Showbiz Sandbox 185: HitBliss Bets You’ll Watch Ads To Get Free Movies

March 11, 2013

HitBliss is a new streaming video service that enables users to earn credit toward popular movies and television shows simply by watching advertising. The catch is all the targeted ads are shown up-front, and viewers must be paying attention or they won’t get the credits needed to purchase or rent videos.

Sharon Peyer is the co-founder of HitBliss and spent four years helping launch the company. In this interview she explains how the service originated, how it works and what the future of HitBliss might look like. Peyer believes consumers are actually willing to watch ads so long as the messages are relevant and they can get something out of it.

It’s no secret that streaming media services are all the rage these days, yet it remains to be seen whether they can be profitable too. Pandora’s latest earnings (or lack thereof) beat analysts expectations sending its stock price soaring. Unfortunately, the royalties they pay for music might start rising, along with the number of competitors like YouTube and Apple looking to enter the market.

Of course we also cover the week’s top entertainment headlines including Pink Flloyd’s 40 year presence in the music charts, Rupert Murdoch’s plans for a television sports network and the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart takes a crack at making a movie.

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Showbiz Sandbox 151: Is It Time To Move Your Music To The Cloud?

June 11, 2012

If anyone is going to struggle with managing their digital music collection it’s Bob Boilen, the creator and host of NPR’s All Songs Considered, and a talented musician in his own right. Boilen created quite a stir a few weeks back when he announced he had just deleted all his music. Rather than keep tens-of-thousands of songs on his hard drive, Boilen has decided to move all his music to the cloud. He joins us for an in-depth conversation about the pros and cons of how we’ll all be listening to music in the future.

The 66th Annual Tony Awards were held over the weekend to honor this year’s best Broadway production and “Once”, based on the hit indie film, was the big winner this year taking home eight awards including Best Musical. Even host Neil Patrick Harris couldn’t liven up a lackluster show where the highlight was meant to be a number from a ten-year-old musical performed live from a Caribbean cruise ship.

When tickets went on sale recently for Justin Bieber’s upcoming tour they sold out all 48 shows in less than 60 minutes. Two concerts at Madison Square Garden sold out in 30 seconds. Yet, what might seem technically impossible at first becomes more understandable upon learning just how few tickets went on sale to the public.

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