Category Archives: Media
Going Gaga at Amazon
At some point, some people decided they’d better eat the costs of their mule herd and invest in tractors to haul stuff if they wanted to survive. Which side of history is the music industry on? Continue reading
This Phone Call Is Brought to You by Coca-Cola
The cost of telephony is approaching zero, and you can already buy TVs that let you have Skype video calls while you’re watching. Can phone ads be far behind Continue reading
Are You Sure You Want to Friend Facebook?
The media business (and yes, since Facebook and Google put content on screens, they are part of it) is entering a Brave New World where marketers are learning with extraordinary specificity your occupation, state of health, social status, hobbies, favorite movies and music, sexual proclivities and practically every other piece of meaningful information about you. We are told that this will improve the rate of return on advertising by orders of magnitude, and I believe it.
But the downsides are potentially enormous, and haven’t been thought through. If information is power, we are handing power on an unprecedented scale to the people who control what we see and hear on those broadband pipes. When Barack Obama joked at Facebook last week that “I’m the guy who got Mark Zuckerberg to put on a coat and tie”, he was a lot closer to the truth of his position in the scheme of things than he realized. Continue reading
TV in 2020: Best Guesses
So where will television be in 2020? I posed the question last week at a panel I led during NAB with execs from DreamWorks, Sony Electronics, Starz, Nielsen and Technicolor. Of course, nobody really knows what TV will look like in two … Continue reading
How Not to Run a TV Network
If TV network executives spent as much time and money embracing new technologies as they do on lawyers to protect their turf, maybe they wouldn’t need Time Warner and Netflix to show them how to do their jobs. Continue reading
AOL: A Case of Split Personality
Seems like sometime soon we’ll be either be celebrating AOL’s recovery or mourning its demise. Can’t fault Armstrong for trying. Continue reading
From iPads to NewsPads
It’s not clear whether The Daily, News Corp.’s ambitious entry into the world of online newspapers, will survive. After all, 50 reporters writing for a product designed for iPads could be tough to support financially — especially since the venture … Continue reading
NYT to Charge Under $20 for Online Access
The New York Times appears to be adopting the same tactics for its online business as the Wall Street Journal, which allows subscribers to its paper version free access to WSJ.com. Continue reading
Papers Fare Well in Online Charge Experiment
Steven Brill’s Journalism Online, testing a new way to charge online newspaper readers, reported that roughly two dozen small and medium-sized papers didn’t see their advertising revenue or traffic decline substantially. Over several months, monthly unique visits to the papers’ … Continue reading


