About the best thing to be said about Amazon Unbox, the mediocre, odiously restrictive, video download service the retailer launched last year, is that it was … er … Windows-only, I guess. Which, obviously isn’t saying much.
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If the old media advertising economy is in the toilet, then its new media counterpart is sitting atop it. According to figures compiled by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, spending on Internet advertising in 2007 rose to $21.2 billion, up 26 percent from the prior year.
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Vonage’s slow death is … well, it’s slowing.The financially struggling Internet-phone company reported today a smaller first-quarter loss thanks largely to prudent cost cuts.
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The cable industry may have finally settled on a wireless strategy–Sprint’s. The Wall Street Journal reports that Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks are discussing a WiMax partnership with Sprint and Clearwire.
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Time Warner’s AOL division posted financial results today, and while its revenue did not, as some investors worried, “fall off a cliff,” it’s clearly hanging on to one for dear life.
Revenue at the AOL unit slid 23% to $1.1 billion, with much of that decline stemming from a steep 28% drop-off in dial-up subscribers. Ad-revenue [...]
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Well, Comcast founder Ralph Roberts has at least one thing in common with Apple CEO Steve Jobs: an annual salary of $1. Bowing to shareholder criticism, the bandwidth-throttling cable company is slashing Roberts’s pay from $1.85 million to a buck and has amended his compensation package so that he will no longer be eligible for [...]
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Undersea Internet cable damage is hardly unusual, but four five cables severed in one week? Seems a bit odd, doesn’t it? Last Wednesday, two cables in the Mediterranean were cut, disrupting Internet traffic from Egypt to India. On Friday, a third cable was cut, this one in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of the [...]
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With little more than a year to go before television in the states goes all-digital, the federal government is doing its best to make the transition easier for couch potatoes dreading the looming obsolescence of their rabbit-eared sets.
Yesterday, the Commerce Department began accepting applications for $40 coupons to defray the cost of a basic digital-to-analog [...]
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Bienvenue, iPhone: France Telecom will begin selling Apple’s cellphone this evening at selected Orange stores in Paris and other cities. … FCC Says ‘Uncle’: A proposal by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to tightly regulate the cable TV industry has been “drastically” trimmed. … Amazon: 1; Feds: 0. The federal government has lost its bid to compel Amazon to release details about the book-buying habits of thousands of its customers. …
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Hulu.com, the News Corp./NBC Universal video service that sounds like it was named by The Web 2.0 Bull—t Generator™, went into private beta today, and while critics continued to snicker at the name, most admitted the ad-supported service was, by and large, pretty decent. ”I am impressed thus far,” wrote BoomTown’s Kara Swisher. “I will, of course, reserve judgment until I get to test-drive it for a while, but in concept and tone and aims–that is, more open than I ever expected the service to be–it is off to a good start.”
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Looks like there are a few more years of life left in those old rabbit-eared TV sets yet. The Federal Communications Commission this week unanimously adopted rules designed to prevent analog-only cable subscribers from losing their local TV stations’ signals for three years after the switch to digital TV occurs.
“This item, at its core, is [...]
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