Hulu and other purveyors of Web TV are going to see a rush of ad dollars over the next few years. But compared to the ad money going to conventional TV, that won’t mean much. A cautionary tale.
Let’s say you’re a small-time blogger who makes a habit out of writing about, say, music or books or software or videogames. And let’s say that you’ve decided to join an “affiliate program” that sends readers to Amazon or to Apple’s iTunes, where they can buy said product. Well, the Federal Trade Commission might like a word with you.
Don’t want to pay $1 for a song on iTunes? Try $80,000 a pop. That’s what a federal jury in Minneapolis has told a woman to pay the music industry for illegally downloading 24 songs, bringing her total bill to $1.92 million. Her response: “Good luck trying to get it, because you can’t get blood out of a turnip.”
Poor John Squires. The Time Inc. SVP seems like an affable fellow. So what has he done to deserve this impossible task–figuring out a digital strategy for Time Warner’s publishing unit? Or, to put it in Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore’s words, figuring out “how to put the genie back in the bottle”?
Shades of Dick Cheney! Subscription music service eMusic’s last CEO took off last fall. Chairman Danny Stein, who ran the company years ago, ran a search for a replacement and decided that the best man for the job was…Danny Stein.
In the old days, back at the beginning of this decade, news that a band’s new album had leaked on the Internet before it went on sale was a big deal. And it occasioned lots of wailing and hair-pulling in the music business. But that was when people bought CDs. Now it’s a way to raise money for charity.
Mystery solved, sort of: AT&T is taking the blame for crippling the SlingPlayer iPhone app. The company’s rationale: The iPhone’s too powerful, and our network isn’t powerful enough.
The SlingPlayer iPhone app–software that lets you watch programming from your own TV on your Apple handset–will go on sale at iTunes sometime after midnight Eastern tonight. But it’s missing a crucial feature–the ability to work over AT&T’s network. What happened? “Ask Apple,” says a SlingPlayer rep.
A bad quarter for Disney, but it could have been worse–at least Wall Street was expecting it. After factoring out one-time charges and write-offs, Bob Iger and company earned 43 cents a share on revenues of $8.1 billion. Wall Street had been looking for 40 cents and $8.15 billion, respectively. The bright spot for the entertainment conglomerate is the same one you see at every media giant these days: Disney’s cable business.
The last time Amazon held a press conference in New York City was in February, when it introduced the Kindle 2.0. Now the company has scheduled another one for Wednesday morning at Pace University in lower Manhattan. Expect a new large-format device that’s optimized for reading newspapers and magazines.
Apple says its customers have downloaded one billion apps for the iPhone and iPod touch from its iTunes store. You can learn more by reading one of the many stories about the milestone or by visiting Apple’s site. Or you can visit the homepages of big Web publishers like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or CNET.com, all of which have once again handed over prime real estate to Apple for another intrusive/interesting ad.
Next to no news from the Apple earnings call this afternoon, which is just the way Apple execs like their earnings calls. Once again, the company provided no information about CEO Steve Jobs’s health except to note that he is still scheduled to come back to work in June. And the company continued to pooh-pooh the concept of netbooks–supercheap, supersmall laptops with very little horsepower that are the hottest part of the PC business right now.
Yesterday I noted that Apple and the big music labels had effectively raised prices at iTunes via a tiered system that priced most songs at 99 cents and many at $1.29. The question: Where are the cheap songs–the ones that the labels had promised to start selling for 69 cents? They’re coming, music label execs tell me. Just hold your horses.
A New York congressman has a message for cable companies that want drop their all-you-can-eat broadband Internet plans: Don’t even think about it. That instruction comes from Rep. Eric Massa, a Democrat who represents the Rochester area, and it’s aimed specifically at Time Warner Cable, which is starting to experiment with broadband “caps” in Massa’s hometown. But any of the big Internet pipe players contemplating charging their users on a per-use basis–and most of them are–can expect to get similar blowback from lawmakers.
Hot off the presses from EMI and Apple Corps, the Beatles’ holding company: a press release that goes on for 461 words about plans for yet another repackaging of the Fab Four’s albums–on CDs. And then these two sentences: “Discussions regarding the digital distribution of the catalogue will continue. There is no further information available at this time.” Because why rush into anything?
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 »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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