You’ll have to take my word for this, but this is exactly what it looks and sounds like on my phone — there’s no drop in quality in this YouTube upload.

What’s truly bizarre is that the live NFL streaming that Verizon does provide is actually pretty good. Or at least it was, when they were offering it for free at the beginning of the season. I don’t know why they’d want to promote it with something that looked like it was made on a Commodore 64.

Also odd: Verizon has made competent, attractive ads for its NFL offering in the past. Here’s one from 2011:

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Neil Webster)

And for those who are into both football and geekery, tomorrow is kind of like the Super Bowl. Well, technically speaking, I guess tomorrow is like the Super Bowl for everyone.

Anyhoo. For everyone looking for some tech to go with their gridiron, there are lots of options.

First of all, NBC is streaming the Super Bowl live over the Internet, for those who can’t make it to a television or want a second screen to enjoy even more of the action.

ESPN president John Skipper said at D: Dive Into Media that he thinks giving away the game for free is a bad idea, but NBC paid for the rights, so they get to do what ever they want.

Verizon is also broadcasting the game live to the smallest of screens via its NFL Mobile service. (However, Peter Kafka notes their marketing of said service could use some work.)

Second, there are a ton of Super Bowl apps, including the official ones for both iPhone and Android, as well as a game program. Peanuts are still not downloadable, but content-tagging app Shazam is offering a variety of commercial tie-ins. Check here for even more game-day apps.

And of course, the big game will be the talk of Twitter, to be sure.

Lastly, as a special treat, AllThingsD will be offering live coverage of the game, the commercials and the social-media hoopla. We had so much fun in January with Footballmer, our liveblog mash-up of Steve Ballmer’s final CES keynote and the BCS championship, that we decided to do it again.

This time, though, I’ll actually get to watch the game, rather than having Ballmer duty. I’ll be commenting on the game, the commercials, the tech and the Twitter commentary. Check back tomorrow before kickoff for that.

But for those more interested in the postgame highlights and analysis, the inaugural Super Bowl XLVI app from NFL Magazine might do the trick.

The tablet app is meant to be more commemorative than anything else — think of those dust-gathering magazines you collect each year — and it won’t stream the game live.

The app will offer image-rich season recaps for both teams, player highlight reels, polls and Super Bowl history. (No word on whether it includes a slide show of Tom Brady’s hairstyles throughout the years.)

After the game, the app will be updated with 15 to 20 minutes of highlight clips, breakdowns of key plays, interviews with players, NFL.com articles on the game and 360-degree photos.

The video available on the app during and after the game will be “clean” game highlights from NFL Network. Later on, extended highlights from NFL Films, with NBC logos and graphics, will be made available through the app.

The app, which is available on the iPad and on Android tablets, is selling at a pregame discount of $2.99 — which is less than half of the postgame price.

“We’ve seen a lot of fan demand for this,” said Jeff Berman, general manager of NFL Digital Media. “We plan to keep the app fresh for several weeks as we introduce new content, and ultimately provide a kind of lifetime digital keepsake.”

Nielsen data shows that 70 percent of tablet owners and 68 percent of smartphone owners use their devices while watching TV, while a poll conducted by Velti and Harris Interactive shows that nearly 60 percent of mobile users plan to look at or use their mobile device during the game. We’ll likely see some interesting data after Sunday, as well, about mobile usage during the Super Bowl. These metrics are key for advertisers as they try to gauge how many eyeballs are on second — and third, and fourth — screens during big television events.

And what about those Super Bowl ads, you ask? NFL Magazine’s Super Bowl app won’t feature any third-party ads this year, but it will include NFL promotions, as well as ads for The Daily, the tablet newspaper owned by News Corp. (which also owns this site), since the NFL is using The Daily’s technology platform to power the app.

Berman said that since this is the first time NFL Digital has done a commemorative Super Bowl app — it’s the NFL’s first tablet-only app, as well — they’re not focused on signing up a bunch of ad partners to start, though it’s a possibility for future versions of the app.

Revenue generation aside, the app means something else for rabid sports fans: The ability to call up key plays on your tablet whenever you feel like watching them. And rewatching them. And showing them to your friends. And discussing the nuances of the plays.

And unlike a commemorative magazine — which, by the way, the NFL will be producing, as well — the app provides an interactive and updatable experience. Look, Ma, moving pictures!

But if you watch the game on the Web, your eyeballs are worth a whole lot less. NBC, which is streaming the entire thing for the first time ever, will be lucky to get anything near a million dollars for that same ad when it runs online.

So why is Comcast’s broadcast network putting the game on the Web, period? Isn’t this the classic analog-dollars-to-digital-dimes trade that Big Media strives so hard to avoid?

Nope, says Rick Cordella, who runs digital for NBC Sports. The network assumes that nearly every eyeball — and every ad dollar — that it gets from the Web this week will be a bonus, because whoever watches online is simultaneously watching on a big TV, the way football is supposed to be watched.

This is supposed to be the classic “second screen” experience that Twitter’s Dick Costolo and so many other digital folks are excited about.

And that makes plenty of sense to me. Many TV guys have gotten plenty comfortable with the idea of streaming their most valuable live sports events online, for free. In most of those cases, the general assumption is that anyone who’s watching on the Web is someone who can’t watch the game on a TV to begin with — see the CBS/Turner Sports livestreams of the NCAA March Madness tournament.

And in NBC’s case, it is packing the Webcast full of extra camera angles and other goodies, including a feature that will let you rewatch every Super Bowl commercial once it’s aired. The assumption is that you’re holding the TV remote in one hand, and controlling your laptop with another.

NBC already does a version of this with its Sunday Night Football broadcasts during the regular season, and the network says it draws between 200,000 and 300,000 unique viewers per game (that’s the source of that Vikings-Saints screenshot, above).

Meanwhile, those broadcasts are the networks’ best-performing shows by a long shot, so it doesn’t seem to have slowed them down. The NFL, meanwhile, reports that Web companion streams of the Thursday night games it shows on its own channel averaged 450,000 uniques.

So Cordella argues that putting the biggest TV show of the year online, for free, is really no big deal. But I’m pretty sure that this attitude isn’t shared by everyone in the TV business, and we might hear a bit about that today at the D: Dive Into Media conference. Curious to see what ESPN boss John Skipper thinks, for starters.

Electronic Arts is predicting that the New York Giants will defeat the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl, by a single field goal.

For the past several years, the videogame publisher has been using its hit title Madden NFL to simulate the outcome of the Super Bowl — and in six out of the past eight matchups, it has guessed correctly.

But unlike the camel in the New Jersey zoo that has picked the winner of five of the last six Super Bowls, EA breaks down the score quarter by quarter.

EA simulates the Super Bowl by using artificial intelligence and real data from each team. It even includes variables such as injuries. The simulation is powered by Madden NFL and Xbox 360, the official console sponsor of the NFL.

EA replays the game’s highlights in a video, including Giants quarterback Eli Manning being named MVP for completing 25 of 39 passes with two touchdowns, and the Patriots’ Tom Brady throwing for 327 yards and three touchdowns.

Spoiler Alert: To win the game, Giants kicker Lawrence Tynes will make a 40-yard field goal, with the final score 27-24.

The spot depicts a batch of assembly-line robots busily building cars, as an instrumental version of the 1979 Gary Numan hit “Cars” plays happily. All is well until one of the robots experiences trouble and complains to the others, “I’m broken.” No problem, one of the others says, fixes his stricken comrade, and all is again well. Cue the voice-over, saying something about assembly lines that repair themselves. Then cue the corporate logo, aaaand … out.

The spot — which has exactly 100 percent less Ellen Page than the last series of Cisco TV ads — is part of a significant new advertising offensive that Cisco is launching today on television, in print and online. The TV spots will appear during the NCAA basketball games, the National Hockey League’s All-Star Skills Competition, and on CNBC and other business-oriented programming. However, it notably won’t appear during the Super Bowl.

Those robots will be seen again, disassembling and reassembling sections of certain Web sites as part of a series of “site takeovers,” including CNBC and The Street, among others.

The print portion is a six-page “manifesto” that explains ways that Cisco’s “Human Network” plays important and unexpected roles at banking companies and companies that sell chutney, and helps the National Basketball Association push its video around the world. The manifesto will appear in The Wall Street Journal (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.), the Economist and the New York Times.

There will also be a social campaign via LinkedIn that goes after 140,000 C-level executives registered on that network. It will be the first time that embedded video will be used in a LinkedIn campaign. More TV ads will come later this year, as will localized versions of the campaign for international markets.

Last week, I talked with Blair Christie, Cisco’s chief marketing officer, who said that the manifesto in particular is about using the voice of its customers to show how Cisco’s technology can help companies do things they couldn’t do before. Of course, the point they’re supposed to get is that a Cisco intelligent network is what’s enabling them to do that.

Christie says it’s all part of Cisco’s effort to simplify how it communicates about itself. There’s no more muddling of the message. There’s no more consumer division to eat into the perception that Cisco is anything but an enterprise- and service-provider-focused networking company, so no more need for cute ads that overdo awkward jokes about teleconferencing, or showing a giggly twentysomething woman in a virtual fitting room. Cisco is now about transforming how companies do what they do, either by doing it better, or seeing new opportunities. It’s a big message, and a tricky one to get across in 30 seconds during a football game.

I asked Christie about the state of Cisco’s brand before this campaign, and whether or not there were any perceived weaknesses, given its recent troubles, that this ad effort is meant to shore up. “There was actually a lot that was right with our brand,” she told me. “The opportunity we had was clear and simple. Our customer voice is our talent, and that’s what we’re showing, and it’s consistent with our strategy. We use our customers as a test bed, so why not use them as a reflection of our brand? It wasn’t rocket science. But it was the customer voice that was missing.”

Simplifying and streamlining are themes that Cisco is certainly acquainted with of late. It has been doing a lot of those, and indeed, even shrinking itself as part of a broad-based restructuring. The results of that effort are starting to show up in Cisco’s results.

Time will tell if this new advertising campaign will help Cisco effectively reintroduce itself to its core customers; fight off strong competitive thrusts from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, whose networking division marketed itself aggressively against Cisco in 2010; and perhaps press a perceived advantage against Juniper Networks, which has been having its own problems.

What I find notable, or maybe missing from the campaign, are recognizable names of customers doing innovative things. Yes, there’s the NBA, but in the print manifesto, who’s the bank that’s using Cisco’s video TelePresence to interact with customers? Who’s the small chutney company that turned “browsers into buyers”? And who’s the car company with such smart assembly-line robots? It’s a good message that, to my mind, could be made a lot more effective with more specific examples.

And while I grant it’s often difficult to get customers to agree to be named in ads like this — you could almost hear CEO John Chambers’s frustration about not being allowed to name a certain banking customer, about which he was obviously proud, on a recent conference call — the biggest networking company in the world shouldn’t have such a problem. It should be able to brag that this or that household-name bank is an enthusiastic Cisco customer, and that Cisco networks powered the manufacturing of that popular car everyone is talking about right now. That would add some real oomph, and really serve to remind potential customers that Cisco is still, despite its recent missteps, the networking world’s alpha dog.

Anyhow, my critique aside, here’s the robots spot. Enjoy:

Cisco Robots from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

Phew! The NFL kicks off tonight, on schedule, on NBC, when the Saints play the Packers. Which means that some of you, for various reasons, are going to watch it on the Web.

And you can! Even better, you can do it legally, for free: Comcast’s broadcast unit is offering a complete stream of the game, via NBCSports.com, along with additional camera angles and other digital goodies. From the press release:

Sunday Night Football Extra employs a full HD-quality player, which includes a draggable picture-in-picture feature for any of the online-only cameras, plus full DVR functionality allowing the user to pause and scroll back-and-forth – even review plays in “slo-mo.”

After tonight’s game, NBC will offer the free streams for every game it broadcasts this season, every Sunday night.

It’s the fourth season in a row that NBC has done this, and I’m always surprised that more people don’t make a big deal out of it. NFL TV rights are the most valuable thing in video, and they only get more expensive each year — Disney just agreed to pay nearly $2 billion a season for Monday Night Football rights.

So the notion that a broadcaster would put this stuff up for free on the Web at the same time seems counterintuitive. (Note that Monday Night Football, for instance, is one of the only things you can’t watch via ESPN’s excellent new iPad/iPhone app.)

The only conclusion I can draw is that there just aren’t that many people watching the live streams — because really, if you have the option, you want to watch this on your big HD set, right?

OK. So what about the rest of the season? Well, you can watch that on the Web, legally, too. But it will cost you: Head over to DirecTV to see how much they’re charging for access to their “Sunday Ticket” package, which now includes unlimited access on your laptop, as well as iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, etc.

(FYI: If you’re willing to shell out for Sunday Ticket but don’t want a two-year DirecTV commitment, and you have a Sony PS3, try out the game device’s new service, which will let you order a season’s worth of football for $340. Pricey, but it will give you more flexibility and you don’t have to worry about installing a dish. Hint: When it asks you if you are able to receive DirecTV where you live, say “no.”)

I don’t condone stealing this stuff off the Web, of course, and those of you who want to do that don’t need my advice, anyway.

I will note, however, that readers who live outside the U.S. and want to stream the games can buy what appears to be a very reasonably priced package directly from the NFL. It looks like $150 for a basic package with all the games, though that may change depending on what country you live in.

*I’m not supposed to do this, because it violates some serious ethical rules, but here goes: Go Pack Go! Except when you’re playing the Vikings. And if you think I’m the only Minnesotan with conflicted Wisconsin loyalties, well — you’re wrong.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

GMG is a publisher of digital currency cards and works closely with Facebook to manage, distribute, market and manufacture the cards.

The cards, which are sold at major retailers including Best Buy, RadioShack, Target and GameStop, are good for Facebook Credits, which is the digital currency used inside all games on the social network.

The digital currency market is growing as more games are played online for free and give players the option of buying virtual goods inside the game. Rather than having to enter a credit card number online, game cards can be conveniently purchased in cash and redeemed online. Another big player in the industry is Atlanta-based InComm.

Topps, which was acquired and taken private by Michael Eisner’s Tornante Company and Madison Dearborn Partners in 2007, says it will leverage the acquisition to enter the digital currency market, while bringing manufacturing, design and collectibility skills to digital currency cards.

Rob Goldberg, the CEO of GMG, will become the VP and general manager of the digital currency business, reporting to Topps CEO Ryan O’Hara. GMG will represent the company’s third business division in addition to trading cards and confections, such as Bazooka bubble gum.

GMG’s other executives, Tim Pechmann and Jeff Mickeal, will also join Topps.

GMG works with about 45 clients, including the NFL and game companies like THQ.

When the selling of Myspace winds down in the next week or so, it’ll probably attract a spate of comments about what a failure the whole social networking enterprise turned out to be.

And — especially when you recall what a Web phenom the social networking site was before it got blown out of the water by Facebook — it was.

That is, unless you think of the mob of former execs who have worked at the company over time, many of whom have moved on to some more golden opportunities after leaving the News Corp.-owned property.

That includes, most recently and notably, former sales head Michael Barrett, who is about to score big as CEO of AdMeld, which is reportedly in the process of selling to Google for $400 million.

Also a big winner: Former Myspace CEO Owen Van Natta, who was fired from that job in one of its many putsches and who quickly rebounded to a top job at online gaming powerhouse Zynga.

So, while it is one of the more overused memes of Silicon Valley, the “mafia” analogy — which has been applied to fertile entrepreneurial breeding grounds such as PayPal, before its acquisition by eBay — is useful when thinking about Myspace.

It is also a good thing to keep in mind about any tech company that goes off the rails: There might still be a silver lining, even if the start-up never sees the light of day again.

As proof, herein is a list I created after pinging a bunch of former Myspace folks:

Jason Oberfest: Former SVP of business development. Now, VP Ngmoco, which was sold to Japanese gaming giant DeNA for $400 million last year.

Dmitry Shapiro: Former CTO, Myspace Music. Now, at Facebook competitor Altly.

Adam Bain: While at Fox Interactive Media, he ran the ad platform for Myspace. Now, head of sales at Twitter.

Jeff Berman: Former president of sales and marketing. Now, GM of the NFL’s digital media unit.

Jason Hirschhorn: Former co-president and chief product officer. Now, on MGM board, angel investor, and there are rumors of him working on a curation start-up.

Amit Kapur: Former COO. Now, CEO, Gravity, an information filtering service start-up.

Chris DeWolfe: Co-founder and former CEO. Now, CEO, MindJolt, an online gaming roll-up.

Ross Levinsohn: Former president of FIM, he was integral to buying Myspace. Now, EVP of Americas unit, Yahoo.

Mike Lang: Former News Corp. strategy exec also involved in Myspace purchase. Now, CEO, Miramax.

Aber Whitcomb: Former CTO. Now CTO, MindJolt.

Jim Heckman: Former chief strategy officer of FIM. Now, CEO of 5to1, recently sold to Yahoo for $25 million.

Dani Dudeck: Former communications head. Now, PR head at Zynga.

Travis Katz: SVP of international. Now, CEO of Gogobot, a social travel start-up.

Richard Rosenblatt: Former CEO of Intermix Media and Chairman of Myspace, he sold it to News Corp. Now, CEO of Demand Media.

Angela Courtin: Former SVP of marketing. Now, EVP at Aegis Media.

These folks should be on the call list of whoever ends up buying Myspace. Last week, I wrote that an investor group, including Activision head Bobby Kotick, is now in the lead for the deal.

As an update, according to sources, Kotick has gotten clearance from Activision’s major shareholder Vivendi to do the Myspace transaction as a passive personal investment.

My Twitterstream was dominated by snarky play-by-play, and the rest of the Web was doing the same thing. Even the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal put Grammy liveblogs on their homepages.

So now it might be nice to head online and actually see–and hear–what I missed. No dice.

The official Grammy site, run by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, has plenty of clips, but none from the CBS broadcast itself–it’s all backstage, or red carpet or other footage I don’t care about. CBS.com doesn’t have anything, and neither does TV.com, CBS’s mini-Hulu.

Meanwhile, Google’s YouTube, the place where I really expect to see clips, is doing a very good/frustrating job of keeping the site scrubbed free of amateur uploads. You can find some stuff, but it takes work, and the quality is poor, and I’m pretty sure it’s getting removed quickly after it goes up.

So while I really want to see Arcade Fire’s performance–my Twitter pals were ecstatic about it–right now the only thing I can find is grainy footage of  Lady Gaga doing yet another Madonna…homage. This may or may not be available by the time you read this:

[UPDATE: Ask, and you shall receive! For now. Thanks to @colinparksfried, @tdotjdot and @nolaschott]

A CBS rep notes that Grammy performances “aren’t typically available online due to rights clearance issues,” and I’m sure that’s true. Any given song can have lots of different owners, and getting all of them to agree to put it on the Web can be a huge hassle. On the other hand, it’s not an insurmountable challenge–that’s why we have Vevo.com, a Web site dedicated to nothing but music videos.

Left unsaid here is that big live events like the Grammys are now TV’s most valuable commodity, and the people who produce big live events continue to struggle with the Web. But more and more of them are getting it–even the very uptight NFL is putting highlight videos up on its site while the games are in progress.

The Grammys are already being augmented very nicely by the Web, which provided it with endless free promotion last night. But now that the live event isn’t anymore, you’d think the music industry, which can use all the promotion it could get, would be pushing very, very hard to let people see what they missed last night.

Who knows. It might even prompt someone to, you know, buy some music.

I’ve taken a quick tour and can report that it’s more or less what you would expect: A filtered stream of tweets about next week’s Packers-Steelers game. Quite astutely, the biggest emphasis on the opening page is on tweets from NFL players themselves, who have embraced the platform even as the league has struggled to make sense of it.

And there are also some cool graphics that show off trending Super Bowl topics, sorted by time, geography, etc. I’m a little surprised to see Steelers talk so widespread throughout the country, but I guess that’s just my Midwestern bias poking through. (Seriously. Everyone’s rooting for Aaron Rodgers, right?)

Twitter did something similar last summer for the World Cup, but that effort didn’t seem to have been thought through very well, and very quickly became overwhelmed with spam and random chatter. I have a hunch Twitter has worked some of that out this time.

Also worth noting is that in the past, this kind of site might have had a hard time attracting much attention, but now Twitter’s ad platform can give it a real shot in the arm: A link to the site is today’s “Promoted Trend.”

He’ll talk to Kara Swisher about the company’s efforts to sell advertising on the service, and if we’re lucky, he’ll give us a glimpse of his improv comedy roots, too. Don’t be shy, Dick!

Dick starts off by insulting Kara’s vest. “Matador casual,” he calls it. Good one! Kara responds by asking him why he’s hanging out at CES.

The same reason everyone else is, Dick says: To talk to industry people. For example, he’d like to get device makers to preload some features like “Fast Follow.”

Kara wants to know if Dick would like a “Twitter button” installed on phones. No, says Dick. But he’d like Twitter to work the same way on different platforms.

So how do you make that happen?

Dick: We’re assigning a product team to make sure that this happens.

Kara: And you’re talking to TV people, too? What’s that about?

Dick: Yep. Because mainstream TV viewing, more and more, they have a device in their hand when they’re watching TV. Like on “Glee.” The characters tweet while the show is on. [This baffles Kara.] When “Glee” starts, tweets per second for “Glee” shoot up, and stay up 100 times that level until the show ends, and then they drop.

That has interesting implications. Like, it takes the DVR out of the mix, because you have to watch in real time to make it worthwhile.

But we don’t know if all of this means Twitter while you watch TV, or Twitter actually on your TV screen.

Kara: Is it important for you to be on the screen?

Dick: We’re already on the screen. But we don’t know if that will be the mainstream experience.

Kara: We had Steve Levitan from “Modern Family” talking about how the Web doesn’t help him, but that he and his team like Twitter.

Dick: Sure! “I was having a conversation with Conan O’Brien, as one does” and he was talking about the importance of Twitter to him, and how the 140 character limit is the right length for a joke. It’s definitely the case that network TV people like Twitter, because it gives them feedback, like they’re in the theater, watching how the shows play out.

Kara: Keep talking about celebrities! I love celebrities.

Dick: Sure! The folks that we’ve hired to work with talent and agencies, etc., we think of those people has high-value publishers. They have a huge following. A lot of people are on Twitter just to hear what those folks have to say.

The interesting thing about the top 200 to 300 tweeters–a lot of them are musicians, actors, etc. LeBron James, etc. I think Lady Gaga is number one. But! They’re not all celebrities. There’s CNN Breaking News. And the New York Times. And other brands like Gary Vaynerchuk, who aren’t really that known outside that world.

And Twitter is disaggregating some of those businesses. Like a third of all the players in the NFL playoffs are using Twitter actively. And many players have more followers than their teams. [Here Dick explains football to Kara.] That’s fascinating.

Kara: Let’s go back to phones. Whats the most important device? Tablet? PC? Phone?

Dick: Mobile is a more and more and more common use of Twitter–40 percent of all tweets created on mobile devices. That might seem low, but it was 25 percent a year ago. 50 percent of active users are also active on mobile.

But Twitter ought to work platform to platform. We want to be agnostic.

Kara: What about what’s coming out from Palm? Working with them?

Dick: Not yet.

Kara: What about games? Talking to those guys?

Dick: Yep. Like with Microsoft on their Xbox, you can see integrating tweets into people who have discussions on Xbox.

Dick: You lost interest in the answer to your question. [True!]

Kara: You’re so annoying.

[Some laughter. Not a lot, though!]

Dick: Anyway, the important thing for us is consistency across device to device to device.

Kara: Speaking of working consistently, how’s that going for Twitter?

Dick: Right. So, we raised a bunch of money. We’re hiring “tons of engineers and operations engineers” in the last year. We hired 100 people in Q4, out of about 350 total. And we’re working very hard on erasing our “technical debt.”

Kara: “That’s a great word for fuck-ups”

Dick: Anyway, we’ve got a guy assigned to this pretty much exclusively. And there used to be a tolerance for this, and now there isn’t. If someone fires a pistol next to your ear every hour, after a while you stop flinching when you hear it. It’s crucial that we do this, both for our users and our engineers, who shouldn’t have to get up at 3 am all the time.

Kara: Time for a vision question, which stumps Yahoo. What is Twitter? What is your vision?

Dick: “We want to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.”

See, that’s a good statement. We’re not just a social network that’s connecting people. It’s connecting for a purpose.

So some people meet girlfriends on Twitter. And other people get tickets to shows they like on Twitter. Etc.

And you don’t have to tweet to get a lot of value out of it.

Kara: What’s the percentage of people who just read Twitter, and don’t tweet themselves?

Dick: Rising. And we have to make that easier to do. “We’re going to spend a lot of time making that consumption experience much better.”

Kara: What’s your business plan?

Dick: To continue to raise money!

[hohoho]

Dick: I’m going to steal Jeff Weiner’s line. We’re a technology company that’s in the media business. Our business model is an advertising model [cough, cough, that's familiar! You're welcome!] So we’re selling ads, and we’re letting people promote their accounts, etc. And we really don’t have to do anything else. Our engagement rates on these ads are ridiculously high. When we saw our stats this last spring when we launched, the numbers were so big we thought we were measuring it incorrectly.

Kara: Is that a big enough business to be a standalone company and/or IPO?

Dick: It’s enough to be a standalone company.

Kara: Sell or IPO?

Dick: We want to be a standalone company. It’s my sincere hope. We’ve accomplished 1 percent of what we want to do.

Kara: You like to sell companies, though.

Dick. Yes, I had two companies that I sold. But that doesn’t mean we’ll sell this one. I’ve had two kids too. But I shouldn’t get a reputation for having kids.

Kara: What’s up with people buying and selling secondary shares of Twitter. It’s an issue for Facebook. What about you?

Dick: We keep an eye on it, and talk to employees about it. But I just think that there are other people that are focusing on it and paying attention, and I’ll let them talk about it. But I just don’t think about that stuff on a day-to-day basis.

Questions and Answers

Q: [sorry missed it].

But answer seems to be about whether Twitter is a platform company or not. Dick quotes Ev Williams by saying they’re not a platform company–they’ve had an API. They want people to be able build off Twitter and build into Twitter. Which requires a more robust API.

Kara has more questions. How do you look at yourself as a leader?

Dick: As a very bald leader.

Kara: But you’re very different than Evan.

Dick: Right. Two components. Three founders at company: Ev, Jack, Biz. They all come at it from a different angle. Jack thinks about simplicity and elegance and the mobile experience. Ev thinks about the user. Biz is “the protector of the brand and the guardian of the culture.”

Kara: He’e the guy who goes on Colbert.

Dick: And he’s great at it. Anyway, those guys are great. My focus is on operational greatness. I try to emulate operators like Ben Horowitz (Opsware) and Susan Wojcicki (Google).

Q: What’s up with that internal page rank for each user? asks Ben Parr from Mashable.

Dick: Your’re not exactly right. We play around with stuff like that. But there’s nothing robust that we would think of productizing anytime soon, and we don’t use it for things like resonance, which we use in ads.

Q: [Sorry, couldnt quite understand.]

Dick is talking about WikiLeaks in general, says there was something specific about WikiLeaks today that he can’t talk about. In general, he hates government mandates to keep things quiet. And he hates that a woman in China was punished for retweeting something. He reiterates Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information. “We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can.” The proof is that we’re banned in China. “We’re not going to sacrifice what we’re trying to do to, you know, get into this country over here.”

Q: How will you work with brands in the future, vs. advertising?

Dick: Our promoted suite of stuff doesn’t simply let advertisers use a giant bullhorn. This stuff has to be organic. “It almost is like a quality-assurance program.”

[Some context for what Dick wouldn't talk about: Feds Subpoena Twitter Seeking Information on Ex-WikiLeaks Volunteer].

Dick is now talking about Twitter and international growth and language. Twitter is growing fast in the U.K. but not in Germany. Why is that? Because German has really, really long words. “There’s a bunch of stuff we want to do, and have to do” just to make things usable in those languages.

Last question, from Kara: What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen at CES?

Dick won’t give a one-word answer. CES is a “quantum conference.” Some years are transformational, some are incremental. “This seems like it was an incremental year.”

And we’re done! Thanks all for your patience. We’ll have video up over the next few days, which should help fill in the gaps left by my lousy note-taking.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110107/live-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-at-dces/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/trying-out-a-revamped-myspace/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/trying-out-a-revamped-myspace/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 23:02:26 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1581 Thanks to the popularity of Facebook, it’s easy to assume that all social networks are designed primarily to connect friends with one another. But many of these networks—think Twitter, Yelp and LinkedIn—aren’t focused on that. Instead, they provide information from strangers, business contacts and group postings on a variety of topics. Myspace is now also shifting in this direction after Facebook decisively overtook it as the most popular social network.

Last month, the company rolled out a revamped version of Myspace, which is owned by News Corp., publisher of the Wall Street Journal. I’ve been testing it to see what has changed and if it’s worth using. Its interface is cleaner than the old version of Myspace and I found it easy to navigate. It’s also inviting for non-members or people who’ve long-since given up on Myspace. But I can’t definitely say I like it enough to add it to my large list of social networks.

Step one of this site’s rehab was a new focus. Myspace (myspace.com) was redesigned to serve as a source of information about entertainment. People who use it can follow five categories—TV, music, movies, celebrities and comedy—that include more than 100,000 topics. News about these topics comes from sites all over the Web and is arranged on users’ home pages to show loads of information at a glance. A Discovery tab at the top of the page shows content related to trends on Myspace makes suggestions based on a user’s preferences and taste. A spokesman said the Myspace topics can be expanded, but for now, if you’re fonder of, say, books, theater or hard news, Myspace won’t be a good fit.

Step two for Myspace included making nice with its old competitor. It now works with Facebook Connect to pull in people’s Facebook “likes” and interests, which automatically generate customized Myspace pages for new users.

The final step of the Myspace redesign was its emphasis on music. The site still contains one of the largest Web music catalogs that plays full versions of songs for anyone who visits Myspace. New versions of band profile pages look more organized. And all artists with band profiles will have ReverbNation’s FanReach email product integrated into their profile to help them create targeted email campaigns for fans.

Was Myspace’s rehabilitation worth the effort? I’ve been using it for a week and it has taught me a lot more than I knew about things I care about. I had no idea that one of my favorite TV shows, TNT’s “The Closer,” recently said that 2011 would be its last season. Nor did I know that Anthony Bourdain blogs about his role as a judge on “Top Chef Masters.” These items and others appeared on my Home page after I performed the process that the Myspace site refers to as a Facebook Mashup.

The Facebook Mashup does a few things automatically for you, in addition to generating a Myspace page filled with topic-related news. A playlist is created in the Music section of your page that contains artists whom you “like” on Facebook (or whom you indicated while setting up an account). And the Videos section of the Myspace page will reflect your tastes in a list of Followed Channels related to your Facebook preferences.

The Home page can be seen in one of three views—List, Grid or Play—and icons at the top of the screen let users toggle among these views. My favorite was Grid View in the Full Grid View format, visible by clicking a small box at the top of the page.

Some of the content displayed on my Home page was mixed up. For example, a tile representing the story about Mr. Bourdain’s blog (originally posted on Celebrifi.com) displayed with it a photo of actor Tom Cruise, who wasn’t mentioned in that post. Another Tom, Tom Colicchio, chef and a “Top Chef Masters” judge, was mentioned in the post, but that doesn’t explain the mix-up.

Anything that falls into the 100,000 plus topics of Myspace’s realm can be found via a search box in the top right corner of the page, but this box is confusingly labeled, “Search People.” Though Myspace still allows users to search for and friend one another, the label on this search box is puzzling, given the greater reach of the site.

You can watch video content from Hulu.com (of which News Corp. is part owner) without jumping to a new page. And videos also come from other sources like TMZ and the NFL.

Users can earn recognition badges—icons that show up on their page—for their involvement on Myspace, and can become curators of topics, awarded on the basis of users’ involvement and how much other people respond to their activity.

This week, a Myspace mobile app was launched in Apple’s App Store, and an Android app is due out next year.

Myspace successfully reinvented itself in a way that could very well get people using it again, but Facebook’s more personalized social network may be more valuable than a rich library of entertainment content.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/trying-out-a-revamped-myspace/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101213/shocking-bieber-upset-oil-spill-tops-twitters-2010-trends/ http://allthingsd.com/20101213/shocking-bieber-upset-oil-spill-tops-twitters-2010-trends/#comments Mon, 13 Dec 2010 08:00:33 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=1147 Although World Cup tweeting caused record high volume and infrastructure demands on Twitter, the most-discussed topic on Twitter in 2010 was actually the Gulf oil spill, said the San Francisco-based company tonight. The South Africa-hosted World Cup came in at No. 2.

(Of course, Twitter hasn’t revealed the secret formulas that helped it aggregate, tabulate and rank these topics.)

In the Twitterverse, after the BP oil spill and soccer, the next most popular topic of conversation in 2010 was the movie “Inception,” followed by the Haiti earthquake and the vuvuzela. The iPad, Android, Justin Bieber, Harry Potter and Pulpo Paul round out the top 10. It’s an odd list, indeed.

The person most discussed on Twitter in 2010 was obviously he of the dedicated servers, Mr. Bieber. (It’s somewhat shocking that world events and tech gadgets were able to keep the teen phenom out of the overall top spot.) Beating out her royal highness Lady Gaga, the No. 2 person on Twitter was Brazilian president-elect Dilma Rousseff (pictured).

Here’s the full 2010 list, courtesy of Twitter, followed by 2009′s list for comparison.

2010 Twitter Trends

Overall Top Trends:
1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

News Events:
1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. Haiti Earthquake
3. Pakistan Floods
4. Koreas Conflict
5. Chilean Miners Rescue

People:
1. Justin Bieber
2. Dilma Rousseff
3. Lady Gaga
4. Julian Assange
5. Mel Gibson

Movies:
1. Inception
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
3. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
4. Despicable Me
5. Karate Kid

Television:
1. MTV Video Music Awards
2. Pretty Little Liars
3. True Blood
4. Walking Dead
5. Grammy Awards

Technology:
1. Apple iPad
2. Google Android
3. Apple iOS
4. Apple iPhone
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops

World Cup:
1. FIFA World Cup
2. Vuvuzela
3. Pulpo Paul
4. Dunga
5. Diego Maradona

Sports:
1. LeBron James
2. Wimbledon
3. Manchester United
4. Brock Lesnar
5. Celtics

Hash Tags:
1. #rememberwhen
2. #slapyourself
3. #confessiontime (hash tag started by Usher)
4. #thingsimiss
5. #ohjustlikeme

2009 Twitter Trends

News Events:
1. #iranelection
2. Swine Flu
3. Gaza
4. Iran
5. Tehran
6. #swineflu
7. AIG
8. #uksnow
9. Earth Hour
10. #inaug09

People:
1. Michael Jackson
2. Susan Boyle
3. Adam Lambert
4. Kobe (Bryant)
5. Chris Brown
6. Chuck Norris
7. Joe Wilson
8. Tiger Woods
9. Christian Bale
10. A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez)

Movies:
1. Harry Potter
2. New Moon
3. District 9
4. Paranormal Activity
5. Star Trek
6. True Blood
7. Transformers 2
8. Watchmen
9. Slumdog Millionaire
10. G.I. Joe

TV Shows:
1. American Idol
2. Glee
3. Teen Choice Awards
4. SNL (Saturday Night Live)
5. Dollhouse
6. Grey’s Anatomy
7. VMAS (Video Music Awards)
8. #bsg (Battlestar Galatica)
9. BET Awards
10. Lost

Sports (Teams, Events, Leagues):
1. Super Bowl
2. Lakers
3. Wimbledon
4. Cavs (Cleveland Cavaliers)
5. Superbowl
6. Chelsea
7. NFL
8. UFC 100
9. Yankees
10. Liverpool

Technology:
1. Google Wave
2. Snow Leopard
3. Tweetdeck
4. Windows 7
5. CES
6. Palm Pre
7. Google Latitude
8. #E3
9. #amazonfail
10. Macworld

Hash Tags:
1. #musicmonday
2. #iranelection
3. #sxsw
4. #swineflu
5. #nevertrust
6. #mm
7. #rememberwhen
8. #3drunkwords
9. #unacceptable
10. #iwish

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101213/shocking-bieber-upset-oil-spill-tops-twitters-2010-trends/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101103/news-corp-earnings-in-line/ http://allthingsd.com/20101103/news-corp-earnings-in-line/#comments Wed, 03 Nov 2010 21:53:31 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25478 That big Myspace relaunch we read about  last week? That’s all fine and good.

But the troubled Web property is a…really troubled Web property, its News Corp. parent stressed today. And it needs to get its act together before it gets kicked off campus.

That’s the message that COO Chase Carey took pains to get across during his company’s earnings call this afternoon.

Revenue at Myspace was down $70 million compared to the same quarter a year ago, the company said, and “traffic numbers are still not going in the right direction, Carey said. Which means that its “current losses are not acceptable or sustainable.”

Okay. But Myspace has been in decline for some time, and Jon Miller and Mike Jones have been trying to fix it for more than a year. And last year at this time, we heard a similar assessment, only then Carey kept calling the site a “work in progress.” So how much more time do they have?

Carey: “We judge in quarters, not in years.”

My understanding is that when Miller took the job as News Corp.’s chief digital officer in the spring of 2009, he believed he had a real shot at fixing the social network, which had already cooled from red-hot to not at all.

But sources in and out of News Corp. tell me that Miller and his team are now merely hoping to patch the service long enough to find a buyer. Perhaps no one has told Carey, who seems to be conducting an anti-sales pitch.

——————-

EARLIER:

First look at Rupert Murdoch’s latest report card: News Corp. ended the September quarter with revenue of $7.4 billion and earnings of $0.27 a share (after factoring out a one-time tax gain). That’s almost exactly what the Street was looking for–expectations were $7.4 billion and $0.24 per share.

A quick run-through by unit:

• Cable: Up, because ad dollars are up and so are those affiliate fees that cable providers don’t want to pay but do.
• Movies: Down, because last year the company had an “Ice Age” movie in its results, and this year it’s fairly hit-less. It is making money selling reruns of “How I Met Your Mother,” though.
• Broadcast TV: Up, because local TV stations are doing better than last year, when they were still crippled by the recession.
• Satellite: Down, because costs were up.
• Publishing: Up, because newspapers are doing better than last year, when they were terrible. Ad revenue is up 13 percent worldwide. (This is where I note that News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)
• Random other stuff: Down, in large part because of Myspace and the rest of News Corp.’s digital unit, which is still trying to turn around.

I’ll come back to liveblog the conference call at 4:30 eastern, in the hopes that Murdoch says something interesting about politics, pay walls, the economy, Myspace, Apple and/or Google. He usually does!

LIVEBLOG:

BIG bummer: No Rupert on call today–because he’s traveling. (Some place with no phones? What’s up with that?)

CFO Dave DeVoe running through segment performance.

Cable: Some boasting about Fox News, FX, Big 10 Network, etc.

Movies: Nothing new here.

TV: TV stations up, but broadcast network losses up big “from higher cancellation costs.”

Satellite: [Apologies, had to duck out for a second.]

Newspapers: Again, ads up in all big newspapers.

Other/Digital: $70 million lower search and ad revenue at Myspace y/y.

Guidance: Leaving unchanged (though DeVoe notes that Myspace is still under plan).

COO Chase Carey:

Lots of focus on our retrans deals, and they are “critical” to our future. “We will be taking this business to a whole new level of profitability.”

Lots of growth ahead in International pay TV market.

Walk through of “key initiatives” throughout the company.

[Still sulking over Rupert-less call.]

Fox Film hasn’t had breakout hits, but no stinkers “in an industry known for them.”

We’ve got Jim Cameron locked up for Avatar 2 and 3, you know. And Modern Family is going to make us a pile of money in syndication.

Wish the World Series wasn’t such a bummer, and a short one. But NFL on Fox doing great.

WSJ still growing. Building digital business that “will take time to emerge.” “We feel very good” about subscription business in U.K.

“We’ve been clear that Myspace has been a problem.”

But relaunching “and we feel really good about” it. “Current losses are not acceptable or sustainable” and current management knows it, even though it’s not their fault.

But we know that we have to work very hard in coming months to get this thing sustainable.

[This is some of the most negative commentary I've heard yet from News Corp. on Myspace. Hard to sell an asset when you're describing it this way.]

Q&A:

Myspace: How much time do you give the relaunch to figure out if it’s successful. And what if it’s not?

Carey: We judge in quarters, not in years. Goal is to get to a place where top-line revenue is going in the right direction and “a clear path to profitability.”

We feel good about the relaunch. But “our traffic numbers are still not going in the right direction” and we have to stabilize that.

Fox TV content on digital platforms: It’s available on Hulu and Fox.com. How is that strategy going, and will you continue to be open?

Carey: Broadly: “This digital arena is still evolving.” We’re very focused on managing rights. Key issues: Windows, ad load, pricing. [Not answering at all, really.] “We think the digital arena is a very important one” particularly mobile, iPad, but “look, scarcity of our product is a real value.” But we’re learning as we go. “I do think it’s important that the digital platforms continue to develop dual revenue stream options.” That’s critical, and options are just beginning to evolve.

More on Myspace: There are a lot of operations in “other” besides Myspace: Mobile, Fox Audience Network, etc. What else could improve there?

Carey: Only two other businesses in there: Mobile, and outdoor networks, (and IGN). Not a lot of room for growth in those businesses.

So it’s really about Myspace?

Yes.

Avatar: What’s upside here?

Carey: Sequel to the most successful film ever? It should be pretty good! “Enormous events, without comparison or rival.”

[Please bring Rupert back!]

Please talk about terms of new Cameron deal?

Nope.

On retrans: Cablevision said they got better terms by holding out for a couple weeks. How do you react to that? If true, will we see more of these holdouts?

[Also a question about BSkyB I'm not that interested in.]

Carey: Mostly I saw Cablevision complaining that the government didn’t bail them out. But we feel pretty good about where we are. We didn’t think the government needed to get into it, and it would have been nice if the government would have been clear up front “it may not have gone off the air at all,” but whatever–”this was a matter to be dealt with between private parties.” [Ignore all those press releases we sent out!]

Can you talk about advertising trends and expectations?

DeVoe [I think]: They haven’t changed.

Cable margins: How long can you keep growing them?

Carey: We have room to drive a number of our channels, via more distribution, jacking up fees, advertising, etc.

What about getting more money from regional sports networks?

Carey: Won’t get into specifics.

[We want Rupe! We want Rupe!]

International channels seem to be doing well. Where is that growth coming from?

Carey: Part of it is the weak U.S. dollar. But overall, growth is “big and broad.”

Oh man. Even Chase Carey is yawning as he answers the question.

[Skipping accounting question.]

Back to network TV: Please talk about sports programming costs, etc. NFL, baseball, NASCAR. You spend a lot. Does retrans help support those costs? Or will you move some of that to cable?

Carey: I don’t think it makes sense to differentiate broadcast and cable much anymore. That’s the point of retrans–to make broadcast look like cable, with dual revenue stream.

On sports: It’s expensive, and draws big crowds. “It’s a unique strength in a world of DVRS” but “they come with big price tags.” We’d like to continue running it, but we have to do it at the right price.

Retrans does help, though–networks that are only ad-supported won’t be able to pay for these rights over time. Still, gotta be disciplined, etc.

Back to digital: What’s going on with Google TV? Are you thinking about different devices and different screens as a way to window, instead of calendar? I.e.: Make it available on PC but not on the big screen, etc.

Carey: I think within the house, the difference between screens won’t matter. I do think mobile is a discrete platform. [And some general chatter about tablets.]

But generally, “our content is incredibly valuable” and “we’re not going to throw it out there for everybody” unless we get compensated for it.

[Boring question about syndicated TV. Carey flipping through papers]

Hey, what about M&A deals, like Yahoo?

“Things like Yahoo are because the press needs things to write about.” [Zing! Also, hey, Jon Miller!] “We don’t need to make any acquisitions. But if there’s something out there, we should consider it, but we’ll do it in a very disciplined way” like we have in the past. Generally, we’d rather build than buy. “But if we see something we can acquire at a very attractive price that fits, we’ll take a look at it.” We’re not shopping.

[Skipping another cable channel question.]

Time for press Q&A:

How do you make broadcast look more like cable?

Carey: Retrans fees, like we’ve been talking about for the past couple years.

What about doing “premium video” (windowing movie release on TV?).

Carey: Looking at it.

What about further delaying movies to Netflix, Redbox beyond 28-day window (Warner talked about this today)?

Carey: We’re okay right now, but we’re looking at it. But as VOD grows, windows will change and evolve. But right now “we feel what windowing we’ve done has been good for us.”

Color on Apple TV 99-cent rental, please:

Carey: It’s pretty new. Only relevant for the past month or so. Too early to judge.

What’s your vision for European and British markets after you buy Sky? Will you buy Endemol?

Carey: Don’t really want to talk about it, too early.

Please talk about Times of London pay wall performance to date. Also, what are you thinking about your iPad newspaper in the U.S.?

Carey: Re U.K.: “We feel very good about it. Realistically, it’s very early….This is not something that’s a one or two quarter game.”

Same thing with the “whole digital arena” evolving, etc.

Hah. Refuses to talk about iPad newspaper. Which is not a newspaper!

Call finished, mercifully.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101103/news-corp-earnings-in-line/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20101018/cablevision-complains-very-quietly-about-news-corp-s-web-blackout/ http://allthingsd.com/20101018/cablevision-complains-very-quietly-about-news-corp-s-web-blackout/#comments Mon, 18 Oct 2010 17:49:08 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24737 Over the weekend, News Corp. briefly pulled down Fox shows from Cablevision customers’ Web browsers.

That’s an unprecedented move in the ongoing fight between cable providers, broadcasters and networks over programming fees. And the news was a big deal for the digerati and people contemplating the future of video.

But it doesn’t seem to have registered in the broader world, and you have to work hard to find any mention of the story in old-media news outlets. And even Cablevision, which uses any ammo it can in the PR fight against Fox and News Corp. (which also owns this site), hasn’t said much about it.

Here, for instance, is Cablevision’s newest message to its customers. If you fast forward to the 1:35 mark, you’ll find a two-sentence description of the Web blackout. But hard to believe many Cablevision customers will be sticking around to hear this one:

At the very least, blacking out part of the Web sounds scary. So why is Cablevision so (relatively) quiet on this?

Two theories, which are not mutually exclusive:

• It’s not worth complaining about because this stuff doesn’t really resonate with consumers–at least, not in the way that losing access to NFL games and play-off baseball does. No one spent Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon in a bar because they couldn’t watch “Glee” on Hulu.
• It’s not worth complaining about because Cablevision and News Corp. are actually on the same ideological page when it comes to this stuff. Neither side is really that happy about free TV shows on the Web. The only real difference the two sides have is about money: News Corp. wants to get more of it for its programming, while Cablevision wants to pay less.

On a related note: I still don’t understand why News Corp./Fox backed off so quickly on Saturday, once news of the blackout got out.

There’s no official reason, but there were mutterings about the technical difficulty of cutting off access to Cablevision TV subscribers while leaving Cablevision’s Internet-only subs alone. But hard to believe that News Corp. didn’t think that one through in advance. Same goes for any “optics”-related reason–the whole point of a move like this was to generate publicity, right?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101018/cablevision-complains-very-quietly-about-news-corp-s-web-blackout/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20101001/nfl-verizon-talk-tablets/ http://allthingsd.com/20101001/nfl-verizon-talk-tablets/#comments Fri, 01 Oct 2010 12:00:38 +0000 Spencer E. Ante http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=30554 The National Football League is in talks with Verizon Wireless (VZ) to distribute its football programming via a tablet computer.

“The NFL will be on a tablet,” said Brian Rolapp, the NFL’s senior vice president of media strategy. “It’s a question of what shape or form. We are currently talking to Verizon about it.”

Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Debra Lewis declined to comment on the talks.

The discussions underscore the growing importance of video to the wireless industry as it begins a major shift to speedier fourth generation broadband networks. The U.S. wireless industry has been touting video for many years but it has yet to take off in a major way.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101001/nfl-verizon-talk-tablets/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100909/watch-the-vikings-and-the-saints-live-on-the-web-for-free-tonight-dont-get-used-to-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20100909/watch-the-vikings-and-the-saints-live-on-the-web-for-free-tonight-dont-get-used-to-it/#comments Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:27:52 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=23284 Brett Favre and the Vikings limp into the Superdome tonight to play the Saints and kick off the NFL season. Great stuff, and if for some reason you’re not going to be in front of a TV, you’re not screwed: You can watch the game live on the Web, legally and for free, via NBC’s Football Extra feature.

Actually, even if you are watching on a big screen, it’s worth playing with the NBC webcast, just for fun: I’ve tried it a couple of times over the past couple of years, and it’s pretty good: The main attraction is the extra camera angles–in the past, they’ve included a shot dedicated exclusively to Favre, which I like. (Some of you, I realize, may choose other angles.)

This is a great, commonsense offering from NBC and the NFL: There’s absolutely no reason to watch football on a PC unless you have to, so it’s hard to see them losing eyeballs here.

Which means every Web visit–and Web dollar or dime–they do get is purely additive. (Note to those of you who like to gripe about this stuff–you will need to have Microsoft’s (MSFT) Silverlight installed to watch the stream.)

But don’t get used to it. After tonight’s game, NBC and the NFL are only offering this once a week, during NBC’s Sunday-night game. And it goes away entirely once the playoffs start. Beyond that, if you want to watch the NFL on the Web, you’ve either got to pay through the nose for a DirectTV package or try to find an illegal stream.

Meanwhile, note the utter absence of a Web marketing campaign telling you about the NBC feed. It’s been up and running since 2008, but I had to reach out to NBC this morning to confirm that it’s still extant.

It’s easy to understand why the Web games are a quiet experiment, unfortunately: NBC and the other broadcasters–CBS (CBS), News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Disney’s (DIS) ABC are paying the NFL a collective $3 billion a year in license fees. So both sides have an incentive, for now, to keep the games a TV-only experience.

Big sports–and pro football in particular–are one of the last bastions of old-style TV economics. Once you see cheap and legal access to the games on the Web, on a regular basis, you’ll know that the TV/Web convergence is here for good.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100909/watch-the-vikings-and-the-saints-live-on-the-web-for-free-tonight-dont-get-used-to-it/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100825/take-that-mark-cuban-bengals-receiver-chad-ochocinco-pays-520-a-word-for-nfl-twitter-fine/ http://allthingsd.com/20100825/take-that-mark-cuban-bengals-receiver-chad-ochocinco-pays-520-a-word-for-nfl-twitter-fine/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:22:17 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=22845 When the NFL banned in-game Twittering by its players last year, I’m pretty sure they had Chad Ochocinco in mind. And while it took nearly a year, the Cincinnati Bengals receiver finally got the league to flex its anti-social-media muscles, via a $25,000 fine for two tweets sent out last Saturday.

Ochocinco (old-timers may remember when he went by the name Chad Johnson) sent this one out about an hour before a preseason game against the Philadelphia Eagles:

Followed by this one, tapped out during the game itself:

By my count (contractions are tricky), those two missives contain a total of 48 words, which puts Ochocinco’s tab at $520 a word. Which means he trumps Mark Cuban’s $510 per-word Twitter fine he got from the NBA a year ago.

And Ochocinco is sorry. Sort of. Because tweeting is great, but exotic luxury cars are expensive:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100825/take-that-mark-cuban-bengals-receiver-chad-ochocinco-pays-520-a-word-for-nfl-twitter-fine/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100315/yahoo-is-teed-up-to-buy-a-sports-site-boomtown-is-betting-on-citizen-sports-for-the-score/ http://allthingsd.com/20100315/yahoo-is-teed-up-to-buy-a-sports-site-boomtown-is-betting-on-citizen-sports-for-the-score/#comments Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:48:51 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25653

According to numerous sources inside and outside the company, Yahoo is poised to slam dunk–I apologize, but sports puns are so easy–an acquisition of an online sports site this week.

And, predicted several of those sources, it is most likely to be San Francisco-based Citizen Sports, a maker of popular apps and games that allow fans to interact on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and Facebook.

Interestingly, Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz is the keynote speaker at the high-profile sports business conference IMG World Sports Congress Wednesday morning in Los Angeles.

There is a plethora of interesting Web sports sites for Yahoo to choose from, including Yardbarker, SB Nation and Rotowire.

With Yahoo’s strong sports content business, especially in fantasy sports and news, and Bartz’s recent statements about making smaller talent and tech acquisitions–as well as the company’s recent focus on social networking and mobile integration–Citizen Sports is a perfect choice.

Citizen Sports started off in 2005 as ProTrade, an “athlete stock market entertainment company,” with $10 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partners Kevin Compton and Doug Mackenzie through Radar Ventures.

Other investors included Kleiner Perkins partner Will Hearst, said the Citizen Sports Web site, “as well as major sports figures, including former Dallas Cowboys quarterback and three-time Super Bowl champ Troy Aikman; Arizona Diamondbacks General Partner Jeff Moorad; legendary NFL Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh; and Northgate Capital Venture founder Brent Jones, the former all-pro San Francisco 49ers tight end.”

But the site has morphed into an innovative digital enabler of interaction among fans of all kinds of sports, via its fantasy sports games and Sportacular iPhone app, as well as numerous apps on Facebook.

It also has tight relationships with Sports Illustrated magazine and other sports partners.

Most interesting is that one of its co-founders, Jeff Ma, was one of the members of the infamous MIT blackjack team, made famous in the book, “Bringing Down the House” and the film, “21.”

It is unclear how much Citizen Sports would sell for, but estimates put its price at about $40 to $50 million.

Both Citizen Sports and Yahoo declined to comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100315/yahoo-is-teed-up-to-buy-a-sports-site-boomtown-is-betting-on-citizen-sports-for-the-score/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100309/verizon-will-carry-nfls-redzone-channel/ http://allthingsd.com/20100309/verizon-will-carry-nfls-redzone-channel/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:27:17 +0000 Matthew Futterman http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=22383 The National Football League and Verizon Wireless (VZ) struck a deal to distribute live games and the league’s wildly popular RedZone Channel beginning next season.

The four-year deal between the country’s most powerful sports league and the largest U.S. wireless operator by subscribers is valued at $720 million, which covers a rights fee and advertising spending, according to people familiar with the details. It will free fans from their couches on Sunday afternoons by giving them access to live footage of every game, something previously only available through a satellite television package. In addition, subscribers can receive the national game telecast on Sunday nights as well as games on the league-owned NFL Network and extensive highlights.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100309/verizon-will-carry-nfls-redzone-channel/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091223/tmz-sports-why-not/ http://allthingsd.com/20091223/tmz-sports-why-not/#comments Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:01:13 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=14382 Is TMZ looking to branch into sports?

Seems likely, according to recent reports. And it makes plenty of sense.

For starters, it’s what the Time Warner (TWX) gossip powerhouse is already doing. See: Tiger Woods, of course. Or more recently, coverage of NFL player Chris Henry’s death.

It’s also something that Harvey Levin’s operation is uniquely suited to do. Blogs like Sports By Brooks and Gawker Media’s Deadspin are excellent repositories for R-rated commentary on sports and periodically break a story themselves. But in general, they either don’t or can’t spend the resources on the grim digging and scooping that TMZ specializes in.

And the conventional media outlets, which depend on the sports leagues for access and/or licensing rights, are loath to dip too deeply into this stuff. They are also likely worried about spooking advertisers, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue for TMZ’s existing product.

My only request: If there’s a companion TV show, can we please dump the “Harvey Levin and his producers sit around the news room and kibbitz” conceit? Don’t like that one bit.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091223/tmz-sports-why-not/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091125/hot-potato-is-ready-to-eat-do-twitter-facebook-users-want-another-realtime-chatter-service/ http://allthingsd.com/20091125/hot-potato-is-ready-to-eat-do-twitter-facebook-users-want-another-realtime-chatter-service/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:25:03 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=13280 Last month I told you about Hot Potato, one of the buzziest start-ups in the very buzzy “real time” sector. Now you can check out the service yourself. But not really.

The New York-based service opened its doors last week, but it won’t really kick into gear until Apple (AAPL) signs off on its iPhone app, and that’s taking a bit longer than the company expected. Founder Justin Shaffer still thinks he’ll be up and running on Apple’s platform in a few days, but until then, you can check out this video interview I shot with him yesterday, where you can get a sense of how the app will work.

Or if you’re impatient, here it is in a nutshell: The service is supposed to let users converse in real-time about “events”–whether a football game, business conference or maybe even a really good house party.

You can already do that on Twitter and Facebook, but the pitch is that Hot Potato will help “curate” the chatter, so you will end up talking to both your friends and interesting people you don’t know–and that’s something Twitter and Facebook don’t do well right now.

If it works, there are some obvious advertising/sponsorship opportunities available for the service: The NFL could sponsor chatter about its games, for instance. Or someone who isn’t related to the football league could sponsor chatter about the games–since this is user-generated content in its purest form, Hot Potato isn’t required to get the go-ahead from anyone before it creates a conversational stream.

In any case, Hot Potato now has a pile of money to help it figure this stuff out. Last week, the company closed its first funding round of $1.4 million (I had originally reported that it was raising “about $1 million”), and in addition to VC backers First Round Capital and RRE Ventures, the start-up has an array of high-profile angel investors who have pitched in.

Here’s the roster: Super-angel investor Ron Conway; real-time start-up incubator Betaworks; Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and his son Ben Lerer, who runs Thrillist; New York Observer owner Jared Kushner and his brother, Josh Kushner; ZelnickMedia’s Strauss Zelnick; Hunch and Founder Collective co-founder Chris Dixon; About.com co-founder Scott Kurnit; Facebook executive (and Apple vet) Dave Morin; Boxee’s Zach Klein; angel investor Allen Morgan; and entrepreneurs and investors Scott and Cyan Banister.

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