In August, Sony Pictures Entertainment bought over Grouper. This $65m acquisition shows the increasing trend of traditional and new media 'mergers'.

Sony does not own a broadcast network nor a direct distribution outlet for movie and television. This purchase will provide Sony with a a ready-made network to deliver both Hollywood produced content and consumer-created videos. The videos then can be shared by users or downloaded to portable video-playing devices - including Sony's PSP.

The traditional media companies are monitoring new developments tightly , looking to close in on new delivery platforms that are drawing eyeballs. Traditional content delivery will increasingly be cross-pollinated with new interactive media to capture more audience.

http://www.grouper.com

In August, YouTube reveals their new marketing platforms - "Brand Channels" and participatory video ads (PVAs). This will give big-brand names a shot at wooing the YouTube community.

"Brand Channels" are like the channels created for all YouTube users who upload their homemade videos to the site. Advertisers can customize their own space on YouTube to attract people with contests and videos etc. Warner Bro. Records was the first to use the "Brand Channel" to promote Paris Hilton's debut album "Paris".

"Participatory Video Ads" features one daily video ad on the home page that users will judge. People can come to the site to rate the ad, share it with others, write comments, and embed the ad inside their own videos or make the ad a favorite. The first participatory video ad was for the Weinstein Co.'s current movie release, "Pulse." The "Pulse" ad was viewed 900,000 times in four days.

YouTube continues to grow worldwide. In Singapore alone, we had been seeing consistent growth in YouTube’s market share for the past 9 months. In July alone, traffic surged more than 16% to reach the record high of 0.71% market share. Comparing against familiar portals like AsiaOne & ChannelNewsAsia, YouTube is growing steadily whereas the News portals are stagant.

With YouTube gaining in popularity, more advertisers will experiment with their new offerings. However, some advertisers will not be comfortable near consumer-created content and will stay away. Advertisers who will ride on these new platforms will probably be youth-oriented.

Following the success of MSN Messenger Packs, Yahoo! South East Asia recently announced the launch of its version of Messenger Packs. Yahoo! estimates over 16M unique users of Y! Messenger across key countries in SEA.

Yahoo! Messenger Pack comes at a much cheaper price tag as compared to MSN Messenger Pack. For a 2.25M impression weekly pack, Yahoo! is pricing this at USD 1,500 for the Singapore market.

Aside from the benefit of high reach, the Messenger ad unit allows advertiser to reach out to millions of Messenger users in their most engaged environments. However, Yahoo!'s Messenger still lags far behind MSN in Singapore. We will need to ascertain its effectiveness at a further date.

© 2006 Zenithmedia
© 2006 Optimedia
© 2006 Equinox

Photos credited to media owners