The internet has fundamentally changed the television business and the Chairman of the FCC is preparing to change how the agency categorizes pay TV providers to adapt. Read more »
BuzzFeed has already built a data-science team and named one of its chief scientists as publisher, and now it has acquired Torando Labs and made the founder — the co-founder and former CTO of Bitly — its VP of data engineering Read more »
A report out Tuesday on the cost of interconnection fights shows that the problem is the business deals, not technology, and that the consumer pays the price. Read more »
YouTube is exploring the idea to add a paid service plan to its site that will give users access to videos without ads, according to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. “There’s going to be a point where people don’t want to see the ads,” Wojcicki said at Recode’s Code/Mobile conference late Monday. YouTube introduced paid channel subscriptions with partners like the Sesame Workshop earlier this year, but this new paid tier would be site-wide. “We’re thinking about how to give users options,” she said — and grow YouTube’s revenue in the process, one might add.
An essay by the head of Google News about the value of trust in journalism sparked a debate on Twitter about whether trust is a good way to think about how journalistic value is created, and if so how trust should be defined Read more »
Facebook exerts a huge amount of control over how millions of people get their news, and media companies are right to be nervous about this state of affairs — so what should they do about it? One response would be to give readers what Facebook can’t Read more »
Amazon added a second Fire TV device: a small streaming stick that costs $39. It joins similar streaming stick devices from Google, Roku, Microsoft, and Matchstick. Read more »
Blendle, a Dutch startup that sells access to articles from media outlets in the Netherlands and elsewhere on a per-article basis, has closed a $3.8M Series A funding round led by the New York Times and German media giant Axel Springer Read more »
Roku wants to go public and raise as much as $150 million, but the filing could be confidential. Read more »
Merely embedding a video doesn’t constitute copyright infringement, Europe’s highest court ruled this week, as long as the video was already publicly available. Read more »
Remember those red envelopes? Fewer and fewer people use Netflix to get DVDs, which is why the company is now closing a call center in Oregon. Read more »
What if your stereo knew who was in the room, and which music they liked? That’s what Prizm wants to do with its context-aware streaming adapter. Read more »
Streaming device maker Roku has raised an additional $25 million round of funding, according to a disclosure filed with the SEC on Wednesday. A Roku spokesperson confirmed the funding and said that it would provide “additional growth capital,” but declined to comment on who participated in the round, which brings the total amount raised by Roku to $155 million. The funding comes at an interesting time for the company; Roku is getting increased competition from the likes of Google and Amazon in the streaming device space, but it could get a boost from both Hisense and TCL shipping TVs powered by Roku’s platform.
Ads in mobile apps can be annoying. So how can brands change things up once they enter the world of IoT? Read more »
Dish customers will have to live without CNN and Cartoon Network until both sides settle their carriage fee dispute. Read more »
Wondering why Alibaba recently invested $50 million into Peel, the company that makes TV remote control apps for phones and tablets? Here’s a clue: Peel signed up its 100 millionth user Sunday night, according to a tweet from Peel CEO and co-founder Thiru Arunachalam. Of course, some of those users may not even realize they’re using Peel: The company also powers Samsung’s WatchOn remote app.
The Supreme Court does not allow cameras in the court room, so John Oliver decided to reenact a case with dogs — and then release the raw footage to remix on YouTube. Read more »
Oddly, I love using my old Kindle (keyboard version) and will likely not consider any upgrade unless it dies. I have had it 5+ years now and expect I will simply need to replace the battery before the machine breaks. Also, I find I rarely read a printed book anymore……
The Kindle Voyage is an extremely nice e-reader that probably won’t change your feelings about e-readers, no matter what those feelings may be. Read more »
Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile says the web-measurement and analytics market is still too full of black-box style tricks and smoke and mirrors, so he is making his company’s entire measurement process and methods public in the hope that others will do likewise Read more »
Not so long ago, people argued that HBO wasn’t going to unbundle anytime soon, or ever. So what changed? Read more »
Matchstick wants to become the streaming stick you take on trips. It’s adding ad-hoc mode to enable hotel room video watching. Read more »
It’s unbundling time! Univision is the latest broadcaster to announce that it plans to stream videos to customers that don’t have a pay TV subscription. Read more »
As so many brands have done, Mozilla — the non-profit foundation behind the Firefox browser — has become a media entity, by launching an online magazine that it says will focus on reporting about open technologies Read more »
CBS is the next network that is offering cord cutters a way to subscribe to its programming without paying for cable. However, live streams are limited to certain markets. Read more »
Osmo is now selling its set of iPad games that incorporate physical game-play in Apple’s U.S. and Canada stores, and the startup secured some funding to grow its business even further. Read more »
Netflix continues to be everyone’s favorite babysitter: 75 of the kids shows currently on Netflix have attracted more than two million viewers in the U.S. alone this year, and more than a dozen kids titles even have an audience of more than five million viewers. The company revealed this nugget in its letter to investors Wednesday — a day that otherwise wasn’t the greatest for the streaming service: Investors punished Netflix in after-hours trading for slower-than-expected growth, sending stock down 26 percent. But at least the kids still love Netflix…
Netflix’s growth in Q3 of 2014 was impacted by the most recent price increase, the company says. Read more »
Ahg, a little disappointed. I made a list last week of what I was hoping would be in it, ordered from most important to least. 1. Chromecast support: this was easy because they already said it would be included. 2. Ethernet: Not included, so why not just stick with the…
Google will make the very first Android TV-powered set-top box available for pre-order at the end of this week. Read more »
News Deeply, a network of topic-specific sites founded by former ABC News foreign correspondent Lara Setrakian, has just launched its latest addition: Ebola Deeply, a site dedicated to coverage of the disease and its impact on society Read more »
HBO wants to sell its service to cord cutters starting in 2015, but details about the unbundled service are still scarce. Read more »
Pono previewed its online music store this week — and with a bit of snooping, I was able to take a look at the services desktop app as well. Read more »
The New York Times’ research and development lab has launched a new project asking readers for help in identifying old advertisements from its print archive — and the project is the first to be built on a new open-source platform for crowdsourcing called Hive Read more »
Firefox is now supporting H.264 for web-based video chat, thanks to a binary component provided by Cisco — but H.264 web video streams still can’t be played natively in the browser. Read more »
BuzzFeed’s new publisher is not a veteran media executive or an MBA with a business background, but someone who specializes in looking at how data can influence the way that media is created and shared — a crucial skill for the current media economy Read more »
DramaFever is the latest niche video service snapped up by a major corporation. So why is everyone suddenly interested in Korean dramas? Read more »
Video Game High School fans can now buy the entire third season for binge watching, turning the show into an interesting case study for YouTube content monetization. Read more »
Want the best-possible Netflix streaming experience? Then get ready to move to Switzerland. U.S. ISPs still rank far behind their European counterparts, despite commercial peering agreements. Read more »
When my Mom passed away, we cleaned dozens of boxes of Bon Appetit out of her Bonus Room that represented almost 20 years of the magazine. Each had been thoroughly read when received and then stored to basically never be touched again. It wasn’t that content was valuable, just that…
