»  Dawn Ostroff, President, Condé Nast Entertainment
»  Jim Lanzone, President, CBS Interactive (NYSE: CBS)
»  David Maisel, Special Advisor to Rovio, Former Chairman, Marvel Studios
»  Mario Querioz, Vice President of Product Development,  Google (NSDQ: GOOG) 

A look at the devices changing the way we get media by
»  Jim Louderback, CEO, Revision3

And insights from
»  Mark Suster, Partner, GRP Partners
»   Robert Tercek, Digital Content Veteran / Former President, Digital Media, OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network

The hashtag for the event is #pcE11.

iCloud will come with an app called “Find My Friends,” a location-aware service that seems akin to Foursquare or Google’s Latitude that lets friends share their location with one another through iCloud, Cue announced. He promised that the app would have “simple privacy controls,” according to a number of live reports from Apple’s event.

Cue otherwise spent the majority of his talk rehashing parts of the iCloud service that Apple already announced in June, such as iTunes Match and iTunes In The Cloud.

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In the meantime, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is taking its less ambitious, music search-and-access service - announced 12 months ago - to India.

Today, it quietly launched a Google Labs feature, “Indic Music Search” (sic), promising: “Listen to thousands of full songs from our partners in.com, saavn and saregama.”

Google’s India music pages include listings and metadata for tracks and albums, and let users play the tracks from those three partners in pop-up windows that carry ads. The pages also offer links through to the partner sites themselves but, realistically, more people are likely to play songs straight from Google.

Google announced a similar project in the U.S. last year, plugging in to its search pages’ OneBox music listings and playback pop-ups from MySpace, iLike, Rhapsody and Pandora.

The way in which Google’s technology indexes partners’ music for presentation through search may be a dress rehearsal for a launch of a full Google Music service. But, otherwise, the Indian service has little that would connect it with some of the reports we’ve been reading about a full Google Music launch…

Indeed, U.S. labels have gone cold on advertising-dependent music services like this and are increasingly keen on new, unlimited-access models including actual subscription income.

This is likely a local-specific deal and has more in common with the Chinese music search service Google launched with Top100 back in 2008 than a prelude to an actual subscription access service.

Google tells paidContent:UK: “This is an experimental launch in Google Labs in India. Google Labs is our ‘technology playground’, where we try out new things and seek feedback from users and developers.  We are still experimenting with this new service, and we look forward to hearing feedback from our users.”

More background at WSJ.com.

Star One would be the second GEC after UTV’s Bindass on the Mimobi platform, which hosts a lot of news channels. Star News on the go would be nice.

When 3G finally gets off the ground in India, these early moves will likely pay off.

Blue music release:

In what is being touted as a first for Bollywood, music label T-Series will simultaneously release the music of Bollywood film Blue on the physical format as well as on the Internet and mobile devices. Hungama Digital Media is handling the digital distribution of music, while T-Series is also making the music available on USB drives and micro chips, which will be priced at Rs490.

The film has a music video starring actor Akshay Kumar and pop star Kylie Minogue.

“Releasing the music of the film on the digital platform simultaneously has several positive implications for consumers, for record labels and for the Indian music industry ... It will also ensure content is protected, thereby enabling the industry to mitigate losses incurred by the entertainment industry due to piracy,” Hungama MD Neeraj Roy said in a statement.

DesiHits had raised a total of $6 million in venture capital funding from Draper Fisher Juvertson, Trident Capital and DE Shaw in two separate rounds. Acharia-Bath also told us that producer Jimmy Iovine, who heads up Interscope Records (now part of Universal Music) has come onboard as a strategic investor with an undisclosed amount of investment. Now the founders hold a little under 40% stake in the company, with the investors and employees holding the rest.

Acharia-Bath said DesiHits is now working with rapper T.I. and The Pussycat Dolls. Between Universal and Warner, DesiHits will potentially have access to artists such as Rihanna, Kanye West, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, M.I.A., Linkin Park and REM.

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“It’s very difficult for pure digital music providers to make money in the space,” DX3 CEO Anu Shah told mocoNews.net. “DX3 has a lot of content relationships and online experience as well, we have been dual-play for many years now. As for us, IMI has a very strong technology platform, many cost-efficient data centers around the world, support and the product range that will enable DX3 to go from being just a digital music provider to connect with social network tools, mobile marketing tools, UGC tools…”

DX3 will be renamed “IMI” by January, will retain and grow its 15 staff in London and will also open a Zurich office to serve pan-European clients from mainland Europe, Shah said. And more acquisitions are on the way: “It’s not the end of IMI Europe’s aggressive expansion plans - we are actively looking at other organic and inorganic acquisitions in the next six months.

Shah said Europe is the “cutting edge of the market” and, accordingly, IMI will use DX3 for some product development. Migration of DX3’s technical services to IMI is underway, the new IMI Europe will be unveiling new services in Q1 and Q2 next year and it’s also hoping to power music services for ISPs Shah said it is talking with.

PS: Hello again! Cerius is back on the wire. Leave a msg on GTalk for updates, tips and general faff on areyoucerius (at) gmail (dot) com

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This effectively marks OnMobile’s entry in the content aggregator space. They now compete with Hungama (Madura Entertainment, a Telugu label withdrew from SIMCA and joined them) in what will slowly elevate into a bidding war. OnMobile does seem to be in a good position to expoit value chain efficiences considering it acts as both middle-ware provider as well as content aggregator. What matters is if this translates into margins that are fat enough to win an expodentailly inflating minimum guarnatee. Hungama, which has so far retained mobile rights for consecutive years for T-Series and recently signed on Eros entertainment, may also be in an unfavourable position with existing operators like TATA, some of whom have their middleware run by OnMobile. Hungama however does lead in international distribution, with a stated base of 50+ operators in 30 countries. What would be interesting to note is how the accounts move once they come up for renewal.

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T-Series states that Guruji.com is offering meta-data (listing and song tags) instead of merely displaying links related to the search term. Guruji, as expected, is stating it’s doing nothing outside the purview of what a search engine is supposed to do and, specifically, isn’t hosting the copyrighted content.

The Indian movie industry reportedly posted a loss for the first six months of 2008, with only four films managing to pull their weight at the box office amongst a total of 116 films. T-series, which supposedly controls 60% market share, relies on these movies for their music library. It seems it’s offline business is feeling the strain from the shift in consumption patterns, hence the attempt to monetize through content deals with UGC platforms like iShare. The fact remains that even if T-Series were to win an injuction against all the platform providers, users, some of whom may not know the Indian Copyright Act of 1957, will still pirate content.

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• Guruji Launches Music Search; Days Without Incident (1)

The service seems to be already posturing for a ‘safe harbour’ by merely indexing and redirecting to files but not hosting them. Regular CS readers will remember In.com’s music service, except where Web18’s horizontal had signed up for indexing content from pre-dominantly international labels, this fills the gap for indigenous music. While the benefits to the user are obvious, I can’t help but wonder how invaluable a service this can be for a T-Series (or Hungama) to detect unlicensed hosts. What matters is if the service manages to gain enough traction to become a blip on the radar of the current industry licensing regime. This does fall under a grey area since Guruji is merely mining content already available elsewhere. A content owner could start by popping out the hosts themselves, provided they are hosted in India. Going by the way the RIAA deals with such disruption, one would expect them to strike hard to make an example (and possibly risk more media attention to the service.) Will they sue? Will they partner? Will they ignore it completely? Days Without Incident (1). 

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• First Look At Web18s Horizontal Portal In.com

Virgin, which has a FM license in London and a national one for AM, was bought by SMG for £225m in 2000 and has now been sold for less than a quarter of that. FT reports TIML intends to spend £15m marketing both the radio station as well as radio as a medium.

One way British Radio has sideloaded to the internet has been through podcasts. Subscription based content has been well adopted by British radio to reach out to audiences on the web. BBC’s Radio 1 and 2 have specifically done very well with repurposing on-air content from comedians such as Russell Brand and Chris Moyles and adding deep content and off takes for web versions. Virgin in comparison has fewer shows that have taken off on the web compared to Aunty. Virgin UK currently simulcasts its broadcast on the internet and (glory) doesn’t geo block the stream either.

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T-Series has been very active against copyright infringement - their case against YouTube comes up for hearing in July, while they had also filed a lawsuit against Rediff (NSDQ: REDF), following which Rediff obtained a license from them for iShare. The music co had also received a restraining order against Santabanta.com. Like Yahoo, other companies have also sought refuge under the DMCA, which is not applicable in India: saying that they’ll remove the infringing material when notified by copyright owners. The problem is, given the rate at which copyrighted content is uploaded on video sharing sites, the copyright owners will have to allocate substantial resources just for this purpose. At the same time, should the platform be held accountable for content that users put up? The argument is - if the platform benefits materially from this infringement (from advertising), they should be. What’s your take?

I contacted Yahoo India for a response, but at present they have no comment.

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The site appears to be a massive aggregator of content and services - they give access to News, Music, Videos and Games, as well as vertical search for Flights, Hotels, Matrimonial information and Products. Some screenshots:

Many more screenshots here.

News: they’re displaying the top India specific news stories with the usual verticals covered - current affairs, science and tech, sports, business etc. There’s a section called “My Feed” where users will be allowed to add their own RSS feeds - similar to Alltop.com. I couldn’t figure out how to add the RSS feeds that I want to read (Update: They’ve added it now. The site is in beta). Content discovery is also enabled via “Hot Topics”. Users can rate stories, and just like in case of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News, multiple sources for news are being displayed. At present, Web18 is aggregating 900 sources of news, and users can suggest news sites.
Music: Web18 has tied up with content providers like Saregama, Universal Music, Sony (NYSE: SNE) BMG, ACM Records, Independent Artists, Putumayo, Times Music, Virgin, Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG), EMI, Counter Culture Records and others. Importantly, for India, they’ve done deals with both PPL and SIMCA. All the music is licensed and users can create their own playlists. They’ve also tied up with Seeqpod for enabling music search.

Comments by Cerius and more on vertical search, videos, games, email, and the implications of this launch in the extended text.

Videos: aggregating videos from Reuters, Blip.tv, YouTube, ishare, BigAdda and others, essentially aggregating embedded videos. Singh told ContentSutra that even when aggregating content from video-sharing sites, they’re filtering out R-rated content. Nevertheless, there’s a naughty video section, which isn’t “family viewing” (with videos like Big B**bs Karate).
Games: Singh told me that they’ve got around 7000 games; no tie-ups there, they’ve just added a number of embeddable games.
Email: has a tabbed interface with quick switching between tabs. Can attach a maximum of 5 files to an email. Like in case of gmail, text adverts currently appear on the right hand side. Also, there’s empty space on top which will be used for a banner advert.
Meta Search: Flight and hotel search tie-up with meta search Bezurk, Matrimonial tie-ups with Bharatmatrimony.com, Hamarijodi.com, LifepartnerIndia.com and WebIndia123 and product search tie-ups with Storeguru, Gadgets.in, Rediff (NSDQ: REDF), Indiaplaza, Ebay, Indiatimes, Futurebazaar, Homeshop18, Sify, Indmall and Sirindia
Advertising: Just one advertising spot on the content pages, and two spots on email.

With most of the content, users can create their own selection. The next step will probably be allowing users to share selections and recommend friends based on similar preferences (ala Last.fm for similar music preferences); the social networking play isn’t there yet, but there’s certainly a base for a network around content. To me, In.com currently appears sparsely populated - I prefer that busy feeling that a horizontal gives, allowing me to discover a lot of content in one go. At the same time, the clean interface is comfortable. Singh said that they’re currently keeping it simple, and once launched, they’ll be rolling out new products and features on a regular basis.

Implications: for now, In.com appears to be a massive meta-search and aggregator in the making; seems to be an attempt to make it the de-facto destination for searching for news, music, travel, videos, games and all kinds of classifieds. This move is distinctly different from some of the other Indian companies like Rediff, Indiatimes and Sify, who either tend to build their own verticals, or tie up with others. In.com isn’t focusing on creating content, but is aggregating/enabling access to content of all types. That’s similar to what Google has done too with quite a few of their services. So I wouldn’t call it a horizontal portal.

User adoption will be key for In.com, so expect a massive marketing effort in the coming months (post launch). Users will give In.com leverage, and help close content-deals with large players. Once any of the larger players in this market (for example Bharatmatrimony for matrimonial) ties up and gets traffic from In.com, other players like Shaadi.com or Jeevansathi.com might feel that they’re losing out by not signing up. But the key to this is for Web18 to be as neutral as possible, get as many users as possible, and maintain that perception of neutrality - for product search, it shouldn’t appear as if they’re favouring their own sites StoreGuru or HomeShop18. Also, I think something like this can also be pushed internationally, with tie-ups for separate countries, but Khiani says that they’re currently focused on India.

Cerius adds: In its current state ( and I do realize its a beta) its a massive mash-up of content, splicing feeds and databases. Some of Web 18’s biggest portfolio properties have been content driven, In.com on the other hand, seems to place an emphasis on what’s going on under the hood.

News (Read). Unless its able to attract a user base which can curate the news flow, how differentiated is the News (Read) section, as say, compared to the localized Google/Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) news?

Listen, the audio streaming service with 27 labels on board, is by far one which addresses an immediate market gap of an indigenous online music experience. The only short-fall I see is that it has everyone, especially the anglicized, on board besides T-series (I presume it was the astronomical minimum guarantee), that’s -70% of the entire Hindi music industry.

The Mail fits in with the overall uncluttered design and I presume will be the thrust of their marketing activities to ensure an active repeat user base. How many will opt to switch or have it as their secondary co-ordinate remains to be seen.

While I would use the Find feature for something like Products (what about Storeguru and Compareindia?), the Matrimonial, Flights and Hotels services are only as valuable as the databases they mine. Missing out on websites with a considerable market share is a serious lack of comparative data, besides, will a generalized Search service compete with more focussed comparative engines like Makemytrip or Cleartrip?

Well I guess no ‘horizontal’ is complete without a gaming element, and considering the ad industry hype that Zapak has created, there could be plans for this to co-exist as the casual gaming arm of Tech2 .

A Mint article earlier in the day had Haresh Chawla, CEO, Network 18, stating Web18 might abandon plans for a listing in London’s Alternative Investment Market and go straight to Nasdaq. While its well known that their LAI listing was deferred due to the recent meltdown, In.com might just be the flagship that can muster the valuation to ride the boats to Nasdaq. Considering the email service, an ubiquitous id across all the verticals maybe planned, with the ultimate spin-off being a social network. Even more, the domain by itself has enough traffic on the mere measure of its name, so expect the coming quarter results to feature a well highlighted spike in traffic.

MySpace’s Chief Operating Officer Amit Kapur was in Mumbai for the launch, and I spoke to him and Tarun Tripathi, Director of Marketing and Content for India, about monetization, plans for hiring, content deals and more:

Why India? Are monetization pressures forcing MySpace to go international?: Kapur feels there’s a strong alignment between MySpace and India - MySpace is a platform for self expression and content is centred around users, and Indians are open and self expressive. India is an economy that’s starting to boom, and MySpace wants to be here for it. For mature companies, significant growth is coming from international markets; there is a lot of buzz around pressures of monetization of social media, but…“Look, we’ve been doing this for four years and we know how to do it. We know how to advertise on a social environment.”

On amount of investment planned for India, targets for number of users and revenues: “We’re not commenting on specifics of investment or in terms of forecasting numbers. We’re going to invest to build the right team here” says Kapur.

On hiring plans and team size: Tripathi says that they’ll expand to 20 people soon. Right now the MySpace India team is just 5 people, and “We’re getting in a new person every few days.”

On number of users: MySpace India has around half a million users, but they’re 30 percent month-to-month for the last two months. Kapur adds that “we’ll see Bollywood actors and actresses and Fashion Designers coming and signing up.”

On taking on Orkut, Hi5 and Facebook in India: “We’re not taking them on,” says Tripathi, adding that “Figuring out strategy only in terms of the competition is not always a great idea.” Kapur says that “we’re a different site - we have a culture and an expressive element to the site which we don’t get on other platforms.”

Local languages on MySpace? MySpace Korea is in Korean…: “We’ve thought about it for a bit, but haven’t really come to a final conclusion yet. We want to integrate ourselves more and more into the international community. In Korea and Japan, the Internet language is predominantly the local language,” says Tripathi. More after the jump.

On Mobile and Online Radio: MySpace is in preliminary talks for mobile, and Tripathi says it’s too early to talk about online radio.

Content plans and partnerships: Independent Bands Or Bollywood?: “Any content creator who wants to reach out to people” says Tripathi. “It could be art, photography, writing, film, fashion. We’re also partnering with Saregama, on the Underground initiative - 30 unsigned bands from across the country will be featured in three albums - for Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, with 10 bands each. You’ll also see interesting things happening with Pakistani content, Retro 80s and 90s music, as well as cult-Tamilian content.”

Events and TV: Kapur says they’ll look at events initially for marketing purposes. Once advertiser relationships are established, events will provide revenues. They’re launching MySpace Live - concerts that will also be broadcast on TV, the first of which (today) will be shown on Zee Cafe, a show called The Gig. “There will be a similar setup for Chennai Bands, Karachi bands. We’ll do the Roots Festival in the North East, where there will be 8 concerts in May,” adds Tripathi. But why aren’t they partnering with the other News Corp (NYSE: NWS) companies - Channel [V]? Kapur says that despite being a News Corp co, MySpace is not beholden to them on an exclusive basis. They’re network-agnostic. However, they have tied up with Channel [V] for a TV show - “Campus Star” with celebrity judges and voting by a MySpace audience.

Monetization?: Kapur says that they’ll monetize with advertising, mobile and e-commerce. Tripathi says that they will share advertising revenue with big content creators, and there will be tie-ups with labels and publishers.

We’d done an interview with Anand after he had resigned from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). Last month, Amar K Deb, head of Channel [V] had put in his papers, and announced plans to launch a content selling portal.

The matter, up for hearing on March 31, refers to a joint-venture YRF entered into with Onyx in 2007 for download rights of the movie’s wallpapers, caller tunes and music. According to HT, YRF terminated the contract and entered into one with Hungama, which has subsequently released the content. Now Onyx wants Hungama to take the content back and Hungama states that it can’t pull back what’s already in the public domain.

One can’t quite help but wonder what role Hungama has to play in the T-Series vs Youtube drama, considering it stands the most to lose. Piracy is a much abused term in the industry and a large misnomer. Take for example this trailer of Tashan on Youtube, while both YRF and T-Series are active in the ‘Take Down Notice’ scene on Youtube, selective amnesia regarding pull back of content in the public domain has choked fair use proliferation of a very large amount of Bollywood content. Regardless, the main feature film still usually gets pirated merely hours after theatrical release.

Notice I just checked with Saleem Mobhani, COO of Hungama, and he says the comments to this post by a “saleem” are not by him. Readers should take this comment as an anonymous comment, and refrain from any defamatory statements. On request, we’re closing comments to this post.

It seems that the key content providers have joined forces and will be together negotiating rates with mobile operators. The body has around 280 members, and they together produce roughly 84 percent of number of minutes on screen in India, around 98 percent of cinema hall minutes and a couple of billion minutes of airtime on radio. The content owners, he said, have pledged their content so “there can be a transparent exchange with telecom operators.” So far, content owners have negotiated separately, and the fragmentation in the industry has resulted in the deals being heavily in favour of telcos. Such bodies are usually highly political and slow moving, and it will be important for everyone to have an equal say - not just the bigger content owners. If smaller content owners don’t get enough of a say, you just might find them breaking ranks and negotiating deals separately.

Dev also mentioned that they’re going to go after content pirates - both the pirates and white collar piracy. He shared some bits from the proposed IT Act: the Indian government is going to enact a very strong copyright act under World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). “Today, we have illegal and semi-legal content. When the new IT act is enacted, if anybody has more than 4 optical DVDs of pirated content, the head of the family can be held accountable. Today the mobile operators allow sending of proprietary content from one user to another. If network service providers air more than 1 hr of pirated content in a month, the chairman of the company can be held accountable. We’re hoping that the whole country will move to the IPR regime,” Dev said.

It’s not that a content selling portal hasn’t been done before: during the last dot-com-boom, someone I know has set up company for a churning out articles for publications and websites, and that went down with the dot-com-bust that followed. I think there’s a market for that now, what with increase in the number of offline publications, and also feature writing being outsourced to India.

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The hearing, which was held last Friday, was rather short and repetitive (I waited over 3 hours for it to begin), and to me it seemed as if both parties didn’t mind “taking it offline”. So expect major negotiations over the next few months. One can rest assured that YouTube will not want to set a precedent that other copyright owners are waiting for - and believe me, there are many of them waiting for a verdict here, including those who have already signed up with YouTube.

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