David Miller

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Entertainment industry conferences have an unfortunate tendency to devolve into gripe sessions about ungrateful, immoral consumers who merrily pirate the work of others and/or object to any attempts by owners to control their content. And there was plenty of that sort of griping going on at this year’s Digital Hollywood conference, […]

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Is Digital Rights Management an overly intrusive, ineffectual set of technologies or a sound way to protect one’s business — and even a blessing in disguise for consumers? That was the question up for debate in a panel discussion at the Digital Hollywood conference here this week. As is typical at […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Marketers are skilled at putting a happy spin on virtually any sort of news, and perhaps that’s why the mood at ad:tech San Francisco, the interactive advertising and technology conference that took place here last week, was so upbeat . People seemed determined not to let the 900-pound gorilla in the room […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Marketers, if you’ve steered clear of placing ads on user-generated content sites, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has a message for you: Stop fretting and start buying space. During his keynote here at the

It’s practically impossible to find a story that doesn’t darkly point out that the microblogging service Twitter has no revenue model, yet despite that concern, all the complaints about unreliable service, the rants about the exceptionally high noise-to-signal ratio, the outright attacks that accuse the company of “top-to-bottom incompetence,” Twitter keeps on tweeting and seems […]

Does the world really crave a more social web? Judging by the mixed response to this week’s rollout of Facebook Connect, the answer is a definite maybe. Facebook Connect enables users of the social networking site to port their account information, photos and links to their friends from Facebook to high profile sites including Digg, […]

Yo ho! It appears that media companies have finally found a way to profit from digital pirates’ booty. MySpace and MTV Networks announced plans yesterday to use a video identification technology developed by Auditude to identify and insert ads over any video clips produced by MTV Networks that are found on MySpace. While no one […]

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Online and off, Content still rules. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into a universal happiness in the media business, especially in a content town like Hollywood. The problem, as some content owners see it, is that there are now slews of tiny content kingdoms since the rise of digital media. And […]

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – P2P — friend or foe of the entertainment industry? The battle raged on at the Digital Hollywood Conference on Thursday, with plenty of some times rowdy audience participation at a mid-day panel discussion. After listening to an hour of enthusiastic support for P2P, a visibly frustrated David Bean, consultant to recording […]

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — For almost a decade now, marketers have dreamed of a world where consumers watching a video or TV show could click on products that they liked and instantly purchase them. In marketing circles this is called the Jennifer Aniston sweater theory. “Friends” was a popular show and Aniston’s character Rachel a […]

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Few things thrill online advertisers more than metrics — those magic statistics that, at least in theory, enable them to know exactly who is viewing their ads and whether those viewers successfully made a purchase, clicked on the ad or signed up for a future mailing. But what worked during the […]

Not too long ago, antivirus software and a firewall was all that was needed to keep PCs safe from digital threats. But now, consumers apparently need a bigger arsenal of security solutions to survive the onslaught of scams and schemes they encounter online. A recent flurry of releases this week demonstrates this trend – Microsoft’s […]