Virgin Media CEO Says Net Neutrality is “A Load of Bollocks”

I don't pay for high-speed to get my ISP's preferred feeds. This is tantamount to a cash grab. A consumer revolt is in order.

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From Torrent Freak - The new CEO of Virgin Media is putting his cards on the table early, branding net neutrality “a load of bollocks” and claiming he’s already doing deals to deliver some people’s content faster than others. If you aren’t prepared to cough up the extra cash, he says he’ll put you in the Internet “bus lane”. | Read full article

CBC Torrent Caught Up in ISPs’ BitTorrent Throttling

From New Tee Vee - The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently made a bold decision to release an episode of the show Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister through BitTorrent. The move was remarkable not only because the national broadcaster decided to go completely ad- and DRM-free, but because it openly embraced platforms that are usually known for pirated content, the Pirate Bay and Mininova.org.

But the experience has taught CBC a valuable lesson: Play with the outlaws, and you’re going to be treated like one. Numerous users have reported being unable to access the show downloads due to ISP-based BitTorrent throttling. To make matters worse, telecom company Bell Canada has just begun to throttle P2P traffic for all of its wholesale customers, potentially affecting a huge number of customers of other ISPs that resell Bell’s DSL service. | Read full article

Comcast agrees not to interfere with file-sharing

From CNN - Comcast Corp., an Internet service provider under investigation for hampering online file-sharing by its subscribers, announced Thursday an about-face in its stance and said it will treat all types of Internet traffic equally.

Since user reports of interference with file-sharing traffic were confirmed by an Associated Press investigation in October, Comcast has been vigorously defending its practices, most recently at a hearing of the Federal Communications Commission in February.

Consumer and "Net Neutrality" advocates have been equally vigorous in their attacks on the company, saying that by secretly blocking some connections between file-sharing computers, Comcast made itself a judge and gatekeeper for the Internet. | Read full article

Making millions when the boss isn't looking

From The Globe And Mail - It's one of the fastest-growing, most lucrative departments at CBS Corp. right now. But the company's president, Les Moonves, has a far more blunt way to describe how the network has turned March Madness basketball into an Internet gold mine.

“People sit at their computers and waste away their afternoons watching basketball games while their bosses are looking the other way,” Mr. Moonves told analysts recently in New York.

When asked about the advertising dollars CBS expects this year from online broadcasts of the annual U.S. college tournament starting today, Mr. Moonves simply added: “We are having our best year, by far. Ever.” | Read full article

Web Playgrounds of the Very Young

From The New York Times - Forget Second Life. The real virtual world gold rush centers on the grammar-school set.

Trying to duplicate the success of blockbuster Web sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz, children’s entertainment companies are greatly accelerating efforts to build virtual worlds for children. Media conglomerates in particular think these sites — part online role-playing game and part social scene — can deliver quick growth, help keep movie franchises alive and instill brand loyalty in a generation of new customers.

Second Life and other virtual worlds for grown-ups have enjoyed intense media attention in the last year but fallen far short of breathless expectations. The children’s versions are proving much more popular, to the dismay of some parents and child advocacy groups. Now the likes of the Walt Disney Company, which owns Club Penguin, are working at warp speed to pump out sister sites. | Read full article

Networks Start to Offer TV on the Web

From The New York Times - Music and TV were lazily paddling their canoes down Prosperity Creek when Music suddenly heard a deafening roar ahead. “Help! What’s happening?” cried Music — but it was too late. The canoe tumbled over the Internet Falls, knocking Music upside-down into the churning vortex.

TV, following at a short distance, was determined to avoid Music’s fate. “I shall go with the current and not fight it,” vowed TV. And with only seconds to spare, TV threw every shred of brainpower and muscle into avoiding its doom.

End of Chapter 1.

Now, nobody knows how that story will turn out. But everybody knows that fewer people are watching network TV with every passing year. This year, the networks have mounted their first counterattack. In addition to short mini-videos for the short-attention-span generation, they’re putting full-length free on-demand episodes online. ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CW are all in the game, with surprisingly pleasant results. | Read full article

Growth in Broadband Slows Dramatically

From Live Science - The number of Americans with broadband Internet access rose 40 percent between 2005 and 2006, but only 12 percent between 2006 and 2007—although certain segments of the population did much better than that.

The figures, gathered by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington, DC, showed that 47 percent of American adults had high-speed Internet access at the start of 2007, up from 42 percent in 2006, and 30 percent in 2005. | Read full article

TV on the Web Embraced by Viewers and Advertisers

From Live Science - If you don’t watch TV shows on your computer, it's probably only a matter time before you do. And the networks would love for you to do so, since your eyeballs are worth as much as 40 percent more when they’re parked in front of a computer than in front of a TV.

Today, 18 percent of the nation's online population watches TV shows on their computers.

That's double the rate of last year, and the figure is expected to double next year, said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. McQuivey notes that the online population is about two thirds of the total U.S. population. | Read full article

ABC Reshapes the Evening News for the Web

From The New York Times - Huddled with a producer in an editing suite on a recent Friday afternoon, the ABC News correspondent Bill Blakemore enthusiastically helped put the finishing touches on a video account of his recent trip to Greenland to see the effects of global warming.

The segment did not look like a normal network news report: It showed Mr. Blakemore riding a sled across Greenland’s ice sheet and casually addressing the camera while wearing a black North Face parka and sunglasses. | Read full article

Set-top box makers still waiting for customers

From The New York Times - Sounds like a raw deal, and it's a situation similar to when you buy a set-top box that downloads movies via the Web: You invest a significant amount of money when you buy the box, then whenever you want to watch a movie, you have to pay again. It's one of the reasons that, so far, the few companies to introduce standalone products in this space, such as Akimbo and MovieBeam, have called it quits, or at the very least no longer exist in their original incarnations.

Now the makers of a more evolved version of the Internet-based video download box hope they can change things. | Read full article

High-Speed Video Store in the Living Room

Fascinating business model. It's almost the kind of VOD box I would go for. Almost.

From The New York Times - If you had to make a master list of all the world’s problems, “limited access to movies” probably wouldn’t appear until Page 273,996.

Truth is, life is teeming with opportunities to see movies: movie theaters, video stores, DVD-by-mail services, TV movie channels, pay-per-view, video-on-demand, Xbox 360, iTunes, Internet downloads, hotel rooms, airplanes and so on.

But according to the team at Vudu, all of those outlets are flawed.

Video stores: you have to drive back and forth, and the movie you want might be out of stock. Netflix and Blockbuster by mail: you have to wait a day or two for each movie to arrive. Pay-per-view, video-on-demand, Xbox, iTunes and hotel rooms: puny movie selections. Internet downloads: they arrive on your computer, not your TV.

Vudu’s new $400 movie box, to be available at month’s end, has none of those problems. It’s a little black box (about 7 by 9 by 2 inches) that connects to your TV and to the Internet through a high-speed link — and it comes darned close to putting a video store in your house. Its built-in hard drive permits your choice of 5,000 movies to begin playing instantaneously. There’s no computer involved, no waiting and no monthly fee. | Read full article

The Wait Is Over! News Corp./NBC’s NewSite has a Name.

From The New York Times - They didn’t take any of your suggestions.

The online video venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal - the long awaited challenger to YouTube announced back in March - will be called Hulu.com. | Read full article

Chicago scraps citywide Wi-Fi network

From CBC.ca - An ambitious plan to blanket the city with wireless broadband internet will be shelved because it is too costly and too few residents would use it, Chicago officials said Tuesday.

"We realized — after much consideration — that we needed to re-evaluate our approach to provide universal and affordable access to high-speed internet as part of the city's broader digital inclusion efforts," Chicago's chief information officer, Hardik Bhatt, said in a statement. | Read full article

YouTube to carry ‘overlay' ads

From The Globe And Mail - Video advertising is coming to YouTube, but it won't be the type common at sites elsewhere.

Starting Wednesday, the popular video-sharing site plans to feature semitransparent “overlay” ads at the bottom of selected video clips. The ad disappears after about 10 seconds if the viewer does nothing; the featured clip automatically pauses if the viewer clicks on the overlay to launch the full pitch. | Read full article

Phone Companies Grabbed Most of New Broadband Subscribers Last Quarter

From Research Brief - According to a new study by Leichtman Research Group, the nineteen largest cable and telephone providers in the US, representing about 94% of the market acquired over 1.7 million net additional high-speed Internet subscribers in the second quarter of 2007. The top broadband providers now account for nearly 58 million subscribers, with cable companies having 31.5 million, and telephone companies over 26.4 million. | Read full article

A Fourth Way to Deliver TV to the Home

From The New York Times - One of the most covert startups in Silicon Valley, the temporarily named Building B, is lifting its head up today to announce a round of funding. Though executives at the Belmont, Calif., company still aren’t saying much about their plans, they appear to have sizable ambitions: Building B is aiming to bring both television and other media content, restyled for the Internet age, into your living room in competition with your cable, satellite or telco’s IPTV service. | Read full article

MySpaceTV Beefs Up Sales

From NewTeeVee - Fox Interactive Media has hired Tom Bosco as v-p and head of sales for MySpaceTV, its newly launched video portal. The role includes overseeing all video advertising across MySpace.

Bosco has hopped between various large Internet players over the years, conveniently serving at each when it was trying to get into the online video space. He helped to launch both MSN Video and AOL Video and also served on the IAB broadband committee. | Read full article

The Joost Problem: American ‘Broadband’

From NewTeeVee - Joost, despite an early lead when it comes to the P2P television is beginning to get some criticism about its video quality. A skeptical report on JoostTeam points out that the bit rate is about half that of video from DivX Stage6 or the iTunes Store. And even that resolution is inferior to standard definition digital video from cable providers.

While Joost promises that they’re working on improving the quality, and touts the power of their advanced video compression codecs, there’s only so much that compression can do. The fundamental problem that Joost faces is the fact that the broadband available to North American households simply isn’t fast enough for them to provide image quality comparable to digital cable or satellite, much less high-definition video. | Read full article

Discovery Shows Move Online

From Online Media Daily - DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS TODAY BECOMES THE latest TV programmer to offer free, ad-supported shows online as the season premiere of Animal Planet's "Meerkat Manor" debuts on the Web, a week prior to its cable TV premiere.

Two other shows from Discovery networks--TLC's "LA Ink" and Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs"--will debut online next Wednesday, Aug. 8, a day after their cable premieres.

All three shows will be available via the Web sites of their respective networks, with episodes of additional Discovery Communications series set to be added to the online roster on a regular basis.

At least three spots, up to 30 seconds in length, will run per hour. There will be no pre-roll spot before the episodes, although billboards may appear. The initial advertiser roster consists of nine brands representing six product categories: automotive, CPG, finance, telecommunications, manufacturing and home care. | Read full article

Broadband and Household Income Go Hand-In-Hand

From The Center For Media Research - New consumer research, Broadband Access and Service in the Home 2007, from Leichtman Research Group, finds that 53% of all US households now subscribe to a broadband high-speed Internet service at home. Broadband services now account for about 72% of all home Internet subscriptions, compared to 60% last year.

While broadband subscriptions continued to increase across the country in the past year, broadband penetration remains strongly correlated with household income. | Read full article