Reuters has this juicy report on an interview that Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone had with Charlie Rose last night. The hard news: Viacom has looked at but won’t buy Facebook because it’s too expensive.
“We would not consider Facebook,” Redstone said. “We looked at it. The price is too high.”
If Viacom finds Facebook too expensive, then maybe Facebook is pricing itself out of the market…The second piece of hardish news: Redstone got coy when asked if Viacom is interested in buying YouTube.
Redstone dodged questions on whether Viacom was interested in buying top online video site YouTube. “It’s a very good company,” he said of the 19-month old site that lets users share homemade videos.
Now, for the purely titillating news, Redstone admits that he was “humiliated” when former CEO Tom Freston failed to buy MySpace, which went to rival mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. instead. Freston’s fumble on MySpace is widely recognized as the reason for the popular executive’s ouster from Viacom.
“Before Rupert got into the act, MySpace was sitting there for $500 million and Tom didn’t take it,” Redstone said.
Update: The video of Redstone’s interview with Rose is here. (Hat tip to Rafat.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:15 PM | Print | Comments (0)The Radio and Television News Director Foundation(RTNDF) issued survey results yesterday that show television continues to dominate traditional and new media as a source of news. Of the 1,016 people surveyed, 65.5% named local television news as one of their top three sources of news, compared with 28.4% who cited newspapers and 28.3% who named national network news.
The surprising (to me) finding is that Internet was one of the top three choices for only 11.2% of those surveyed. This I couldn’t quite believe, so I scoped out in more detail the survey’s methods and detailed statistical results. The study, funded by the Ford Foundation and conducted by researchers at Ball State University, is, after all, conducted under the auspices of local TV news directors.
The more detailed results show that even young people (18 to 35) don’t pick the Internet as one of their top three choices for news — only 13.9% of the people surveyed in this demographic category said that the Internet is one of the top three sources of news. How can this be? It seems so counter-intuitive and certainly feels wrong for most of us who are online denizens.
I scoped out the survey methodology and it seems pristine with one niggling problem. The researchers relied on random sample dialing to residential telephone numbers, a fact that skew the results away from young people and early technology adopters, many of whom rely strictly on their mobile phones for voice service. (The researchers, however, oversampled for the young demographic, perhaps to take this into account.)
No, the answer lies in what kind of Internet subscription the respondents’ had, a background demographic question that did not appear in the survey queries. If the researchers had cut the data according to type of Internet subscription — dial-up versus broadband — the data might have yielded more interesting findings.
As this Pew Internet and American Life Project survey demonstrated, for homes with broadband connections, the Internet is actually second only to local news as a source of news. The Pew study, released in March, showed that 46% of young (18 to 36) respondents with broadband connections cite the Internet as a source of news, second only to local TV stations, which 51% cited as a source of news.
However, as is true with the RTNDF survey, older respondents and homes with dial-up rank the Internet fourth as a source of news. The implications, of course, are that as broadband penetration continues to increase, and as the younger demographic becomes the older demographic, the Internet will increasingly be the second-ranked source of news (and eclipse local broadcast stations?) no matter how you cut the data.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:37 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The EFF has sued the Justice Department after the FBI failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the Bureau’s DCS-3000 and Red Hook surveillance programs. In its complaint, EFF claims that the DCS-1000 is a successor to the “Carnivore” program, which intercepts information in millions of emails per second for suspected criminals.
Red Hook is a system used by the FBI to intercept and collect voice and data calls. Under its FLAG (FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government) project, the EFF filed its first FOIA request on August 11, 2006 and the FBI has yet to respond, violating the statutory limit for processing an FOIA request, the EFF contends.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:15 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The online video venture backed by Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, known as the Venice Project, is coming out from under wraps and Business Week’s Steve Rosenbush got an exclusive look. One hundred people have been testing the system, with a wider beta test to follow in November and full access to anyone slated for the year-end.
The Venice Project (no other name has been revealed yet) is trying to persuade media companies to put their full-length videos online, and will accepted user contributed video, in an effort to turn the PC into something more akin to a TV. According to Rosenbush, it succeeds in creating “something far beyond anything you’ll experience in your den.”
To get started, users need to download a piece of software from the Web and install it on their PCs. When they boot up, the software will connect to the Web and open a full-screen window displaying “near high-definition” quality video images.
While the software turns your PC screen into something that looks a lot like your TV, the capabilities go far beyond anything you’ll experience in your den. Jiggle your computer mouse, and a variety of tools appear along the edges of the screen, even as the video continues to play. At the bottom of the screen, there are controls like those on a DVD player, including stop, pause, and fast-forward, as well as a search window to find new videos. An image on the left includes a menu of preset channels. And on the right, there’s a set of interactive tools that let you share video playlists with friends or family. An image at the top of the screen identifies the channel and the name of the clip you’re watching. All of the images can be expanded by clicking on them with a mouse.
Unlike Kazaa, also founded by Zennstrom and Friis, the Venice Project hopes to work out licensed deals with content providers beforehand. “This system is designed from the ground up with the content owner, the marketer and the consumer in mind,”Friis says in the article.
The two entrepreneurs are also talking to marketers and advertisers about coming onboard as sponsors at the outset.
Update: Om has this interesting interview today with Janus Friis. Check it out.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:48 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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