FACEBOOK made further concessions in its war against user privacy. Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologized on the company blog for “a lot of mistakes” surrounding Beacon — admitting the company did a “bad job” with its release. Most importantly, he announced that users will now be able to completely opt-out of Beacon.
VERIZON has rolled out HD VOD on FiOS TV in five markets, making 75 HD titles available. Three more markets will receive the service soon and it will available to all FiOS TV subscribers next year. The company is aiming for 1,000 hours of HD VOD and 150 HD channels by the end of 2008.
COMCAST said it will lose video customers in 2008 due to increased competition from IPTV services from Verizon and AT&T as well as competition from satellite. The company lost 54% in quarterly profit during the third quarter, due to a large loss in basic video subscribers. The company also lowered its cable revenue growth estimates for this year from 12% to 11%.
THE WGA‘s counter-offer to the AMPTP included a slight rollback of demands for online revenue sharing, asking that 2.5% of gross only be paid on revenue after the first year. During the first year of a release, payment would be tied to the number of streams a piece of content generated. Payment would be based on blocks of 100,000 streams and counting would be restarted every quarter.
MOVIEBEAM will shutdown on December 15th. The company has been contacting customers to inform them of the shutdown and offering some of them refunds for recently-purchased MovieBeam boxes. The on-demand movie service used wireless signals to transmit movie rentals to customers. It was originally started by Disney.