Boy, the big name players jumping into the IP video distribution business just keep on coming. The latest: Wire service giant Associated Press announced today that it will launch an online video news network for newspaper, television and radio Web sites in the United States.
The AP Online Video Network will give members their own branded video player. But AP seemingly plans to keep all the ad revenue generated by their videos, allowing members to generate ad revenue from member-supplied content.
AP is also increasing the fees it charges to members by 2.2% to reflect the widespread publishing of AP content on member web sites. The company is also adopting a new licensing scheme along with the price hikes that purportedly gives publishers greater flexibility to republish AP content on the web.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:59 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Guru of the dot.com heyday George Gilder offered some dire predictions at the AO2005 conference, according to News.com’s Michael Kanellos. While Gilder still holds sway over the technology cognescenti, we take issue with these predictions, namely that TV and Hollywood will disappear.
“TV is dying fast and it will be followed by Hollywood. These industries fed on scarcity. There are only a few channels available. TV was technology of tyrants. It fed this advertising model that has collapsed,” Gilder told an audience at the conference. “The thirty-second spot is just going to die. Nobody is going to watch any ads they don’t want to see. “Book culture and blog culture can redeem a civilization,” he said.
That’s what everyone feared about radio when TV came along, and, incidentally, that’s what everyone feared about Hollywood when, you guessed it, TV came along. Newspapers have been “dying” for 30 years and theaters were going to killed by the VCR (although admittedly the theatrical distribution business isn’t in fighting shape these days, but the VCR is hardly to blame).
Old media never die — they just adapt, sooner or later, to the changing tide.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:06 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBackGiant telco SBC released its Q2 05 earnings this morning (more later) but the biggest news hidden by the company’s press release is that for the first time in twelve months, SBC’s mighty DSL juggernaut has slowed. In the second quarter of 2005, SBC added 360,000 new DSL customers, a 40% drop from the 504,000 high-speed subscribers added during Q1 05. (See stats below) To be fair, the year-over-year DSL adds were up over the 315,000 DSL gains in Q2 04, but against the hype of the DSL v. cable price war, expectations held that SBC would produce another recording-breaking quarter.
It’s little surprise then that in June SBC took the bold step of slashing its DSL service price to $14.95, below the price of premium dial-up services such as AOL.
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SBC DSL Subscribers |
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| Total | ||
| DSL Subs. | Net DSL | |
| Quarter | (mil.) | Adds (000) |
| Q304 | 4,679 | 402 |
| Q404 | 5,104 | 425 |
| Q105 | 5,608 | 504 |
| Q205 | 5,968 | 360 |
It’s too soon to tell, but investment house Morgan Stanley may have to eat its words: earlier this week, analyst Simon Flannery predicted that the phone companies would add a collective one million high-speed subscribers for Q2 05, beating out the higher priced cable options.
SBC is the biggest DSL provider in the U.S. and with only 360,000 net adds, it’s going to be hard for the total number of DSL adds for the big four telcos to top one million.
Cable operators have long maintained that cut-rate pricing on high-speed service is for losers — what matters is speed and quality of service, a contention backed up in the market by the continued brisk growth in cable modem service. In early July, Comcast upped the ante, and hoped to counter SBC’s price cut, by increasing the download speeds of its standard modem offering to six Mbps while keeping prices (around $43/month) the same.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:30 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
VoIP provider Skype is no doubt hot — the company is growing at a scorching pace, with 5.3 million subscribers worldwide, and provides the foundation for a host of new audio and video services. This week Skype announced it is moving into the Wi-Fi space under a partnership with European provider The Cloud.
But Skype is aiming higher still. According to ZDNet’s Dan Farber, Skype investor Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson sees the VoIP provider morphing into a major communications backbone. Speaking at the AO2005 Innovation Summit via a new Skype videophone service, Draper, along with company founder Niklas Zennstrom, sounded euphoric:
Despite Skype’s meager revenue to date, Draper wasn’t shy–in fact, he was absolutely giddy during the interview–about characterizing Skype as the next huge thing, a backbone for a global, massive communications service. “We aren’t replacing the telephone,” Draper said, “we are creating a richer communications service.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:37 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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