There’s not much of a business yet in Apple TV, as Apple’s leadership often notes. But there may be soon, with the market for connected TVs evolving as it has been. In a research note issued this morning, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster says the time is right for Apple to release the next iteration of Apple TV and to begin work on a full-fledged Internet-connected television set.
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Long-suffering Sirius XM investors who’ve held onto the company’s stock despite its troubles are being rewarded for their perseverance. Sirius shares are up over 13 percent today at 68 cents. And they’re up about 26 percent for the week. Why? A few reasons. The government’s “cash for clunkers” program and rumors of new iPod dock.
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This week has been a good one for Sirius XM Radio. The company’s shares spiked, rising about 20 percent to 54 cents on news of the government’s expanded “Cash for Clunkers” program and the positive impact it should have on new car sales and, by extension, new Sirius subscriptions. That analysts had been predicting a second-quarter loss for the satellite radio company, along with the loss of thousands of subscribers, did little to temper enthusiasm.
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Despite some glaring omissions in its channel lineup, Sirius XM’s new iPhone app has earned considerable traction in the iTunes App Store. It was downloaded more than one million times in the first two weeks it was available–this despite the fact that the app doesn’t include access to Howard Stern, the personality Sirius often claims is responsible for driving more subscriptions than any other.
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If you thought the decline in subscribers posted by Sirius XM Radio in its first quarter was ugly, you ain’t seen nothing yet. With the souring economy weighing heavy on the auto industry–a mainstay of Sirius’s business–and partner Chrysler navigating bankruptcy, the struggling company is bracing itself for continued subscriber losses in its second quarter.
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Google’s gone and run afoul of the Department of Justice again. Its interest piqued by the growing outcry over the company’s proposed book-search settlement with authors and publishers, the agency has opened an inquiry.
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EBay may yet find a way to justify the astonishing $2.6 billion it paid for Skype. This morning, the Internet phone service launched an aggressive new international calling plan for U.S. customers. For flat fees of up to $9.95-a-month, Skype is offering unlimited calls to computers, landlines and some cellphones in 34 countries.
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The Recording Industry Association of America demands damages of $150,000 per song for file-sharing infringements, yet it pays the artists who create those songs pennies for their work. And now it wants to pay them even less.
The RIAA and its online counterpart, the Digital Media Association, have petitioned the Copyright Royalty Board to slash the [...]
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Yahoo took some time off from fretting over its uncertain future today to ditch its also-ran subscription music service.
This morning the company said it’s exiting the subscription-music market and throwing its support behind Rhapsody America, a joint venture company owned by RealNetworks and Viacom. In the coming months, Yahoo Music Unlimited subscribers will be [...]
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Looks like Last.fm co-founder Richard Jones and Facebook founder Mark “Once every hundred years media changes” Zuckerberg have at least one thing in common: a penchant for new-economy hyperbole.
Announcing the debut of Last.fm’s “unprecedented” on-demand music streaming platform, Jones–in a moment of Zuckerbergian grandiosity–proclaimed:
Today we’re redesigning the music economy.”
Which will no doubt come as a [...]
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The clever folks at Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile unit have figured out a way to comply with a court order prohibiting the sales of iPhones tethered to its network, and still remain the exclusive German carrier of the device: sell the iPhone without a T-Mobile contract at a wallet-shriveling price.
And so this morning, the company [...]
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