Archive for November 20th, 2006
Comcast is expected to announce a deal with Disney to offer some of ABC’s top shows on video on demand for free, reports the Wall Street Journal. Desperate Housewives, Lost and World News with Charles Gibson are among the VOD shows, as well as selected programs from ESPN, the Disney Channel and Toon Disney. But to keep affiliates happy, the ABC shows will only be available in markets where the network owns a station. (CBS is the only other network to offer its primetime shows on VOD for free, but again, only in markets where the network owns a station.) Also, Disney has agreed to release new movies on VOD within 15 days after the respective DVDs go on sale. (WSJ sub. req.)
November 20th, 2006
WaPost national political editor John Harris and reporter Jim VandeHei are quitting the paper to start the Capitol Leader, a new multimedia publication that’s backed by Allbritton Communications. The website and newspaper will partner with WJLA-TV (owned by Allbritton) as well as draw from regular features on CBS Face the Nation and CBS This Morning. (WSJ sub. req.)
November 20th, 2006
The gatekeepers’ legal worries about user-contributed content have one less leg to stand on after the California Supreme Court ruled that Web sites cannot be sued for libel for publishing inflamatory information supplied by other parties. Cory adds: This is a big ruling with profound implications for citizen journalism. The court ruled that people who claim they were defamed in an Internet posting can only seek damages from the original source of the statement. A big victory, although I’m sure we’re not hearing the end of this. Safran adds: This is a debate Cory and I have disagreed upon for years. (Not the liability issues, but simply what a court would rule.) I am happily proven wrong, and give full credit to my good friend, the Honorable Representative from Seattle. Johnson adds: … I got nothin’. Just wanted to have the last word after all the addenda.
November 20th, 2006
Boston’s CBS affiliate, WBZ-TV, has announced it will once again call itself WBZ. The station has been forced to go by the utterly identity-free CBS4 in recent years, but is absolutely best known in Boston as “‘BZ”. (Logo to the right is from early ’90s.) You know that cliched line about how a station’s name “means news”? WBZ actually does “mean news” here because its radio station, WBZ-AM is all-news and goes back to 1921. The TV channel went by “WBZ” for about 50 years. People know it. With channel numbers becoming meaningless and networks increasingly going around the affiliates, it’s especially important to establish and stick with a brand. What’s especially surprising about this shift is that WBZ is a CBS O/O - and you have to think it would have been that much harder to get the change made. Next up: the station will mercifully get to rebrand its website’s mouthful of a url: cbs4boston.com.
Full release, after the jump.
Read the full post November 20th, 2006
Washington, D.C.
Read the full post November 20th, 2006
After a firestorm of criticism, News. Corp. said today that it has canceled the O.J. Simpson book and Fox television special “If I Did It.” The network quotes News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch as saying he decided that the project was “ill-considered.” Several Fox affiliates had chosen not to broadcast the special, in which Simpson talks in hypothetical terms about his role in the killings.
November 20th, 2006
After listening in on the conference call, it’s clear this partnership between Yahoo and seven newspaper companies is bigger than first reported. Called a “deep strategic partnership” with “major commitments” over multiple years, the deal involves unprecedented collaboration between traditional media and a portal. The motivation for Yahoo is clear: “We believe the local segment is largely untapped,” said Yahoo CEO Terry Semel. The ability for Yahoo to expand its advertising (search, graphical and classifieds) into the local market is a huge boost. Not to mention, the value of pulling in more branded local content. The motivation for newspapers: expose newspaper content, classifieds and advertising to a larger, younger audience — and dramatically speed up product development with Yahoo technology.
“The world is changing rapidly,” said William Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews, when asked why he’s partnering with Yahoo. “We think going it alone will just take too long, and we think we can get there much faster doing it this way.” This is a key admission. Local media companies have been struggling online, especially in technology and local search (35 percent of all searches are local), and technology heavyweights as well as hundreds of startups are making a serious run at local. Can local media companies, standing on their own, succeed without a major partner? The newspaper consortium above chose to partner with one of the heavyweights. It will be interesting how this will put pressure on local TV sites to speed new products to market, expand distribution and get scale in advertising. (Disclosure: I work for a Belo TV station.)
November 20th, 2006
AOL, MSN and Yahoo say they’re all but sold out of their premium ad inventory for the holidays. “The biggest inventory sold months ago,” said Yahoo’s Diane Rinaldo. One of the more popular ad packages: home page roadblocks, where a single client dominates all the major ad positions over a given period of time.
November 20th, 2006
