Filed under: BROADCAST/CABLE | Tags: 2008, Barack Obama presidential campaign 2008, John McCain, NBC, New York Times, Senator Barack Obama, Situation Room, United States
If you plan to set your DVR to record NBC‘s Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony from Beijing on August 8th, plan to set it beginning at 730p ET, rather than 8p. NBC Sports has announced Opening Ceremonies would start a half hour earlier than originally planned for no other reason other than it looked so good during rehearsals that they decided to get the games started a tad earlier. (Cynopsis 8/4)
While the presidential race has boosted the ratings and online hits for cable news networks, other media outlets — the broadcast networks, newspapers and magazines — have seen little bounce from the campaign, according to The New York Times. One possible reason: the rapid rise of Internet news and opinion sites such as Politico.com, which averaged 2.5 million unique visitors in the first half of the year. The New York Times (8/4)
Senator Barack Obama was asked about Senator John McCain during a taping of “The Situation Room” on CNN in May.
Basic networks have enjoyed ratings bonanzas this summer by placing a large emphasis on original, scripted series, while the broadcast networks stuck largely to reality shows, according to the Los Angeles Times. The key question for cable programmers, however, is how many of those viewers they will retain once the broadcasters launch their fall schedules. Los Angeles Times (8/4)
Shailene Woodley, left, India Eisley and Molly Ringwald in ABC Family’s “The Secret Life of the American Teenager.”
Fox has ordered up a fifth season of So You Think You Can Dance, from 19 Entertainment. The show is scheduled to air its current season finale later on this week. (Cynopsis 8/4)
Wall Street has been impressed by the latest round of quarterly reports coming out of the cable MSOs, saying they have performed better than expected. On the flip side, analysts noted their disappointment in the performances of Verizon’s FiOS TV and AT&T’s U-verse services. Combined, Comcast and Cablevision nabbed 69% of the net new broadband subscribers in the second quarter, with AT&T, Verizon and three other telcos together attracting just 31%, according to the Silicon Alley Insider. Silicon Alley Insider (8/4) , Broadcasting & Cable (8/4) , Barron’s (8/4)
Filed under: ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA | Tags: 2008 Summer Olympics, AOL, Google, Microsoft, NBC, Time Warner, Windows Media Center, YouTube
ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA
NBC has launched its online video hub for the 2008 Olympics, which features free on-demand video for over 20 sports. In order to maximize quality, the videos are available as downloads (you can start watching before the download finishes) and will be in “up to HD” quality. Unfortunately, the video downloads will only be available on Windows machines running Windows Media Center – once again Mac users are left in the cold, likely because of DRM issues (and the fact that Lenovo and Microsoft are sponsors). (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/31/nbc-launches-on-demand-olympic-coverage-in-hd 7/31)
Google‘s video-sharing site YouTube will show daily coverage of the Beijing Olympics in India, Nigeria and 75 other countries where broadcasters haven’t bought exclusive rights to the programming. YouTube promises to block the content in areas where rights have been sold to others. (Iwantmedia 8/4, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aOh2Npv1H8Kk 8/4)
Time Warner is moving forward with its plans to sell off AOL in pieces, and is finally ready to formally separate the AOL portal and advertising business from its legacy dial-up access business. But how much can it hope to get for these parts? When Google invested $1 billion in AOL a few years ago for a 5 percent stake, that valued AOL at $20 billion (which some people thought was an inflated figure even back then). Today, even after breaking it up, Time Warner will be lucky to get more than $7 billion for the whole lot. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/04/time-warner-ready-to-unload-aol-in-pieces-but-at-what-price 8/4)
In a demonstration of just how open Yahoo search can be, one of its senior engineers has created a simple search mashup that combines Yahoo’s BOSS framework and Google’s App Engine. Yahoo BOSS allows developers to create their own customized search apps based on Yahoo’s search engine, and the Google App Engine is a platform for hosting apps. Vik Singh, the engineer who leads the Yahoo Boss project (and a former Google engineer) created a simple Question-Answering Service, where you put in a question, and it tries to come up with the answer based on the top 50 results from Yahoo. (So, if you ask, “Who invented the light bulb?,” it looks for the most popular dates in the top 50 results and returns: “Thomas Edison”). (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/04/yahoo-boss-is-so-open-it-runs-on-googles-app-engine 8/4)
Yahoo‘s Aug. 1 shareholder’s meeting came and went without a mutiny as CEO Jerry Yang received 85% of the vote to stay at the helm of the company. Investors also voted to retain all nine current directors. (Cynopsis 8/4)
AOL’s video portal, which has an online syndication deal with Discovery Networks, the Big Four broadcasters and other cable services, has received a makeover with a greater focus on linking with other AOL sites, such as AOL Music, AOL Television and GameDaily. New ingredients will include a search engine more targeted to viewers’ preferences and more advertising opportunities. Broadcasting & Cable (8/4)
Joss Whedon’s online musical “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” crashed when it went live July 15, when some 1,000 people a second tried to view the show. “Dr. Horrible” is seen as a notable test of what people will pay money to watch on their computers. (Iwantmedia 8/4, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/arts/television/02horr.html 8/2)
The music industry should embrace illegal file-sharing Web sites, according to a study by the MCPS-PRS Alliance, which represents music rights holders, and Big Champagne, an online media measurement company. The illegal sites have strong brand loyalty and “will never go away.” (Iwantmedia 8/4, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e72884f6-6175-11dd-af94-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1 8/3)
Amazon has acquired twelve year old Canadian company Abebooks (formerly the Advanced Book Exchange), the companies just announced. AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books focusing on used, rare and out of print titles for sale by independent booksellers – it currently has 110 million books for sale from 13,500 sellers. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/amazon-to-acquire-abebooks 8/1)
Fox Searchlight has just posted a new R-rated trailer for the upcoming Choke movie, based on author Chuck Palahnluk’s novel of the same name starring Sam Rockwell. (Cynopsis 8/4)
U.S. federal regulators are declaring that Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent traffic last year was unlawful, marking the first time that any U.S. broadband provider has ever been found to violate Net neutrality rules. Comcast will be required to disclose in the future how it manages traffic. (Iwantmedia 8/4, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10004508-38.html 8/1)
Filed under: WIRELESS | Tags: Android, Apple, Foxconn, Google, iPhone, iPhone 3G, Nokia, TechCrunch
Techcrunch put together a roundtable about the upcoming mobile platform wars between the iPhone, Google’s Android, and older platforms like Nokia’s. One thing Erick Schonfeld discovered as he was organizing the event was that it was really hard to find anyone developing Android apps other than the 50 people who won the Android Developer’s Challenge. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/02/mobile-web-wars-videos-does-anybody-care-about-android 8/2)
Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant that produces the iPhone 3G for Apple, has ramped up production to 800,000 units per week, says a source close to Apple with direct knowledge of the numbers. This is “above current full capacity” and there may be some concerns with quality control. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/04/foxconn-building-800000-iphones-a-week 8/4)
You can now grab Nullriver’s NetShare app, which lets you browse the web from your computer using your iPhone’s data connection , from this direct link. You’ll probably want to grab it quickly, as Apple may well pull it down again. Apple posted the application to its App Store, but quickly pulled it down after only around 20 minutes. The application lets users of both the original (EDGE) and 3G iPhones browse the internet on the go wherever their cellular network has coverage. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/tethering-app-returns-to-apples-app-store 8/1)
Another day, another capricious decision by Apple to pull a fairly innocuous application. This time it’s BoxOffice, a diabolical system for finding and displaying local movie times. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/04/apple-pulls-another-innocuous-iphone-app 8/4)
Tapulous, the company behind Tap Tap Revenge, has announced that the popular iPhone app will hit 1 million installs some time this weekend. The app is the second we’ve heard from to hit the milestone (Facebook reached it last week), and is another testament to the extremely rapid growth some applications have seen on Apple’s newly launched App Store. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/31/tap-tap-revenge-approaches-1-million-users-music-industry-takes-notice 7/31)
Back in the Marauder’s Top 5 App List, Tap Tap Revenge came in at number 5 in the list. I just wish I was a betting woman. I think the fact that Facebook’s application has done so well is only a testament to how popular the site is. The SDK application is so awful that I have kept the web app live on my home screen because I just can’t part with it. Sad Facebook. Very sad.
Apple will introduce a version of its iPhone based on its iPod nano music players in time for the holiday season, according to a U.K. publication, which did not mention whether that launch would also include the U.S. market. Mobile carrier O2 would sell the “nano” on a pay-as-you-go basis for up to $300, the report said. The Daily Mail (London) (8/3)
Throw out that WAP browser on your cell phone. We are quickly approaching a point where a full browser experience is available on our mobile devices. And it is not just the iPhone. A startup called Skyfire is in some respect even further along than Apple in bringing the entire Web to your phone. Its mobile browser lets you slide Web pages around and zoom in like with the mobile version of Safari. But it also supports Flash and Ajax sites. (It does this by offloading most of the heavy lifting to its servers rather than the mobile client). That means you can watch Youtube videos and go to Google Maps right in the mobile browser instead of having to download separate apps. In contrast, the iPhone’s Safari browser still does not support Flash and so to watch a a video you have to launch the separate Youtube app. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/skyfire-brings-full-browser-experience-to-nokia-s60-phones-200-private-beta-invites 8/1)
The LiMo Foundation, the Linux-based effort by a consortium of handset makers, has added 11 members from the U.S., Europe and Asia, the group announced today. LiMo, whose chief rival is Google, with its emerging Android platform, now boasts 52 members and 21 compatible handsets, compared with 34 members for Google, with no phones on sale yet. Forbes (8/4)
Filed under: GAMING | Tags: Electronic Arts, Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, Wall Street Journal, Wii, XBox, Xbox 360s, XBox Live
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata reflects on the Wii phenomenon and discusses the company’s latest effort to keep propelling the company forward in this Q-and-A style interview with The Wall Street Journal. Among the company’s goals: to keep new gamers engaged and an eventual push into developing markets. The Wall Street Journal (free content) (8/4)
Nintendo characters Mario and Yoshi frame President Satoru Iwata at a recent presentation.
Microsoft may lower prices on Xbox 360s to appeal to the mass gaming market. According to one report, an Xbox console with no hard drive could retail for $199 as soon as next month. Nintendo’s Wii is currently the lowest-priced console on the market at $249. CNET (8/1)
According to the head of EA Games, the company will incorporate Xbox Live avatars into new versions of its games. The avatars can don football gear and other accessories, but there is no word on whether the avatars can be inserted into the new versions of “Madden” or “NCAA Football.” GameDaily BIZ (8/1)
Filed under: TECHNOLOGY | Tags: Amazon, Amazon Kindle, Amazon.com, Departments, Loreto, Maynas, Peru, South America
TECHNOLOGY
Ever since Amazon launched the Kindle last November, we’ve been wondering about just how successful it’s been. The electronic book initially sold out and supplies have been tight. The Kindle is such a small part of Amazon’s overall business that the company does not break out how many it’s sold. But we found out anyway: 240,000 Kindles have been shipped since November, according to a source close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the numbers. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/amazon-to-acquire-abebooks 8/1)
Speaker designer Matthew Polk demonstrated a new speaker system designed for the slim profile of flat-screen TVs, the SurroundBar 360. The speaker system, measuring 44 1/2 inches wide and 4 1/8 inches high, can fit beneath a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. The SurroundBar 360 will be available for sale this September at a suggested retail price of $1,199. ElectronicHouse.com (8/1)
Sharp has launched a home cinema rack system available with an integrated, upscaling DVD/CD player. The AN-PR1500H system also is equipped with HD-enabling technology and 2.1 front surround speakers. The unit comes with a USB port so users can upload photos or link up an iPod. Pocket-lint.co.uk (8/1)
