Video/Audio

Can CNN find a digital upgrade to the analog King?

For the streamed product, ESPN could apparently find two major advertisers: Samsung and the U.S. Army. Worse, the same ads (actually slight variations of two) ran over and over and over, often back to back. Incredibly, they were more repetitive than Joe Morgan, the long-maligned partner of Miller’s.

So, through thick and thin, digital marketing, with better targeting being introduced around the clock, keeps pulling dollars away from traditional media — TV, newspapers, radio, and magazines.

Clearly, the Journal is trying to anticipate success here — that’s clearly what’s behind what some have derided as a high iPad only $17.29 monthly sub fee. Of course, that could be a good problem to have. Tablets, with good subscription price points, potentially lucrative ad rates and low (compared to print) costs of production and distribution, may be the building block of the digital-first news business.

News and magazine publishers now see a second digital revenue line. It’s 70 percent of X (the retail price) multiplied by Y (volume of sales). As news companies reinvent not only products, but new business arrangements with the distributors of the day — from Google/Amazon/Yahoo to Comcast/AT&T/Verizon — expect to see the Apple model invoked as “fair.”

I think we’ll see these companies go head-to-head for reader and subscriber dollars. As they do, I think they’ll face a new five-fingered exercise. Raise one hand; five is the probably the maximum number of iPad news sites for which readers will pay.

CNN’s ratings slides is beginning to look like daily newspaper’s long circ slide.  The hot cable media — Fox, especially, and less so, MSNBC as well as CNN’s own HLN, with its screaming, tabloidy, violence-centered coverage — all are beating it, and ever more handily with each ratings period. Maybe its problem is similar to [...]

You can see how public media is finally forging long-overdue connections: NPR, Frontline and PBS, and now the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is putting money into local online news. That’s a potent combination brewing.

The Apple model, in a sense, just sets a new cost-of-distribution. While web distribution has been free-plus, the cost of Apple distribution – if you charge for news products – is a predictable, and seemingly stable 30%. Just give me 30% off the top, says Steve Jobs. Ironically, that 30% is just a little higher than the costs of physical distribution for newspapers or the percentage that magazine publishers pay to get physical products to readers.

As 4G becomes mainstream over the next 18 months, expect to see lots more — it’s tailor-made for the tablet and other mobile platforms. For more on how the Times is getting its video act together, consider its new partnership with Thought Equity Motion, itself in motion in creating a video marketplace, “The Newsonomics of New York Times Video.”