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The NY Times reports:   Those who have been looking forward to Kirstie Alley’s comedic role in “Fat Actress,” the new seven-episode reality-based series about her experiences as a woman who doesn’t meet Hollywood’s age and weight requirements, will have two viewing options when the first episode is shown next month. Showtime Networks announced yesterday Continue Reading →

Verizon was in the news again, announcing the launch of V Cast – a new service which provides almost full frame rate video to your 3G cell phone.  The service offers hundreds of feeds from popular content providers like NBC, CNN, FOX, etc.   There is a ton of experimentation going on with the format. Continue Reading →

Unless you live under a rock, you know about the Verizon-MCI deal.  I don’t want to comment about the business part of this merger, you can get about a zillion subject matter experts to weigh-in about the dollars and sense.  However, I do want to highlight the relative prominence of IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) in Continue Reading →

In a 4-to-1 vote, the FCC ruled that cable only “must-carry” one digital signal from each broadcast licensed station in their footprint.  This is being seen, rightly or wrongly, as a stunning defeat for the broadcasters and a serious win for the cable industry. “This is a major victory for consumers …” said exiting CEO Continue Reading →

I was fortunate enough to attend a panel at Digital Hollywood’s 2005 Digital Media Summit featuring some of the most prominent players in the P2P (peer-to-peer) world. Just to set the stage, 99% of the attendees were in business suits or similar “serious” business attire – this was not a geekfest, the audience was made Continue Reading →

The 2005 Media Summit New York started off with a bang yesterday morning as keynote speaker, Mel Karmazin, CEO Sirius Satellite Radio was interviewed by BusinessWeek Media Editor, Tom Lowry.   Always entertaining, Mel started off by throwing down the gauntlet to terrestrial radio – calling it a mature business with growth limited to GDP increases.  Continue Reading →

Linda Moss of Multichannel News reports: “Regional phone companies planning video services will be forced to pay cash to carry local broadcast-TV stations — which will initially put them at a competitive disadvantage to cable, but will ultimately cause problems for MSOs, a Wall Street analyst said Monday.”   Add this to the upcoming FCC Continue Reading →

The NY Times reports a dispute between the country’s two biggest beer brewers has a brand-new battlefield – the Super Bowl. Late last week, with football fans by the millions gearing up for the big game, Fox Broadcasting decided not to put on the air a Miller Brewing Company ad that poked fun at Anheuser-Busch’s Continue Reading →

This article by Seattle Times technology writer, Kim Peterson, tells you some of the facts about Halo 2 and Microsoft’s unusual plans to make it into a movie.  This is an interesting twist on the concept of line extension.  Most video games that have tried to cross over into linear story telling have enjoyed less Continue Reading →

This item by Jeff Baumgartner was published on CEDMagazine.com: Buoyed in part by customers scrambling to watch Sunday’s Super Bowl in all of its high-definition glory, Comcast Cable said it has breached the 1 million mark on deployed set-tops with high-definition capability. Of that figure, 800,000 were deployed in 2004, the company said, but noted Continue Reading →