Marketing Pilgrim

If you recently bought a Google TV device, I hope you kept the receipt!

If you’re on the fence, then this might convince you that Google’s foray into set-top boxes is dead on arrival: Viacom just yanked access to its content.

Viacom has joined the ranks of NBC, ABC, Fox, and CBS–all of which have blocked Google TV in some form or another.

Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, and Nickelodeon are just a few of the Viacom owned networks that bring up the dreaded “sorry, this content is unavailable for your device” when attempting to stream a full episode from their websites.

Try to access their full episodes and you’ll be greeted with this less than friendly message:

Rupert Murdoch is determined to take the free out of Internet publishing if it’s the last thing he does on this earth. In his latest effort to do so he is even in cahoots with someone that seems a bit surprising, Steve Jobs.

Murdoch’s News Corp has apparently sunk $30 million into hiring 100 people to produce an iPad only paper in the very near future called “The Daily”.

The ‘paper’ is expected to cost 99 cents per week and provide readers with another outlet for news. To what degree there will be original news and a mashup of other News Corp. properties remains to be seen but the staff reports of only 100 is pretty small for a full-blown news organization. Whatever the look, it is likely to be announced this month with a launch set for the start of next year.

The Age of the App is truly upon us. Not shocking or daring at all to announce it but this industry has come to life in a very short period of time and it is starting to settle in a bit. How do we know this? It’s when app users en masse are no longer willing to accept just anything that is called an app. Once the new industry smell is gone, app users get just like everyone else: demanding.

eMarketer reports on some research from Effective UI and Harris Interactive that tells the story, to some degree, of just what the app user crowd is expecting. And it’s a lot.

MY DVR is precious to me for many reasons but one is the ability to skip over the commercials while watching my favorite shows. Now, YouTube is going to give their viewers the same choice and it raises some interesting questions.  They call it TrueView, and according to AdAge, it’s going to launch very soon.

TrueView has a number of options connected with it that change depending on whether you’re watching short-form or longer-form videos on YouTube. At the lowest level, viewers will be allowed to skip an ad. For longer material, YouTube is working with the concept of allowing the viewer to choose all ads up front or scattered throughout the program TV style. There’s also talk of offering the viewer a choice of ads which is something Hulu tried a few years ago.

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Flame-Resistant Sleepwear For Everyone In The Family.

Wow! Just wow! It seems to me that if you and your family were sleeping in a location that is especially conducive to catching on fire, then maybe, just maybe, you might want to find a new place to sleep. I mean I think finding new sleepwear would be the last thing on my list. But, for the hell of it, let’s assume that there’s a reason that your entire family is sleeping on top of a volcano.

Well, this will be a nice way to tidy up the week by adding to the rumor mill that has Google actively looking to purchase Groupon. Yup, that’s right. There is some rumor mill fodder to consider but from the heavy hitters like Kara Swisher at AllThingsDigital’s BoomTown as she reports

According to multiple sources close to the situation, Google is in discussions with local deals powerhouse Groupon about buying it.

Without making the requisite joke about the deal of the day, sources said the price being considered is certainly no discount–well above the $2 billion to $3 billion that Yahoo offered Groupon in acquisition talks that took place earlier this year.

But sources cautioned that the talks are not complete, and could also end up without any result, as the Yahoo discussions did.