Wireless Federation

A federal judge overseeing a €637 million (US$1 billion) copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube has ordered the popular online video-sharing service to disclose who watches which video clips and when.

An Associated Press report also said US District Judge Louis L. Stanton authorized full access to the YouTube logs after Viacom and other copyright holders argued that they needed the data to show whether their copyright-protected videos are more heavily watched than amateur clips.

The data would not be publicly released but disclosed only to the plaintiffs, and it would include less specific identifiers than a user’s real name or email address, the Associated Press report said.

Lawyers for Google, which owns YouTube, said producing 12 terabytes of data, equivalent to the text of roughly 12 million books, would be expensive, time-consuming and a threat to users’ privacy, the report said.

The database includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how often a clip is viewed.

Attached to each entry is each viewer’s unique login ID and the internet Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer’s computer.

Stanton ruled this week that the plaintiffs had a legitimate need for the information and that the privacy concerns are speculative.

Stanton rejected a request from the plaintiffs for Google to disclose the source code, the technical secret sauce, powering its market-leading search engine, saying there’s no evidence Google manipulated its search algorithms to treat copyright-infringing videos differently.

Viacom is seeking at least €637 million (US$1 billion) in damages from Google, saying YouTube has built a business by using the internet to “willfully infringe” copyrights on Viacom shows.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
 

YouTube, Google Inc’s  popular video sharing site, is giving away tools that let Web developers tap the underlying database functions of YouTube, in effect allowing users to build their own YouTubes.

The Silicon Valley-based video-sharing site said on Wednesday that it is providing wholesale access to YouTube’s extensive video library, global audience, and the underlying video hosting and streaming network that powers YouTube.

The move goes significantly beyond the current access to YouTube videos in which any Web user can copy and embed selected videos onto their own Web pages.

YouTube said its latest customization offerings allow anyone building a Web site or Internet-connected software program to upload videos straight to YouTube. They can fetch video feeds, comments, responses or playlists from YouTube.

What YouTube is offering parallels an earlier move by Yahoo Inc to open up the ability of its Flickr photo-sharing site to provide deep access to Web developers in order to embed underlying features of Flickr in other sites.

Web site developers can let users rate videos or add them to a favorites list embedded within their own sites. They can also customize and control the Adobe Systems Inc Flash video playing software through which videos are viewed.

The expansion of what is known in technical jargon as APIs, or Application Programmer Interfaces, lets developers build a so-called “chromeless” Flash player — a video-viewing window that is stripped of formatting such as title bar, browser buttons or status bars so they can create their own players.

These free customization features can be used in conjunction with the existing APIs which launched last year and which provide the ability to view videos on other sites and to search for videos on YouTube. 

By adding underlying features and functions of YouTube, developers can enable users to publish videos directly from their mobile phone devices or encourage new users to share videos to the Web site, as if they were on YouTube itself.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News

Promising new channels for the growth of Internet advertising, from mobile phones to social networks, still face substantial challenges in 2008 when it comes to persuading marketers to invest in them, an executive at the Avenue A/Razorfish Web ad agency said.
Jeff Lanctot, senior vice president at Avenue A, described mobile advertising, social media and Web video as “not ready for prime-time,” “a work in progress” and “a ways away” from standardization, respectively, in an interview with Reuters.
Each of these channels represents a major gamble for the world’s biggest Internet players, particularly as investors show concern over how Web search and other established formats will weather a possible U.S. recession this year.
Avenue A is part of the aQuantive online marketing company bought last year by Microsoft Corp for $6 billion. Microsoft has since launched a $41 billion unsolicited takeover offer of Yahoo Inc to better compete against Web search leader Google Inc .
Avenue A, in an annual report on the state of the digital advertising market released on Sunday, said current trends will make it difficult for major Web publishers to increase ad revenue in 2008, as marketers divide their budgets across more sites.
The agency handled $735 million in advertiser budgets in 2007, up 36 percent from the previous year. In 2008, it could direct nearly $1 billion in spending, based on industry estimates.
It spent client money on more than 1,800 sites in 2007, compared with 863 the previous year. The shift comes to the detriment of large portals like Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN.
On the flip side, large online advertising networks that help marketers navigate through so many Web sites and place ads are gaining ground. The top ad networks have been acquired by Yahoo, Microsoft and Time Warner Inc’s AOL.
“The data says it’s probably the right strategy for them,” said Lanctot. “Not unlike search, the ad networks benefit from scale.”
A SEARCH RECESSION?
While search advertising continued to gain a larger share of advertiser budgets in 2007, a U.S. recession this year could take a toll if consumers are searching and shopping less, according to Avenue A.
Google has sought growth in new outlets, particularly its YouTube video sharing site. It introduced small ad overlays on YouTube, adding to several video ad formats used on other sites that include television-like commercials within a clip, or a video player embedded within a sponsored area on a Web page.
“You’re going to see a lot more investment in all those different types of video ads but I think we’re probably a ways away from standards being adopted,” Lanctot said. “They may be announced; I just don’t think they’ll be widely adopted.”
Microsoft made a $240 million investment in social network Facebook, which faced criticism over an effort to publicize products or sites favored by its users.
“For marketers it was reasonable to expect that there would be and probably continue to be a rocky road to finding out what the right ad models are on Facebook,” Lanctot said. “For our clients we advise that it would be good to test, but to go in with eyes wide open.”
It is still difficult to generate high or even average prices for ads placed on social networks, but that could improve as the networks increase their ability to target their millions of users more accurately, he said.
Both the networks and advertisers might consider rewarding members for spreading the word about their products online, not unlike the way credit card companies or airlines give consumers points for their purchases.
Mobile advertising began to attract serious attention from clients in the second half of last year, partly boosted by Apple Inc.’s Web-browsing iPhone, and won’t become a staple for marketers until 2009, the Avenue A report said.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News Mobile Advertising

European carriers may not sell quite as many Apple Inc.iPhones as AT&T Inc., but there’s still a good reason to have them on the books, according to René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom AG. He says the device is driving up average wireless data usage as much as 30 times higher than on other phones.

The CEO revealed the data figures this week as the German carrier revealed key metrics around its T-Mobile International AG cellular operations in Europe and the U.S. In Germany, T-Mobile has sold 70,000 iPhones with contracts.

These phones are helping to drive up mobile data use for the operator, Obermann says. “iPhone customers retrieve weather reports, stock prices, and YouTube videos from the Internet on the go — all as a matter of course.

“The average Internet usage for an iPhone customer is more than 100 MBytes. This is 30 times the use for our average contract-based consumer customers.”

Note that Obermann doesn’t specify if that is per month. Carriers, however, do generally measure users’ data consumption on a monthly basis.

The ability to watch TV and download video and music on a phone can dramatically increase the volume of data that a mobile user burns through anyway, notes Unstrung Insider senior analyst Gabriel Brown with a personal example: “I used 100 MBytes in an hour and a half listening to Internet radio on my phone the other day.”

Ramping up data usage rates is extremely important to Western European carriers since they need to replace voice revenues and find alternatives to text messaging, which is expected to reach saturation point over the next few years.

Heavy Reading senior analyst Patrick Donegan suggests that such potential data increases may also be a reason for wireless carriers to re-examine their backhaul capabilities in the near future.

“Datapoints like this suggest that many operators are still underestimating the impact that data is going to have on their backhaul networks,” says Donegan. “The ability to support these data volumes flexibly and cost effectively in the backhaul network is going to differentiate mobile carrier performance just as much as their ability to win over the end user market at the front end.”

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News

French mobile operator SFR has extended its Illimythics unlimited mobile internet offer until 11 March. To date, the service has attracted 250,000 subscribers, well above an initial target of 100,000. Some 25 percent are new customers and 48 percent are SFR subscribers who have changed plan free of charge. The company states that users can enjoy unlimited internet surfing, messaging, music and live TV, with no time or download volume restriction. A 2 hour Illimythics plan will cost EUR 39 for two years to the first 50,000 consumers who sign up by 11 March. The price then rises to EUR 49 per month. SFR ’s 3G+ (HSPDA) network covers 70 percent of the French population. It carries big internet names such as Google, Dailymotion, YouTube, MySpace, eBay, etc. A broad range of 3G+ handsets are available.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News

Advertising is an enormous U.S. economic force; in 2006, it was estimated to be worth $296 billion. In old media, it funds terrestrial network TV, radio and Yellow Pages while paying half or more the cost of most newspapers and magazines. Online digital content is also largely free to consumers, with e-mail, social networking, popular information and listings paid for by $20 billion in banners and sponsored search. Virtually anyone with a computer is online, most have broadband and use is unconstrained by price.

Access to content at no incremental cost to consumers stokes up demand by orders of magnitude. Un-metered dial-up and flat-rate broadband Internet access make online usage free. Google, Yahoo!, eBay, MySpace, YouTube, Skype and Sling Media ride for free on the carriers’ pipes, but among others, these destinations are why most households pay $20-$45 per month for fast Internet access. Advertising charges underpin these Web players’ business models, whereas monthly recurring charges have made large and healthy new business for telcos with DSL and for cable companies’ with Internet modem services.

NO SUCH THING AS FREE
In mobile, there is no such thing as free for most subscribers, where uptake and usage is significantly constrained by pricing. Additional phones can be added to my AT&T family plan for $10 per month. My bucket of 1,400 voice minutes can be shared among them, but data plans are on a
per-phone basis with unlimited Web starting at $20 per month and rising to $40 with video and text. Without a data plan, usage charges are a whopping $10 per megabyte.

Mobile Internet uptake and usage will increase dramatically as unlimited data plans become more widely adopted and cheaper with increasing competition. Not many users are willing to pay a subscription or variable charges to access weather information on a phone when they can get it so many other ways for free. New data users are even less inclined to pay monthly subscription fees for premium content and will have less need to do so with increasing availability of free content. Leap has recently undercut the leading carriers by 40% with its Cricket unlimited EV-DO PC data card plan at $35.

Intensifying price competition in handset data plans is also inevitable. Information providers will provide much of what we want with advertising support and with “free” generating massively increased demand. Carriers also benefit – as they did with online – with substantially increased subscriber uptake for mobile data.

MORE ROOM TO GROW
Potential abounds. Several pioneers with ad-supported business models are jumping in with the same entrepreneurial drive as in online. So far, for example, only around 13% of mobile subscribers access news and information each month and less than half that percentage use search. Only a small proportion of content pages viewed on the mobile Web or via rich clients such as Java or BREW include any advertising. Nevertheless, approximately 1 billion ads are served by Admob and Third Screen Media each month in the United States, and the number is growing rapidly. Mobile advertising is at bargain prices. Display ad cost per thousand (CPM) and search cost per click (CPC) are substantially less than their online equivalents, where in search, for example, clicks average more than a dollar and frequently fetch $25 or more for hot key words with high priced purchases such as mortgages or insurance.

Mobile search providers Medio, JumpTap, Microsoft (MotionBridge) and Google have the additional capability of click-to-call. With location-based capabilities, local search and advertising has unique potential in comparison to its 15% share of online. For example, location-based click-to-calls from Saturday night revelers who fall on the wrong side of the law would be worth a lot to attorneys who specialize in these matters.

There are still significant challenges in this nascent marketplace. Advertisers want national reach across all major carriers. Whereas consumers frequently switch TV channels, consumers tend to have just one phone and one on-deck carrier experience. Advertisers also need systems to make buying and formulating campaigns easy, the workflow capabilities to target and match advertisements with Web page inventory and the measurement tools to measure effectiveness.

Mobile advertising revenues are less than 1% of wireless carriers’ $20 billion in data service fees which are growing at double-digit rates. Advertising revenues in support of the content subscribers consume will surely grow to a significant proportion of these figures over the next few years.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News

For Matthew Key the choice has come down to Milton Keynes or Uxbridge. Battle plans have been drawn, extra troops deployed and this Friday at 6.02pm, the invasion will begin.

Key, the man instrumental in bringing Apple’s iPhone to Britain on Friday, wants to be in the thick of it when his O2 stores fling open their doors to sell the most hyped product this side of Christmas.

After months of planning, his main concern is that everything goes smoothly, and his only decision is which store to attend. By closing all 450 O2 outlets for four hours on Friday afternoon while a new Apple merchandising area is fitted out in each, Key is hoping that a throng of fanatics will start queuing in anticipation.

“That is part of any Apple product launch. People do get pretty excited about it,” he said.

The UK boss of the mobile-phone operator beat the opposition to partner Apple for its British launch. In June, he jetted to California with César Alierta, boss of O2’s Spanish owner Telefonica, for an audience with Apple boss Steve Jobs.

“The iPhone is a step change compared with anything else that has been in the marketplace,” said Key. “Once people see it and use it, the level of customer satisfaction is off the scale.”

In America, customers queued for days to get their hands on the phone. Apple has so far shifted more than 1m units. It remains to be seen whether Britain will fall as hard for Apple’s latest beauty. But as the hype builds, a threat lies in the wings.

Google is preparing to announce plans for its long-awaited G-Phone. In some ways the name is confusing – it’s not one Google uses – because the internet giant has been working not on a handheld device but on software that will give phone users fast and easy access to its services, from search and maps to e-mail.

At first glance it might not seem a radical departure from what is already on offer. Many phones – including the iPhone – offer access to Google’s services. But as always, Google’s ambitions are large. While Apple has revolutionised the phone, Google wants to revolutionise the phone industry. THE iPhone is an undeniably tasty piece of kit. On a screen just larger than a credit card, owners can use the telephone, camera, a standard iPod and navigate the internet, pinching their fingers together to shrink pages of information and drawing them apart to zoom in.

The two drawbacks are the touch-screen keyboard (the fat-fingered will struggle) and the price. At £269 each, plus the commitment of a minimum £35-a-month contract lasting 18 months, the iPhone costs head and shoulders more than everything else on sale at the moment. In Britain, falling call charges mean that anyone willing to pay £35 a month can expect a top-of-the-range phone thrown in for free.

Some analysts are sceptical of iPhone’s appeal beyond a hardcore of fans. “We see this pricing as limiting the iPhone’s appeal to Apple aficionados and wealthy fashion victims who are looking to upgrade their iPod,” said James Barford at Enders Analysis.

Google’s plans are still under wraps, but it is likely to make its attack from the other end. Last week, Google’s share price rose past $700 on speculation that an announcement of its mobile-phone plans was imminent. The rise made the company more valuable than Citi, the world’s biggest bank.

To date, the mobile-phone industry has been about monthly charges and call costs. Extra services cost extra money. In America, for example, Verizon customers who want satellite navigation pay $10 a month or $3 a day. It’s a lucrative business model but it’s not Google’s business model. Google has made its fortune by giving its services to its customers for free and then selling ads to pay for them.

In its efforts to gain traction in the mobile market, Google has approached several handset manufacturers about the idea of building phones tailored to Google software. Taiwan’s HTC and South Korea’s LG Electronics are rumoured to be the top contenders.

The phones themselves are unlikely to be the most radical element of Google’s plans. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has said that mobile phones should be free for consumers who agree to watch ads. He believes mobile ads are worth twice as much as regular internet ads because they are more highly targeted.

The company is seeking partnerships with the wireless operator Verizon Wireless in America, as well as Orange and 3 in Europe. An announcement could come as soon as this week. In return for letting Google use their networks, the mobile operators would get a slice of the billions in ad dollars, pounds and euros that Google aims to generate.

Google also wants to open up the software that runs mobile phones, allowing independent software developers to customise applications and build new features. Third-party applications could include services tailored to a users’ location and linked to Google Maps and other Google applications. Google, meanwhile, could gather user data to show targeted ads to cellphone users and share the revenue with the mobile-network operator.

Mobile advertising is a rapidly growing market. Analysts Frost & Sullivan predict the mobile-advertising market in America alone will generate $2.1 billion (£1 billion) in revenue by 2011 compared with $301m in 2006.

The Shosteck Group estimates the market will be worth $10 billion glo-bally by 2010. With all that money to play for, who needs a £35-a-month contract?

Michael Gartenberg, vice-president at Jupiter Research, said: “A year ago you wouldn’t have put Apple or Google in the same sentence as mobile telephony. But they are there now and, as they have shown before, they are likely to be highly disruptive.” AS principal analyst of mobile devices at Washington-based Current Analysis, Avi Greengart tests hundreds of new phones every year. “The iPhone is the first phone I would describe as fun,” he said. Other phones have offered internet access, cameras, touch screens and so on, but none of them has done it as well as Apple, he said.

But will it make as big a splash in Britain? Unlike the American mobile-phone market, the British market is saturated with handsets. Many people have more than one, for home and for work. Loyalty is low. So anything that marks one operator out from the rest can only help.

In many ways this plays to Apple’s advantage. O2’s Key hopes the iPhone will help him pinch high-value customers from Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile.

“Because of the structure of the UK market, three-quarters of customers using the iPhone will be new to O2,” he said. “The same customer using an iPhone is more profitable to us than one using an existing phone. It has far more functions and they will be using them more.”

But his detractors say Key had to sell his soul to Apple to secure the partnership. For the first time, a handset maker will cream off service revenues from a network operator, giving it a continuing income stream. Rivals say that they baulked at Apple’s demands for 30% of revenues.

“Clearly, there are lots of sour grapes from the other operators,” Key retorted. “I sometimes put myself in their shoes and think: what would I be doing to protect my business? I am very happy with the deal we have.”

The industry is not taking Apple’s incursion lying down. Vodafone has signed up Music Station, a music-download service backed by all the main record companies. It is offering unlimited downloads for £1.99 a week. Meanwhile, 3 has just launched its Skypephone, offering free international calls to other Skype users.

The company everyone is really watching is Google. The iPhone is the latest in a long line of beautifully designed and ground-breaking products from Apple. But unlike the iPod, which has changed the music industry, the iPhone is in some ways a throwback to an older model of mobile-phone ownership. For all its beautiful bells and whistles, the iPhone is expensive and comes with heavy monthly charges.

Google has had a tough job convincing the mobile-phone industry that it needs to change and that the future belongs to free services paid for by advertising. After a series of skirmishes it appears that some of them are listening. In Britain, Vodafone and Yahoo announced an advertising deal last year. In America, Verizon and Google, which were slugging it out in Washington over the internet firm’s mobile plans, are talking.

“The buzz around Google is that they could change the way mobile phones and services are sold. They have this huge machine in internet advertising behind them. They could change the economics of the industry,” said Greengart.

Google’s Schmidt was among the first to get his hands on an iPhone. He even appeared on stage with Apple’s Jobs at the launch, announcing Google Map and search would be on the phone.

“There’s a lot of relationships,” Schmidt told the audience. “If we merge we can call it Applegoo.”

As Apple and Google both turn their formidable focus on the mobile market, can relations stay so sweet?

SQUARING UP FOR A FIGHT: HOW APPLE AND GOOGLE COMPARE

Apple: Market value $163.5 billion Sales $24 billion Sales growth (one year) 24.3% Profits $3.5 billion Employees 14,800 Chief executive Steve Jobs Founded 1977 Products: Macintosh computers, iPod digital music players, iTunes music store, Mac OS X operating system, iPhone.

Google: Market value $212 billion Sales $10.6 billion Sales growth (one year) 72.7% Profits $3 billion Employees 10,674 Chief executive Eric Schmidt Headquarters Mountain View, California Founded 1998 Products: Google search, maps, images, Earth, books, g-mail, YouTube, news, video, the G-phone?

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News

San Mateo based mobile advertising solutions provider AdMob has announced AdMob for Facebook Mobile, a mobile advertising solution for developers of third-party Facebook applications.

AdMob has enabled optimized mobile ads for Facebook Mobile, which developers can use to monetize their mobile applications. Developers can start showing ads and earning money immediately.

AdMob for Facebook Mobile is said to be the first monetization solution for Facebook Mobile developers. AdMob is now serving 1.5 billion ads a month, up from the 1 billion they were serving when we first wrote about them in August.

AdMob Investors include Sequoia and Accel Partners and management includes staff previously with eBay, YouTube and Google.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News Mobile Advertising

Google is expected to unveil in the next two weeks new software and services for mobile phones. People familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal that the new products are expected to enable handset makers to bring Google-powered phones to market by the middle of next year. In recent months Google has approached several US and foreign handset manufacturers about the idea of building phones tailored to Google software, with HTC and LG Electronics seen as potential contenders. Google is also seeking partnerships with mobile operators. In the US, T-Mobile USA is seen as a likely partner, while in Europe Google is pursuing relationships with Orange and 3 UK, according to the paper’s sources. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment. The Google-powered phones are expected to bring together several Google applications, including its search engine, Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail. The main point of its mobile strategy though is to make the phones with open software, including the operating system, so that independent software developers would get access to tools to build additional phone features.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News

The ASA Advertising Standards Agency does have a sense of humour then as it approves Vodafone’s cloud launghing YouTube adverts.

Personally, I think the picture is funny and cute but hardly sells me YouTube or videos. But the 33 complaints were concening children and language. It won’t be long before YouTube will have an age rating to cater for the British Stiff Upper Lip.

Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News Mobile Advertising