A Blockbuster Announcement?

Two pioneers of the entertainment have joined forces recently.  TiVo and Blockbuster just announced a deal to combine both of their respective business models to offer their customers on-demand movies.  Sounds great, but is this news that will grow TiVo and jumpstart Blockbuster?  This article, and myself hardly think so.

The agreement

will allow TiVo subscribers with Series 2 or higher boxes and a broadband Internet connection to rent and purchase movies on-demand from the video store chain's library.  In addition, TiVo DVR's will soon start appearing on Blockbuster shelves.

While the idea sounds like it could be an important bellwether of better times for each company, I could see this being no more than a small term fix at best.  In the current economy, often times, it's entertainment and luxury items that are the hardest hit.  Although people will still watch movies this service will require two components for it to work.  This is about one more then needed.  

Blockbuster needs this to be huge though.  They've been getting pounded by Netflix harder then Apollo beat on Rocky in (and let's be honest) the only good Rocky movie.  But Blockbuster is missing the point here.  The movie rental service is about more then just convenience.  Netflix is a fully integrated service that is both reliable and proficient.  The ability to rank movies, view ratings, and have the website offer suggestions is a quality that cannot be understated.

No offense to both companies, but have Blockbuster and TiVo been living in a cave recently?  On-demand viewing has been around forever, and at prices much lower then the $4 movies that they will offer.  Once again, the market is just too saturated with entertainment possibilities these days.  So I'm going to help them out, pull my best Simon Cowell, and offer some suggestions.

1. Make sure the entire movie library is available for watching.  None of this new release and "Bond 20th Anniversary Special" stuff.  I want to watch Police Academy 4, do not tell me I can't.
2. Offer the DVD extras.  How dare you charge me a DVD rental price and not offer the full extent of the DVD package.  The best part of the Notebook is the Rachael McAdams commentary section.
3. I have a bomb TV, I mean it's big.  Like, I have to turn it sideways to get it out of my door.  So I want to view movies in Widescreen.  Hell, I want them in HD and BluRay too.  If I can get a DVD that way, that's the way it needs to be.
4. Make previews optional.  I mean I love them as much as the next guy but here's the deal.  It's late and I'm with a girl.  She decides we're going to watch Made of Honor.  Fine, I'll jump on this grenade.  But do I need to see the trailers for 27 Dresses and Sweet Home Alabama?  Please, spare me.
5. Give us the option to rent TV shows.  At reasonable prices mind you.  I can see Family Guy on Cartoon Network, but if I'm going to pay for it, don't make me fork over more then $1 an episode.

These are just some suggestions.  But if they want this to work, they have to make it much better then the other options.  In this epic battle to keep us Americans glued to our couches there will be few winners.  It's entertainment's natural selection.  I could care less who makes it out alive, just as long as I can watch Caddyshack whenever I damn well please.

My Favorite Things

My Favorite Things

I'm going to write out some of my favorite things, so you can learn more about me. I hope you like it.

• Sweet looking sunglasses.


• Practical jokes


• Anything Pittsburgh


• Dummying Jarod Palmer in practice


• Jonas Brothers Official Website

Sponsored Search: A Brief History

The topic of my paper was search engine advertising. I would have liked to have kept it more detailed, but I felt that looking at it from both perspectives (search engine entity/web site entity) allowed my paper to have a more complete scope. This article, Sponsored Search: A Brief History, views my topic from that of the search engine entity.

Before I discuss the article itself I would like to discuss the potential reliability issue that arises. To include this article in my paper I had to reconcile the fact that it's written by two employees at Yahoo! with the fact that it presents a really nice summary of search engine advertising.

Authors Fain and Pederson summarize sponsored search, or "the presentation of text advertisements in response to a user's query". They begin by explaining the importance of Web Search to the public. People often take for granted that engines like Google and Yahoo provide a real service to them for free. How do they do it? The answer, while quite obvious, is often overlooked. The revenue generated from text advertisement helps fuel the business models of these companies.

While search engine advertising implies exactly how it reads, things are much more complicated then meet the eye. The algorithms that determine the relevancy of keyword searches most often produce the best results per individual. However, in order to generate revenue, search engines have added several wrinkles in price setting and result listings to help their bottom line. Fain and Pederson introduce the earliest occurrences of such in the beginning of the article.

The original search engine model used annotation via tags (keywords) that described a sites content. The idea was that the most relevant results were listed first. Unfortunately, sites caught on and abused these processes by manipulating these tags to outrank more relevant sites. GoTo was the first search engine to address the problem by manually editing its search results, today this work is automated using complex software.

Before the days of sponsored search, search engines relied on banner advertising to earn revenue. Much like a billboard they charged for space on sites where more memorable graphical ads could be placed. A dilemma occurred however. Keep users on their site longer to view these banners, or send users promptly to the sites appearing in search results. Paid search helped end this problem by tying search engine's revenue to the actual sites visited from search result requests. But measurement and pricing of these paid searches still remained an issue.

One of the biggeer advancements in advertising was the cost per click model used by Yahoo! beginning in 1996. Yahoo! charged companies each time an advertisement provided by the search service resulted in a click to a certain companies website. However, problems arose, and the measure of the effectiveness of these clicks became increasingly debated. Do these clicks result in an action from the searcher? Do the advertisements provide a lasting impression on the searcher? All of these concepts had to be reconciled. Almost every search engine has a different strategy they use to evaluate the cost of their service and its effectiveness. This is why sponsored search bids can fluctuate so much even daily.

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