Retired

• Viewers look at options as TV rates rise – Back to the antenna? That’s fine until 2009, but then what? It’s either cable and satellite or putting out the $$ for an HD tuner.
• Show may be a go, but its network isn’t – What happens when you know your network is going away and your show hasn’t even aired yet? Some producers shrug their shoulders because that’s just how TV works. At the end of the day, all I care about is whether or not Veronica Mars and The Gilmore Girls make the cut.
• Microsoft, partners to challenge Apple iPod – Bill Gates refuses to concede the digital player market to Apple, but he currently lacks any device to actually challenge them with.
• The curious case of the sanitized kids’ films – You can be sure they won’t be selling any T-shirts with Curious George passed out from sniffing ether.
• Video, podcasts and blogs track Olympic Games – Just in case you aren’t ignoring the Winter Olympics.

Here’s what happened while CBS wasn’t trying to make up its mind:

• Pirates: It Takes One to Know One: Will the music industry read this? Probably not.
• Survey says: music costs too much, and it sucks – Of course this same survey could have been taken in 1966 or 1976 or 1986 or 1996 and had the same results. People have been complaining about the price and quality of music for decades.
• A Wi-Fi iPod – Looks like Apple is working on an iPod equipped with wi-fi. Great… there goes another $400.
• TV event draws a rare big crowd – It certainly drew a large crowd to our apartment, but of course it may have been the free food that drew everyone and not the game itself.
• Digital Deadline Set: 2/17/09 – This just came over the telegraph: over the air analog TV transmissions will cease on February 17, 2009. Of course, if you still have a pair of rabbit ears on top of your TV, you’re probably not reading this anyway.

Continuing a long-standing tradition* here at Medialoper, we bring you all the news we couldn’t bring ourselves to rant or rave about — despite the fact that this news will change your life. Also it gives me something to do while I wait to see what I’m getting when I download Battlestar Galactica Vignette 2. More on the Battlestar experience to come later — here’s the news.

• Verizon to Start TV Service in N.Y., Mass.: Like all smart phone service providers, Verizon is rollilng out the fiber optic and obtaining television broadcast franchise licenses (good news for cities who need the bucks). Like ATT, Verizon started it FiOS services in Texas before rolling the service out to other locations. The broadband, hopefully lightning fast, fiber optic will bring the standard slew of HBO, Showtime, ESPN delights to the masses.
• Vote of Confidence for S&S – CBS head Les Moonves must have taken a tour of the Simon & Schuster dungeon because he’s discovered thousands upon thousands of potential moneymakers. In addition to providing a vote of confidence to the publishing house, Moonves realizes that a giant backlist is just content waiting to be exploited. We agree.
• BusinessWeek: More blogs, less ads – FishbowlNY notes that BusinessWeek has goen blog-happy in light of declining advertising. Clearly, they have seen the future, and realize that creating a strong online presence now will be the key to survival. Not only is online cheaper to produce and maintain, but creating go-to content areas will bring back the advertising bucks — maybe not to print edition prices, but it’s clear that print edition prices aren’t long for this world anyway.
• Breaking News: AT&T reaches out and touches…Endeavor – Meanwhile, FishbowlLA uncovers a first-of-its-kind (we hope) alliance: AT&T has partnered with Endeavor. One can only assume the telecom giant isn’t looking to go on casting calls, and one can only guess as to what a talent agency brings to the table. We will officially begin the countdown to AT&T’s “original content” announcement.
• Netflix looks to download arena – As company revenue soars for Q4, year – Despite exceeding growth targets in 2005, Netflix is talking all downloadable video all the time. Without getting specific of course. The question remains whether the studios and Netflix are nimble enough to change to a multi-delivery business model.
• Google May Be Close To Developing iTunes Competitor – A Bear Stearns analyst is speculating that Google, coveting that iTunes demographic (and all those lovely consumer dollars), will roll out a music service. Said analyst doesn’t explain how Google will differentiate its service from the already-crowded music market or the dead services along the trail. It is expected that Google’s entry, should it happen, will hit the Internet within six months.
• The Long Snout – O’Reilly, an early adopter of online technologies to deliver content, notably reducing really heavy books to bits and bytes, is now offer “Rough Cuts”. The new service will allow subscribers to access works-in-progress. Given that the publisher plays heavily to the programming and technology crowds, this approach will get usable information out to market much faster and more effectively than the traditional publishing model.
• TimesSelect Draws About 156,000 Web-Only Subs in First 4 Months – Proving that the paid content model isn’t dead, the New York Times online subscription sevice, TimesSelect, has pulled in over 150,000 paid subscribers. The NYT continues to tinker with the model, but given this early success, it shows that people will pay for content they want.

* – Like a collection, a tradition is formed when we have more than one of something.

We’ve pulled together a sampling of stories that reflect discussions happening all over the entertainment industry. This week, we pay special attention to the UK.

• Long-lost tunes dug up for jukebox of the net; Universal releases 100,000 vintage tracks online; Archive raid aims to get older fans downloading: Realizing they have a cash cow just sitting there, Universal opens the vaults for the iPod generation (which not only includes pre-teens but also baby boomers). Bands like the Fairport Convention, the original Nirvana, and Big Country will be released into the wild. It is unclear what service Universal plans to use.
• BBC chiefs defend licence fee bid: The BBC needs a 2.3% hike in its licence fee to give the public what it wants, BBC director general Mark Thompson has told the House of Lords: A changeover to digital programming, demand for fewer repeats fuels the increase. The question remains as to whether this will do much to position the BBC for the future.
• CBS to Air ‘Micro-Series’ on TV, Internet: CBS will air The Courier in seven installments of a minute or less via cellphone and on the internet. The series will also air during CBS broadcast programs (think commercial break, no product). Pontiac is sponsoring the series; CBS.com will provide further details about the series’ core mystery. Inexplicably, CBS will not release the micro-series concurrently to cellphones and the internet. Those users have to wait until a day after broadcast to download. CBS is using Verizon’s V Cast service, so if you’re not using that system (and you may not be in light of last week’s news), you’re out of luck.
• Fox TV takes time on new distribution outlets: Fox isn’t rushing into making announcements and cutting deals, they say (though in-the-know types can easily assume that frantic deal-making is going on as we type). Peter Liguori is playing it coy on whether Disney’s deal with iTunes was premature, choosing to liken new media to a marathon. We’ll give him that.
• E-read all about it: The world of publishing stands on the cusp of the greatest innovation since Gutenberg. With cheap, portable electronic readers just around the corner, what is the future of the printed book?: Robert McCrum contemplates how electronic devices will affect the future of the book (we could have saved him some time: the book as we know will remain an institution for a long time to come). He looks at devices and contemplates the big question: how long before the OED offers download-to-your-phone definitions?
• Close-up on what went right, wrong: Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times reviews the last year in entertainment (motion picture-centric). He points to the key factor driving changes in how we watch: time. As in the consumer’s time. (Note: at least one level of registration required.)
• Ofcom suggests TV download plan: Broadcasters in the UK could have the right to distribute independently-made TV shows for downloading under new proposals from media watchdog Ofcom.: The UK continues to grapple with new technologies that threaten to drastically change how television has been controlled for decades. Interesting tidbit: the UK is the world’s biggest market for illegal television downloads. So much for our image of prim and proper Britons.
• Journalism’s paper tigers? A decade into the Internet age, newspapers try to stay relevant after losing a monopoly: Newspapers, who stood by as the internet siphoned off classified advertising revenue (we remain slack-jawed at the way the leading papers failed to grasp the importance of Craigslist), now try to figure out where they fit in the new new media.
• Wait wait! Don’t tell me! Too bad. TV spoilers abound, and the best you can do is keep up: Finally, the decline of appointment television has created a new challenge for viewers — how to avoid spoilers.