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ACCORDING TO AN ARTICLE BY Paul Tharp in the New York Post, the New York State Consumer Protection Board has its knickers in a knot over video.google.com. “It’s fairly easy to find [explicit] videos throughout the Internet, but it’s certainly another case for Google to organize these videos and present them so freely on a Continue Reading →

ACCORDING TO A LAWSUIT FILED by the record labels, XM Satellite Radio’s XM + MP3 service is causing “Massive Wholesale Infringement.”  Ooo… that sounds bad!  The suit, filed May 16, 2006, alleges that the service is an improperly licensed “download service.”  Ouch! Having come from the music business, I get a little insulted when businesspeople Continue Reading →

AMERICANS HAVE A LONG HISTORY of paying for convenience over quality. Sometimes it makes sense (i.e. plastic utensils or paper napkins) and sometimes it doesn’t (i.e. quick serve restaurants or .mp3 files). In general, it is hard to predict the quality/convenience ratio for average Americans. But let’s try. High fidelity (HiFi) audio started to appear Continue Reading →

A FEW WEEKS AGO I was having a typical advanced-media conversation with a C-level executive. During the conversation, she made the following declarative statement: “My six-year-old grandson does not know the difference between the television screen, the computer screen or the 9″ diagonal screen in the back of his parent’s SUV. To him it’s all Continue Reading →

I sat through a pitch the other day that made me smile. A biz dev guy, who I truly respect, put up a slide entitled “Engaged Marketing” and proceeded to explain the concept to me. I listened about as long as I could and then I covered the title and posed the question, “This slide Continue Reading →

I’M HERE AT THE NATIONAL Association of Broadcasters’ NAB 2006 show in Las Vegas, with 80,000 of my closest friends. On the tech side, it may look like business as usual–but if you know what you’re looking at, you can clearly see that versions of Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law are actually starting to change Continue Reading →

“On the money, direct, to the point, Anne Sweeney, Co-Chair Disney Media Networks, President Disney-ABC Television Group flawlessly delivered a “let’s do it together” speech at Broadcasting & Cable’s ‘New Distribution Pipelines: Turning TV Content into Revenue’ keynote. What will we do together? Absolutely everything to do with alternative distribution of network content. How? Don’t Continue Reading →

If you look around the floor at NAB you’ll see thousands of bodies, but that’s not where the action is. This is a show about pre-set meetings … everyone who is anyone has a full dance card. One Sony exec had three “must attend” dinner invitations — an impressive calorie count for an old-fashioned “tech Continue Reading →

“To us it’s a refrigerator, to our grandparents it was technology … you may think of myspace as technology … our users don’t.” said Shawn Gold, myspace.com’s senior vice president-marketing and content.  He was referring, of course, to the 72 million registered users of myspace.com–the wild, wild West of social networks.  Myspace may not be Continue Reading →

THE ANNUAL TRADE SHOW AND conference of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association was held in Atlanta earlier this week. Since this show sits squarely in the middle of media trade show season, there was not much new ground to cover. There were a few programming and technology announcements and some interesting improvements to existing Continue Reading →