How rich is this — Rupert Murdoch, the prototypical media baron, gave a speech yesterday in which he proclaimed the era of powerful media chieftains has ended. (His speech was to a group with a Dickensonian too-good-to-be-true-but-is-true name, The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers).
Owen Gibson in The Guardian writes that Murdoch said that power has shifted to the masses and away from the old elite, an assessment that, however rich with irony, is nonetheless consistent with Murdoch’s recent push into the social networking business and his iconoclastic attitude.
“A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it, and very much as they want it,” he said. Indicating he had little desire to slow down despite his advancing years, he told the 603-year-old guild that he was looking forward, not back. “It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy - not just companies but whole countries.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:00 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Business Week has this item about Verizon’s FiOs TV service in Keller, TX and how the locals down there are flocking to the telco-delivered TV service. But, as the article points out, Keller is not a typical market and may offer no lessons about how well Verizon will fare with its FTTP-based service in other markets.
Keller is an affluent, new development with a relatively weak cable operator (Charter Communications, which hasn’t yet launched voice services in the market but plans to do so this month). Moreover, the town’s residents are all atwitter about being a video experiment of sorts, which surely drives up the take-rate. Verizon contends that it has captured 20% of the video market in Keller since it launched last year.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:22 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Courtesy of Om, this intriguing study (complete with a host of market share tables) from TNS Telecom. The study, based on TNS’ extensive tracking surveys of 32,000 consumers, concludes that a combined AT&T-BellSouth will will control 22% of all consumer dollars spent on telecom services (including video services) and 34% of dollars spent in the business market.
If the market is defined as strictly wireline, then a combined AT&T-BellSouth will control 37% of the market. After the merger closes, virtually half (49%) of the telecommunications market will be controlled by three companies — AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:06 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Gabe Rivera is (I assume) a one-man blog aggregating machine and has captured mind-share, if not money, with his Memeorandum sites on tech and politics. TechMeme hit so fast that it became the “thing” among the blognoscenti, a meteoric rise that was bound to create backlash.
Still, despite the complaints about TechMeme’s tunnel vision, or the blogosphere’s equivalent of pack journalism, it’s the site most tech bloggers visit every day, and sometimes many times per day. Now Gabe has spruced up the site with, first, a redesign, and now photos — techmeme is starting to look like Google News.
But that’s not all — Gabe has launched a juicy gossip site called WeSmirch, which has the tagline “automatic dirt digger.” It’s very cool and possibly addictive, which is why I plan to never visit again.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:15 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The New York Times (in the Sports section for once) has this article penned by Richard Sandomir on the decision by CBS to offer March Madness basketball games online at no charge. The interesting part of the piece is that CBS says that it is generating more revenue from advertising this go-around than it did last year when it offered the games on a premium basis.
Already the advertising booked for the online product has exceeded the amount of subscriber revenue amassed last year, said Joe Ferreira, the executive producer of CBS Sportsline. “We felt the free model would increase the number of eyeballs seeing the sponsors’ messages,” he said. Commercials different from those on CBS will be inserted into the streamed games.
Another interesting bit: CBS has set up a system that can accomodate 200,000 video streams at once, exceeding any other planned event on the web, including AOL’s broadcast of Live 8 last summer. To keep the traffic flowing, CBS will query viewers every half hour to determine if they are still watching. If the system doesn’t get a response, viewers will be kicked off and users waiting in a “cyberwaiting” room will be ushered into the events.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:47 AM | Print | Comments (0)
A spate of articles today focuses on wireless Internet access and it’s clear that wireless broadband is in demand. USA Today’s Paul Davidson has this piece about two Senate proposals to free up unlicensed spectrum for Internet access, moves that broadcasters fret might interfere with the digital broadcast spectrum.
The Washington Post’s Michael Chandler has this article on the great lengths to which residents of semi-rural Washington suburban Loudoun County go to in order to get broadband access. One county resident turned his organic vegetable garden into a high-speed Internet hub, spending thousands of dollars so that he and his neighbors could have wireless Internet access.
And the BBC Online has this article regarding an OECD report that casts doubt on the viability of WiMax. (Om had a good piece yesterday on the OECD report.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:12 AM | Print | Comments (0)Seth Kenvin of BigBand Networks sent me an email a couple of weeks ago letting me know he has a blog and it got me to wondering just how many corporate-affiliated or corporate-employee blogs are out there in this sphere that we cover at IP Democracy, namely the delivery of new media and applications over IP-based networks.
Of course, most of the very big players in the tech sector or IP technology world have official blogs (Google), or allow their employees to blog in a semi-official capacity (Robert Scoble). But there are a lot of companies out there that don’t have blogs or employee-written blogs, or at least I can’t find them. Here’s a list of the company-backed or company-related blogs I’ve found so far:
| Corporate-Backed or Employee-Related Blogs in the IP Media World | |
| Company | Blog |
| Amazon.com Inc. | Amazon Web Services Blog |
| AOL - Jason Calacanis | Jason Calacanis’ Blog |
| AOL - Joe Loong, Senior Programming Manager | Magic Smoke |
| AOL - Justin Uberti, Chief Architect of AIM | Tales of a Running Man |
| AOL - Shawn Carnell, System Architect | I Am Alpha |
| AOL - Ted Leonsis, Vice Chairman | Ted’s Take |
| BigBand Networks (Seth Kenvin) | Vivoda |
| Brightcove | The Latest from Brightcove |
| Cisco Systems, Inc. | Cisco High Tech Policy Blog |
| Cox Communications | Digital Straight Talk |
| Dell, Inc | Linux Engineering |
| Electronic Data Systems | EDS’ Next Big Thing Blog |
| Google - The Official Blog | Official Google Blog |
| Hewlett-Packard Company | HP Blogs |
| Honeywell International | HoneywellBlogs |
| Intel Corporation | Intel Geek Blogger |
| International Business Machines | Guide to IBM Blogs |
| Microsoft (Ray Ozzie) | Ray Ozzie’s Weblog |
| Microsoft (Robert Scoble) | Scobelizer |
| Microsoft Corporation | MSDN’s Microsoft Blogs |
| Motorola Inc | Team Moto |
| Oracle Corporation | OraBlogs |
| Ruckus Wireless | The Ruckusroom |
| Sprint | Things That Make You Go Wireless |
| Sun Microsystems Inc | Jonathan Schwartz |
| TBS | The Daily Flog |
| Texas Instruments | Video 360 Blog |
| The Boeing Company | Randy’s Journal |
| Viacom International Inc | Real World/Road Rules Blog |
| Xerox Corporation | Palo Alto Research Center |
It’s a diverse group, ranging from video programmers (TBS) to pure-play tech companies (Cisco), but that’s how this new convergent market is shaping up. The blogs themselves are of varying quality too — but most take a stab at offering some kind of interesting commentary, although most definitely hew to the corporate point of view.
It’s a no-brainer that companies, particularly companies in the IP and tech sectors, should have blogs. They’re almost costless and they’re a great way to get out the company’s point of view — as long as the blog isn’t simply a boring PR tool.
Can anybody fill me in on the blogs I’m missing that should be on this list? If I ever figure out how to set up a wiki, I might set up an IP-Related Corporate Blog Wiki.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:25 AM | Print | Comments (2)
Blogs We Read
