Bookmarks for October 15th from 07:35 to 08:07

mediaeater links for October 15th from 07:35 to 08:07:

• MySpace Strives to Recover Its Cool – WSJ.com – MySpace's online-hangout push marks an effort to focus its offerings and differentiate itself from rival Facebook. As an entertainment site, MySpace would compete for ad dollars with a broader group of Web sites, including online video sites like Google's YouTube and Hulu, a joint venture of General Electric's NBC Universal, News Corp. and Walt Disney. It also would compete against music sites like Pandora and portals like AOL, which is also trying to reinvent itself with a push to create content.

  "This is not an all-things-for-everybody portal," Mr. Hirschhorn says. "This is a social entertainment experience."

• Where the Wild Things Aren’t: The problem with Spike Jonze’s movie–The Hollywood Reporter – While Warners is no doubt hoping that this means the pic is powerful, the truth may be more sobering. The people who are into it are really into it, but they feel like a relatively small group, a cadre mainly of well-educated people in their twenties and thirties who might also be the audience for the Arcade Fire and Karen O songs that populate the soundtrack. It's not the worst audience to have in your pocket, but it's not necessarily the multi-generational hordes that you'd want/expect with a 45-year-old children's classic — or a $90m studio film.

  The movie could well open in the low-20-million range, but it's hard to see how the positive momentum will be sustained — especially as the occasional parent who sees it with their child on opening weekend may opt not to recommend it to the rest of the PTA set.

• Channel 4 signs long-form content deal with YouTube – October 15 2009: YouTube and Channel 4 have signed a pioneering content deal which will make the broadcaster’s original programmes available on demand, in full and free-of-charge via YouTube in the UK in the coming months.

  The strategic partnership marks the first time that a broadcaster anywhere in the world has made a comprehensive catch-up schedule available on YouTube, providing Channel 4 with additional advertising inventory and reach: YouTube last week announced it was serving over 1 billion video streams every day.

• Big players ramp up social games – •Microsoft is making its Xbox Live gaming console available on Facebook and Twitter by year's end.

  •Nintendo recently created a Facebook application that lets Wii users correspond with one another. It also launched a Twitter page with a fictional boxing reporter following the main characters of one of its games.

  •Electronic Arts' Scrabble is among the most popular games on Facebook, with nearly 500,000 monthly active users. It also is available on iGoogle, iPhone, the Web and other digital platforms.

  This year, EA created a social-gaming group led by Robert Nashak, formerly in charge of Yahoo Games.

  •Ubisoft in July launched its first game on Facebook, called TickTock.

  "I haven't personally been this excited about gaming since the first Nintendo" in the mid-1980s, says Omar Abdelwahed, who is a producer at Ubisoft.

• National Ratings in Prime-Time: Week of October 5, 2009 – CBS finished first in households, total viewers, adults 18-49 and adults 25-54 for this third week of the 2009-10 season, with growth over the comparable year-ago period of as much as 11 percent among adults 18-49. The Eye net's winning streak in total viewers is now three consecutive weeks. Fox dominated among adults 18-34, with an increase of eight percent, while tying NBC for second in adults 18-49. Elsewhere, Fox ranked fourth with double-digit losses from one year earlier.