ESPN

Last week, three of the nation’s largest cable companies quietly pulled the plug on a joint cell-phone venture with Sprint Nextel Corp., called Pivot. The goal of this service offering was to help the cablers compete with the Telco Triple Play (Video, Voice & Data). In theory, a Quadruple Play (Video, Voice, Data plus a Continue Reading →

  If you are having trouble viewing our video player, check out MediaBytes on YouTube. CABLE PROGRAMMERS have submitted a letter to Kevin Martin calling his a-la-carte proposal “devastating” for consumers, who will suddenly find themselves missing channels they expect to have with cable service. The letter also questioned the FCC’s legal right to enforce Continue Reading →

  If you are having trouble viewing our video player, check out MediaBytes on YouTube. SHELLY PALMER discusses the connections between 8 teenagers in Florida, kidnapping, assault and online video. Read this week’s essay, “What We Can Learn From Eight Florida Teens”. GOOGLE will soon open up its beta TV ad-buying service to the general Continue Reading →

  If you are having trouble viewing our video player, check out MediaBytes on YouTube. COMCAST plans an imminent release of the first system that allows television ads to be targeted to the individual household level. The system will reportedly be deployed this June to over 100,000 homes in Baltimore. The technology is being developed Continue Reading →

  If you are having trouble viewing our video player, check out MediaBytes on YouTube. SHELLY PALMER analyzes Antigua’s threat to undermine U.S. copyright laws by legalizing piracy. Read this week’s essay to learn about the 1st InfoWar. GOOGLE submitted a letter to the FCC requesting that the “white spaces” between television channels be authorized Continue Reading →

APPLE will host its iPhone special event this morning at the company’s Town Hall. Steve Jobs is expected to reveal plans for allowing third-party applications to be installed on the iPhone. Apple’s invitations for the event also promised “some exciting new enterprise features.” MICROSOFT has decided to use the video player of MOVE NETWORKS in Continue Reading →

THE RECORDING INDUSTRY lost a major ruling in Atlantic v. Brennan when a federal judge in Connecticut ruled that merely making music available to other users is not evidence of copyright infringement. The judge also found that no proof of infringement was supplied by the record companies that brought the suit. With two of three Continue Reading →

Scott Boyarsky, Director of Program Management at the Walt Disney Internet Group called me to chat about an extraordinary website called newsclipper.org. It’s extraordinary for a bunch of reasons (which I shall explain) but the most interesting part of our conversation centered around a simple, unavoidable truth: newsclipper.org does exactly what you or I might Continue Reading →

SHELLY PALMER and KEVIN MARTIN will talk about the transition to digital television on BLOOMBERG TV today at 12:10 ET. THE FCC is backing down from a plan to force TV stations to air up to 12 PSA’s per day warning viewers about the upcoming digital transition. Instead, the Commission is expected to accept a Continue Reading →

GOOGLE CEO Eric Schmidt phoned YAHOO‘s Jerry Yang on Friday to offer some sort of help in avoiding a MICROSOFT takeover. No details of the call have been released but there is speculation that it could involve Yahoo outsourcing its search business to Google. Google has posted a reaction to the takeover bid on its Continue Reading →