The new conventional wisdom is that sooner or later, consumers will have to start paying for some of the stuff they currently get for free on the Web.
But will they actually pay up? Here, the conventional wisdom is not so helpful. Nor are studies predicting consumer behavior.
It’s official: Scripps Networks Interactive has won the Travel Channel auction. In a deal that values the channel at $975 million, Scripps will acquire a majority interest in the property while current owner Cox retains a 35 percent stake. News Corp., among others, had been bidding for the channel.
No, you still can’t buy the Beatles on iTunes. But next month, you will finally be able to buy the band’s music–legally–in MP3 form. Provided you’re willing to pay way, way up.
Puzzled by the weird story of the “Alex,” the would-be e-reader that looks something like the “Nook,” the e-reader Barnes & Noble introduced last month? Then this won’t clear anything up: Spring Design’s court case against the bookseller, which it says broke an “implicit promise” and stole its idea for a two-screen device.
Here’s another quick glimpse of the advertising market, courtesy of Viacom. The cable giant says ad sales are still down, but that the rate of decline is slowing. And in the fall of 2009, that constitutes pretty good news.
The layoff ax swings close to home today: The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau, which will result in up to nine job losses. News Corp. which owns the Journal as well as this site, has been pouring resources into the paper, but the Journal certainly isn’t immune to the pressures that all print publishers are under these days
What happens when one of the biggest bands in the world Webcasts a live concert on the world’s biggest video site?
You get a lot of video streams. Close to 10 million, says YouTube, adding that Sunday’s live Webcast of U2’s Rose Bowl concert was the single largest event it has streamed so far.
It’s easy to get the impression that everyone uses Twitter. And many people do! But new statistics indicate that four of five Web users are still Twitter-free. Worth keeping in mind as Google and Microsoft start plugging tweets into search results.
RealNetworks says more than 500,000 people have downloaded its all-you-can-eat music app. But it’s hard to tell what that number actually means.
Three years after the Google deal, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley explains some of the cryptic language in the clip that defined the Web 2.0 era. Also, he’d like you to know his site is generating more than a billion views a day.
YouTube sneaked up on big media, then scared the hell out of them, then tried to do business with them, more or less unsuccessfully.
Now, three years after Google plunked down $1.6 billion for the video site, it seems to have figured out an approach that works for at least some big players: Hand over a chunk of the site to content creators, who get to control it, sell ads on it, program it with their stuff and share some of the ad dollars. Newest example, reportedly: Britain’s Channel 4.
Spotify, the streaming music service Americans love talking about but can’t actually use, has given us even more to chat about: The company now promises to roll out some sort of TV service…some day.
Where? In Sweden, of course, which is where Spotify started, and which acts as a sort of test lab/best-case-scenario provider for the service.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt used the opening moments of a New York City press conference to reinforce a message he’s been delivering for several weeks: The worst is over, things are looking up, and Google is spending accordingly.
Amazon won’t even tell us how many Kindles it has actually sold, so projecting how many it’s going to move in the future makes for particularly tough fortune-telling. But that doesn’t stop anyone from trying: Forrester thinks Jeff Bezos and company will move 600,000 newly discounted units this holiday season and sell 1.8 million by the end of 2009.
Had to see this one coming: Amazon is chopping the price on its plain-vanilla Kindle e-book reader and is introducing a new version that will allow users to download books when they’re outside the U.S. Your move, Sony–and every other would-be Kindle competitor.
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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