Ad Wars
In reference to a new DVR with a feature called Auto Hop that “that lets consumers zap away broadcast TV commercials at the touch of a button:”
“It’s a win-win for both consumers and the networks,” said Vivek Khemka, Dish Network vice president of product management.
The networks aren’t happy:
Dish said Fox and NBC have refused to allow its ads for the new DVR on their networks.
“Ads are key to our business, so we’re not supportive of anything that doesn’t support our advertisers,” said Paul Lee, president of the ABC Television Group.
Oddly enough:
Ratings indicate that DVR usage has increased viewership of some network TV shows, said Jack Myers, publisher of the industry newsletter The Myers Report. In an odd way, fast-forwarding through commercials often makes people concentrate more intensely on the TV and stop if something interests them, he said.
So people are watching more TV…and paying more attention to what they like…and this is a bad thing?
(Source: The Huffington Post)
Photo
Google Chrome is now number #1 in web browsers. IE has dropped almost 15% in the last year; that’s a pretty drastic change! In light of this data, it’s hard to claim that people don’t rapidly switch technologies as they find something better.
Photo
Our favorite poster of the week. Short, visually compelling, with a clear call to action. Take the survey here.
(Source: goshen.theredpost.com)
Photo
A survey for a theater redevelopment project in Goshen mentions RedPost. Nice! We’ll be asking for the results.
Quote
Diverse opinions are healthy and disagreements are good. But if the goal is to win through protracted conflict it may work in politics but not in real life. What works in real life is building cooperative networks to figure out how to move forward on this or that challenge.President Bill Clinton at the CTIA Wireless convention
(Source: CNET)
Quote
The Atlantic: Cities (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)I think the basic logic was outlined long ago by one of our mutual heroes, Jane Jacobs. She attempted to understand the city by stepping out her front door, analyzing a stretch of Hudson Street in the Village. Jacobs compared the crowded sidewalk to a spontaneous “ballet,” filled with people from different walks of life. While urban planners had long derided such neighborhoods for their inefficiencies – that’s why Robert Moses, the “master builder” of New York, wanted to build an eight lane elevated highway through Soho and the Village – Jacobs argued that these casual exchanges were essential. She saw the city not as a mass of buildings, but as a vessel of empty spaces, in which people interacted with other people.
These sidewalk conversations came with real benefits. According to Jacobs, the virtue of Hudson Street was that it encouraged the “mingling of diversity,” allowing city dwellers to easily exchange information. The end result was a constant churn of ideas, as strangers learned from each other - “knowledge spillovers.”
