BEST BUY has stopped selling all analog TV sets and has ordered stores to pull unsold sets from the shelves, ensuring an all-digital holiday season. The mandate is an aggressive and bold move to prepare for the upcoming digital transition. The retailer has committed to selling digital-to-analog convertors and will stock them by early January.
MYSPACE officially announced plans to open its platform to developers within the coming months and allow them to earn ad revenue from services they create. Rupert Murdoch told a gathering at the Web 2.0 Summit that the site will fall short of its earnings forecast but will still pull in $750 million for the company’s 2008 fiscal year. The mogul noted that this is 30 times the revenue it generated when he purchased the site for $580 million in 2005.
THE DAILY SHOW will launch the new DailyShow.com this Thursday at noon. The site will contain almost the entire show archives with over 16,000 video clips from the past nine years. New shows will be posted by 8 AM the morning following broadcast. Comedy Central has committed to giving South Park the same treatment on the new South Park Studios.
NIELSEN and ESPN will work together to track viewers across multiple platforms including online, mobile and TV. Nielsen’s TV/Internet Convergence Panel will link up with Nielsen Mobile and other sources in an attempt to measure how TV can drive people to the web and how the web can drive people to TV. The initiative will give ESPN a better understanding of its audience and offer advertisers more information on how their money is being spent.
KEVIN MARTIN is circulating a proposal to relax media ownership rules and allow companies to own both newspaper and TV stations in the same city. The proposal seeks a rapid repeal within the next two months. It is already supported by a majority of FCC commission members and, of course, Rupert Murdoch.