Industry

CBS Acquires Last.fm

If you scroll down TechMeme today past all the news about Microsoft’s surface computing concept (way cool), you’ll land on several articles about CBS’s acquisition of Last.fm. I have a very selfish reason for finding this interesting. If Last.fm warrants a buy-out by CBS (to to the tune of $280M), maybe that means Pandora will … Read more

TiVo – Buy, Sell or Waffle

It’s a day full of TiVo. The company reports quarterly earnings this afternoon and apparently none of the financial analysts agree on how investors should react to a predicted $.02 per-share loss. I borrowed the title of this post from a Motley Fool article, which goes on to report that seven analysts recommend TiVo as … Read more

What’s Up with Radio?

The argument I hear about television is that we’ll never move completely to a pay-per-program model because the vast majority of people like being able to sit mindlessly in front of a TV screen and channel surf. I agree because that theory has already so clearly played out in the radio world. As popular as … Read more

Comcast Launches TVplanner

There was a fair bit of conversation at the recent Cable IPTV conference around how Comcast is approaching competition from online video services. Part of the approach involves having its own online video destination, (see news about the upcoming launch of Fancast), and the other part involves using the Internet to push subscribers to cable … Read more

Verizon Launches FiOS TV 2.0

Originally announced at CES, I’ve been given word that Verizon’s FiOS TV Interactive Media Guide ~aka FiOS TV 2.0~ is rolling. The new GUI has just launched in Fort Wayne, IN and will be deployed to existing FiOS TV customers as a software update on existing hardware over the summer. To the best of everyone’s … Read more

XM Down. 24hrs and Counting

XM is down. As in: Many (all?) subscribers are without radio. Sounds like XM pushed a software update which took one of their satellites offline. I suppose this could happen to anyone (like RIM), but right about now if I were still a XM customer I’d be pondering cancellation. Sirius probably is.

Are Paid Internet Video Downloads Doomed?

Forrester Research recently came out with a bold claim that paid internet video downloads have no future. The report claims that paid downloads will give way to ad-supported models.This claim waivers on one major issue: will quality internet video only be a mainly ad-supported business? And the answer is most definitely no.

The reason is mainly tied in with DVD sales and the fact that content owners will not want to switch to a questionable ad supported business when they have a lucrative DVD sales. However, they will be prepared to offer paid video downloads in addition to selling DVDs. Mike Wolf of ABIResearch is also thinking along the same lines.

This is something we can clearly see happening today with a variety of paid movie download sites such as Amazon Unbox, and a lack of legitimate free streaming TV episodes and movies.

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Who Has the Best HD?

Comcast published the results of a study earlier this month claiming that viewers preferred Comcast HD signals to HD transmissions from Dish Network and DirecTV. The study was conducted by Frank M. Magid Associates with oversight by Accenture and the law firm Loeb & Loeb. Now DirecTV is suing Comcast for claiming better quality HDTV … Read more