Digitalsmiths Blog:

Hot on the heels of the NAB Show and the much-anticipated April 3rd arrival of the iPad, Netflix and broadcast networks ABC and CBS recently announced moves to offer video applications for the iPad.

When Steve Jobs announced that the iPad would not support Flash, he set off a stampede of vendors racing to support HTML5.  In fact, my inbox is overflowing with vendor press releases announcing their support of the iPad and HTML5.  You won’t see a press release from my company, Digitalsmiths, and here’s why.

Look around: it's no longer the Wild West out there. Yesterday's TV Everywhere experiments and pilot programs are morphing into today's company-wide business priorities for cable providers.

Metadata is simply data about data.  While it sounds really boring, metadata is the key to unlocking exponential growth in viewership, discovery and monetization opportunities for premium video content.

Like everything in digital media, there are different flavors of metadata, with no standard definitions and a variety of descriptions.  I'm going to muddy the waters a bit and provide my take on this vital component of the video landscape.

Last year, high-profile online video platform (OVP) announcements were everywhere.

Connected devices -- which include smartphones, home entertainment consoles like the Xbox 360, and now Apple's tablet, the iPad -- are everywhere. 

All of the above support video, and as iTunes has shown, users will pay to download movies.  According to Apple's "Rewind 2009" list, feature films like "Twilight" and "Pineapple Express" were among the top iTunes downloads for '09.  The

If you are in the digital media business, then you probably already know that CES -- the Consumer Electronics Show -- happened in Las Vegas last week.  CES is the big time: a global forum for major technology companies to roll out their new offerings in an effort to dazzle both consumers and the assembled press. I'm a fan of technology in general, and of CES in particular.  With so many big players and so much energy on the floor, it's hard not to get swept up in all the excitement.

2009 was a rough year for the wider economy, but it was actually an amazing twelve months for companies in the digital media space.
Online video viewership was up, with more and more consumers accessing content on all sorts of devices including cell phones, Xboxes, iPods and portable gaming devices.

Making movies is like product development.  Each new Adam Sandler comedy or zombie spookfest is essentially a new product – one that must be marketed to a target audience.

That audience either shows up or stays at home on opening weekend, and although many things have changed in the content business, this simple fact has not: hits make money, while turkeys die a quick death at the box office.   

As a rule, I use this Blog to provide you information on the digital media industry, successful customer strategies and latest innovations. My goal is for this to become a “go-to” resource for honest, insightful and practical information – not a place where I shamelessly promote Digitalsmiths.

Today, I’m going to break my own rule.

If it were a hurricane, it would have been a Category 5.  This was the “big one.”  The death of Michael Jackson drove online viewership to near record highs (only to be surpassed by the Inauguration of President Barack Obama) and brought several prominent news sites to a screeching halt.  While it may be impossible to accurately estimate exactly how many people watched the events worldwide, we know that most sites experienced at least a 20 percent increase above normal.  This created a snowball effect that nearly brought the Internet to its knees.