Where’s Dave?

Sorry for the light posting, gang. I’ve been on the road 8 nights at this point, starting on Sunday watching football in our California office followed by a couple of 12-hour work days. Friday night I flew into New York City to pitch in behind the scenes on a Good Morning America segment and ventured … Read more

Time to Light More Dark Fiber?

Broadband Reports put a post up yesterday about Maine having the slowest Internet speeds in the New England region. I only had dial-up service for the one year I lived in Portland, but in a corner of my brain I was pretty sure I remembered seeing a statistic then about the state having the most … Read more

10 New Pilots Headed For A Crash Landing

marketing-shift-logo.pngIt’s not very politically correct, but I’ve always been fascinated by dead pools. I’ve never actually participated in one, but there is something about wagering on life and death that appeals to the degenerate gambler in me.Since I’m pretty sure that participating in a dead pool is illegal in San Francisco, I suppose that I will have to live with the next best thing, dead TV pools. Marketing Shift is putting on a contest where they are asking readers to try and pick ten of the new shows, that you think will be off the air by the end of the fall season.

The winner of the contest will be the first person to have all ten of their picks canceled. The winner will receive a little bit of link love from MarketingShift.com, but the loser ends up with an internship at Cat World the CW ;)

If you want to see a list of all the candidates for the pool, you’ll find it on Marketing Shift’s website, but here are my picks for their first annual TV dead pool contest:

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NBC Direct Will Never Replace My TiVo

NBC has announced that they are introducing a program that will let you automatically download some of their shows to your PC. With the announcement came the latest round of TiVo doom and gloom articles, that assert that this technology will some how be able to replace a DVR. While I like that NBC is being innovative and are offering more choices to consumers, I am also skeptical about the long term prospects for this one.

I suspect that NBC is hoping to build a strong subscription base for the shows, so that they can then try and pitch companies on paying for ads by the download. There may be some advertisers that will be foolish enough to accept these arrangements, but over the long run, the advertisers will figure out why it’s doomed for failure.

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Sling and DirecTV Stream the NFL with Supercast

There’s news out of Sling Media today, and since I don’t work for the company (unlike Dave), I feel perfectly justified in covering it. :) Sling is collaborating with DirecTV on a new offering called Supercast, which brings online streams of NFL games to the Web every Sunday. Subscribers to the DirecTV/NFL SuperFan package can … Read more

Slacker Cozies Up with EMI, Warner and Universal

Streaming music company Slacker has big news out today. The company has inked a deal with EMI, Universal and Warner Music Group to let customers access their music from soon-to-be launched Slacker Portable Players. This makes Slacker among the first companies to offer a mobile streaming music service that is not accessed on a cell … Read more

PS3’s Virtual ‘Home’ Delayed

Bad news for PS3 owners… Looking forward to setting up your new digital digs in the upcoming “Virtual Home” world coming to the Playstation Network? Well real-estate still isn’t for sale, and it won’t be for a while. In another embarrassing blow for Sony, the much touted “Virtual Home” has been delayed until Spring 2008 … Read more

CNBC HD… Isn’t?

CNBC is going HD. Sort of. The channel will broadcast in 16:9 and they’ll show HD graphics, banners, and tickers on the sides. But the 4:3 talking heads will preside in all their (upscaled) SD glory. While I can sort of understand saving money by delaying the HD studio gear investment, it’s still somewhat baffling … Read more