The collosal debacle that is HP’s pretexting scandal just keeps on growing. For those not in the know (and I can’t imagine there are many people who don’t know the story), HP’s Chairwoman Patricia Dunn hired private investigators to spy on board members whom she believed were leaking information to the press. Consultants to these private investigators used a form of fraud known as pretexting, whereby they posed as board members to obtain confidential records, to peruse the calling records of the board members to see if they were the leaky boats.
When HP board member Thomas Perkins (the respected venture capitalist of Kleiner Perkins fame) was informed of the spying efforts, he objected and then resigned from the board. (As an aside, is Perkins the only HP board member with any guts or moral conscience? No one else complained or took a stand in the face of this outrage.) Perkins tried to get HP to modify its SEC filing regarding his departure so that it properly indicated that Perkins resigned in protest over the spying. HP ignored Perkins, who then took his amazing story to the press.
That’s when the dam sprung a leak (no pun intended). The swirling public controversy caught the attention of California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who says he will probably file criminal charges against HP.
But the dam really burst when it became known that not only did HP spy on its board members, it also spied on reporters, including writers at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNET’s News.com. There is no way to overstate just how bad a move this was for HP, nor how sorry the tech giant will be that it ever thought to mess with the press this way.
Lockyer tried to verbalize the grave danger HP faces from the awakened media monster but even his clever word bite is inadequate.
Now, to have illegally spied on reporters I would say is stupid cubed — to the power of three. What a way to stick your finger in the hornet’s nest, to spy on reporters.
I have faith that a p*ssed-off press will make mince-meat out of HP. That’s why I disagree with Lucy Dalglish, head of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Daglish believes that HP’s snooping will have a “chilling” effect on reporters and their sources.
“It shows incredible arrogance on the part of the company and disrespect for the role that a free press plays in a democracy,” Dalglish said. “It’s completely inappropriate and it clearly will have a chilling effect on reporters being able to do stories where they have to rely on confidential sources. There’s a reason why there are so many safeguards and hoops that the Justice Department has to go through to get phone records.”
Although Dalglish makes some valid points, given the badness that has befallen HP — and we can only imagine what horribleness is ahead — only the most foolish companies will attempt to gag board members or executives in a similarly idiotic fashion, or even try to hint that “leakers will be punished.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:27 PM | Print | Comments (1)
The National Football League and Yahoo have joined hands to stream the NFL’s full slate of live games online…but only for viewers overseas. The Yahoo!-powered games will be available on NFL Game Pass at a steep price of $24.99 per week or $249.99 for the entire 17-week NFL regular season.
At these prices, it’s clear the NFL is hoping to scoop up some extra cash by providing the events to die-hard fans who can’t access the games overseas. The NFL has said as much — this is a service for “avid” fans and not the mass market.
Which raises an interesting concept: does the web facilitate high-priced access to video content for narrow groups of viewers willing to pay big bucks for that access? For example, I might pay a lot of money for online access to an obscure TV show or for historical WWII footage, content not likely to draw a crowd (and therefore not likely to generate ad revenues).
Since this content already exists and putting it online is a relatively costless proposition, particularly if demand on the servers is light, why wouldn’t programmers start setting up premium portals for all kinds of content? Any subscription or access payments are just gravy.
That’s the case with what the NFL is doing — North American football appeals only to North Americans. It’s a particularly geographically narrow sport. Outside of Canada or the U.S., few people want to watch it…unless they’re North Americans.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:26 AM | Print | Comments (0)The big news today (aside from the appalling but nonetheless juicy pretexting scandal at HP. The WSJ didn’t break this story but it has the best coverage now) is Amazon’s launch of its long-awaited movie download service. The Internet retail behemoth, which already sells scads of DVDs, has launched Amazon Unbox, which will ultimately offer thousands of television shows, movies and other videos from more than 30 studios and networks.
Applying the price level set by Apple with its iTunes store, Amazon will sel TV shows at $1.99/episode, with movies selling for $7.99 to $14.99. Movies will also be available for rent for $3.99.
Practically all of Hollywood — except Disney, which is expected to announce a movie download deal with Apple next week — is on board including Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, Warner Bros., Lionsgate Entertainment and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (which is owned by Sony).
Some top TV programmers — again, excluding Disney-owned ABC — are selling their shows on Amazon, including all of the Viacom networks (CBS, MTV, Nickleodeon, etc.), PBS, BBC, A&E and Discovery, among others.
I’m still not sure why Hollywood is investing so much effort in doing online movie distribution deals, but then pulling the rug out from under consumers by allowing them to watch the films only on PCs (or mobile devices) and burn the films to DVD for PC-only playback. Hollywood presumably won’t make that last leap to allowing DVD-burning for TV viewing because traditional retailers, such as WalMart, might revolt. But hey, even WalMart is getting into the online distribution game, so perhaps it’s time for the studios to give up these playback restrictions.
In any event, just like most other movie download options, Amazon’s Unbox is restricting video playback to PCs or Windows-related mobile players. As Mike at TechDirt noted, this is the same-old, same-old for web-based movies:
There’s nothing new here and nothing compelling. Amazon has shown in the past that it understands a lot about making the online shopping experience work well for consumers. It’s too bad they were unable to transfer that knowhow to video downloads.
Update: I love this - here’s Richard Greenfield’s (Pali Capital) take on the whole you-can’t-watch-movies-on-TV-sets restrictions required of Amazon.
The rules and pricing scheme of Unbox, make us believe that movie studios do not want legal movie downloading to be terribly successful in the near-intermediate term.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:28 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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