Olympics

Britain Adds More Spectrum to Deal With Olympics-Related Wireless Crunch

Ina Fried in Mobile on January 23 at 11:42 am PT

The British regulator responsible for managing wireless spectrum says it has a system in place to ensure that massive demand doesn’t overload the airwaves.

Oscar Bouquets for "The Social Network," as Zuckerberg Readies for the Brickbats

Kara Swisher in News on September 17, 2010 at 5:14 am PT

It’s just a post on the popular entertainment blog “Deadline Hollywood.” But it’s a clear indication the makers of the movie about the origins of Facebook are gunning for maximum attention and Oscar buzz with only a few weeks to go before its debut. And they will further gas up the marketing machine for “The Social Network” more, even though it appears it will be devastating to the real-life version of its main subject, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Newsflash: People Who Really Like the World Cup, Really, Really Like the World Cup

Peter Kafka in Media on June 17, 2010 at 8:40 am PT

If you love this stuff so much that you’ll consume it on TV, the Web, your phone and the radio, then you’re going to end up consuming an awful lot of it. In other news, people who really like chocolate eat a lot of chocolate.

YouTube’s Modest Proposal: Sports Online (Almost) Instantly

Matthew Futterman, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on March 12, 2010 at 12:00 am PT

Friday brings the opening of cricket’s wildly popular Indian Premier League and with it, hopefully for sports fans, a window into the future of international sports broadcasting. (NBC Sports executives, please keep reading). IPL, which has quickly become one of the most popular forms of one of the world’s most popular sports, has new wrinkle this year.

Red Bull, Verizon Tweets Run Afoul of Olympics Rules

Emily Steel, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on February 22, 2010 at 2:56 pm PT

Neither Red Bull nor Verizon Communications are an Olympic sponsor, but both have posted items about the Vancouver Games on Twitter and Facebook. That is a violation of Olympics rules, which say advertisers that don’t pay the tens of millions of dollars an official sponsorship costs may not associate themselves with the Games or the athletes during the events or the weeks surrounding them.

"All-Access" Hockey for Olympic Games

Lauren Goode in News on February 11, 2010 at 12:38 pm PT

The National Hockey League is launching an “all-access” service to capitalize on the 2010 Olympics and increased digital-media consumption of its games. The league, which has 140 players competing in Vancouver, has already seen an uptick in traffic to its Web, mobile and social-media outlets.

Yahoo Demos Cool Etch-a-Sketch Mobile Search App and New Search Dude Shashi

Kara Swisher in News on February 10, 2010 at 10:30 am PT

BoomTown will be hoofing it elsewhere today, so I am missing Yahoo’s search event at its Sunnyvale campus this morning. Thankfully, I was at the Silicon Valley Internet giant earlier this week, getting a grilling from CEO Carol Bartz, and was able to talk to both Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Yahoo Labs and Search Strategy, and new hire Shashi Seth, the company’s SVP of Search Products. Both talked about what the items on today’s agenda–a six-months’ look back at Yahoo search innovations, its upcoming Olympics shortcut on the search page and a new mobile search app that uses a kind of Etch-A-Sketch drawing technology–using fingers, not keywords–to help users find stuff.

Web TV You’ll Need to Pay to See: Time Warner, Comcast Roll Out “Authentication.” Who Else Is In?

Peter Kafka in Media on June 24, 2009 at 3:00 am PT

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts will announce this morning that their two companies are linking up for a trial of an “authentication” effort. That means a handful of cable subscribers will get online access to Time Warner TV shows that have been previously kept off the Web. The idea is to protect cable subscription revenues by giving pay TV subscribers–but only subscribers–Web access to all the shows they get on TV. It’s a simple idea, but making it a reality will be very, very complicated.

Warner Music Videos Back on YouTube, if You Know Where to Look

Peter Kafka in Media on May 21, 2009 at 5:44 am PT

A licensing dispute means Warner Music Group can’t promote a new album by one of its biggest acts on the world’s biggest video site. But you can still find Green Day videos on the site, if you know where to look. What gives?