Abhishek Tiwari

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Apple, as most of you know enjoys the lion’s share (over 70%) in the online music business. Apple has managed to execute deals with major music companies and has a significant portfolio.

However recently (early July) one of Apple’s key partners Universal Music Group (Vivendi, world’s biggest music corporation) refused to renew its contract with Apple to sell their content via iTunes store. Universal obviously is looking for much more favorable terms, which is leading to this impasse. Both companies would suffer as a result of this. As 1 out of every 3 songs sold in America come from Universal, Apple would loose this significant chunk if the deal does not go through. Universal too could risk up to $200 Million as a result.

That was just the beginning. This past week Universal announced a key deal involving Google and gBox, part of its 6 month experiment to sell DRM free music. Under this deal Universal will purchase advertisements through the Google AdWords program. This is not related to Google’s Music referral service but purely ads deal. These ads will direct the user to gBox where they can purchase songs for $0.99. gBox a online music service, which until now was in stealth mode has been forced out as a result. The service is scheduled for launch on August 21st.

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This is very interesting. Just few days back I was talking about what Media Networks should do in order to catch up to the online social media phenomenon. While channel surfing last night I landed on ABC (Channel 7) and caught the later half of a new show called i-CAUGHT. Turns out that this was not just another TV show on ABC milking the online videos. This is a big initiative from ABC News. They launched this service yesterday and it was their first show at 10/9 Central.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a major network like ABC foray into this space, in order to bring the TV and Online Social Media experience together. I must say it was real weird at first, as I am not used to watching YouTube style videos on my TV (yeah, I know I need to buy the Apple TV). Also they had some seriously insane graphics on the show. It reminded me of minority report as the host flipped through the video. Here is the introductory video from i-CAUGHT.

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Few weeks back I wrote about Comscore publishing metrics around the online video market. They reported that Google was the clear leader with 21.5% of the market-share. This obviously is post their YouTube acquisition.

Since then there hasnt been much noise in the space. There have been few blurbs here and there about similar services offering incremental features but nothing groundbreaking to speak of. However while browsing TechCrunch today I stumbled upon a post about a new service from HongKong called MEGAVIDEO.

These guys are solely aimed at displacing YouTube from the #1 spot. Please bear in mind that they feature nowhere in the ComScore top 10. Talk about focus.

The video below presents their 10 reasons to use their service versus YouTube.

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Back in April Accenture conducted a survey of 110 senior media executives (TV, Radio, Music etc), where they see the growing ability and eagerness of individuals to create their own content as one of the biggest threats to their business.

Some of the stats were:

• 57% of the respondents identified the rapid growth of user-generated content — which includes amateur digital videos, podcasts, mobile phone photography, wikis and social-media blogs — as one of the top three challenges they face today.
• 70% of respondents said they believe that social media, one of the largest segments of user-generated content, will continue to grow, while only 3 percent of respondents view social media as a fad.

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Over the past few years the the number of blogs on the internet has increased exponentially. There are over 50 million blogs on the web. Over past couple years it has increasingly become hard for subscribers to keep track of blogs and good posts. I have 50+ blogs on my netvibes, where thousands of posts are constantly bombarded at me. It is increasingly getting difficult to track interesting posting anymore.

Some of the top bloggers, who have understood the problem introduced new features like “Weekly Summary”, “Top Posts” etc. Recently bloggers are playing with video blogging. Now the concept has been around for sometime. However its prominence as a serious blogging (or should I say vlogging) tool is becoming obvious now. Bloggers like Robert Scoble (with his PodTech shows) and Om Malik (with his “The GigaOm TV“) are leading by example. Although not immensly detailed, these online shows are becoming a great way of summarizing interesting stories and focussing on the hottest areas for the week (or day). Apart from summarizing these shows are enabling top bloggers to have a bigger media presence. Webb Alert is the latest entrant in this space (launched Aug 2).

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