And what a big deal it is.

Amazon has teamed up with Viacom in a pact that will deliver content from MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, TV Land, and VH1 to Prime Instant Video. The total number of new titles the deal delivers to Amazon is 2,000.

Prime Instant Videos can be watched on the Kindle Fire, Mac, PC, or Roku and select TVs, set-top boxes, and blu-ray players.

“Together with the existing movies and shows from CBS, Fox, Disney-ABC, PBS, NBC, Sony, and Warner Bros., we now offer, at no additional cost, unlimited instant streaming of more than 15,000 titles,” Amazon says.

“We’re adding something for the family with Nickelodeon favorites like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Dora the Explorer, iCarly, and Yo Gabba Gabba,” the announcement continued. “We’re adding comedy with titles like Chappelle’s Show, The Sarah Silverman Program, Strangers with Candy, and Hot in Cleveland. And we’re adding reality TV with several past seasons of The Real World, Basketball Wives, and Jersey Shore.”

Amazon Prime is still best known for offering free two-day shipping on millions of items in return for a $79 a year membership.

Does today’s announcement make you more likely to sign up for Amazon Prime, if you’re not already a member?

“When you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership,” the warning from Apple reads.

The warning came in response to a growing number of claims that shady marketing practices and purpose-driven technologies are falsely inflating app store rankings via erroneous, repetitive download schemes.

In order to maintain the integrity of the App Store and its ranking system, Apple says it will clean house and not hesitate to remove anyone who tinkers with the legitimate established processes that determine an app’s rightful ranking in the App Store.

The following is a guest post by Glen Suh, Director of Marketing for TapIt mobile advertising.

In today’s mobile world, smartphone users expect a lot out of their mobile phones.  Users desire fast processors, high data speeds, and a well laid out operating system. Furthermore, users also expect higher quality pictures and video playback as smartphone technology advances. HTML5 banners provide marketers with a richer canvas on which they can create a more beautiful and engaging advertisement.

With the demand of rich media increasing, HTML5 will play a large roll in changing the way ads are made in addition to the way users view and interact with mobile advertisements.  HTML is being implemented in today’s mobile advertising world due to the fact that it can be downloaded from an ad server and then displayed on the web or in apps. The ability that apps have to render HTML is a huge advantage for developers because Android and iOS both support this technology, which allows for multiple platform and OS compatibility across devices. HTML5 can be leveraged to fix the fragmentation issues even allowing advertisers to take a successful desktop campaign and run it on any mobile operating system that embraces the technology.

The utilization of HTML5 also benefits advertisers in the sense that they can now give mobile users a richer interactive experience without the need to leave a mobile-optimized site or app to view an ad. Also keep in mind that when a developer integrates a rich media ad kit, it generally tends to result in sluggish performance. However, with implementation of HTML5 the ad rendering engine is lighter and simpler, speeding up load times and making it more suitable for resource-constrained mobile devices.

While traditional mobile banner ads typically redirect users to an external mobile site, rich media ads built off of HTML5 technology gives advertisers another way to drive response rates without annoying or interrupting the user.

According to the survey, nearly 40% of respondents used mobile devices in response to TV ads and 45% estimated that they spent 30 minutes or more on their mobile devices during the game.  Interestingly, the survey showed that almost twice as many respondents used their mobile devices during the first half of the game compared to the second half – a powerful take-away for advertisers indeed.

“Mobile is an amazing channel for reaching consumers when they are in a lean-back entertainment-oriented mindset,” explained Anne Frisbie, Vice President and Managing Director, North America, for InMobi.  “Savvy advertisers will allocate more dollars to mobile advertising, either in conjunction with TV ads or through mobile-only advertising campaigns during similar sporting events and key holiday weekends throughout the year.”  Other takeaways from the survey include:

• 39% used their mobile device in response to a TV commercial during the game by doing one or more of the following: discussing commercials, getting more information about an advertised product, or watching TV ads again.
• 30% reported using their mobile devices most during commercials.
• 27% downloaded a Super Bowl app.

As the mobile world gears up for Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Inneractive decided to take a look back at the continued massive growth of the industry in terms of everything from mobile ad clicks to revenue, platforms, and regions that saw the most growth.

The full infographic is embedded below, and also available here.

The data used for the infographic stems from a report White Horse published last year called “The Future of In-Aisle Mobile,” in which the agency conducted a first-of-its-kind ethnographic study on consumer use of smartphones to aid in-aisle shopping.  The result was a dramatic picture of the gap between consumer mobile behavior in the aisle and retailers’ readiness to channel that behavior into customer loyalty and sales.

In creating the report, White Horse surveyed 390 smartphone users and turned six of the most interesting findings into the below infographic.  The free report is available for download here.

Covering everything from the right calls-to-actions to proper testing, segmentation, and even the downfalls of developing a “pointless app,” the infographic uses original, primary research with references to eConsultancy and the Information Commissioners Office out of the U.K.

The full infographic is embedded below.  Let us know what you think and whether you agree or disagree with these “seven deadly sins” in the comments section.

Source: Text Marketer Bulk SMS Services

If you’re unfamiliar, Summify is all about summarizing all the social news that matters to you.

In a nutshell, Summify aggregates social media updates and announcements within a user’s timeline. Summaries of all the big news can then be delivered via email, the web, or even mobile app.

“You’ve probably noticed we’ve been quiet lately,” the Summify team announced on its blog Thursday. “Well, we’re extremely excited to announce that Summify has been acquired by Twitter! I know, right? We can hardly believe it ourselves!”

“Roughly 2 years ago,” the post added, “we moved from Romania to Vancouver after being accepted into Bootup Labs, an awesome startup incubator. It has been an incredible journey, with lots of highs, a few lows, and many product iterations. In March 2011 we launched our email summary product and we’ve been blown away by the response ever since. Many of our users tell us we found a magical solution to a truly unsolved problem.”

“Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time efficient manner. As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.

With Twitter’s 100 million user base (half of which is engaged via mobile devices), the acquisition seems like a fitting and timely move for the microblogging king of the social media world.

Following the launch of the latest iteration of their SMS marketing platform, dubbed Tatango v3.1, the company launched both an affiliate program and a referral program.  For those unfamiliar with how affiliate programs work, it’s the ability to drive traffic to a certain company (in this case Tatango) and earn a commission on any sales your traffic generates.  For Tatango’s program, you earn a healthy 20% monthly commission for the life of every new customer you bring on.

In addition, the company has launched two new tools; the ability to create SMS autoresponders and SMS marketing flyers.  The SMS flyer tool allows anyone to quickly and easily create an advertisement for their SMS marketing campaigns that are both well-designed and, most importantly, comply with all SMS marketing best practices.  Tatango is offering the new tool free of charge, and it’s even available to non-Tatango users regardless of their SMS marketing provider.

The company’s new SMS autoresponder feature allows people to request information immediately to their mobile phones via text message.  Each SMS autoresponse you create allows you to use all 160 characters to include things like click-to-call phone numbers and even links to websites, social media profiles, videos, surveys, etc.  The company is offering the new feature with unlimited messaging credits for $49/mo.  To celebrate the launch, the company is even holding a text-to-win contest using its new SMS autoresponders for a chance to win one of 10 Clingo Universal Car Phone Mounts.

According to the information presented by comScore, 182 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in December 2011.

That’s averages out to more than 23 hours per viewer.

The total U.S. Internet audience viewed 43.5 billion videos. Not surprisingly, Google Sites – but YouTube chiefly among them – ranked as the top online video content property in December with 157.2 million unique viewers.

VEVO ranked second with 53.7 million and Yahoo! Sites ranked third with 53.3 million viewers.

Other notable findings from the December 2011 report include:

• 85.3 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The duration of the average online content video was 5.8 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.
• Video ads accounted for 14.1 percent of all videos viewed and 1.2 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

To learn more about the new report from comScore, click here.