Mediaboss Marketing

Media companies may take a huge leap of faith into a new phase of the Digital Age, or at least if everything goes according to Facebooks plan they will, The New York Times reported this week. Over recent months, the social media giant has been holding closed-door discussions with at least half a dozen media mammoths such as The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and National Geographic, etching out the details of a proposed plan to host news content inside Facebook, instead of making users go to an external site.

The plan has been touted as a sure-fire way to streamline user experience by allowing links to load more quickly and letting users avoid the pesky ads that make news consumption cumbersome.

But some media observers are skeptical, saying it could destroy incentives for journalistic integrity and prevent small publishers from reaching their audience.

The companys [Facebooks] news feed algorithm is an increasingly important news filter, particularly for younger 'millennials.' That means any deeper partnerships with media groups to host their stories could be controversial, with publishers that do not sign up likely to complain vociferously if Facebooks algorithm penalises their stories as a result, wrote Stuart Dredge for the Guardian.

The ability of small publishers to reach their audience has already diminished even without the preferential treatment that Facebooks potential media collaborators could receive. In 2012, Facebook announced that organic page reach was just 16 percent. In other words, a single article posted by a news organization probably appeared in only 16 percent of the organization's followers' news feeds. By February 2014, that number had declined to 6.15 percent, and by January 2015, organic reach was practically nonexistent, the tech website Dazeinfo.com reported.

In such [a] scenario, if Facebook ties up with a bunch of leading publishers and hosts their news content, those publishers who are already facing warmth due to the fall of organic reach, will become more distressed, wrote Dazeinfo research analyst Pritha Bose.

Even for media giants, the proposed change has been characterized as a leap of faith. Most media companies are accustomed to driving traffic back to their own sites and collecting their own data on users, not to mention ad revenue. While BuzzFeed has pioneered a policy of spreading content outside its site, The New York Times uses a subscription model that accounts for a growing percentage of its revenue. Ad revenue sharing plans for the new deal with Facebook would still need to be hashed out and solidified, anonymous sources confirmed to The New York Times.

Nevertheless, some analysts say that Facebooks ability to reach a vast audience may make it worth the risk. Facebook currently has more than 1.3 billion active monthly users, about a fifth of the worlds population, and already has become the leading source of traffic for many digital publishers.

It [a media company] would have to weigh the benefits of reaching Facebooks users and the ad revenue that comes with them against the prospect of giving away its content and losing the clicks on its own site that would instead stay within Facebook, The New York Times reported.

But while Facebook has little experience participating in revenue sharing with content providers, it has been experimenting with revenue sharing options. Some of these experiments, one of which prioritizes video hosted on Facebook over other content, could be an example of what the future will hold.

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Facebook woos media giants: Will social media control the future of news? (+video)

Launch their Soyuz spacecraft is scheduled for 2:42 pm CDT Friday, March 27. Media should pick up credentials by 12:30 p.m. Friday, and must be escorted and in place before NASA TV launch coverage begins at 1:30 p.m. Accredited media wishing must ensure seating to watch the final hour of the countdown by calling the JSC Newsroom at 281-483-5111 before 4 p.m. Thursday, March 26.

Offering one of Mission Controls actual flight control rooms provides a rare opportunity to observe the launch, taking place half a world away at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazhakhstan. Seated in the Blue Flight Control Room, media may watch the countdown and launch from the same seats occupied by flight controllers during early station assembly, and more recently last Decembers first test flight of the Orion spacecraft.

Meanwhile, Space Center Houston, the official visitor center for Johnson Space Center, invites space buffs, NASA employees and media to watch the launch live on the largest giant screen in Texas.Space Center Houstons mission briefing officers will provide background on the launch and one-year crew. Discount tickets are available on-line.

Kelly and Kornienko are leaving Earth on a one-year mission to better understand how the human body reacts and adapts to the harsh environment of space. Obtaining data to determine ways to further reduce the risks during future long-duration missions to an asteroid and eventually Mars. The crew will support several hundred experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science research that impacts life on Earth. Data and samples will be collected throughout the year from a series of studies involving Scott and his twin brother, former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly. The studies will compare data from the genetically-identical brothers to identify any subtle changes caused by spaceflight.

Joining Kelly and Kornienko will be Gennady Padalka, who will spend six months aboard the outpost. During that time he will become the first four-time station commander and world record holder for most cumulative time ever spent in space.

For more information about the International Space Station, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/station

For more information about the One-Year Crew, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/oneyear

For more information about NASA Television, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For more information about Space Center Houston, visit:http://spacecenter.org

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NASA Invites Media to View One-Year Crew Launch in Mission Control

The media world has undergone a seismic upheaval over the last 20 years, with new tremors shaking the landscape seemingly every week. The latest: TheNew York Times, BuzzFeed, National Geographic and perhaps other well-known publishers are in negotiations that could result in social media giant Facebook hosting news stories and other content they produce directly on its own servers.

The shift, reported by The New York Times itself, would allow Facebook users to see content from those outlets without having to click through to their sites a shift that would represent a sea change in the relationship between Facebook and the news media, and one that could leave publishers even more reliant on the social media service than they are now.

Facebook, with more than a billion users, currently drives a tremendous amount of traffic directly to news sites via links that appear in its users news feeds. The social media giant sent nearly a quarter of the total visits publishers received in December 2014, according to Shareaholic, up 18 percentage points from three years earlier. Yet as Facebooks users increasingly turn to mobile platforms such as phones and tablets, it wants to streamline the browsing experience for users and keep them from clicking away, in the process becoming much more than a place to watch ice bucket challenge videos or keep tabs on friends, family and ex-girlfriends.

If Facebook essentially wants to become the Internet for its users, it knows it still has work to do. Facebook officials have said that the process of opening a news link on a web browser generally takes about eight seconds, an eternity in an era when users have more content choices than they can possibly consume. It also frequently forces the reader to deal with inconvenient pop-up advertisements and other features of news sites that are difficult to navigate, or even just plain dismiss, on a phone screen. If Facebook were able to host the content itself, it argues, it would make for a much smoother user experience, making the reader more likely to actually, well, read the story he or she clicked on.

Its a compelling argument, and if maximizing readership was the sole imperative of news organization, it would be a no-brainer. But its not. News organization in general need advertising revenue to survive, and also value the information they are able to collect by tracking the activity of readers on their sites. To make the idea more appealing to media companies, Facebook is reportedly considering a new revenue-sharing scheme that would pay the content publishers a portion of ad revenue generated.

This would not be the first time that the Internet upended the business model of traditional news media. A decade ago, Craigslist was the bogeyman of newspaper advertising departments, as revenue from classified advertising began to crater with the rise of the free, local message board that gave advertisers control over how and when their ads were displayed. To some extent, its arguable that newspaper still havent really recovered.

Whether publishers embrace Facebooks new scheme remains to be seen. Content producers large and small have reason to be wary of ceding too much control over their fates to the social media giant but publishers desperate to reverse rapidly declining revenues might be willing to give up some control for the right amount of money, and Facebook might be able to offer key players enough blandishments to make the program worth their while. It is also possible that Facebook-hosted content could receive enough traffic to make advertising revenue sharing more popular for some smaller sites than hosting content on their own had been.

In any case, should a deal with Facebook be struck, it could fundamentally change the news and media worlds once again. What else is new?

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:

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Will Facebook kill the news media or save it?

posted by Bob Kovacs / Broadcast Engineering Extra 03.24.2015 01:43 PM

Globecast Launches Media Centre in Los Angeles

A facility to create and playout video content to any distribution platform.

LOS ANGELESGlobecast announced the launch of its Los Angeles Media Centre, offering broadcasters and content providers a converged workflow to prepare, deliver and playout content to any kind of distribution platform. The new Media Centre adds to the company's facilities in London and Singapore, providing a one-stop-shop for media management, playout, satellite and OTT distribution.

The new facility, which has been upgraded to include Globecasts Media Factory for content logistics and converged workflow, brings broadcast and OTT solutions together under one roof, making it more efficient to handle both linear broadcast and on-demand services.

Globecasts Media Factory replaces multiple operations with a single, process that handles everything from VoD preparation and content formatting to creative services, quality control and compliance. The Media Factory approach allows Globecast to pass on economies of scale to customers who also benefit from the greater flexibility and the ability to scale up and down as required. The LA Media Centre features state-of-the art technology from leading providers to create an integrated broadcast facility.

Globecasts managing director in the U.S., Eddie Ferraro, said, In this constantly shifting media landscape, cost-efficiency and time-to-market are key to a successful business model. Broadcasters today have to cover traditional linear playout as well as VoD and catch-up services across multiple platforms in order to reach their viewers. Our new Media Centre enables them to do exactly this from right here in the heart of LA.

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Globecast Launches Media Centre in Los Angeles

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- If you want to know whymedia companies are wary ofApple (AAPL - Get Report) getting into the television business, youneed only to look at what happened to the music industry after it introducediTunes: Music companies lost much of their clout and reach.

The maker of the iPad and iPhone is expected to unveil a 25-channel Internet-based television service later this year, according to areportlast week in The Wall Street Journal, deepeningits competition with Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG)as well as streamingservices from Roku, Sony (SNE) and DISH (DISH).

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For media companies that spend billions of dollars developing programming, Applerepresents an opportunity and a risk. The opportunity is the chance to gather insights into the viewing habits of Apple's customers, a high-income demographic active in social media, and to better reach the roughly 10 million U.S. households that have a high-speed Internet connection but choose not to subscribe to a pay-TV service.

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Apple's Internet TV Success May Lie in Sharing Customer Data