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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 →

Are they right?  Advertisers will tell you that spot television is less effective now than ever before.  It is hard to reach an audience and even harder to measure lift from any specific ad campaign.  The old saw, “… 50% of my advertising works, I just don’t know which 50%.” is still heard in the Continue Reading →

As you know, Marty Yudkovitz is the Vice-chariman of the Advanced Media Technology Emmy Awards.  The cut and paste from Reuters follows.  In other TiVo news the company is launching an SDK (software development kit) for third party developers.  What does that mean to you?  Lots of new home-brew and third party TiVo-centric software, downloads, Continue Reading →

I sat in a conference room at Universal Music Group a few months ago with some very high ranking officials and was surprised to hear one marketing executive tell me that music videos were, “valuable content” and, “UMG should be compensated when a network or show airs them.”  I asked her the obvious question, aren’t Continue Reading →

The New York Times published a front-page article about MythTV this past Sunday (1/30/05).  MythTV is one of dozens of home-brew PVR (personal video recorder) websites – it basically is a DIY TiVo.  However, the Times lumps it into a genus of technologies dedicated to helping people steal pay-per-view and premium television.  The builders of Continue Reading →

One of the most interesting things at the NATPE convention this week was Google’s new video search tool.  In its present state, it is not very useful – however – one of its probable futures could significantly change the way about half of us watch television.  Here’s their official press release, it’s a quick read.  Continue Reading →

We are living in interesting times and nowhere is the effect of change more evident than here in Las Vegas at the 2005 NATPE (National Association of Television Program Executives) convention.   The highly conglomerated syndication business is represented.  But as one high-ranking executive of Columbia Tri-Star told me, “… we’ve had to learn how Continue Reading →