Media

MONACO -  (Published 11.11.12) The animated GIF, those quirky, short moving images introduced way back in the day by CompuServe in 1987, are making a comeback, thanks in large part to the easy conversion from video to the GIF, format explains David Karp, founder and CEO of Tumblr, in this interview with Beet.TV Karp explains how Tumblr has become a popular platform for sharing GIF’s by allowing files uploads of up to 1 MB.  You can find some very cool GIF’s on this Tumblr page. We spoke with him at the Monaco Media Forum. Update 5.21:  The New York Times has a story about the history and evolution of the animated GIF.

Paul Finebaum, the radio host known for his popular college football show, will reportedly start his new job Aug. 1.

“The Eternal Wonder,” an unpublished novel by Pearl S. Buck that surfaced last year in a storage unit, is to be released this fall by Open Road Integrated Media.

The reductions, through layoffs and by leaving positions unfilled, come after a companywide efficiency review by the Walt Disney Company, which owns the sports network.

Careerbuilder.com uses video content as a tool to unite job seekers with hiring companies. Having recently begun offering video content on their mobile platform, the Chicago-based site has almost doubled their video views, says Patrick Moye, director of design, video and branding for Careerbuilder.com Careerbuilder.com, the largest online employment website in the United States, produces videos for their clients and recommends that companies focus on telling stories about the types of positions for which they wish to hire. “Every company out there has a unique story to tell. Every company’s different. Everybody’s got something special.” Moye says. “And that doesn’t always come across in just a job posting or just content on a website. And so what video allows you to do is really articulate that story and tell a much more compelling message to those job seekers so that the right types of people end up applying for those clients.” Currently, about 3,000 different companies are using video on Careerbuilder.com. We interviewed Moye last week at the Brightcove global customer conference in Boston.

Thanks to new funding from Knight Foundation, the Internet Archive is expanding its collection of TV news broadcasts. The archive also plans to build a better search and user experience around the clips, which can only be viewed online and not downloaded. The expansion plan is being supported by $1 million in funding from Knight Foundation. With this support, we will grow our TV News Search & Borrow service, which currently includes more than 400,000 broadcasts dating back to June 2009, to add hundreds of thousands of new broadcasts. This means helping inform and engage communities by strengthening the work of journalists, scholars, teachers, librarians, documentarians, civic organizations and others dedicated to public benefit.With TV News Search & Borrow, these folks can use closed captioning that accompany news programs to search for information. They can then browse short-streamed video clips and share links to specific ones.

ESPN on Tuesday began making a significant reduction of its work force, laying off more than 100 employees at its Bristol, Conn., headquarters and in at least one regional technology center. While a precise headcount has not been confirmed, sources said as many as 150 people have been let go, a number that includes open positions that will not be filled. Some 4,000 employees work at the Bristol campus. All told, the company employs 7,000 workers worldwide. ESPN acknowledged the layoffs in a statement released this afternoon: “We are implementing changes across the company to enhance our continued growth while smartly managing costs. While difficult, we are confident that it will make us more competitive, innovative and productive.” The last time ESPN made deep cuts in payroll was in May 2009, when approximately 100 staffers were laid off and 200 vacant positions were left open. The layoffs come on the heels of a record day on Wall Street for ESPN parent Walt Disney Co. On May 7, shares soared to a record $66.07 as the company delivered better-than-expected FY Q2 earnings. ESPN did much of the heavy lifting for Disney’s media networks division, as the cable networks generated $3.46 billion in revenue for the three-month period that ended on March 30. Per RBC Capital estimates, ESPN accounts for 69 percent of Disney’s cable revenues; as such, the sports giant is likely to have delivered $2.4 billion in quarterly revenue. In recent years, ESPN has laid out gargantuan sums of cash for the live sports rights that keep its engine purring. Last May, ESPN and the ACC inked a 15-year extension of their existing rights contract at a rate of $240 million per year or $3.6 billion. The rights to the new Bowl Championship Series playoffs will cost $560 million per year through 2025, while re-upping with Major League Baseball ($5.35 billion through 2021) and the National Football League ($15.5 billion through 2021) were two other high-profile moves. The network’s current $3.88 billion deal with the National Basketball Association expires at the end of the 2015 season. Another costly line item is ESPN’s new digital center, which is being erected in Bristol at a cost of around $125 million. Midway through its 2013-14 upfront presentation, ESPN last week gave media buyers and advertisers their first look at the Digital Center 2 facility and the new SportsCenter set. On the other side of the ledger, ESPN makes a killing on affiliate fees, charging operators an average rate of $5.01 per subscriber per month, according to SNL Kagan estimates. Last year, the flagship network collected $5.96 billion in sub fees—more than four times what runner-up TNT earns in a year ($1.42 billion). ESPN also beats all comers in the ad game, generating $2.07 billion in sales revenue at ESPN and ESPN2. Shares of Disney were flat at $66.09 in mid-afternoon trading.

This afternoon, NBCUniversal will announce that ESPN exec Cherie Cohen has joined the fold, reporting to evps Dan Lovinger and Laura Molen with the title of svp of cable advertising sales. Cohen will oversee NBCU's regional sales offices in Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles. In keeping with the company's new focus on synergy between its broadcast properties (NBC proper and Telemundo) and its cable networks, Cohen will work closely with the broadcast nets in addition to selling time on cable. “Cherie is a seasoned media executive with a successful track record working creatively across multiple assets and platforms and she will be a terrific addition to our powerful and diverse portfolio of brands,” said Lovinger. Indeed, Cohen has been working at ESPN where she held the post of vp of multimedia sales and oversaw West Coast ops for the sportscaster. Along with the promotion to svp, Cohen will leave ESPN at a time when the cable network is undergoing some serious personnel changes: Potentially hundreds of employees were laid off today. Cable television is Cohen's bread and butter: prior to her tenure at ESPN, she worked at Court TV from 2002 to 2004. Her first day at NBCU will be June 3.

David Campbell’s post pulls together some interesting stats on online news consumption, in particular video: News is a popular category on YouTube (it was the most searched for item in four out of 12 months in 2011) There is no strict correlation between length of video and popularity — one-third of popular videos were 2-5 minutes in length, and nearly one fifth were longer than 5 mins Oyala, a large video streaming platform, reported that long form videos of 10 minutes+ accounted for 57% of viewing time on tablets they served Multimedia completion rates can also be good: MediaStorm says that more than half, and often two-thirds, of those viewing their stories online stay with them to the end, even when stories run up to 20 or more minutes.

Twitter officially patented its “pull-to-refresh” technology for streaming on its mobile app today, The Verge reports. But Twitter also has an original, internal approach to patent applications. All Twitter’s patents include a contract in which the company agrees to engage in patent litigation only if they are sued first. The contract is meant to deal with the concerns of the engineers whose work is being patented, and who feel the definition of defensive litigation can be fuzzy. “[Engineers] were going around saying we’re worried about what patents mean,” said Twitter IP attorney Ben Lee, who drafted the IPA and guided it through the revision process. “The IPA is an expression of the values of the company.” Lee’s work on the IPA began during his initial job interview with Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray in November of 2010. “The notion of trying to come up with new ways of handling patents was a major reason for me coming to Twitter in the first place,” he said. “I don’t think it was that long after that we were already having significant conversations with the engineers and senior management about some things we could do.” Unfortunately, work on the IPA was put on hold not long after Lee joined Twitter — a patent troll had sued the company over a junk patent on “virtual communities,” and Lee spent serious time living in a Virginia hotel room as the case went to trial. “We’ve seen the negative impact” of patent abuse, he says. “And we’re a young company.”