Media Industry Archive

Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, reported earnings this morning, and in so doing, made the increasingly strong case for all media to be a multiple revenue-stream business. The company’s new cable subscriptions are slowing, but hardly falling off a cliff: it lost 233,000 basic cable subscribers, while gaining 247,000 digital subs. The increase in digital subs was a big...

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Holy crap! It’s one thing when those of us writing blogs predict the end of major newspapers and magazines, such as my colleagues and I here at Bnet Media have doing for the past year, but quite another when the print publications themselves join in the act. In an essay entitled “MSM, RIP,” and signed by “The Editors,” one of our venerable journals, The New...

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With all due respect, I beg to differ with my BNET Media co-conspirator, David Weir, on whether Google TV Ads will be around for awhile. It will be. It’s easy to see why most pundits would believe that Google TV Ads would follow in the footsteps of Google’s failed attempts at bringing its automated, auction-based model to print and radio. But Google TV Ads is different, because it...

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Another intriguing experiment about how to exploit the web’s search, networking, and publishing technologies to help authors, readers and publishers all find each other is on the scene. Quillp (Beta), a Berlin-based startup, aims to circumvent the “traditional limitations” of the publishing industry by providing  “an integrated platform for readers and authors.”...

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Mobile World Congress underway — Thousands of mobile industry professionals will meet this week for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The event is a week-long conference where many companies in the mobile industry are expected to show off new products and discuss the state of the economy. Among the early announcements: Microsoft is expected to announce Windows Mobile 6.5, the...

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For the past (gulp) 30 years*, one of the most authoritative voices about computer and Internet security has been  John Markoff , who’s spent the majority of that time writing about technology for The New York Times. The book he co-authored with Tsutomu Shimomura in 1996 — Takedown,  about the capture of cyber criminal Kevin Mitnick — is still a must-read on my booklist....

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It’s been a while since I posted about Twitter, not because I haven’t been paying attention, but because whatever the latest techno-crush is for other journo-bloggers tends to make me nauseous. But today, at breakfast at Mel’s on Geary in the Richmond District with a couple of non-journo friends (and my ten-year-old daughter), it struck me that a convergence of technologies is...

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Every weekday, at least a half dozen SEC filings land in my inbox, most of which I glance at quickly and discard. But one of those arriving today describes the financial situation at a site I love, Salon.com, and the news is not good. According to the company’s 10-Q, net revenues decreased 16% to $1.8 million for the three months ended December 31, 2008 from $2.2 million for the same...

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Hope no one minds that I’m binging on Nielsen data this week, but, as Nielsen has just released its first-ever chart of the top network TV shows that were viewed online, covering December, this data is definitely worth pondering. First, here’’s the chart, via Mediapost. Then we can discuss: For the most part, it favors “can’t-miss-an-episode” series, like...

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Facebook devalued to $3.7 billion — While once evaluated as high a $15 billion, the details from Facebook’s recent settlement with ConnectU reveal a lower valuation of $3.7 billion. The original number stems from an agreement with Microsoft where the software maker purchased a 1.6 percent share of Facebook for $240 million. The Associated Press was able to circumvent shoddy...

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