Kara Swisher in Media on July 5, 2011 at 12:05 pm PT
Here’s a handy helper for those following the fate of the Hulu premium online video service, whose noisy efforts to sell itself have gotten a lot of attention of late:
“In preliminary talks” = “hawking itself to one of a half dozen big moneybag tech companies who will visit with Hulu’s bankers and management to see its presentation at Morgan Stanley’s office in Century City in Los Angeles.”
Peter Kafka in Media on February 12, 2011 at 4:00 am PT
The Internet radio service is handing over half of every dollar it brings into the music industry. But things could be a lot worse. And the royalty system that taxes Pandora also allows it to thrive.
Peter Kafka in Media on January 18, 2011 at 8:20 am PT
Here’s another swing and a miss by the big music labels: “Comes With Music,” a plan to bundle free music downloads with Nokia phones, is going away.
Peter Kafka in Media on January 5, 2011 at 7:57 am PT
Here’s a logical, and cool, marriage between your iPad and your TV, brokered by your cable guy–with some strings attached.
Peter Kafka in Media on January 4, 2011 at 3:30 am PT
If you’ve got $49.99, you can buy a copy of “Rock Band 3.” Or you could have bought the company that makes the videogame. Ouch.
Kara Swisher in News on December 9, 2010 at 5:02 am PT
While the news has been be out there for a month, Miramax officially confirmed this morning that former News Corp. exec Mike Lang was named CEO of the Hollywood movie company.
What will be interesting about that for digital content players will be to see exactly what the man who was deeply involved in deals to buy the Myspace social networking site and also create the Hulu premium video service will do with Miramax’s rich trove of more than 700 award-winning films in its movie library.
John Paczkowski in News on December 3, 2010 at 3:00 pm PT
Back in January, Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted the company would make one acquisition a month. Now with the year nearly finished, the company has made 41, including Phonetic Arts, announced today–more than half of significant size. And Google’s clearly not through yet. The company just announced the acqusition of video optimization outfit Widevine for an undisclosed price.
John Paczkowski in News on December 1, 2010 at 7:48 am PT
Intent on remaking the cable landscape, Netflix this morning inked another distribution deal, this one with FilmDistrict. Under its terms, first-run films that typically would have been licensed to cable channels for broadcast during the so-called “pay TV window” will now instead go to Netflix for streaming.
Peter Kafka in Media on November 16, 2010 at 8:09 am PT
The Beatles are locked up on iTunes until sometime in 2011. What happens after that? It’s not clear! Which means that Beatles conspiracy theorists have something new to chew on.
Melanie Trottman, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on November 9, 2010 at 5:00 am PT
The National Labor Relations Board is taking a stand on employees’ rights to post negative comments about supervisors on social networking sites, alleging that a company illegally fired a worker for criticizing her boss on Facebook. The agency disclosed the complaint last week against ambulance service American Medical Response of Connecticut Inc.
