Mobile News Asia

After some effusive praise for CBS’ cost containment and ability to withstand the economic downturn, Sumner Redstone, executive chairman, CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS), handed the call over to Les Moonves, CEO and president. Before hanging up, Redstone repeated a line he gave when introducing the Viacom (NYSE: VIA) earnings call last week, saying that “Content is always king.” In his opening remarks, Moonves couldn’t resist celebrating the record-breaking Super Bowl viewership of 106.5 million. “In a socially fragmented universe, big events and TV viewership provides the biggest bang for the buck.”

Through some quirks of scheduling, I got my first taste of Olympics action on a laptop through in-flight wireless—not the big screen in our living room—and watched the winning ski jump late at night on demand using the NBC Olympics iPhone app. The 2010 Winter Olympics may not be the “everything online live” Olympics but it’s close to the “everywhere” Olympics—as long as by everywhere in the U.S.,you mean on NBCOlympics.com.

The network, which expects to lose money on the Vancouver games, is trying a feat as tricky as some of the moves in pairs skating: produce a social media-centric Olympics without allowing video sharing or embedding. Perkins Miller, SVP of digital media for NBC Sports, makes no apologies for the decision. It’s all part of a strategy to make every one of the 17 days count for every second. Key elements include keeping all the video on NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) sites; making highlights freely available; and limiting online access to more than 1,000 hours of video on demand and 400 hours of live competition streaming to users who already pay for video via satellite, telecom or cable.

So far, it seems to be working—although it’s hard to say how much higher traffic might be if users could watch marquee events live online. Through the first two days, the network says NBCllympics.com traffic was up 350 percent from the Torino Winter Games in 2006 with 4.5 million uniques compared to Torino’s 1.02 million. NBC also says the site has delivered 4.5 million video streams, up nearly 700 percent over Torino. (NBC is also using autoplay so it’s hard to know how many of those were initiated directly by users.) No word on how many times the iPhone app has been downloaded but it’s the top free app now (it’s also a featured app, which helps) and had 5.3 million pageviews Saturday, compared with 2 million for opening day.

CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) Chief Research Officer Dave Poltrack took dead aim at a Forrester Research survey that said marketers consider TV ads less and less effective. AdAge was there to capture Poltrack’s fit of pique. He was particularly set off by advertisers’ claim that only 41 percent of their media budgets went to TV last year versus 58 percent in a 2008 survey. Poltrack called those figures here “bullsh*t numbers.” He added, “For that to happen, if advertising dollars during the recession went down 10 percent, TV advertising would have been down 30 percent. Everyone knows that didn’t happen.”

Bob Iger wasn’t on stage for the iPad launch last month, but the Disney CEO just gave a demo spiel Steve Jobs, the company’s largest shareholder, would applaud about a “really compelling” device that could be a game changer. Volunteering and replying to analyst questions about how Disney plans to use the new Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) tablet, Iger reeled off a series of iPad uses that are either likely or already in progress: a companion to ABC’s Lost, an ABC News app, a digital books app for Disney, an enhanced version of the popular ESPN Sports Center app, and apps for Marvel (NYSE: DIS).

Some might be adapted for iPad, some created. Iger said the iPad platform will “enable us to really start distributing product that is different than the product you typically see.” For instance, Disney was working on a version of its still-nascent Disney Digital Books for iTunes and iTouch. “Suddenly this device comes along,” offering an “even more robust platform” for possibilities like read-a-longs, simple animation, music come to life.

One of the pleasures of watching a TV show on an online video site is that there tend to be fewer commercials. But as Nielsen prepares its single measurement for TV and online viewing to be rolled out this fall, broadband video viewers may have to get used to sitting through more commercials. An AdAge piece says that for Nielsen’s unified TV/online ratings to count to media buyers and TV networks, web videos will have to carry the same number of commercials that a show has when it runs over the air or on cable.