Reuters says more than 400,000 Americans have dropped pay TV this year. If you want to evaluate the state of the pay-TV business, you have to include the results from the telco guys, who have been taking share from the cable and satellite guys. And you have to look at numbers for the whole year, not a single quarter. Once you do that, you end up with numbers that are basically flat, give or take a few thousand subscribers.
You can argue that the pay-TV industry’s no-growth or barely-there growth is due to a weak economy and lousy household formation numbers. Or you can argue that it’s because people really are swapping out pay TV for Netflix, Apple TV, etc. Or a mix of both, or whatever.
But for now, at least, you can’t argue that the pay-TV industry is shrinking.
Read more here
Friday, August 3
Americans drop pay-TV
More than 400,000 American homes drop their pay-TV service since the start of the year.
DirecTV Group, the No.1 U.S. satellite TV provider, revealed its first ever quarterly customer losses on Thursday, with some 52,000 homes dropping the service in the second quarter. That was more than analysts expected from a company long seen as the best run video provider in the industry.
Also on Thursday, Time Warner Cable Inc, the No.2 cable provider said it lost more subscribers than analysts expected with 169,000 customers leaving the service. The biggest U.S. TV distributor, Comcast Corp, lost 176,000 video subscribers.
The idea of cord-cutting has gathered steam as several major technology companies have held talks with program makers about putting together TV packages that will be delivered via the Internet. The idea would be to use cheaper, smaller TV packages to attract customers to buy or use their services. So far Google Inc, Intel Corp and Amazon are among those known to have held talks.
Read more here
Also on Thursday, Time Warner Cable Inc, the No.2 cable provider said it lost more subscribers than analysts expected with 169,000 customers leaving the service. The biggest U.S. TV distributor, Comcast Corp, lost 176,000 video subscribers.
The idea of cord-cutting has gathered steam as several major technology companies have held talks with program makers about putting together TV packages that will be delivered via the Internet. The idea would be to use cheaper, smaller TV packages to attract customers to buy or use their services. So far Google Inc, Intel Corp and Amazon are among those known to have held talks.
Read more here
Thursday, August 2
4 reasons investors don't like Facebook
In a little more than two months since its initial public offering, Facebook has gone from being a stock that investors fought to own to one they can't get away from fast enough. Wednesday, it set a new low. Anyone watching the unrelenting drop may wonder how Facebook's star dimmed so quickly on Wall Street. Four reasons:
•Disconnect between serving consumers vs. investors. The fact that Facebook seems more concerned about designing products than finding ways to profit from them is irking investors.
•Overhype from the start.
Read more here
•Disconnect between serving consumers vs. investors. The fact that Facebook seems more concerned about designing products than finding ways to profit from them is irking investors.
•Overhype from the start.
Read more here
Belo: Sinking Newspaper Revs
A.H. Belo, which publishes the Dallas Morning News among other newspapers, saw total revenues decrease 5% from to $109 million in the second quarter of 2012, the company announced Wednesday. Total advertising revenues sank 8%, from second-quarter 2011 to second-quarter 2012, with display ads down 15% to $21.5 million, preprint revenue down 1% to $20 million, and classifieds down 13% to over $13 million. Total digital ad revenues increased 1% to $9 million, while circulation revenues decreased 3% to $34 million.
Last week McClatchy, which publishes newspapers including The Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee and Charlotte Observer, reported that total revenues slipped 4.8% to $299 million in the second quarter of 2012.
Lee Enterprises -- which owns almost 50 daily newspapers, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch -- said total revenues decreased 4.3% to $179 million in the second quarter of 2012, due mostly to a nearly 6% drop in advertising revenue, to $125 million.
Read more here
Last week McClatchy, which publishes newspapers including The Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee and Charlotte Observer, reported that total revenues slipped 4.8% to $299 million in the second quarter of 2012.
Lee Enterprises -- which owns almost 50 daily newspapers, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch -- said total revenues decreased 4.3% to $179 million in the second quarter of 2012, due mostly to a nearly 6% drop in advertising revenue, to $125 million.
Read more here
Tuesday, July 31
A Quarter of E-Commerce Could Be Mobile By 2017
Just about every aspect of desktop migration to devices is accelerating to a pace that many of us couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. ABI Research is now projecting that by the close of 2017, 24.4% of e-commerce will be m-commerce.
The striking estimates are based on what the company calls a “spectacular” doubling of worldwide m-commerce to $65.6 billion in 2011 alone. Rapid adoption of smartphones is driving the consumer side of the equation as developing countries join more mature markets in moving directly to more advanced devices.
Read more here
The striking estimates are based on what the company calls a “spectacular” doubling of worldwide m-commerce to $65.6 billion in 2011 alone. Rapid adoption of smartphones is driving the consumer side of the equation as developing countries join more mature markets in moving directly to more advanced devices.
Read more here
Monday, July 30
Median Writer and Reporter Wages by State
Here’s how journalist wages compare to the national median ($49,192) for writers/authors by state:
Read more here
Read more here
iPhones make Chinese eyes light up
Ask about Apple inside China and you hear little but praise. It is one of the most admired brands in the Middle Kingdom. A survey last year by researchers at Stanford University found that iPad penetration was greater at an elite high school in Beijing than at one in Palo Alto, California. In the first quarter of this year Apple earned $7.9 billion in greater China, making it the firm’s second-biggest market.
In short, Apple’s products are selling fast and likely to sell even faster. Some predict that China will overtake America to become Apple’s largest market within a few years.
Read more here
In short, Apple’s products are selling fast and likely to sell even faster. Some predict that China will overtake America to become Apple’s largest market within a few years.
Read more here
Transfer of Value
Traditional newspapers that move online are about to lose the war against pure players and aggregators. Armed with the conviction their intellectual superiority makes them immune to digital modernity, newspapers neglected today’s internet driving forces: relying on technology to build audiences and the ability to coalesce a community over any range of subjects — even the most mundane ones.
On one side, legacy medias: Great franchises who grew on strong values, such as “pristine” journalism, independence, storytelling, fact-checking, solid editing, respect for the copyright… Along the way, they made their share of mistakes, but, overall, the result is great. After all, at the height of the Fourth Estate’s power, the population was better informed than today’s Facebook cherry-pickers. Now, this (aging) fraternity faces a new generation of media people who build their fiefdom on a completely different set of values. For instance, the notion of copyright has become exceedingly elastic.
Original stories are getting very little traffic due to the poor marketing tactics of old-fashion publishers. But once they are swallowed by the HuffPo’s clever traffic-generation machine, the same journalistic item will make tens or hundred times better traffic-wise. Who is right? Who can look to the better future in the digital world ? Is it the virtuous author carving language-smart headlines or the aggregator generating eye-gobbling phrases thanks to high tech tools? Your guess. Maybe it’s time to wake-up.
Read more here
On one side, legacy medias: Great franchises who grew on strong values, such as “pristine” journalism, independence, storytelling, fact-checking, solid editing, respect for the copyright… Along the way, they made their share of mistakes, but, overall, the result is great. After all, at the height of the Fourth Estate’s power, the population was better informed than today’s Facebook cherry-pickers. Now, this (aging) fraternity faces a new generation of media people who build their fiefdom on a completely different set of values. For instance, the notion of copyright has become exceedingly elastic.
Original stories are getting very little traffic due to the poor marketing tactics of old-fashion publishers. But once they are swallowed by the HuffPo’s clever traffic-generation machine, the same journalistic item will make tens or hundred times better traffic-wise. Who is right? Who can look to the better future in the digital world ? Is it the virtuous author carving language-smart headlines or the aggregator generating eye-gobbling phrases thanks to high tech tools? Your guess. Maybe it’s time to wake-up.
Read more here
Why Murdoch’s The Daily Doesn’t Fly
Rupert Murdoch might pull the plug on The Daily which looses $30 million a year. But, in an open email to the publication’s staff, Jesse Angelo, its editor-in-chief, was quick to deny such rumors. Eighteen months ago, The Daily was held up as embodying the newsmedia’s future. It was the first to be designed for the iPad. Fact is, The Daily never took-off. Six months after its high-wattage launch, it only claimed 80,000 paid-for subscribers. Today, Jesse Angelo mentions a mere 100,000 subs. It is both far from the 500,000 necessary to break-even.
Read more here
Read more here
Sunday, July 29
A musical merger could create a new model, or a dozy mammoth
Some are now wondering whether Universal Music Group was wise to gamble
quite so much money on EMI’s recorded-music division, which it bought
from Citigroup for £1.2 billion ($1.9 billion) in an auction in November
last year.
Sales of recorded music have fallen by half in the past decade, from about $13 billion in 2002 to $6.5 billion last year. Downloaded music is much cheaper than the old compact discs. Indeed, thanks to widespread piracy, it is often free.
Digital sales are rising, but are still only a fraction of what CDs used to generate. Subscription services such as Spotify may appeal more to tech-savvy music aficionados than to casual buyers who might once have picked up a CD on the way home from work. Efforts to bundle music with mobile-phone or pay-TV subscriptions have failed to catch on.
Read more here
Sales of recorded music have fallen by half in the past decade, from about $13 billion in 2002 to $6.5 billion last year. Downloaded music is much cheaper than the old compact discs. Indeed, thanks to widespread piracy, it is often free.
Digital sales are rising, but are still only a fraction of what CDs used to generate. Subscription services such as Spotify may appeal more to tech-savvy music aficionados than to casual buyers who might once have picked up a CD on the way home from work. Efforts to bundle music with mobile-phone or pay-TV subscriptions have failed to catch on.
Read more here
Homebrew apps have arrived
In May Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, unveiled a kit
that allows people with no programming skills to create a working app
within minutes. Apple, too, has applied for a patent indicating it is
also building a DIY tool for iOS, its mobile operating system. And in
March the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a beta version
of App Inventor, which allows even simpletons to make apps for Android
phones.
Read more here
Read more here
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