“Paradoxically, a format that hasn’t changed since Mr. Carson codified it (monologue, celebrity, musical guest), is ideally constituted for the cut-and-paste ethos of YouTube and Twitter. Far more than a drama or a reality show, a joke or musical number can be plucked and posted online as a stand-alone. There is no need to DVR: Why record the cow when the Internet and social media can give viewers the milk free?”
Tag Archives: technology
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The divergent public views on pay are particularly odd, since today’s excesses are more often in Silicon Valley. When the sequel to the movie “Wall Street” was filmed a few years ago, it was in Eric Schmidt’s apartment, not at a Wall Street executive’s. Mr. Schmidt, by the way, was reported by Business Insider to have a “fabulous life” with a Gulfstream V, a 195-foot yacht and multiple homes across the country including a new $22 million Hollywood mansion. You could write similar things about Google’s co-founders.
Imagine if Mr. Dimon or Mr. Blankfein lived so ostentatiously? Wall Street is certainly known for its high-end consumption, but it is also a place where being conspicuous about it is frowned upon. In Silicon Valley, however, the superwealthy can flaunt their toys and no one says a word.
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“If you want Google search, they’re going to shove Google Plus at you pretty hard, so the consumer’s forced to take the product they don’t want to get the product they want,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies antitrust law and the Internet.
“That raises big questions under antitrust law,” he said. “It reminds me a little bit of Microsoft when Microsoft was fearing Netscape and decided to bend over backward and do anything possible to tie Explorer to their operating system.”
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Generally speaking, antitrust regulators are most worried about mergers that create monopolies that can raise the prices of goods and services when customers have few or no other choices. But officials should be just as concerned about deals that turn a business into a dominant buyer that can make or break its suppliers.
An all-powerful cable company, for example, would be able to influence and control what Americans could watch or read by refusing to carry channels or certain Internet services, or it could favor its own content. Comcast, for example, might find it tempting to treat programming from NBC Universal, which it owns, better than shows from rival networks and movie studios.
Officials at the antitrust division of the Department of Justice and the F.C.C., who have spoken recently about the importance of competition in the increasingly concentrated communications industry, need to study this deal closely. If they find that the merger would give Comcast too much power, the agencies can demand that the company make significant divestments (Comcast has offered to divest three million customers to get regulators to look upon the deal favorably) or they could sue to block the acquisition altogether.
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The U.S. cable-TV business, much like telephone and radio, has been consolidating from dozens of regional players to a handful of giants. Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable would unite the nation’s two biggest cable operators, giving Comcast roughly a third of the nation’s cable-TV subscribers. Below is a chart of major acquisitions (both partial and whole) by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Charter and Cox since the early ’90s.
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In our multidevice world, Amazon’s media store functions as what I like to call a “connector” — it bridges the chasm between otherwise foreign technologies.
This gets to the most important principle for dealing with an uncertain future: Invest your time and money in connectors. For instance, store all your important documents on the cloud-storage service Dropbox, because its business model depends on it working everywhere. And it does: The documents you create on any single machine are replicated on all your other machines, instantly. Similarly, when someone hands you a business card, you can snap a photo of it on the note-taking app Evernote, which also functions as a connector, letting you get at your scribbles regardless of which machine you move to next.
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“Gig City,” as Chattanooga is sometimes called, has what city officials and analysts say was the first and fastest — and now one of the least expensive — high-speed Internet services in the United States. For less than $70 a month, consumers enjoy an ultrahigh-speed fiber-optic connection that transfers data at one gigabit per second. That is 50 times the average speed for homes in the rest of the country, and just as rapid as service in Hong Kong, which has the fastest Internet in the world.
It takes 33 seconds to download a two-hour, high-definition movie in Chattanooga, compared with 25 minutes for those with an average high-speed broadband connection in the rest of the country.
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Nintendo, which is based in Kyoto, Japan, said revenue in the first three quarters of the current fiscal year, or through December, fell to 499 billion yen, or $4.83 billion, from ¥543 billion a year earlier.
Nintendo’s president and other executives said they would take a pay cut for five months to take responsibility for the poor performance. The pay of the president, Satoru Iwata, will be cut in half.
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Two broadcast television stations in Los Angeles will become the first participants in a pilot test of the government’s plans to eventually free up and auction off more airwaves for use in wireless broadband, officials said on Tuesday.
The stations, KLCS, a public broadcaster, and KJLA, a small multilingual programmer, will participate in a channel-sharing experiment that is being devised with the trade association for wireless phone carriers. The wireless companies are eager to get broadcasters to give up airwaves so they can buy them and use them for high-speed wireless Internet connections.
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The web was more like a set of tin cans and a thin wire back then, so news media upstarts had trouble being heard. With high broadband penetration, the web has become a fully realized consumer medium where pages load in a flash and video plays without stuttering. With those pipes now built, we are in a time very similar to the early 1980s, when big cities were finally wired for cable. What followed was an explosion of new channels, many of which have become big businesses today.
The same holds true for digital. Organizations like BuzzFeed, Gawker, The Huffington Post, Vice and Vox, which have huge traffic but are still relatively small in terms of profit, will eventually mature into the legacy media of tomorrow.
More and more, it’s becoming apparent that digital publishing is its own thing, not an additional platform for established news companies. They can buy their way into it, but their historical advantages are often offset by legacy costs and bureaucracy.
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shaun james bockert 