A former Universal Music executive, now headed to Yahoo, explains concisely why his former employer and the other big guys are just playing out the string: CD sales are wasting away, and the digital boost they were counting on simply isn’t big enough.
Underwhelmed with last night’s Super Bowl ads? So are the people who paid for them. The majority of TV ad buyers say they think their spots are less useful than they used to be. That’s potentially good news for Google and the Web, but it will be a long time coming.
Google got a second ad for free last night: A Vizio ad that promoted YouTube, along with a slew of other Web services. But the ad did a lousy job of promoting the company’s Internet-connected TVs. Pity, because it actually has something cool to pitch.
Remember the whole Conan O’Brien/Jay Leno imbroglio from last month? Perhaps NBC wishes you didn’t. It has removed every episode of the show’s seven-month run from its NBC.com site, as well as Hulu. YouTube is pretty barren, too.
Apple has some 140,000 apps for its iPhone users. People who use phones with Google’s Android operating system have much less choice.
But here’s a consolation prize: Android users do get to use the coolest app in New York City. At least, according to the NYC Big App competition, which awarded its Grand Prize last night to WayFinder NYC, an Android-only app.
Little Boxee, the much hyped Web video service, played a cameo role at today’s Congressional hearings on the Comcast-NBCU deal. And as sometimes happens when Boxee and big media intersect, controversy ensued.
Former Google sales boss Tim Armstrong has brought a slew of former colleagues with him to AOL, but this may be his highest-profile hire so far: Dave Eun, who has been in charge of content deals at Google and YouTube, will replace Bill Wilson, one of the last high-profile AOL guys from the pre-Armstrong era.
It’s a pretty standard chain of events: New platform opens up, investors try to attach themselves to developers who want to exploit it. Thus, the AppFund, which says it will invest up to $500,000 in iPad-specific apps.
So, when’s that Hulu Premium service we heard about last fall going to show up?
If Disney EVP Kevin Mayer knows, he’s not telling. But for the record, he says, “no decisions have been made” about a pay service. Still, the site’s visitors will be asked to pay for something at some point.
The music industry’s decline has been so prolonged that this now qualifies as a man-bites-dog story: Sony says its music sales actually went up, just a bit, in the last quarter. Thank Michael Jackson and Susan Boyle.
Does this sound familiar? I love watching “Lost,” though it takes me a day or two to get to it. But I can’t take a day or two away from Twitter. Something’s got to give.
YouTube has finished its first attempt to charge customers to watch Web video. The good news: Some people paid up.
And from YouTube’s perspective, that’s all that matters. Good thing, since the video site’s Sundance experiment netted less than $11,000.
Condense a Steve Jobs pitch into 180 seconds and he sounds a lot like Billy Mays. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
DVD sales are collapsing, nearly as quickly as music sales did over the last decade. Just ask MGM, which saw sales drop off a very steep cliff in just a couple of years. And remember this when you hear talk of Hollywood’s resurgence or the coming boom in 3-D.
Yet another tie-up between Google and the White House: A one-on-one interview between Barack Obama and YouTube. The crowd-sourced questions are a sort-of novelty, but it’s worth nothing that this is yet another live-streamed event for the clip site.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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