Print Magazine Embedded Video

THIS is so not GREEN. But it is cool. Welcome to disposable video chips that play video in a print book or magazine. Tech dirt says: Earlier this year, we talked about how some magazines were really making an effort to make the physical magazine worth buying by doing cool things with the physical product. Most of those were niche publications, but there’s some evidence that much more mainstream magazines are experimenting as well.

Last year, Esquire Magazine experimented with an e-ink cover. However, it looks like Entertainment Weekly is going even further, by allowing CBS to embed video within an ad in the magazine.

Yes, you read that right. Basically, a small video screen is installed in between two pages, and seen through a cutaway. Apparently, it works pretty well, with full-motion video, including sound (apparently somewhat loud, with no volume control, which is a bit annoying).

CTNGREEN has been embedding clean scaled auto play video in a nice green virtual way for over 16 months, we know that tech so well that some call us the best at it, ( thanks for the Kudos ) virtually of course… Our magazine is not print but it is full screen and superior for HD.

BUT is this new physical video insertion really a good thing? You decide, but we think print magazines already produce enough landfill. We would like to know the carbon cost of this trick if anyone knows enough to supply us with such info.

The feedback i get already is that the audio is rather like a cheap singing card and the video above seems to confirm that low expectations will be met.

WSJ

In a marketing stunt to promote its fall TV series, CBS Corp. is inserting thousands of tiny screens in copies of the Time Warner Inc. publication Entertainment Weekly.

The screens measure two and a quarter inches diagonally and play about 40 minutes of clips from new and old CBS shows.

The video begins with a cheeky intro to the “video-in-print” technology, starring characters from the show “The Big Bang Theory.”

After that, the reader/viewer can push a spot on the cardboard insert that holds the screen and watch a clip of the sitcom “Two and a Half Men.” Push another to see a preview of the new crime-investigation spinoff “NCIS: Los Angeles.” Another delivers an ad for PepsiCo Inc., which is helping fund the promotion.

The player, developed and made by Americhip Inc. of Los Angeles, is much like the chips that play music in some greeting cards and magazine ads and is rechargeable.

Bloomberg:

Apparently, they cost quite a bit more than a soda. According to Paul Caine, president of the Time Inc. magazine group that includes Entertainment Weekly, the ballpark dollar cost for one of these video units is in the “low teens,” although he said the cost may come down before the issue comes out.

Time Inc. wouldn’t disclose how much it is charging to run the novelty ad, which has to be hand inserted at the printing plant. It is much-needed revenue, though, as Entertainment Weekly ad pages were down 32% in the first half of this year compared to a year ago.

Upon getting to the ad, there is a 5-second delay before anything happens — there is enough on the page to probably hold the unassuming reader’s attention for that long, if nothing else the eerie stare from Neil Patrick Harris — and then a 5-second still promo before the promo for the player’s developer, Americhip.

Next up is a pre-roll featuring a bespoke setup by three characters from the network’s hit Big Bang Theory sitcom. ”I weep for civilization,” opines Emmy-nominated Jim Parsons (Sheldon Cooper) at the end of the clip, scripted to reveal that the über nerd was tricked into appearing in an ad in Entertainment Weekly rather than “the current edition of Physics Today.”

As impressive as this step is, the true marriage of print and digital multimedia still seems quite far off, and eons away from the streaming updates in the newspapers of Minority Report fame.

Still, it is boldish, baby steps like this that bring about dramatic shifts in media. That said, the logical extreme of the current wave of tech innovation heads more toward digital reproduction of a print experience, as the Kindle DX aspires to do for newspapers, rather than to ultrathin hardware pasted to paper.

In a more-limited context, is there much of a future for this branch?

Last Year Esquire did a lame blinking screen - this is a whole new level of physical print insertion.

see http://www.americhip.com/ and get a dose of what they call MultiSensory Marketing

Note - this is not epaper, its a stiff but thin chip and batteries not on very flexible media stock.

THIS is flexible:

So i expect more of this e-paper to hit the shelves soon.