A sign of changing times in the video game industry is that audience reach is becoming talked about as well as unit sales.

Until now, publishers’ interest in statistics ended at the checkout. They wanted million-selling games, and unit sales just about summed up their revenues.

But in-game advertising is becoming more of a factor and games are becoming more like broadcast media with their online capabilities.

In television, media planners and buyers use reach to help figure out how much they are prepared to pay for advertising spots.

The greater the reach, the more they would pay, hence video game publishers wanting to know just exactly how many people are playing their games.

Online advertising networks such as Microsoft’s Massive should be able to provide accurate figures, but what about social game play in the home, rentals, used sales and games just being passed around among friends?

Enter Interpret and its Gameasure tool. Interpret was started by three former members of Nielsen’s interactive practice. It interviewed over 5,000 gamers about their playing habits and has produced its first report.

It suggests that Call of Duty 3, for example, which has sold more than 2m units in the US, has actually been played by 9m gamers.

It also says they prefer Gatorade over Sprite and like chewing gum.

Activision, the game’s publisher, is Gameasure’s first client and can presumably use this information to attract advertisers and higher rates.

“The market has matured, media planners are becoming more and more important and they need this data,” Michael Dowling, Interpret co-founder and chief executive told us.

“We can provide both the reach and a deep profile of gamers.”

A challenge for Activision though is the limited number of advertisers selling World War Two products. A trailer for Casablanca on DVD and an old Coke ad are all that immediately spring to mind.

Apple TV is out, and the tech-heads are weighing in from across the blogosphere. In spite of a glowing review this morning by the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, there is a fair amount of skepticism about Apple’s attempt at a home media device.

Thomas Hawk’s list of ten gripes includes a lack of ability to stream content from anything other than iTunes (no YouTube, for example) and the lack of a built-in DVD player.

Meanwhile, Wired seems to have struggled to come up with "5 reasons why Apple TV rules" to balance out its "5 reasons why it sucks." Somehow, praise like "It’s sexy" and "there’s not a lot of high-profile, branded competition" doesn’t quite rise to the same level as complaints like "it doesn’t do much" and "it offers nothing new."

That last point - "it offers nothing new" - may bear repeating. At its core, Apple TV provides an easy way for people to view their favourite films and TV shows on their television sets. But so does a basic cable set top box. In Apple TV’s case, the content just happens to come from iTunes.

Users can also display other content, such as photographs, over their televisions using Apple TV, but only if they use certain software to do it (Apple’s proprietary iPhoto on the Mac and Adobe’s Photoshop photo album on Windows PCs). For now, at least, users who want to watch a video clip on YouTube or display photos that sit on sites such as Flickr or Snapfish will be locked out.

Apple TV may have a slick design. It may be a breeze to set up, and for a few early adopters it may prove the be all and end all of internet TV. For the rest of us, it is likely to remain one device among many competing for attention in the increasingly gadget-centric living room.

See our earlier coverage of the Apple TV debut here and here.

In an intriguing exploration of the value placed on virtual life, a Chinese company has effectively held internet game characters hostage: demanding players give up their virtual goods or, get this, donate their real blood if they want to continue to play.

Moli Group recently froze the accounts of 30,000 players of its massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) title "Cabal" that it believed guilty of such abuses as using automated sub-routines to generate virtual wealth.

But the company - which is not one of China’s better known MMORPG operators but still claims to have 7m users - has offered the targeted players some interesting ways to win back access to their online personas.

One method was to simply agree to give up all the virtual wealth they had accumulated in the game, but aother was more creative: give something back to offline society by joining company-organised public good works such as street-sweeping and helping old folks. A Moli officials says more than 700  players with frozen accounts answered the call.

Most dramatically, any player willing to join an "entirely voluntary and uncompensated" public blood donation drive would also have their accounts unfrozen.

Still, this part of the unusual effort to promote good works appears to have had only limited results: the Moli staffer says just 80 players with frozen accounts took part in the blood drive. That suggests that, for most gamers, blood is still thicker than bits and bytes.

It seems that Wall Street’s new passion for technology IPOs has not been a casualty of the risk-aversion that has been spreading out from the sub-prime lending market.

Case in point: BigBand Networks, a supplier of technology to cable companies, which made its debut late last week. In keeping with the new fashion of the times, this nine-year-old Silicon Valley company had yet to turn a profit when it filed to go public late last year. It’s annualised revenues only reached $150m. Yet three days into its life as a public company, BigBand’s stock has jumped by more than 30 per cent, giving it a value just shy of $1bn.

Loss-making companies like this seem to be finding it easier than at any time since the Dotcom bust to make it to Wall Street. Let’s hope the comparison ends there.

Creators of expensive high-definition video and TV channels may be dismayed to learn that the second most popular HD channel on the Comcast cable network is made up entirely of still pictures.
GalleryPlayer’s channel is second only to the ESPN sports channel in the ratings, although the Seattle company admits its viewers may not always have their eyes on the screen.
It believes it has created a new category, which Kevin Akeroyd, chief executive, labeled as “HD Lifestyle Imagery” when I spoke to him on the fringes of the TV of Tomorrow show in San Francisco this week.
Consumers want to have some kind of visual muzak to show on their big-screen HDTVs when they host parties rather than have the equivalent of a black hole in their wall.
GalleryPlayer has negotiated rights with picture libraries and museums to create tasteful high-definition slideshows from the Art of Claude Monet to pictures of great golf course and 1,000 Places To See Before You Die.
After the considerable start-up costs of acquiring images and the technology to ensure correct formatting, the company expects to be making profits by next year.
It is exploiting numerous distribution methods – PC screensavers distributed through Google Pack and Windows Media Center, DVD sales of images, channels on HD providers such as Comcast and hotel channels.
Moving images will be next. Don’t expect any live sports action, said Mr Akeroyd, but burning log fires, aquaria and spectacular waterfalls are expected to be just as popular with his big-screen customers.

So why did Sony’s PlayStation 2 outsell its technically far superior successor by more than two-to-one in the US last month?

The answer is easy: price.

NPD’s figures for February show 295,000 of the $125 PlayStation 2s sold compared to 127,000 PS3s.

Next week, the PS3 will go on sale in the UK and Europe, costing the equivalent of $825.

Sony sold more than 50 per cent of its PS1s after the price dropped below $100, so the company is playing the long game in expecting a slow pick-up for the PS3 and continued strength for the PS2, particularly with its strong games line-up, headed by God of War.

The PS3 remains a poor third to Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which recorded sales of 335,000 and 228,000 units respectively in February.

Both significantly undercut the PS3 on price, although Microsoft showed it was not afraid to put huge price tags on games today, when it released details of the long-awaited launch of Halo 3.

The “Legendary Edition” will sell for $130, more than double the standard price for next-generation games.

Microsoft says there will be limited quantities and the version will include a Spartan helmet case, two bonus disks and some storyboard artwork. There will also be a “Limited Edition” priced at $70 and “Standard Edition” at $60.

Halo 3 is expected to be released in mid-November on the Xbox 360.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has blown the whistle on what it says is a sinister plot by Hollywood studios to take control of digital televison in Europe.

According  to the EFF, new product standards being developed by the Digital Video Broadcasting project would limit customers’ ability to record and store digitally broadcast films and television shows by introducing strict digital rights management into the next generation of IP TV devices.

The DVB’s digital video standards are most prevalent in Europe, but they are also used in India, Latin America and other countries around the world.

The EFF says the DVB’s co-called Content Protection and Copy Management standards would do little to stop piracy, but would impose severe restrictions on customers’ ability to decide when, where and  how to view the content that streams into their homes.

According to the EFF report:

Hollywood bills the intent of CPCM as "protect[ing]" and "enab[ling] business models," but, more precisely, they want to be able to curtail personal uses of television content that may disrupt their current business models. They also want to make you pay again and again to make legitimate uses of lawfully-acquired digital television content. For example, you’ve already paid for your cable subscription, but instead of being able to "time-shift" your favorite show to watch it later on the device of your choice, content providers want the power to force you to buy that show again on DVD or through another delivery mechanism.

Ren  Buchholz, an EFF policy coordinator, says the push to introduce these new restrictions could spark a fight in Europe similar to the fight in the US over the broadcast flag, a similar system designed to allow broadcasters greater control over what devices can do with their content.

In 2005, a federal appeals court struck down a Federal Communications Commission rule that would have required device makers to design their devices to work with the broadcast flag.

The this latest chapter suggests that the battle over DRM is far from over.

YouTube may still be hogging the headlines but, in other news, more internet video channels are on the way.

Divvio.com launched this week with a channel model designed to provide a more personalised and organised online video experience.

Divvio allows you to set up video and audio channels according to your interests. For example, I created a Manchester United channel and Divvio searched for the term and came up with a list of soccer clips from YouTube, which I could then play in a window on its website or create a playlist from the best of them.

Many didn’t work, were of poor quality or had already been removed from the site. The Divvio service is therefore only as good as the sites it links to, but its video player at least smoothes the process by being able to handle all types of files.

Hossein Eslambolchi, former head of the old AT&T’s Global Network Services division, founded Divvio in Silicon Valley last year and attracted angel funding from the likes of Eric Benhamou of Palm fame, former Yahoo executive Geoff Ralston and former Cisco executive Mike Volpi.

He says Divvio will be different from rivals such as Blinkx and Joost in searching more sites more intelligently.

Meanwhile, the chipmaker AMD is promoting another means of moving internet video to your television through its Active TV Technology, launched on Wednesday at CeBIT. Using middleware partners such as MediaMall, it is creating a link between the PC and the set-top box to carry a range of internet-channelled content to the big screen. Reuters, the BBC and Movielink are among the featured channels.

It’s very similar to Microsoft’s media extender for the TV and the channels available through its Windows Media Center.

The technology is unlikely to gain much traction in the US where cable and satellite providers prefer to keep tight control over the content coming from their set-top boxes, but AMD is hopeful of a bigger take-up in Europe where free-to-air digital TV boxes are commonplace.

There are two interesting aspects to Microsoft’s acquisition of voice technology company Tellme today (Business Week has an interesting pre-acquisition piece on the company here.)

One is that Microsoft is competing harder for hot young start-ups. This is a company that might easily have gone in the past to Google, which has tended to be far more aggressive in buying into promising new ideas. Steve Ballmer laid out the importance of acquisitions to Microsoft on a trip to Silicon Valley last year, and the results are starting to show.

The other is that Microsoft is going to fold Tellme into its business division, which includes Office. Whatever the excitement about internet search (an area where voice recognition software could play a big part), Microsoft’s core business of selling "productivity" applications for office workers has plenty of room for growth. As speech comes to play a bigger part in how workers interract with the internet services they need to do their jobs, this could prove an important deal.

"Some things have to stay the same."

Janus Friis is one of the last people in the world you would expect to say that. He and Niklas Zennstrom, inventors of Kazaa and Skype, have come to symbolise the disruptive power of the internet.

Speaking last week in London at the FT’s digital media conference, though, Friis suddenly came over all conservative. The TV experience is not broken and doesn’t need fixing, he said. The 30-second advertising slot works just fine. TV viewers actually like it.

He’s kidding, right? Seems not. Friis, like everyone else in the internet video business these days, is so intent on appeasing the established powers in the TV business that messages like this have become commonplace. Web innovators who used to talk about nothing except the user experience are learning how to coddle potential partners.

It seemed to work. Later the same day, BBC Worlwide head John Smith said Friis and Zenntrom’s new Joost service was "more benign that most." Expect a BBC content deal soon to sit alongside the breakthrough agreement with Viacom last month. But who is looking out for the users?