Discovery Communications and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions signed a deal to remake Discovery Health as the Oprah Winfrey Network. The pact will give Harpo 50% control of the network, and Discover Communications will grab 50% of oprah.com. Oprah gets editorial control, Discovery gets a cash machine. For now, Oprah’s signature product, The Oprah Winfrey Show, won’t air on the network. The current syndication deal - which runs through May 2011 - prohibits a cable network repeat. “This is an evolution of what I’ve been able to do every day,” Winfrey said. “I will now have the opportunity to do this 24 hours a day on a platform that goes on forever.”
Discovery Health, by the way, is in more than 70 million homes.
January 15th, 2008
At Macworld, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the wraps off iTunes Movie Rental service with 1,000 movies from Touchstone, Miramax, LionsGate, Fox, Warners Brothers, Walt Disney, Paramount, Universal and Sony. “We have every major studio,” Jobs said. After download, users can watch it for 30 days. Pricing is $2.99 for older movies, $3.99 for new releases and $4.99 for new HD movies. The movies began playing 30 seconds after the download is initiated. The service will go live by the end of February. Also, Jobs admitted that AppleTV is not meeting expectations, and he announced a cheaper verson ($229) that will allow you to download movies to your TV set.
For gearheads, Jobs unveiled the MacBook Air, which measures only .16 inch thick (with an optional flash memory drive) and .76 inch think with the standard 80-gig hard drive. Here’s a guy demo’ing it. Ok, that is thin.
For all the play-by-play, visit Engadget’s coverage of today event.
January 15th, 2008
