Text Messaging the Movie Screen

Screenvision and Verizon Wireless are getting together later this month to test an audience survey technology together, in 10 US cities. The idea is to encourage movie-goers to text message votes about their favorite music to the screen, where they'll see the results tallied (amidst the rolling series of pre-show advertisements.)

News of the deal is here and here.

If you're at a theater that's showing pre-show ads, I suppose it can't hurt to have more to do than just sitting there passively...though I do worry that this will make it seem OK to be text-messaging *during* the movie.

Viewing Video on Cell Phones Gets Easier (and Cheaper) .... New Ad Model for Revver

Here's a Wall Street Journal video that shows how MyWaves.com allows users to get short videos onto their phones -- without subscribing to a separate service like MobiTV:

The story is here. From the piece:

MyWaves Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., is one of a flurry of start-ups offering new ways to access Internet videos on cellphones, hoping to overcome barriers that have prevented mobile video from taking off in the past.

For years, cellular carriers including Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. have offered licensed video content for cellphones, such as sports highlights, TV shows and music videos. But these services, which carry monthly subscription fees, offer limited content programmed by the carrier and usually work only on certain phones. Adoption has been slow.

Now, the new services are taking a different approach, allowing users to view a wider array of Internet video clips -- without locking themselves into a subscription and without purchasing a fancier phone. The services each operate slightly differently, but users can view online videos using any standard video-enabled phone. Videos can be wirelessly downloaded to a handset for viewing later, or sometimes streamed over cellular networks to be watched in real time.

...Some new offerings say they have attracted nearly a million users and are attracting tens of thousands more a day.

In other news....Revver says it will let video creators put ads at the start or the end of their videos, and earn money not based on clicks (as Revver has done in the past) but on how many times the ad was shown. Revver's CEO says the ads could command about $20 per thousand impressions -- money that'd be split 50/50 with the creator.

Here's the Adweek story.