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.