On April 2, the free online game will be unveiled, marking the culmination of two and a half years of development. It represents a significant undertaking for the network.

Kyra Reppen, SVP and general manager of Nickelodeon’s Virtual Worlds Group, who was showing off the game at GDC last week, declined to quantify the investment, but said it will be heavily promoted, much like a new TV show.

Monkey Quest is comparable to other so-called massively multiplayer games, such as the insanely popular World of Warcraft, which has roughly 12 million subscribers.

Except for that it is cute and cuddly, and something even parents can approve of.

“What we did was take the big adult games and adapt them for kids, which is something you don’t see very often,” Reppen said.

That doesn’t mean they cut any corners.

While it runs in a PC’s browser, it has the quality look and feel of a console game, thanks to a development platform company called Unity, which has been the basis for a lot of other high-quality games.

Monkey Quest takes place in the World of Ook. It spans a vast territory that encompasses five different tribes, which are connected by a network of highways. Initially, there will be 50 levels for players to achieve, but new content will be added daily.

Even after the game launches, the Nickelodeon team will be busy adding missions, characters and other tribes–indefinitely.

In the game, each player creates an avatar monkey that can be customized. Even without a lot of work, the monkeys are very animated and have kid-friendly attributes, like the ability to burp, or take a nap if they aren’t being very active.

Challenges include fighting monsters, or venturing into volcanoes, where they may meet Maurice the Gorilla, a friendly giant that enjoys roasting marshmallows. Players never fight one another, and even when shooting monsters, they use silly guns like the Kernal Blaster, which is an ear of corn. The monkeys are also rewarded with bananas for completing tasks.

The game is targeting 8 to 12 year olds, and keeps things safe by limiting what can be said. Players are never allowed to know each other’s real names, and some phrases are filtered out of text-based conversations automatically. Nickelodeon monitors conversations around the clock, and parents can even choose to limit chats to a handful of canned phrases, like “do you want to trade x for y.”

Still, they find that doesn’t keep kids from interacting with one another.

While the game is in beta, they are noticing that a lot of the players are learning how to interact with one another through gestures. For instance if a monkey squats down and puts his hands above his heads, it implies that it is offering to give another monkey a boost up to a higher ledge. If you give someone a boost, it’s only proper etiquette to reciprocate.

Like many social games today, the game is free, and users never have to pay if they don’t want to.

But there’s two premium offers to entice kids. Subscriptions will cost $9.95 a month, or users can choose to pay as they go, by buying Nick Cash. Parents can enter their credit card online, or they can buy game cards in 40,000 retail locations through a partnership with InComm. Players who pay have access to additional content, including premium missions and items for your avatar.

The idea for Monkey Quest is an evolution from Nickelodeon’s roots in the gaming space, starting with Neopets, which Viacom purchased almost six years ago.

Neopets, which launched 11 years ago, allowed kids to take care of virtual pets, by buying them food, toys and clothes. Similarly, users had to purchase virtual currency to play.

The week-long campaign will appear in Zynga’s popular FrontierVille, and is part of the company’s efforts to build up additional sources of revenue beyond relying on the few users who elect to pay for virtual goods.

“Rango,” which debuts in theaters on Friday, is about a chameleon who must save the day in a Western-themed town, much like the atmosphere depicted in FrontierVille.

The placement is being conducted through a partnership between the San Francisco-based social games developer Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies.

Starting this afternoon, the 15 million daily players of FrontierVille will be presented with three Rango-related tasks, if they choose to participate.

Players must find the chameleon, who easily blends into the frontier. Then, they must get their friends to send them 10 buckets of water, and finally they must watch the film’s trailer in advance of the film’s release. If players do all three, they receive a Rango statue to add to their homestead.

The product placement is more overt than some of the ones in the past. It also doesn’t offer much value. For instance, the statue has no secret powers, and will not bring crops back to life, like the Farmers Insurance blimp did last year in FarmVille.

In an interview, Manny Anekal, global director of brand advertising at Zynga, told us that’s not the appeal of the statue. “They are collection-ists and completion-ists, but they also like getting things that are unique, and you can’t buy it,” he said.

For Paramount, he said they’ll be watching the number of people who participate and how much awareness of the brand it creates.

Some critics question whether Zynga’s strategy of doing one-off product placements will be able to scale and be come a large enough business since each offer is so specialized, and the company must work so closely with the advertiser to come up with an appropriate ad campaign.

Anekal said it’s a work in progress. They’ve only had a dozen or so product placements since the second half of last year. “In terms of what we can scale. We are working towards that. We are nascent in the space.”

Zynga has worked to promote two other movies: Sony Pictures Entertainment’s The Green Hornet in Mafia Wars and DreamWorks Animations’ Megamind in FarmVille. The DreamWorks promotion attracted more than nine million people to interact with Megamind’s “Mega-Farm” in the 24-hour period.

Nickelodeon has ordered up another season of its popular animated television series “SpongeBob SquarePants” for a ninth season.

Yay!

No, really–it is the only kids’ show I have been able to endure so far.

Krabby Patties for all!

Here is the good video of its theme song:

That’s what Steve Ballmer and company will spend to push two big consumer tech rollouts in the coming months: Windows Phone 7, its attempt to claw back share from Apple and Google, and Kinect, its attempt to push its Xbox 360 platform past Sony and Nintendo.

Redmond’s plans for its phone rollout will reportedly involve more than $400 million in marketing efforts. And Kinect, a motion-sensor add-on for the Xbox, will be a half-billion-dollar project, says the New York Post’s Claire Atkinson. Here’s where some of that money will get spent:

• Burger King promotion
• Pepsi promotion
• Kellogg’s cereal promotion
• YouTube homepage takeover
• Ad buys on Nickelodeon, Disney sites
• Ad buys on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” and Fox’s “Glee”
• Ad buys on Time Inc.’s People and InStyle
• Times Square event

And here’s some free media–video of Microsoft showing off Kinect at the D8 conference in June, when the company was still calling it “Project Natal”:

[Image credit: popculturegeek]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101018/microsofts-billion-dollar-media-bailout-plan/feed/ 13 http://allthingsd.com/20100806/google-and-viacom-team-up-again-brace-yourself-for-fred-the-movie/ http://allthingsd.com/20100806/google-and-viacom-team-up-again-brace-yourself-for-fred-the-movie/#comments Fri, 06 Aug 2010 11:00:15 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=22299 There is a very, very good chance that if you’re reading this site, you’re not a fan of “Fred.” But there are lots of Web surfers who are. More than 1.9 million of them subscribe to his YouTube channel.

So Fred, a character created by Nebraska teenager Lucas Cruikshank, is indeed getting his own TV movie next month.

That’s interesting, because it marks one of the first times a character constructed entirely on the Web has crossed over into the mainstream. And it’s sort of interesting, because the stuff Cruikshank makes is so awful.

Here’s a sample, but be warned: This is sort of the video equivalent to “Metal Machine Music,” except no one seems to be high. And it’s really popular.

Most interesting, though, is the company backing the movie. That would be Nickelodeon, the kids’ cable channel owned by Viacom (VIA). Which, for now, at least, continues to fight Google (GOOG) and YouTube in a three-year-old copyright suit. But that’s not stopping the network from embracing a YouTube star.

This is a second recent example of Viacom and YouTube working together, at arm’s length, while they continue to face off in court. In June, Viacom’s MTV unit agreed to start selling ads on YouTube for Warner Music Group’s (WMG) videos.

But Viacom still won’t work directly with YouTube, which makes promoting a YouTube-celebrity movie a little tricky. There’s no mention of the Fred movie anywhere on Fred’s official YouTube channel. And if you want to see the official trailer, which describes him as an “Internet sensation,” you’ll have to look somewhere other than on YouTube. Viacom is running it on its own site, on its own video player.

Again, you’ve been warned:

Fred the Movie: “Trailer”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100806/google-and-viacom-team-up-again-brace-yourself-for-fred-the-movie/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100512/viacoms-addictinggames-com-named-%e2%80%9cworst-toy-of-the-year%e2%80%9d/ http://allthingsd.com/20100512/viacoms-addictinggames-com-named-%e2%80%9cworst-toy-of-the-year%e2%80%9d/#comments Wed, 12 May 2010 16:30:54 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=24975 AddictingGames.com, a web site run by Viacom’s (VIA) Nickelodeon unit, claims that it is “the largest source of the best free online games.” And now it has another distinction: the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood has awarded the site its coveted TOADY (Toys Oppressive and Destructive To Young Children) Award–for the worst toy of the year. Here’s the explanation from the CCFC web site:

TOADY voters were aghast that Nick allows children such easy access to the horrific content on AddictingGames.com, including the Perry the Sneak series, where gamers take the role of a peeping Tom trying to catch revealing glimpses of naked women showering–and successful voyeurs are rewarded by getting in bed with their prey; Stick Dude Killing Arena, the object of which is to “Train to Kill Until You Die”; and Kitty Cannon [Kitten Cannon, actually], where players can “make Fluffy bloody” by shooting a kitten out of a cannon onto a row of metal spikes.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100512/viacoms-addictinggames-com-named-%e2%80%9cworst-toy-of-the-year%e2%80%9d/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090929/countertrend-h-p-says-please-print-often/ http://allthingsd.com/20090929/countertrend-h-p-says-please-print-often/#comments Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:18:02 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090929/countertrend-h-p-says-please-print-often/ If your company makes printers but general trends are leaning toward using less paper and moving digital content to e-readers and smartphones, what can you do? Hewlett-Packard’s solution is to find new ways to get people to print more.

The $399 H-P Photosmart Premium All-in-One with Touch-Smart Web (hp.com/go/touchprinting) will print, copy, fax and scan like other all-in-ones. But it connects to the Internet using built-in Wi-Fi and displays customized Web applications on its 4.33-inch touch screen. These apps are designed to promote printing in any way possible, including photos from Snapfish, Sudoku puzzles, movie tickets from Fandango, coupons, maps from Google (GOOG) Maps, coloring-book pages and news articles—all without using a computer.

The print apps are part of the new H-P App Studio, H-P’s (HPQ) answer to the flurry of app stores—Apple’s (AAPL) App Store, RIM’s (RIMM) BlackBerry World, Android Marketplace, Palm’s (PALM) App Catalog and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Zune Marketplace—that ease the process of downloading onto mobile devices. A “Get More” icon on the printer’s touch screen presents descriptions of available apps. There are currently 15 available for download onto your printer, and more will be added in coming months.

The Photosmart All-in-One connects to Web apps that promote printing of everything from photos to tickets.

This printer is designed to work with more than just the H-P App Studio. A downloadable tool called the H-P Photo Print Gadget installs on computers running Windows 7 or Vista (not Windows XP) so people can drag and drop photos to it for printing. PlayStation 3 owners can capture and print screen shots as evidence of their game success. And a long-available free app in Apple’s App Store called H-P iPrint Photo lets iPhone and iPod Touch owners send photos to this and other H-P printers.

The goal of this product is obviously to get people to print more, and in my case, it worked. I used more paper in a week of testing the Photosmart Premium All-in-One than I normally print out in three weeks at my office. The printer quickly churned out dual-sided pages with photos in rich colors.

But the concept of adding apps to a printer while also asking people to become more paper-reliant seems like one step forward, two steps back. I could see this concept working on a thin, stylish printer that could fit neatly on an entryway table, making it a cinch for people to grab maps, movie tickets and coupons on their way out the door. But this is a large, all-in-one machine that takes up some serious space.

And if this all-in-one is truly meant to work without a PC, it should do a better job of letting you interact with pages, like zooming in on a document to preview before printing. In the current document preview screen, the text is too small to read. Likewise, the Google Calendar app printed a nice one-page calendar month view, but I couldn’t zoom in on the print preview to see specific appointments. This forced me to print the page to see its contents, using more ink and more paper.

Other apps are shamelessly begging users to press Print. A Toys and Crafts app made by H-P itself includes paper dolls with cut-out clothes that can be snipped and folded to stay on the doll’s form. For the doll’s face, kids are encouraged to use a photo of themselves that–surprise, surprise—they can print using their all-in-one.

Coupons.com supplies two apps—one for coupons and one for recipes. I browsed through 87 product coupons in my ZIP Code and marked those that I wanted to print using a small check-box on the touch screen. Pressing “Print” compiled three coupons on one piece of paper. Recipes from Coupons.com printed with brightly colored photos of the end result; I’m looking forward to following one for Curried Chicken Salad.

For now, the Google Maps app isn’t ready for prime time: It prints only maps, not directions. H-P says it’s planning to add directions but wouldn’t say when. And a Nickelodeon app couldn’t load on my printer. Some apps took from 10 to 30 seconds to load—precious time when you’re running out the door.

One of the smartest apps, Tabbloid, lets people assemble a personalized tabloid-style print-out of news from a variety of sources like Daily Kos for politics and FanHouse for sports. But this assembling must be done on a computer, thus negating this printer’s no-PC approach. I chose from a list of 10 topics including automotive, celebrity, politics and sports and created a printable Tabbloid that, with one click, was sent wirelessly to the corresponding app on my printer. I printed it out to read during my commute.

I liked using the Photosmart Premium All-in-One’s generous screen for touch gestures like flicking left-to-right through a carousel of icons that represent apps. An on-screen keyboard appeared when I had to type in passwords for things like my Snapfish account.

H-P says it will introduce other products with TouchSmart Web capability and access to the HP App Studio, and one hopes these products will include low-end printers rather than expensive all-in-ones. The apps on the H-P Photosmart Premium All-in-One with TouchSmart Web are user-friendly, but I’m not convinced they’ll incite people to print more things more often.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090929/countertrend-h-p-says-please-print-often/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090514/april-video-winners-hulu-of-course-and-mtv/ http://allthingsd.com/20090514/april-video-winners-hulu-of-course-and-mtv/#comments Thu, 14 May 2009 14:41:03 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7366 Here’s an online video story you haven’t seen before: Viacom’s MTV sites had a really good month last month.

This news comes from Nielsen Online, which just released its video traffic numbers for April. The top line is more or less unchanged. Google’s (GOOG) YouTube dominates the field, generating more video traffic than the next nine biggest sites on the Web combined.

And of course, Hulu, the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC is continuing its rocket ride. The No. 2 site saw streams increase 7.1 percent over the previous month and 490.4 percent compared with a year ago (though bear in mind that April 2008 was Hulu’s first full month out of beta).

None of which is surprising. One thing I didn’t expect: MTV grew faster than anyone else in the Top 10 last month. The site posted a 15.7 percent increase in month-to-month traffic–in a month when overall video usage actually declined 2.3 percent compared with the previous month.

Here’s the full breakdown (click table to enlarge):

Bonus data point: Nielsen breaks out Web traffic by brand, not by corporate owner. But cobble together MTV’s video traffic with corporate cousin Nickelodeon’s, and parent company Viacom (VIA)  gets a total of 319.7 million video streams in April. That’s enough to qualify for third place, and not that far behind No. 2 Hulu’s 373.3 million.

Not bad for a company that spent a long time frittering away what should have been a very big lead in Web video. And perhaps promising for Vevo, the YouTube/Universal Music site launching later this year.

Usually when a company has a banner month–or even a passable one–according to Nielsen or Comscore (SCOR), I get barraged with celebratory press releases. Nothing from Viacom to date, though I’ve asked the company for comment.

Anyone else want to explain why MTV’s sites spiked in April? In the meantime, here’s MTV’s version of the newish Eminem video:

Eminem – New Music – More Music Videos

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090514/april-video-winners-hulu-of-course-and-mtv/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081231/why-the-web-matters-in-the-viacomtime-warner-fight/ http://allthingsd.com/20081231/why-the-web-matters-in-the-viacomtime-warner-fight/#comments Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:49:24 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=2646 The Viacom/Time Warner Cable faceoff–Viacom is threatening to yank its channels (Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, MTV, etc.) off the screens of the cable company’s 13.3 million subscribers at midnight tonight–is nothing new. A cable network wants more money, a cable operator doesn’t want to pay up. Happens periodically.

The new twist here is what broadband video adds to the equation: It’s both a plus for Viacom (VIA), and a source of irritation for Time Warner Cable (TWC).

• The upside for Viacom: Additional leverage as it negotiates with Time Warner. If you can’t get “The Daily Show” on your TV in January, you can watch it all over the Web: At its own site, at Fox and NBC’s Hulu, and on Comcast’s (CMCSA) Fancast.
• But that same promiscuity with content is one of the things that’s now stuck in the craw of Time Warner: It figures it is paying Viacom a per subscriber fee because those subscribers can only get Viacom’s stuff on cable. If they can get it anywhere, the argument goes, it’s less valuable.

I don’t want to overstate the importance of the Web here: Cable subscription revenues are going to be much, much bigger than Web dollars for Viacom and other content providers for a very long time. And there’s no reason to think this won’t get resolved in the way that all these fights get settled: Time Warner pays more than it wants, Viacom accepts less than it was looking for.

But do look for the cable guys to wring some additional online concessions out of the networks in the years to come: Either the ability to distribute the shows online themselves (hence, Fancast), or a piece of online revenues, in some form or another.

Meanwhile, here’s Viacom’s 30-second ad, which you can now find on YouTube, of course:

And here’s a highlight from the last broadcast of “The Daily Show”: Hall and Oates playing tribute to former News Corp. employee Alan Colmes:

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