Friday, November 9, 2007

snapshot 11/9/07

iLike Consolidates Promotional Chaos, Offers Single-Point Updating
Artists have more places than ever to promote their music, but that creates an almost unmanageable maintenance issue. Instead of writing songs, developing artists are now being dragged into endless and repetitive promotional updates. A number of companies and entrepreneurs are addressing that concern, including quickly growing networking play iLike. Just recently, the company unveiled its Universal Artist Dashboard, a tool designed to let artists universally update a large number of profile pages.

The iLike application is already well-entrenched in Facebook, and that has been a serious traffic driver for the company. In fact, any music-related Facebook discussion is woefully incomplete without the iLike application, which powers a massive number of artist profiles on the destination. But iLike is also a member of the newly-formed, Google-backed OpenSocial, a universal platform designed to populate content across numerous social networking destinations - including MySpace. OpenSocial was just announced, though the iLike Dashboard will eventually tap the broad network of destinations.

Alongside the Dashboard release, iLike also constructed 160,000 profile pages for artists that had not already done so, an oddly proactive move.


Blockbuster makes DVDs searchable on Facebook
Blockbuster is taking its brand into the Facebook social networking platform under a new marketing scheme called Facebook Ads. The new program integrates about a dozen corporate brands into the Facebook universe, which is one of the fastest growing social networking applications and challenging Rupert Murdoch's MySpace as the dominate online community platform.

Blockbuster will use a new application called "Movie Clique" to allow Facebook users to search through Blockbuster's library of movie titles, create lists of movies they want to see and share movie ratings and reviews with other Facebook users. Users who also are subscribers to Blockbuster’s online Total Access program can use Movie Clique to rent movies directly from Blockbuster within the Facebook Web site.


10-Q Watch: RNWK: $8 Million Paid on MTVN’s $230 Million Note to Rhapsody America
As part of the Rhapsody America JV between MTVN and RealNetworks, (NSDQ: RNWK) MTVN agreed to contribute a five-year $230 million note, obligating RNWK to buy $230 million worth of advertising MTVN cable channels. Essentially, it was a mechanism to guarantee and quantify MTVN’s contribution of advertising inventory. In its 10-Q filed today, RealNetworks states that as of September 30th (the end of the quarter), MTVN has made total payments on the note of $8 million and that RealNetworks has booked an equity gain of $4.1 million (based on its 51 percent holding in the JV). Other financial details:
  • MTVN has contributed $7.68 million in intangible assets, $4 million of which is its trade name and trademarks. Technology and Subscribers accounted for $1.9 million and $1.68 million respectively.
  • MTVN and RealNetworks have additional funding obligations of $16.7 million and $17.4 million respectively in December 2007.

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