts a projected image to give it the proper dimensions, rather than the trapezoidal shape that results when a projector is angled upward. The Optoma projector doesn’t have this feature. To get a normal rectangular movie image, I had to hold the projector level, toward the projection surface.

For business travelers who do presentations or for people who want to create a theater-like experience in a hotel room, vacation house or against a sheet in the backyard, the Dell projector would be a good fit. For now, the Optoma projector is a good idea that needs refinement.

Email Nick.Wingfield@wsj.com. Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

A Search Engine With a Real Eye for Videos

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:52:03 +0000

Web video has transformed the way the Internet is used, but finding the exact clip you want can be incredibly hard. And it’s no wonder, considering that sites like YouTube conduct their hunts by looking at a clip’s “contextual metadata” — tags, video title and description — and thus can often be misled by false information. For example, a homemade video about cooking might be inaccurately tagged with a popular search word like “Obama” so as to get more traction.

At the top of a VideoSurf results page for ‘Mad Men,’ users can search for clips featuring specific characters.

This week I tested VideoSurf.com, a site that claims to be the first to search videos by “seeing” images that appear in these videos. The company says its technology can analyze a clip’s visual content, as well as its metadata — especially when searching for people. VideoSurf has analyzed and categorized more than 12 billion visual moments on the Web to understand who the most important characters and scenes are in a video, and it uses this knowledge to sort clips according to relevancy.

Search results on VideoSurf spread out videos in a filmstrip-like format, distinguishing one scene from the next. Users can choose an option to show only faces, which helps if you’re looking for a specific person in a long video or movie. And when looking at videos from certain sources, you can select a scene from the filmstrip and jump ahead to that scene rather than sit through the entire clip.

When it works, VideoSurf is one of those technologies that make you wonder why someone didn’t think of it sooner. The site aggregates content from about 60 sources, including YouTube, CNN Video, Hulu, ESPN and Comedy Central, and a sorting tool weeds out unwanted results like the irksome slideshows that are labeled as videos. VideoSurf can find videos on all kinds of subjects, but it really shines when it finds well-known people.

But VideoSurf has some rough edges and doesn’t always work as it should. In its defense, the site is still in its public beta, or trial, stage, and plans to be full-blown by early next year. Right now, one of its best features, the ability to jump ahead to specific scenes, works with video from only a handful of sources including YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion and Google (GOOG) Video. Videos from Hulu.com confusingly allow jumping ahead only from certain screens.

Additionally, I came across a couple of videos that were no longer available, though they were listed in search results. And a customizable VideoSurf home page for users with accounts on the site saves searches but not specific clips; VideoSurf plans to fix this next week by adding a favorites page where users can store and share favorite videos with others.

Still, I really grew to like VideoSurf’s clear way of displaying content that would be otherwise buried within videos. Rather than trying to guess a video’s contents by looking at a single representative image, VideoSurf’s filmstrip views showed me exactly what I’d be watching. In many cases, I viewed a video I might not have otherwise watched because its filmstrip showed shots of scenes that looked interesting.

On the left-hand side of the search-results page, VideoSurf users can narrow results according to Content Type, Categories and Video Sources to see just what they’re looking for — or, often more important, what they’re not looking for. Content Type, for example, includes slideshows, Web series, full television episodes and full movies; a search can include only videos in a particular category (say, slideshows) or exclude that category altogether by unmarking the box beside it.

Most search-results pages include tiled still images at the top representing the characters in the videos. By selecting one of these characters, users can refine search results to show only videos with that character. For example, I typed the title of a favorite television show, “Brothers and Sisters,” into the search box and saw the names and images of seven actors on the show at the top of the screen. I selected Sally Field and was redirected to results of videos featuring only the mother she plays on the show.

I used VideoSurf to search for Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” music video, and then changed the date parameters to find only videos posted this week. This retrieved a Saturday Night Live skit in which the pop singer spoofs her own video with help from three men in tights — including Justin Timberlake. While the SNL skit ran, a list of related videos appeared in a column on the right, including clips of J.T.’s past SNL skits.

Occasionally, annotations appear on videos, but these come from the source — not VideoSurf. If overlaid text appears on YouTube videos, it can be turned off using an icon in the bottom right of the YouTube screen. Video-sharing sites that use introductory pages such as pre-rolls before each video will still show those pages.

VideoSurf makes it easy to send specific clips of videos to friends. I did so by selecting a Share option and adjusting slide bars to trim the clip to start and end at scenes I preferred. Clips shared with friends via email are sent with the VideoSurf filmstrip, giving others the ability to also know what the video will include so that they, too, can discern whether or not they want to watch it.

Clips can be shared on social-networking sites like del.icio.us, MySpace and Facebook, though VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip didn’t show up on these sites like it did in emails.

I also tested an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser called Greasemonkey that works with VideoSurf. When installed, this displays VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip beneath search results from Google Video, YouTube, Yahoo (YHOO) or CBS.com (CBS). Once installed, filmstrips illustrating important scenes appear along with the normal text results for videos, and some of the filmstrips enable jumping ahead to specific scenes. This somewhat techie Greasemonkey extension can save people the extra step of making a separate visit to VideoSurf.com to watch a specific clip.

VideoSurf uses smart technology that can save people the aggravation of watching videos that aren’t what they appear to be. Since so much Web content now includes videos, a visual search tool that can better assess videos like VideoSurf is a good idea. When this site improves its now-flaky ability to jump ahead to specific scenes in videos, it will be even more valuable.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

Cull Web Content With Alerts

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:28:02 +0000

It can be hard to find just what you want in the 24-hour news cycle that constantly churns content out online.

One way to find the information you want is by setting up computer-generated alerts. These electronic notifications are relatively simple to use and offer a range of helpful services, from a virtual heads-up when your name is mentioned online to messages about a product’s price suddenly dropping.

For years, I’ve used Google Alerts as a way of keeping track of myself online. If my name is mentioned in a blog or if this column appears on the Web, such as on the site of a newspaper that syndicates it, a Google Alert sends me an email about it. Google Alerts can work for you to find a variety of things, such as telling you if a video of a favorite band popped up online or that a blogger posted something about last night’s episode of “Mad Men.”

In about a month, Google will begin delivering these alerts to users via feeds, as well as emails. Google (GOOG) certainly isn’t alone in the alerts arena, as Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) and AOL (TWX) are also players. This week I tried two small companies that recently joined the mission to help users find the Web content using alerts.

Pinpointing Searches

I tried Alerts.com and Yotify.com, and found worthwhile features in both. While Google Alerts does a good job of finding search terms in news, blogs and videos, Alerts.com and Yotify use forms that are a cinch to fill out and let you pinpoint your searches.

Alerts.com offers to notify users via email, SMS text messages or even voice calls to a cellphone or landline. The site organizes your alerts on a personalized Web page and uses a desktop application called Elertz to tell you when an alert has generated results. I liked this site’s flexibility: It not only gave me different ways to receive notifications, but also enabled a variety of options for time-specific deliveries of alerts.

But Yotify has advantages of its own, including the ability to integrate with FriendFeed and Facebook so friends can offer their recommendations or opinions. It also lets users search for event tickets or items auctioned on eBay (EBAY). And a smart preview panel gives you an idea of the type of results your search will return before you submit the request for an alert.

Viewing Results

For now, Google Alerts and Yotify will send alert notifications only via email, though all three services will let you view your alert results online. All three are free, but SMS alerts sent to a cellphone via Alerts.com may not be, depending on your plan.

All in all, I found there were certain things each service was good at doing. For example, Alerts.com lets me know college football scores when I want them: only after the final score; at the end of each quarter and after the final score; or at the end of each quarter, after the final score and after each time a team scores points. Yotify gave me detailed options in a Craigslist search for furniture, including showing only listings with photos or just those that included the word “sofa” in a title; it will even hunt for a specific price range.

For the person who wants to spend minimal time creating basic alerts, Google Alerts will do the trick. These can be narrowed down to show results that fall into the News, Web, Blogs, Video or Groups categories, or you can perform more-blanketed searches using a Comprehensive category.

Alerts.com offers plenty of simple alerts that require only a bit of scheduling to set up. Each alert appears as a widget that can be expanded, edited or deleted with a simple click, and this page has a clean look with attractive, cohesive graphics.

I didn’t care much for Elertz, the desktop component of Alerts.com, because once installed, it notified me of new Alerts data using an irksome star that glowed red until I checked my notifications. Elertz didn’t work properly on my Windows XP machine until Alerts.com fixed a bug.

But Alerts.com’s price watch and price protection alerts are incredibly useful. Price watch looks to see if an item’s price drops into a lower price range, at which point users are notified. Price protection watches to see if products you bought are now on sale so you can get a refund. I tried both, and I’m hoping I’ll hear soon that a specific pair of Anthropologie boots is on sale.

Yotify uses the idea of virtual scouts that scour the Web for specific information. Scout findings can be condensed or expanded in one click, and results can be filtered for more specific findings or shared with friends via Facebook or FriendFeed.

Scout Work

But some scouts took too much work to set up. When I tried to set up a scout for college football scores, I didn’t see a sports category (Alerts.com had a colorful NCAA icon right on its home page). Instead, I had to choose News, then select ESPN, then NCAAF and finally enter “Penn State” in a key word box for my scout. And after all that, the scout offered results only daily or hourly via email.

I would also prefer if I could better organize my scout lists. As it was, all of my results appeared in one list: The NCAA scout was right above the scout that found Obama mentions on Huffington Post, and below that were results for YouTube’s most-watched videos. Yotify says it will add ways to more neatly arrange data in the next month or so.

On average, Yotify returned more results instantly, such as 10 instant Craigslist sofa results compared with Alerts.com’s two in the first few hours.

Overall, these sites are worth trying so you can find which alert system works best for you and stop wasting time searching the Web the old-fashioned way.

– Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

New Amazon Service Streams TV Shows And Films to PCs

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:08:05 +0000

Consumer options for viewing popular TV shows and movies directly from the Internet, as opposed to watching them from traditional cable and satellite systems, keep growing. Last week, yet another approach to Internet distribution of commercial video content emerged.

Amazon (AMZN) launched a new service called Amazon Video on Demand, which allows users, for a fee, to watch any of 40,000 TV episodes or movies, in real time, on their Windows and Macintosh computers, and on specially equipped Sony Bravia TV sets. This service replaces an earlier Amazon video offering called Unbox.

[ See post to watch video ]

I have been testing Amazon Video on Demand and I found it worked well, although it has some limitations. The user interface is clean and smart, the quality is good if you have a fast Internet connection, and there are some clever features. On the downside, it works poorly with the slow connections typical in places like hotels. And there are some studio-imposed limits on what content is offered and how you can view it.

To date, there have been three major models for legally getting TV shows and movies from the Web.

In one, best represented by Apple’s (AAPL) widely used iTunes store, the TV shows and movies are ad-free, but you pay for each. All of this content is downloaded to your Windows or Macintosh computer or your Apple TV set-top box for later viewing, even when you’re not connected to the Internet — though on Apple TV you can start watching while the material is being downloaded.

A second model, best represented by the studio-owned Hulu.com, presents movies and TV shows on a Windows or Macintosh personal computer free of charge, but requires you to watch commercials that can’t be skipped. The TV shows and movies you view on Hulu are “streamed” rather than downloaded, meaning they are meant to be viewed immediately, in real time, rather than stored for viewing when you’re not connected to the Internet.

The third online model is best represented by Netflix (NFLX), the popular DVD distributor. It offers a “Watch Instantly” streaming option on Windows PCs or on TVs equipped with a special set-top box, for a small portion of its large catalog of TV shows and movies. These videos are ad-free and don’t carry an individual charge, but require a monthly subscription fee.

The new Amazon Video on Demand service is a hybrid of these others. As on iTunes, the TV shows and movies it offers are ad-free and purchased individually, don’t require a subscription, and work on both Windows and the Mac, plus on one type of set-top box. In Amazon’s case, that’s Sony’s Bravia Internet Link, a $299 device that works only with Sony (SNE) TVs.

But, like Hulu and Netflix and unlike Amazon’s older Unbox service, the new Amazon Video on Demand service offers videos via real-time streaming. In many cases, it also allows downloading, iTunes-style, to Windows PCs (but not Macs) and to TiVo devices attached to a TV. The videos can’t be streamed in real time using a TiVo (TIVO).

Amazon’s streaming videos are viewed in any of the major Web browsers and don’t require any special software. I tested the new service on both Windows PCs and Macs, and on a Sony Bravia TV equipped with the $299 adapter box. In my tests, Amazon’s videos looked quite good over a fast Internet connection. However, on a typically lousy hotel Internet connection, the movies were often grainy and kept stuttering.

The new service doesn’t yet offer videos in high definition, something Apple just announced this week it is adding for some TV shows. Amazon says it is working on HD.

Amazon’s user interface for the new service is very nice. All of your purchased videos are available in a library stored on the company’s servers, so you can easily watch them again and again if they are purchased, or resume a partly watched rental. And the service remembers where you stopped watching a video and resumes it at that point, even if you started it on, say, a Dell (DELL), and resumed it on a Mac.

On the downside, the new Amazon service isn’t always simple or consistent. For instance, you can watch only two videos at a time, and not all titles can be either streamed and downloaded, or be either purchased or rented. Most rentals last 24 hours, but some differ.

Selection was OK, but not great. Because of studio policies, many current and recent movie hits aren’t available. There are gaps as well in the TV selection. For example, while iTunes offers the current second season of the excellent “Mad Men” series, Amazon has only the first season.

Prices also can be confusing. Amazon rents most movies for $3.99 and sells them for between $9.99 and $14.99. TV shows generally cost $1.99. But some titles carry different prices, albeit these are often lower.

All in all, Amazon Video on Demand is a good service for people who prefer paying for ad-free TV shows and movies, and is another strong step in the Internet’s rising competition with traditional TV.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.