This week, CBS news program “60 Minutes” had an interview with Microsoft co-founder and now major philanthropist Bill Gates, called “Bill Gates 2.0.”

It also included some discussion of his longtime relationship with the late Apple legend Steve Jobs.

Here’s the interview in full, in which he talks mostly about eradicating diseases like polio by improving vaccine delivery and his other efforts to alleviate suffering worldwide.

And here’s a special report by “60 Minutes,” in which CBS’s Charlie Rose talks about the Gates-Jobs part, which includes parts of the joint interview the pair did at our fifth D: All Things Digital conference in 2007:

In a detailed post, the site’s tech team has published a fairly thorough tick-tock on how the attack was carried out.

This is the opposite of what companies usually do when they experience a security breach. The pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army has been attacking the Twitter accounts of many Western media organizations in recent weeks, including CBS News, the BBC, Associated Press, and others). None of those organizations have followed up with any significant disclosure about what happened.

When companies and organizations suffer a computer breach of any kind, the impulse is to keep the details of how it was carried out close to the vest. There are many legitimate reasons for this, not the least of which is that it’s embarrassing. And the details can shed light on internal processes and procedures that might be of value to competitors.

In addition, there’s a public relations consideration. Stories about hacking attacks are negative. If there’s any media coverage, there’s an understandable desire for the coverage to stop. Disclosures about how it happened yield another round of coverage that would otherwise be unwanted. In cases like this, the desire for no coverage wins out.

As one media organization after another has fallen for the Syrian Electronic Army’s tricks, there seemed to be a common thread that ran through the circumstances of each incident. All appear to have fallen prey to some kind of “phishing” attack. These are spoofed emails that look legitimate but which contain attachments or links that are used to gather information like usernames and passwords to carry out the attack.

What The Onion has disclosed is that the attackers in this case used a sophisticated multilayered attack, using information gleaned in the first round to then launch a second that gathers more information, and so on, until at last they had penetrated the target: The Onion’s Twitter account, with a healthy five million followers.

This is by far the most detailed account of any of these attacks that I’ve read. And the more people who read it the better, because eventually the methods used will stop working.

I’ve long thought that there ought to be more transparency from private companies in these matters, especially from media organizations that have a certain amount of accountability to the public that they serve. When hackers thought to be based in China attacked several media organizations, including The Wall Street Journal (which, like this website, is owned by News Corp.) and the New York Times, the apparent intent was to monitor communications about reporting what those organizations were doing about Chinese officials and companies.

In the case of the Syrian Electronic Army, the intent was to take advantage of the Twitter followers these organizations have attracted and hijack their accounts to spread political propaganda. The attacks do some short-term damage to reputations and result in some embarrassing press coverage for a day or so. Usually, no one ever learns anything useful, because the details remain obscured. Yesterday, The Onion changed that. It’s an example we can all learn from.

Shortish version:

• Aereo, which distributes broadcast TV programming over the Web but doesn’t pay the broadcasters to do so, has won a couple of important legal victories in federal court.
• Now the IAC-backed company plans on expanding to 22 cities outside of the New York area, starting with Boston this month.
• CBS, one of the broadcasters that is suing Aereo, has said it will oppose Aereo every time it opens in a new market, with a new suit. Last month, CBS spokesman Dana McClintock warned of new lawsuits via Twitter (at least twice), and CBS CEO Les Moonves said the same thing during an earnings call last week.
• Aereo, which cites both men in its complaint, is essentially asking the same court that granted it its first legal victory — New York’s Southern District — to preemptively rule against CBS in any of the cities it has announced plans to enter this year.

And here’s the comment from CBS:

These public relations and legal maneuvers do not change the fundamentally illegal nature of Aereo’s supposed business. The issue of unauthorized streaming of copyrighted television programming is now being contested in the 2nd Circuit and the 9th Circuit, and wherever Aereo attempts to operate there will be vigorous challenges to its Illegal business model.

Still here? You must really want to read this thing! Here you go:

Aereo Complaint for Declaratory Judgment – FINAL FILED

The group, the Syrian Electronic Army, has claimed responsibility for some of the latest high-profile account hacks, taking over the official Twitter handles of NPR and CBS and, most recently, sending a false tweet from the Associated Press’s Twitter account that sent U.S. stock markets into a tailspin for a few brief moments last week.

“We are aware that a number of Guardian Twitter accounts have been compromised and we are working actively to resolve this,” a Guardian spokesperson told AllThingsD.

Update 3:15 PST: Twitter has sent out e-mail notices to a number of journalists who user Twitter, urging them to take extra security measures with their accounts in light of the recent hacks. A portion of the email, obtained by AllThingsD reads as follows:

“These incidents appear to be spear phishing attacks that target your corporate email. Promoting individual awareness of these attacks within your organization and following the security guidelines below is vital to preventing abuse of your Twitter accounts.”

And also worth noting from the email:

“We believe that these attacks will continue, and that news and media organizations will continue to be high value targets to hackers.”

In this the most recent hack, the SEA tweeted out advertisements for its movement from the Guardian’s smaller, vertical-based Twitter accounts such as @GuardianBusiness and @GuardianFilm, according to the Naked Security Blog, which first noted the attack.

“Follow the Syrian Electronic Army … Follow the truth! @Official_SEA12 #SEA #Syria,” the messages read.

It is possible, as noted by Guardian staffer James Ball, that the SEA used a similar email phishing attack employed last week on members of the Associated Press, in which the hacker cohort sent out well-crafted false emails that tricked staff members into handing over their email account information.

As of mid-morning Monday, a number of the Guardian Twitter accounts had been suspended.

After the spate of recent high-profile hacking incidents — including one on Twitter itself that potentially compromised 250,000 user accounts — Twitter has come under heavy scrutiny for its security practices.

The guys doing the Guardian phishing attack I mentioned yesterday (it’s SEA) are really very good: sustained, changing, mails today.

— James Ball (@jamesrbuk) April 29, 2013

Rumors circulated that the microblogging service would eventually introduce two-factor security authentication, essentially a way of verifying a user’s identity when trying to log in to an account.

It’s worth noting, however, that these rumors floated around last time Twitter was hacked, and we haven’t seen anything yet. Surmise what you will from that.

Representatives from Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

Syncbak, founded in 2009 by Jack Perry, has created a technology to deliver broadcast-TV signals to tablets and smartphones. The service isn’t yet commercially available. It is being tested by more than 100 local-TV stations in 70 markets.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

It’s a band of digital activists and hackers who support the beleaguered government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The group, which claimed credit for the attacks via a statement on its website, has a history of attacking the websites and social media accounts of various western media organizations.

On April 16, it attacked websites and some Twitter accounts belonging to NPR. Last month, it attacked the website of Human Rights Watch, as well as its Twitter account. Also in March, it breached a Twitter account belonging to the BBC. And last year it gained access to a blog belonging to Reuters, and posted a fake story, detailing a retreat by Syrian rebels that hadn’t happened.

CBS experienced at least one more attack last night after the initial one. The Verge captured images of three more tweets from the account belonging to its high-profile Sunday night magazine show “60 Minutes,” presumably sent by hijackers. Today, as of 8:15 am PT, the “60 Minutes” Twitter account and that of another CBS show, “48 Hours,” were suspended.

Matt Polevoy, a social media producer at CBS News, announced the suspension:

Update: We’ve suspended the 60 Minutes account while we investigate with Twitter.

April 20, 2013 7:59 pm via Tweetbot for iOSReplyRetweetFavorite

@CBSMatt

Matthew Polevoy

Obviously, those messages posted did NOT come from 60 Minutes staff. This is serious matter and we’re treating it as such.

April 20, 2013 8:09 pm via Tweetbot for iOSReplyRetweetFavorite

@CBSMatt

Matthew Polevoy

A Twitter account belonging to the Syrian Electronic Army has also been suspended, but, in what appears to be a rolling battle with Twitter, the group appears to have created a new one. It seems to be doing the same thing with Facebook, creating new accounts every time an old one is shut down. A message posted to the current Twitter account contained the following video that appeared to take credit for the attacks against CBS:

No comment yet from Twitter. Since it’s a Sunday night, it will be interesting to see if there’s any mention of the incident on “60 Minutes” tonight.

Of course, this is all taking place against the backdrop of a quickening of events with regard to the U.S. and Syria, so it’s no surprise that pro-Assad hackers would seek to make a statement of some kind and get attention. And while most of our attention has been focused on Boston, there’s been a lot going on.

Last week officials from the United Kingdom told the United Nations about concerns that chemical weapons had been used by the Assad regime. And that’s important because President Obama has often referred to that as a “red line,” though he hasn’t exactly spelled out what crossing it means. Presumably, it could mean military intervention.

Also this week, the Pentagon ordered 200 people into neighboring Jordan to help that country deal with the potential use of chemical weapons, and to prevent the fighting from spilling over its borders. Separately, the U.S. said it would double the amount of nonlethal aid that is going to the rebels.

So you can see why pro-Assad sympathizers might want to get your attention right now.

Some 75,000 people have been killed in the three-year-old civil war, and many thousands more have been displaced. It has effectively become a military stalemate, and a bloody one at that.

CBS News confirmed via its primary Twitter account that various accounts operated by its high-profile news magazine shows “60 Minutes” and “48 Hours” have been compromised. The links are said to be serving up malware, so, again, don’t click on them.

Also confirmed to have been hacked is @CBSDenver, the Twitter account associated with the news division of the local affiliate in Denver, Colo.

We have experienced problems on Twitter accounts of #60Minutes & @48Hours; We apologize for the inconvenience; Twitter is resolving issues

April 20, 2013 12:57 pm via Seesmic twhirlReplyRetweetFavorite

@CBSNews

CBS News

PLEASE NOTE: Our Twitter account was compromised earlier today. We are working with Twitter to resolve.

April 20, 2013 1:13 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@60Minutes

60 Minutes

PLEASE NOTE: A message that was posted earlier to this account was not written or sent by @60Minutes or its staff.

April 20, 2013 1:32 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@60Minutes

60 Minutes

Since the offending tweets will probably disappear within the hour, here are some screen grabs. (Update: They already vanished.)

Pres Panayotov / Shutterstock.com

Is News Corp. really going to yank Fox off the airwaves in response to Aereo?

Snap consensus judgement from the various corners of the TV Industrial Complex: No way. At least, not anytime soon.

People I’ve talked to who work in TVland think that News Corp. COO Chase Carey’s comments are just that — comments, not a plan.

It’s possible that over time, if broadcasters do think that Aereo or Aereo-like technology really threatens the fees they get from pay TV operators for their over-the-air programming, they’ll move more of it to cable networks. And, in fact, programmers have already started moving lots of high-profile sporting events from free TV to pay TV.

Near-term, however, people seem to think that both practical and legal restrictions — for instance, deals that Fox and CBS have with the NFL for football broadcast rights — would prevent this from happening. More important: There isn’t any reason to do so right now, since only a handful of people are actually using Aereo to get broadcast TV for free.

All that said, Wall Street seems to like the idea.

Earlier this year, Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger gamed out a scenario where all four broadcasters moved from over-the-air to pay networks, and concluded that it wouldn’t be a terrible idea, at least financially. By Juenger’s thinking, the lost “retransmission fees” and advertising dollars the broadcasters would lose from over-the-air programming would be replaced by even higher “affiliate fees” and advertising dollars they could get on cable.

And Juenger thinks that move might benefit pay TV distributors, too: “There is enough logic here to suggest it wouldn’t be completely crazy for a cable operator to make a pre-emptive offer to broadcast networks in a given market to convert to a cable model.”

In any case, for whatever reason, TV investors are cheering Carey on. Look what happened to shares at Fox owner News Corp. (which also owns this website), ABC owner Disney and CBS this afternoon after 1:30 pm ET, when Carey made his remarks at an industry conference:

The outlier here is NBC owner Comcast, whose shares also moved up after Carey’s remarks, then down again. Perhaps some investors are less comfortable with what this means for America’s biggest pay TV operator.

(Image courtesy of Pres Panayotov / Shutterstock.com)

Image copyright Norm Hall | Getty Images Sport

It’s a stark contrast from the glory days, where distribution was fixed and scarce, and all we had to do was put a great product out there. At the time, all content had found its own native distribution outlet — a channel on the dial, a spot on the newsstand, a movie theater, video store — that delivered it to the bulk of its audience. That distribution was beautifully limited — there’s only room for 12 channels on the old VHF dial, 16 movies at a multiplex and maybe several thousand titles at video rental stores.

But today, distribution and consumption are in constant flux. Look at TV. To be truly “Everywhere” these days, a TV show has to be on network, cable, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Facebook and Amazon, have its own native app in Apple and Android stores — at a minimum — and a presence in Google’s mighty search index.

To succeed today, digital media companies need to get control of their distribution. The opportunity for savvy media companies is to abandon the outdated if-we-build-it-they-will-come mentality, and master the craft and science of programming.

Programming is the skill of matching content to audience. Programming is what built the global TV and film industry from $200 billion to $300 billion in the last decade. If you want to succeed in digital media going forward, programming is everything.

I spent time recently with a friend from CBS and told him about what my company Wetpaint does to program social as a channel: In short, we deterministically deliver the right content to each audience at the right time. That might mean, for example, a recap of yesterday’s news timed for the morning bus ride, a short-form video clip posted to coincide with a mid-morning coffee break, a gossipy tidbit just as lunch begins. “That may work in entertainment,” he said. “But it would never work in breaking news. In news, everything needs to go out immediately.”

So I did some research, and it turns out he’s wrong. When you look at what our editors consider breaking news within the entertainment category, the vast majority of stories — more than 75 percent — perform better when they’re packaged and presented at another time of day, and not when they first break.

While immediacy became the mandate in the ages of CNN and Google, smart programming is far superior in an age of multiple distribution outlets.

The expertise of digital programming is in its infancy, but some of the secrets for success have emerged. Here are a few:

• You don’t have one big audience.
  Digital media companies need to know who their audience is and what they like, and then customize their product and pitch accordingly. But convention on the Web has been to serve everyone the same thing — and the folly of that is a massive missed opportunity. Instead, understand your value to all your major audience segments. After all, each person you reach thinks of herself as an audience of one. Meet her where she’s at, and you’ll find your resonance — and performance — will be much greater.

  For decades, the National Football League operated on the basic assumption that football is for guys. That conventional wisdom was upended in 2010 when research by the NFL and Nielsen found that more than 40 percent of the league’s fans were women. (It’s upward of 44 percent now.) Of course, football fans (both male and female), segment along many lines — and NFL marketers will have to find ways to speak to, sell to and grow all those demographics. But acknowledging women was a huge and lucrative step to grow the league’s opportunity massively.

• Learn what will resonate. (Hint: In the battle for consumer hearts and minds, heart wins every time.)
  Once you know who your customers really are and can group them by their common interests, the world opens up. You have the freedom to design new content and experiences to delight them. It doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all any longer; your brand doesn’t have to be watered down to its most basic and neutral. Many brands and publishers struggle for relevance — but once you articulate who your audiences are and understand what they’re interested in, the door is open to all kinds of new conversations. Research, feedback and analytics can all help you become expert in each of your audience segments. Then use those insights to grow your brand.

  Sticking with the NFL as an example, when the league learned about its popularity with women, it took that finding and ran with it, introducing a new website, ad campaign and product lines — all aimed at the now 80 million women who tune into NFL games each weekend. Female fans rewarded the new attention by dropping millions on NFL apparel, jewelry, nail polish, yoga mats, etc. The league went further and partnered with the American Cancer Society to raise awareness about breast cancer, which explains all the pink flourishes (gloves, socks, wristbands, etc.) on the field and the sidelines these days. This overdue — and heartfelt — outreach strengthened the bond between the NFL and its huge female fan base. The league’s bottom line smiled. In 2012, NFL fans spent $3.2 billion on consumer products.

• Timing is everything.
  Of course, the most basic element of the art of content programming, one that has been mastered by the TV networks, is knowing what performs when. Prime-time shows don’t work in the mornings, and re-runs would squander the huge opportunity of evening viewing. There’s a time for opinion and a slot for hard news, and reversing them tanks performance and tunes out audiences.

  But on the Web, well, somehow the only rule of thumb our industry seems to know is “the best time to post is now.” And that’s preposterous.

  In terms of social, the state of the art sounds better, at least at first: There are lots of generalizations out there about when to post content: Mornings are better than evenings, Facebook sharing spikes on weekends, tweeting peaks on Fridays. Well, that’s all great in theory, since it documents average behavior of average audiences. But the point isn’t to get it right for someone else’s average consumer. Whether we’re talking about work or play, we all develop our own individual routines and habits. Discovering the personal quirks of your particular audience is a goldmine for programmers.

  How powerful is it? Several years ago, a U.K. content agency called Collective Content was helping a small management firm develop its programming strategy. Traffic to the client’s website waned on weekends. Nothing surprising there. But Collective Content began to notice an uptick in Sunday visits. “Sunday evenings had become the new Monday morning,” wrote Collective Content founder Tony Hallett. “Execs and other managers were getting a jump on the working week. This was a great time to feed their need for information.”

  At Wetpaint, we try to time content delivery to the distinct habits of our audiences, which vary from show to show. The very young (13-24) “Pretty Little Liars” audience likes a fast-paced, high volume content diet, so we serve them fresh stuff all day long. Older (55 percent are over 24) “Grey’s Anatomy” fans catch up on new content in the evening, just before they get into TV-viewing mode. So we freshen our “Grey’s Anatomy” pages late in the day. If you program according to someone else’s guidelines, all your best shots will miss your target. Instead, know your audience and you will hit the mark.

• Like it or not, people judge books by their covers. Design your packaging to resonate.
  In pre-digital days, content packaging discussions went like this: How long is the story? Do we need photos or illustrations? Today, fuhgeddaboutit. Digital editors have lots more arrows in the quiver. They can trot out old packaging chestnuts like long-form profiles or Q&As, or they can present content in slideshows, video, audio, polls, quizzes, clickable infographics, Spotify playlists, etc. The packaging options just keep growing — and so does the menu of social media megaphones you can use to trumpet the final product.

  Working all those levers in a way that engages your audience and exploits the strengths of each packaging and delivery option is an art and a science. BuzzFeed is one of its master practitioners. In its self-proclaimed rules for “How to Go Viral” (an infographic, of course), Buzzfeed recommends making lists (“9 out of ten Internet lists go viral”), using quizzes to appeal to user vanity (“People online love talking about themselves”) and staying relevant. We won’t quibble with the BuzzFeed rulebook. But in our own experience, packaging — like timing and just about everything else — is audience-specific. Fans of “Vampire Diaries” like to vote, for example; so we give them polls. And it works — to the tune of thousands of Facebook ballots click-cast for star Nina Dobrev in our sexiest legs poll.

• Test, test, test, for insights you can use.
  If you follow my Digital Quarters blog and Media Success newsletter you know I’m a nut for data. I firmly believe that the only way you can truly know your audience in all its wondrous eccentricity is to embrace testing with a gusto that borders on obsession. (Yes, I am seeing somebody about this.) Every shred of content you produce, from the glossy video to the tiniest tweet, is an opportunity to learn something about the consumers who visit your site. Don’t waste it.

  As you generate (via surveys, focus groups or, our favorite, A/B testing) and then sift through the mounds of data, trends will unfailingly emerge. These insights into user preferences help drive programming decisions at Wetpaint.

  Testing tells us that our “Bachelor” and “Bachelorette” fans revel in relationship gossip. Stories about dating, cheating, break-ups, pregnancy rumors, etc., perform four times better than episode-related news like recaps or sneak peeks. But within that relationship news subcategory, the two audiences diverge: Bachelorette watchers are scandalmongers. Bachelor fans are sentimentalists. We tailor our content accordingly. Testing has also made us smarter about social media. Facebook posts with photos work best when we’re promoting content for scripted (“Grey’s Anatomy”) or reality (“Bachelor”) shows. For breaking news, text-only posts do just fine. If the news is big, words are enough to catch the eye.

• The News Feed is the new EPG, and you must be present to win.
  The greatest opportunity of all in digital media is the chance to be relevant to your audience — not once a day, not on an appointment basis once a week, but minute by minute. To do that means being where your users are at all hours of the day — with exactly the right content at the ready. For consumers, it would be like the “Electronic Program Guide” that we’ve had on TV for the last 20 years — only it would be completely personalized and constantly refreshed. Quel fantasme, n’est-ce pas?

  Lo, there’s an app for that — and it’s the No.1 app on every smartphone. Yes, Facebook is the new Electronic Program Guide. Consumers check Facebook many times a day — usually just briefly, sometimes longer — to see “what’s on” in their lives. In fact, 23 percent of all time spent on smartphones is spent on Facebook mobile apps.

  For media companies, the great opportunity here is to cement your relationship with your audience by getting in their network — and then turning up the content they’ll enjoy to whatever frequency interests them. Do it right — with great audience targeting, insight, timing, packaging and testing — and you earn a position at the top of the News Feed hour after hour, day after day.

  Who understands this well in media? Of late, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer has been talking about building a “daily habit” with consumers. Why not twice a day, or more? That is the power of presence in the feed. And it comes from meeting each member of your audience where she is.

Smart programming is like a good relationship. It requires paying attention, being responsive, trying new things. It’s hard work, but the rewards are enduring — a loyal, ongoing relationship with a growing audience. And that surely makes it worth the effort.

This is a guest post by Ben Elowitz (@elowitz). Elowitz is the co-founder and CEO of next-generation media company Wetpaint, and the author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile.

By a vote of 2 to 1, the Second Circuit appeals court denied a preliminary injunction motion filed by big media companies including Disney, CBS and News Corp. (which also owns this website), upholding an original decision from last summer. You can read the entire decision at the bottom of this post.

In essence, the court said that Aereo’s technical architecture — which pulls down broadcast TV signals from the air, stores them on a computer and retransmits them to its users over the Web, without paying broadcasters for the rights to do so — may well hold up to further legal scrutiny.

The ruling doesn’t mean Aereo’s court battles are over by any stretch, but it is another win for a company that knew from the outset that it would spend a lot of time and money on lawyers. Aereo is specifically designed to fit a legal precedent established by Cablevision, the cable TV company that won the right to create a “cloud-based” DVR for its customers a few years ago. So far that plan seems to be working.

If Aereo, backed by Barry Diller’s IAC, does end up winning in court, it doesn’t ensure that the company will succeed. But it would most definitely affect the bottom line of the broadcast TV networks, which pull in huge fees from pay TV providers for the right to show their programming. Aereo has already received overtures from pay TV providers like Dish Network and AT&T that are intrigued by the notion of bundling the company with Internet-only broadband packages, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

It is worth noting the dissenting opinion from District Court Judge Denny Chin, who doesn’t buy the Cablevision argument at all: “The system is a Rube Goldberg-like contrivance, over-engineered in an attempt to avoid the reach of the Copyright Act and to take advantage of a perceived loophole in the law.” We’ll have plenty of time to watch the two sides hash this out some more.

Meanwhile, if you want to see Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia demonstrate how his service actually works, here he is in action at our D: Dive Into Media conference from February.

AEREO decision –

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130401/barry-diller-and-aereo-win-another-legal-battle/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130319/espns-cunning-plan-to-stream-march-madness-head-to-bill-simmons-house/ http://allthingsd.com/20130319/espns-cunning-plan-to-stream-march-madness-head-to-bill-simmons-house/#comments Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:01:43 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=304857 Turner and CBS paid a gazillion dollars for the March Madness tourney, so the only way you can watch/stream the games is by heading to one of their channels/sites.

But ESPN, which isn’t paying a penny for the games, has figured out how to get in on the action, too. Bill Simmons, the sports network’s star columnist/podcaster/broadcaster/editor, will be offering up commentary during the tournament’s first two days, live, via a YouTube link.

Simmons will host the video stream from his house, along with a cast of characters from his Grantland universe, including ESPN analyst Jalen Rose and writer Rembert Browne.

The idea isn’t to compete with the games themselves, but to offer up pre- and post-game commentary at preset times, along with the option of breaking in live if something merits a pop-in.

I don’t know if this will work, but it certainly sounds intriguing. And a lot more promising than most “second screen” efforts, which seem designed to fulfill some business development goal without ever considering what a bona fide human might want to do while they watch TV.

And I’ve seen at least one version of the idea that seemed to work pretty well: For the last few years, the New York Times’ David Carr and A.O. Scott have been livestreaming their own commentary during the Oscars. If you tuned in to the show last month, you got to see stuff like this.

Here’s Simmons’s vision for his experiment, via email:

We want this to feel like a looser, more irreverent studio show. Like a live podcast where people feel like they are hanging out with us while watching basketball. I have no idea if this will work but we like trying new things at Grantland. … the only way we know if something will be successful is by trying. We will talk about things that I assure you none of the traditional shows will be talking about. Office pools, gambling picks, what we are eating, etc. I can also promise you no other studio show has their mother cooking all day Thursday an Italian feast for everyone to eat on Friday’s shows.

At the end of the day this really is just a convoluted way of getting ESPN to pay me to watch basketball with my friends. Oh — and now I can write off part of my man cave on my taxes.”

(Simmons’s rep would like us to stress that he’s joking about the tax dodge. Though it seems reasonable to me.)

ESPN isn’t attaching ads to the streams, but I can imagine that if it works out, they might try that down the road. Meantime, this isn’t an ESPN stream that requires a cable subscription or any other prerequisite — point your browser to Grantland.com/live and you should be good (not quite sure if the YouTube-hosted stream will play on mobile devices, though).

Here’s the tentative schedule for the shows, to be repeated Thursday and Friday:

• 11:30-12:15 am ET
• 1:30-1:45 pm ET
• 6:10-6:50 pm ET

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130319/espns-cunning-plan-to-stream-march-madness-head-to-bill-simmons-house/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130314/why-you-can-watch-ncis-on-your-ipad-but-not-big-bang-theory/ http://allthingsd.com/20130314/why-you-can-watch-ncis-on-your-ipad-but-not-big-bang-theory/#comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:58:09 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=303709 CBS has a new iPad and iPhone app that will let you watch many of its shows for free. That’s not interesting at all.

What is interesting are the decisions the network has made about what you can watch on the apps, and when you can watch them. Because they say a lot about the state of the TV business, and the way it is and isn’t adapting to digital reality.

Stuff to pay attention to:

• CBS, which for a long time kept most of its shows off the Web, now offers almost all of them on the Web, and you can see most of those on the apps. The omissions in the mobile lineup are the shows that CBS doesn’t own. “Big Bang Theory,” for instance, comes from Time Warner’s Warner Bros. studio, so it’s not on the app.
• You can see most of CBS’ daytime and nighttime programming (soaps, “David Letterman”) on the apps the day after they air. But its primetime stuff — (“NCIS,” “The Good Wife,” etc.) won’t show up until eight days after it airs on the network.

The state of mobile, or at least the state of TV’s thinking about mobile, has a lot to do with both of those decisions.

For starters, while regular human beings recognize that stuff they look at on a tablet or a phone is the same as the stuff they see on TV or a Web browser, that’s not how biz dev and legal people think. So CBS, for instance, doesn’t have the rights to show “Big Bang Theory” on your iPad, even though it can let you watch it on its website.

And even when CBS does have mobile rights, it can’t convince advertisers to give it full credit for the eyeballs that watch its shows on phones and tablets, for technical/measurement reasons. So it’s not going to put stuff on mobile until it has wrung out the full value of its TV ad dollars.

When it comes to “Letterman” and “The Young and the Restless,” that’s the next day. But CBS and other networks are trying to convince advertisers that they should get credit for shows and ads that people watch in the seven days after an episode first airs. That’s not happening right now — currently, they get credit for shows watched live or on DVRs in the first three days after air — but CBS is hoping/assuming they’ll get what they want in the next couple years.

CBS isn’t the only network paying attention to the so-called “C7” window; you can see evidence of that in Fox’s decision to keep its shows off the Web except for “authenticated” viewers who are also paying for cable TV. (News Corp., which owns Fox, also owns this website.)

But that thinking isn’t universal, either: Right now you can watch the episode of “The Neighbors” that aired last night on ABC, on the network’s site or its iPad app, or on Hulu, for free, without any kind of sign-in/registration.

Actually, you can watch it here, too (unless you’re reading this on a tablet or mobile, because, see above). Enjoy.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130314/why-you-can-watch-ncis-on-your-ipad-but-not-big-bang-theory/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130312/blocked-march-madness-heads-farther-behind-the-cable-paywall/ http://allthingsd.com/20130312/blocked-march-madness-heads-farther-behind-the-cable-paywall/#comments Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:37:08 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=302719

Aspen Photo / Shutterstock.com

Heads up, cord-cutters: If you want to watch March Madness next year, you’re going to have to pay up.

The last two rounds of next year’s college basketball tournament, including the championship game, are likely to be broadcast on one of Time Warner’s Turner network channels — TBS or TNT — instead of CBS, according to Sports Business Daily and the New York Times.

CBS and Turner share coverage of the tournament, and the switch for the final games was already scheduled for 2016. No one has explained why the two companies are moving the date up by two years, but it fits a pattern we’ve seen for several years: Big-time sports events migrating from free TV to pay TV.

In 2006, Monday Night Football moved from ABC to Disney’s ESPN. If you wanted to watch much of last summer’s Olympics, you needed a pay TV subscription that gave you access to NBC Universal’s cable channels. And as SBJ’s John Ourand notes, the BCS college championships, the NBA conference finals and some baseball playoff games have all moved over to cable, as well.

The free-to-pay move serves the interests of the TV Industrial Complex in several ways: The cable networks, flush with cash from subscriber fees, can afford to pay big bucks for the rights to what is must-see TV for many people. And because it’s must-see TV for many people, it helps raise the overall value of the cable networks (Rupert Murdoch used the same strategy to turn Fox into a legitimate broadcast operation two decades ago).

And moving big-time sports to pay TV helps pay TV, period. Nielsen figures there are five million cord-cutters, or cord-nevers, and that number would presumably be much bigger if you could get sports online without paying for TV.

Which is why I’ve been waiting for Google, or Apple, or Intel, or some other TV outsider to pony up for the rights to a slate of NFL games, or some other sports franchise that millions of people have to watch, no matter where they are. Hasn’t happened yet.

(Note that if Aereo, which distributes broadcast TV over the Web without paying programmers a penny, wins its court case, then expect just about every big broadcast show — not just sports, but everything — to move from broadcast to cable networks owned by the broadcasters. Big if, though.)

Meantime, if you’re serious about college hoops and you’re serious about not paying for TV, you might still have a legal option next year.

Last year, CBS and Turner offered a $4 package that let you watch the games live on Android and iOS devices, and that option has gone away this year. This time around, you can only stream the Turner games if you’re an “authenticated” pay TV subscriber, though you can still stream the CBS games to your PC without registration.

But Turner/CBS are offering app users a free four-hour “preview” this time around. So if you’re willing to do a little planning — and if the option is still available — you could save up your preview time for the championship game, and at least watch that one for free.

That sounds like a lot of work, right? That’s what the pay TV guys are hoping you think …

Aspen Photo / Shutterstock.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130312/blocked-march-madness-heads-farther-behind-the-cable-paywall/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130311/william-morris-endeavor-invests-in-app-maker-chaotic-moon/ http://allthingsd.com/20130311/william-morris-endeavor-invests-in-app-maker-chaotic-moon/#comments Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:42:37 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=302336 Talent agency William Morris Endeavor says it has taken an undisclosed but “significant” stake in Chaotic Moon, an Austin, Texas-based software company. Chaotic Moon makes apps and other products for a range of companies including Disney’s Marvel, Microsoft and CBS; it also did much of the work on The Daily, News Corp.’s now-shuttered iPad app.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130311/william-morris-endeavor-invests-in-app-maker-chaotic-moon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130227/native-ad-network-sharethrough-lands-veteran-digital-exec-patrick-keane/ http://allthingsd.com/20130227/native-ad-network-sharethrough-lands-veteran-digital-exec-patrick-keane/#comments Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:00:08 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=298816 The last time Patrick Keane went to work for a digital media startup, he took the reins of Associated Content and things went pretty well: He ran the Web-article maker for a little more than a year, and ended up selling it to Yahoo for $90 million.

So keep an eye on Keane’s newest job: He’s going to be president at Sharethrough, a startup that’s trying to let advertisers buy “native ads” at scale on multiple sites.

Native advertising may be the media industry’s most popular buzzword of the moment. In short, it’s an updated version of the old-fashioned advertorials you used to see in magazines and newspapers, or on old-timey radio and TV shows like “Texaco Star Theater”: Content solely underwritten by advertisers that’s supposed to look and act like “real” content. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it so much you’ll share it with your friends.

The model has picked up currency again as advertisers conclude that conventional banner ads and other techniques aren’t registering, and as content-makers try to fight declining ad rates. Two big issues: Most native ads are lousy, and they usually have to be created on a bespoke basis, one website at a time.

Keane, who has also put in time at CBS and Google, says his new company can solve these problems; right now their approach is to function primarily as a video ad network, distributing ad-sponsored clips on lots of different websites.

I’m not sure how they’ll grapple with native ads that aren’t videos, but for now they seem to have some traction. Last year, they sold $18 million worth of ads/content, and are looking to do $40 million this year.

Sharethrough CEO Dan Greenberg, who started the company when he was at Stanford, will stay on. He has raised $11 million in the last couple years, and has 85 employees in three cities.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130227/native-ad-network-sharethrough-lands-veteran-digital-exec-patrick-keane/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130226/why-silicon-valley-is-the-next-detroit/ http://allthingsd.com/20130226/why-silicon-valley-is-the-next-detroit/#comments Tue, 26 Feb 2013 20:36:05 +0000 James McQuivey http://allthingsd.com/?p=298577

Image copyright Suzanne Tucker

All good things must come to an end, including Motown and many a once-noble region or hamlet. So I have history on my side when I lob the following grenade: Silicon Valley will take its turn someday, falling from the heights it has attained.

I make this assertion because if we look closely, we can already see what will cause the decline of Silicon Valley. In fact, the valley’s residents are consciously planting the seeds of the valley’s own demise. What’s more, I believe many of them will celebrate when the valley is no longer on top.

My cheery assessment depends on this sleight of words: Decline is relative, and the decline that Silicon Valley faces will be less like watching Hewlett-Packard slip into irrelevance and more like proudly standing to one side as the rest of the world — eventually even the less-developed world — catches up to it. Thus, the “decline” I claim the valley seeks and will eventually succumb to is a most desirable decline, indeed.

Digital disruption — a force that Silicon Valley gestated and nursed from its earliest days — is now global. Digital devices, the networks that connect them, and the software tools that prod human beings to hanker for more of all these things will soon be everywhere. The long-term effect of rising digital disruption will be to redistribute the benefits of the future across the planet even as it continues to improve the already futuristic valley that started it all. What does Silicon Valley have today that other places will eventually enjoy as well? Access to three things the valley currently has in spades:

• Knowledge. With ubiquitous sensors in every device we own or location we frequent, we will soon collect in a single day far more information than we could have stored in all the hard disks manufactured prior to 2000. But that information is meaningless if we can’t render it into knowledge, which granted the smart people of Silicon Valley an early edge that they are now giving away for free. Analytics available to even the lowest YouTube channel producer now rival the most sophisticated reports CBS, NBC and ABC had available in the 1980s. Apply even better analytical engines to the data from Fitbit pedometers, Google Glass and the myriad of sensors that will listen to the stress in our voices or identify behaviors that undermine our health, and you’ve got an unprecedented depth and breadth of knowledge available soon to anyone, anywhere.
• Tools. Knowing something is nice, but being able to act on that knowledge is even better. Digital disruption depends on the distribution of tools — most of them free or nearly free — that equip anyone who wants to use knowledge to initiate and test a new concept. Kickstarter and its peers provide this opportunity for thousands of people who want to test their ideas; Amazon can make anyone a merchant partner, an affiliate, or an author, all for no cost; and the Square card reader just helped local merchants sell $800,000 worth of goods and services around the Super Bowl on game day in New Orleans.
• Capital. It’s not that there’s money going around. But thanks to the knowledge and digital tools available to you, you need a whole lot less of it to bring your idea to fruition. I recently spoke to Charles Teague, CEO of FitNow, the company behind the wildly successful LoseIt! calorie- and weight-tracking app. A veteran of the startup business from the earliest days at Allaire, Charles described for me with a slight tone of disbelief in his own words how cheaply he can launch and manage a company today compared to even ten years ago. This is partly because the tools are cheaper — you can open your Amazon Web Services account with a credit card — but also because much of the value digital disruptors deliver today comes through software. And as a successful entrepreneur who had sold his company to Qualcomm told me last year, “It’s just software; I can do anything in software for $40,000.”

People fond of wine and cheese will argue that there’s more to valley life than just these three things. That’s certainly true, but when you have more knowledge, tools and capital, some of the other things the valley prizes become common elsewhere as well. A culture of achievement, for example. As only people who have lived in a subculture that keeps them down know, the valley is a unique place where even surfers think they can be the next startup billionaires, leading to the creation of a company like GoPro.

It’s presumptuous of me to suggest that all valley residents will be so happy to be dethroned, even if the decline is only relative to the rise of the rest of the world. Venture capitalists, lawyers and politicians will feel the relative decline the most because their services have long been offered under the presumption that the value they provide is scarce, an assumption that’s now patently false. Other valley residents will be pleased, at least if Jeff Hammerbacher, Chief Scientist at Cloudera, is any indication. As he told me in an interview for my new book, “Digital Disruption,” “I don’t subscribe to the ‘great man’ theory of the world. I’d much rather create fertile soil for other innovators to plant their seeds in than just water my own tree. “

He actually talks like that. And that’s what makes him and many others like him the planters of the same seeds that will sow the relative decline of Silicon Valley by lifting everybody else up to join it. Even — perhaps especially — Detroit, home of over 250 Kickstarter projects.

James McQuivey is the author of “Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation.” He is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research and the leading analyst tracking the development of digital disruption.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130226/why-silicon-valley-is-the-next-detroit/feed/ 120 http://allthingsd.com/20130222/former-cbs-exec-lurie-joins-former-yahoo-levinsohn-at-guggenheim-digital-media/ http://allthingsd.com/20130222/former-cbs-exec-lurie-joins-former-yahoo-levinsohn-at-guggenheim-digital-media/#comments Fri, 22 Feb 2013 18:35:23 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=297250

Well-known digital media exec Zander Lurie has been hired by former Yahoo exec Ross Levinsohn to become one of his key lieutenants at Guggenheim Digital Media.

Lurie will be an EVP there, where he will help manage and grow the new heavily funded digital unit of Guggenheim Partners, whose current media assets include Billboard, the Hollywood Reporter, Adweek, the Clio Awards, Film Expo Group and the digital extensions for Dick Clark Productions.

Lurie was most recently an exec at CBS, including as SVP of strategic development, where he worked on a number of key digital initiatives. He was CFO and head of business development for CBS Interactive and also worked on M&A at its CNET tech news unit. Lurie left the media giant in May.

“The opportunity to join Guggenheim Digital Media and work alongside Ross was a no-brainer,” wrote Lurie to me in an email. “We have high-quality, trusted brands in the portfolio and an appetite to grow our position in the premium content/video landscape.”

Expect more acquisitions now that the deal-making Lurie is joining the deal-making Levinsohn and there’s a pile of dough to spend.

Lurie is the first significant hire by Levinsohn, who became CEO of GDM last month. He had been interim CEO of Yahoo, but lost that job when the Silicon Valley Internet giant hired former Google exec Marissa Mayer.

Michel Protti, who worked with Levinsohn at Yahoo as his chief of staff, is also joining GDM as SVP. Before Yahoo, Protti worked at McKinsey & Company.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130222/former-cbs-exec-lurie-joins-former-yahoo-levinsohn-at-guggenheim-digital-media/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130221/ok-microsoft-whats-your-next-game-machine-going-to-look-like/ http://allthingsd.com/20130221/ok-microsoft-whats-your-next-game-machine-going-to-look-like/#comments Thu, 21 Feb 2013 15:50:45 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=296965 Sony showed off its next-generation gaming machine last night — except it didn’t.

So what does Microsoft plan to do when it replaces its own gaming console? We asked Xbox head Yusuf Mehdi when he stopped by the D: Dive Into Media conference last week, along with Nancy Tellem, the former CBS executive hired to build up Xbox’s video business.

You can see what they had to say below, in the full-length version of their interview. Warning: Neither Mehdi or Tellem wanted to spill much (then again, they didn’t promise a “launch” event, so you can’t blame them).

But you can read between the lines and get a sense of where they’re headed: While lots of people are interested in lightweight casual games and low-cost machines that can play them, Microsoft seems committed to the idea of a heavy-duty machine with lots of proprietary bells and whistles. So you shouldn’t expect an Apple TV-sized box, for instance.

Tellem, who is building a full-fledged studio in L.A. to create shows, series and events for Xbox, is noncommittal as well (likely because she is still figuring it out). But she is talking about the same kinds of ideas: Video that isn’t just proprietary to Xbox, but that takes advantage of the device’s hardware and processing power. Assume that once she gets going, for instance, she’ll create stuff that takes advantage of Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensors.

One big difference between Sony and Microsoft is the way the two companies are positioning their machines: While Sony’s customers spend plenty of time streaming video on the PS3 (they log more Netflix hours than Xbox users), Microsoft is much more explicit about using the Xbox as an entertainment device, period.

Which is why it’s interesting that Microsoft has decided, at least for now, not to go ahead and simply become a pay-TV provider, like Intel says it will do this year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130221/ok-microsoft-whats-your-next-game-machine-going-to-look-like/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130219/dish-networks-charlie-ergen-gets-real-the-full-dive-into-media-interview/ http://allthingsd.com/20130219/dish-networks-charlie-ergen-gets-real-the-full-dive-into-media-interview/#comments Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:26:02 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=296113 Last week, we hosted our second D: Dive Into Media conference in Dana Point, Calif. If you joined us in person, you got a day and a half to talk with and listen to the most interesting people in the media business as they spoke about the future of their industries. If you tuned in to our livestreams, you got a free, real-time sample of what that was like.

And if you missed the whole thing? Your loss!

But no worries: This week, we’ll start running complete videos of each of our onstage interviews and demos, so you can review them anytime you want. We’re kicking off today with Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen, who rarely speaks in public, but sat down with us for an hour.

We’re so glad he did, because he has got one of the most interesting perspectives on the way technology is reshaping the TV business — and the ways that the TV business is stubbornly and successfully resisting change.

Some of this stuff parallels thoughts you’ve heard from other people — but usually not those with this much skin in the game. Ergen is a billionaire with the third-largest pay-TV business in America. So getting this stuff right matters a whole lot to him.

There’s a lot of great stuff in here. Like:

• Ergen’s assessment of his odds as he tries to grab Clearwire’s spectrum out of Sprint’s clutches (low), and why he’s taking on CBS and every other broadcaster with his ad-skipping Hopper DVR (both for leverage and because his customers want it).
• His explanation of why he bought Blockbuster (real estate) and why he failed to challenge Netflix (too late, too timid).
• His take on cord-cutting, which you never hear pay-TV bosses say out loud. (Yep, it’s real. And cord-nevers — kids like his who don’t have pay TV and never had — are even real-er.)
• What he thought of the Bloomberg Businessweek piece that described Dish as “The Meanest Company in America,” and whether his company’s work culture will let it compete with the likes of Google and Facebook. (Dish is not going to be supplying private buses for its workers anytime soon).

And the nice thing is that you get to sample as much, or as little, as you like. Enjoy, and come back for more over the next few weeks:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130219/dish-networks-charlie-ergen-gets-real-the-full-dive-into-media-interview/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130218/i-love-you-man-gates-lashes-himself-to-ballmer-over-microsofts-mobile-mistake/ http://allthingsd.com/20130218/i-love-you-man-gates-lashes-himself-to-ballmer-over-microsofts-mobile-mistake/#comments Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:41:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=295998

In a wide-ranging interview with Charlie Rose on “CBS This Morning,” Microsoft Chairman and co-founder Bill Gates made a little news — or a lot of it, if you are a reader of internal tea leaves at the software giant — in noting that the company’s early mobile strategy was “clearly a mistake.”

But, perhaps more interestingly, when asked about the meh performance of Steve Ballmer, who replaced Gates as CEO some years ago, the typically non-diplomatic tech legend declined to throw his longtime confidant over the side.

Instead, he strapped himself to Ballmer, in an orgy of “he-and-I” band-of-brothers statements that clearly linked the duo, even though Rose’s question was specifically about how Ballmer was doing.

“He and I are two of the most self-critical people you can imagine,” said Gates, noting a lot of “amazing things” such as Surface and Xbox in the Ballmer regime. “Is it enough? No, he and I are not satisfied that in terms of breakthrough things that we’re doing everything possible.”

Gates did note the obvious in addressing the slowness of Microsoft in the mobile market over the last several years, which has allowed rivals like Apple and Google to dominate the key sector.

“There’s a lot of things like cellphones where we didn’t get out in the lead early,” said Gates. “We didn’t miss cellphones, but the way that we went about it didn’t allow us to get the leadership.”

No, it did not, but Gates is not blaming Ballmer for it, it seems.

Watch for yourself:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130218/i-love-you-man-gates-lashes-himself-to-ballmer-over-microsofts-mobile-mistake/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130211/dishs-charlie-ergen-says-he-doesnt-want-to-kill-ads-for-real/ http://allthingsd.com/20130211/dishs-charlie-ergen-says-he-doesnt-want-to-kill-ads-for-real/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2013 03:04:28 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=293944 The new version of Dish’s Hopper lets customers watch any show they’ve paid to see, on any device they want, when and where they want to watch it. Broadcasters were already suing Dish over the device, and in the case of CBS, it prevented subsidiary CNET from awarding the device top prize at CES. (For his part, Walt Mossberg preemptively awarded the gadget the D: Dive Into Media best-in-show award, which is fictional.)

Dish Chairman and co-founder Charlie Ergen said tonight that he’s not out to kill ads, and he’s not seeking leverage over broadcasters. He’s simply pushing past old one-size-fits-all TV modes of advertising — while being careful to stay within the lines by fully recording original broadcasts from satellite transponders before enabling ad-skipping.

Speaking at D: Dive Into Media this evening, Ergen said, “I don’t want to kill ads. I think advertising is great, and I’m very aware that there’s multiple revenue streams in television, subscription and advertising. But I also don’t want to put my head in the sand, and I think the world is changing.”

He added, “If we’re going to take a side, let’s take the side of the consumer.” That means doing things like letting watchers choose between ads, as Hulu does, Ergen said.

“A single mom may not need that testosterone ad that runs time and time again; she may want something about fashion,” he said.

Ergen posed his ongoing litigation with broadcasters as a battle for the future of commercials. “If the broadcasters were to win on their claims, they’d outlaw the DVR,” he said.

Dish is a different breed, according to Ergen. “As a company, we’re hobbyists. We hope to make money, but if we make good products, we’ll make money. As a company, you have two choices — you can fight change or you can embrace change. And I believe it’s less risky long-term to embrace change.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130211/dishs-charlie-ergen-says-he-doesnt-want-to-kill-ads-for-real/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130211/amazon-will-get-new-cbs-stephen-king-series-while-its-still-on-the-air/ http://allthingsd.com/20130211/amazon-will-get-new-cbs-stephen-king-series-while-its-still-on-the-air/#comments Mon, 11 Feb 2013 15:16:32 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=293564 On June 24, CBS starts running “Under the Dome,” a 13-episode miniseries based on a Stephen King novel, produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television. And on June 28, Amazon Prime customers can begin watching the show online for free.

It’s no longer news when CBS or any big TV player licenses their stuff to subscription video companies like Amazon or Netflix. But this one does have a twist. It’s one of the few times subscription video customers can watch a show “in-season” — that is, they can see it online while it’s still running on TV.

CBS in particular has been conservative about keeping its shows offline for a long time. Frequently, it won’t license its stuff until the show is off the air, period.

The difference this time is that “Under the Dome” is a one-off summertime miniseries, and presumably CBS assumes that it will have limited value in reruns or syndication. So it’s willing to move things up quite a bit.

And even then it is careful to make sure that it maximizes its value for the network before it goes digital: The TV guys get advertising credit for anyone who watches their shows within the first three days after they air. Amazon won’t get the shows until that window closes.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130211/amazon-will-get-new-cbs-stephen-king-series-while-its-still-on-the-air/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130210/amid-super-bowl-blackout-its-back-to-you-no-back-to-you-on-snl/ http://allthingsd.com/20130210/amid-super-bowl-blackout-its-back-to-you-no-back-to-you-on-snl/#comments Sun, 10 Feb 2013 17:16:50 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=293275 It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that the Super Bowl blackout that played out on TV screens last Sunday would find its way into a “Saturday Night Live” sketch six days later. Last’s night’s outing opened with a sketch riffing on how the CBS broadcast team, forced to improvise for 34 minutes, began to run out of things to talk about.

While there was certainly a lot of squirming in the broadcast booth, there was plenty of chatter on social networks, even though technically speaking, most people gave the Web the night off.

Anyway, if you didn’t see it last night, here’s the sketch, courtesy Hulu.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130210/amid-super-bowl-blackout-its-back-to-you-no-back-to-you-on-snl/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130204/the-super-bowl-gave-the-web-the-night-off/ http://allthingsd.com/20130204/the-super-bowl-gave-the-web-the-night-off/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:23:04 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=291323 Yes, you could stream the Super Bowl on the Web yesterday. But most of you didn’t. And while a lot of you were tweeting or Facebooking during the game, a lot of you stayed away from the Web during the game, period.

Here, via broadband service company Sandvine, is what happened to Web traffic during the game, at an unnamed East Coast-based ISP:

Overall, Sandvine says, network usage was down 15 percent during the game. And that makes plenty of sense. Though it would have been interesting to see what had happened if the 49ers hadn’t shown up, post-blackout, and decided to make it an actual competition.

Also not-that-surprising-but-still-interesting: Those of you who did tune into CBS’s livestream (and bonus features) did it more often when there was something interesting to watch — like Beyonce, or Colin Kaepernick running at super speed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130204/the-super-bowl-gave-the-web-the-night-off/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130204/super-bowl-eyeballs-up-a-bit-super-bowl-chatter-up-a-lot/ http://allthingsd.com/20130204/super-bowl-eyeballs-up-a-bit-super-bowl-chatter-up-a-lot/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:36:06 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=291208 Last night’s Super Bowl set a new ratings record. Last night’s Super Bowl also set new records for social chatter on Facebook and Twitter.

No coincidence, right?

Well. Maybe. The numbers are still rough, and will morph a bit over time. But here are the basics:

TV ratings are up slightly: CBS says last night’s game earned a 48.1 rating, which means it drew a few hundred thousand more U.S. households than the 2011 Super Bowl, which held the previous record with a 47.9 rating. Each ratings point equals about 1.14 million households, so once you’re done rounding, the audience for both games was right around 54 million homes. The Super Bowl is such a huge event that it’s hard to move the numbers much one way or another.

Social numbers are up a lot: You can take your pick of social metrics here, all of which measure different data sets. Social tracker Trendrr says social activity was up 2.7x, from 17.5 million comments to 47.7 million. Competitor Bluefin thinks comments were up 2.5x, from 12.2 million to 30.6 million. Twitter itself tracked 22.1 million comments, up from 13.7 million last year.

So: A lot more chatter, not many more eyeballs. This actually looks quite a bit like last year’s numbers, which saw chatter go way up while actual viewing dropped a tiny bit. And we’ve seen other examples, like last fall’s MTV Music Video Awards, where social metrics went up a bunch while ratings slumped.

So perhaps it’s time to stop associating increased Twitter and Facebook traffic with increased ratings. Social activity may help the TV guys keep an audience, and that’s certainly a good thing from their perspective.

But my hunch is what we’re really seeing is an increase in the per capita volume of social chatter. That is, people who like to talk about TV on Twitter and Facebook are even more likely to talk about TV than they were last year, or the year before that.

Now we have to figure out what that means for advertisers, programmers and the social networks themselves.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130204/super-bowl-eyeballs-up-a-bit-super-bowl-chatter-up-a-lot/feed/ 0