CBS Interactive is exiting the German IT publishing market, selling its stable of local sites – ZDNet.de, Silicon.de and CNET.de – to NetMediaEurope (which also owns Gizmodo.de, ITespresso.de and Channelbiz.de).
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Read more at TechCrunch Europe. → Read More
In what I think is an interesting experiment, CBS this morning debuted a “60 Minutes” application that you can find in and launch from the Chrome Web Store (which just got a major facelift).
Granted, “adding it to Chrome” doesn’t really do anything but take you to this page, which you can just open in Chrome just like you would any page, but the Web app does look pretty nice. → Read More
Back in November 2006, I published the Top 10 Greatest Internet Digital Media M&A Deals of All Time. It included eBay’s $1.5 billion acquisition of PayPal, Yahoo’s $1.6 billion acquisition of Overture, and Microsoft’s $400 million purchase of Hotmail back in 1998. It also included News Corp’s $580 million acquisition of MySpace. Don’t laugh. The list was published a month after the big $900 million deal with Google, which I thought Google had drastically overpaid for at the time. Of course, times they change, as does the list, so I decided to update the list – and yes, I went through all 255 pages on the Acquisitions section of CrunchBase.
Below is my updated list of the Top 10 Greatest Digital Media M&A Deals, in reverse order. Give me your top ten in comments. → Read More
Amazon has just announced a deal with CBS to allow Amazon prime customers to stream television shows from CBS’s library of content. Financial terms of the non-exclusive deal were not disclosed.
According to the release, Amazon Prime customers will be able to instantly watch thousands of episodes from the CBS library at no additional cost to their membership. In February, Amazon officially launched the instant streaming service for movies and TV shows for Prime subscribers. → Read More
CBS has acquired Clicker, a TV Guide for internet programming, according to a release just issued by the companies. Clicker’s CEO Jim Lanzone has been named President of CBS Interactive. Terms of the deal were not disclosed; Clicker raised a total of $19 million in funding. According to multiple sources, the deal was in the $50 million to $100 million range.
Clicker is a comprehensive search engine for TV content on the web. The startup made its debut at TechCrunch50 in 2009, and currently indexes more than one million full length TV episodes on the web. → Read More
The wheels are in motion. The rumors have persisted for a while now that a new Apple TV (soon to be called “iTV”) is approaching. It’s thought to be a cheaper, smaller version of the current device that puts an emphasis on streaming rather than storage. The killer app of such a device could literally be apps — as in, the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch variety. But don’t forget about the iTunes content.
While apps (and particularly games) will be great to have in the living room, that room first and foremost remains the place that people consume Hollywood entertainment. A ton of it. While Apple was successful in getting the music industry to bend to its will, they so far haven’t been able to do the same with Hollywood. But they’re going to need to with this new Apple TV. So now they’re apparently calling on an old friend in their latest attempt to make that happen: the trusty $0.99 price. → Read More
Software testing marketplace uTest today announced the results of its so-called “TV Networks Bug Battle” competition. More than 500 software professionals from 30 countries around the world participated in the quarterly competition, reporting a total of 908 technical, functional and GUI bugs in the web and mobile apps of NBC, CBS, Fox and ABC.
Testers were challenged to search the sites for bugs – performing a combination of exploratory, functional and usability testing. → Read More
Well, TV manufacturers are definitely embracing 3D for the home. Obviously it’s going to require the networks to jump in too, as evidenced by Sony and CBS building the “Sony 3D Experience” in the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. → Read More
In the advertising industry overall, revenues generated by direct and brand advertising are roughly split 50/50. But in the online world, where direct advertising is represented mostly by search and email ads and brand advertising by graphical display ads, the split is closer to 70/30 in favor of direct ads.
Last year, with the economy down, the display portion of the U.S. online advertising industry had a particularly rough time. Total revenues in 2009 were down 5.2 percent to $7.5 billion, estimates JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan in a new Internet industry report. But he forecasts that in 2010 U.S. display advertising will rebound 10.5 percent to $8.3 billion, buoyed by a rising economy and actions to reduce the glut of display ad inventory for higher quality sites and content. For instance, both AOL and CBS are making moves to remove their premium ad inventory from ad networks where prices get beaten down to the lowest common denominator. → Read More
The cable companies suck. All of them. Some suck less than others. But they all suck. We need someone to whip them into shape. And that someone may be Apple.
Apple may be on the verge of gaining two key television network agreements, according to The Wall Street Journal. Specifically, CBS and Walt Disney (which runs ABC) are said to be considering a proposal by Apple to offer a subscription-based TV service over the Internet. Presumably, this would work through iTunes like all of Apple-based content, but also presumably it would work over Apple’s Apple TV device (though maybe a new version of it) to bring this content into the living room, where people are used to consuming it. Simply put: This could be huge. → Read More
I don’t know about you, but I have a male geek crush on Cooliris, the startup behind this splendid technology that enables users to browse photos and videos from the Web, their desktops or their iPhone devices in a visually attractive 3D manner that one really has to try to get a feel of how amazing that can be.
Publishers are starting to notice that too, and are increasingly turning to the startup to make some of their own imagery and video content more visually appealing and browsing it, well, downright sexy.
Latest premium publisher to join the fray: CBS Interactive’s TV.com. → Read More
Bias much, CBS? The network ran a report on 60 Minutes the other day (which shows how far off our radar the show is, seeing as though we just found out about it) that, according to TechDirt’s fantastic report, is basically a piece of MPAA propaganda. It makes all sorts of ridiculous claims that can easily be disproven by, you know, spending two minutes looking this stuff up. → Read More
There is no love lost between CBS and Hulu. You won’t find any full episodes of CBS shows on Hulu, and CBS’s own site TV.com is so similar in look and feel that one might call it a product of envy. So it should come as no surprise that the knives are still out for Hulu at CBS Interactive.
An email with an article critical of Hulu from CBS Interactive CEO Quincy Smith that was passed around internally (excerpted below) landed in our inbox. Smith confirms that the email is real. Earlier today, he passed along an article from Contentinople titled “Execs Rip Hulu for Giving Away Content” which quotes media executives on a panel laying into Hulu for giving away TV shows for free. The panelists in the article also praise the cable industry’s proposed TV Everywhere model which will make TV shows and movies available online only to consumers who are already existing cable TV subscribers and can be authenticated as such.
Smith passed along the entire article to his executive team, along with a note wondering “how hard it would be to prove that some ratings declines are a result of reckless hulu streams.” CBS’s ratings for the Fall Season premiers have been doing relatively well, compared to other networks. The implication Smith seems to be making here is that maybe the other networks are down because their audience is going online. If he could prove that, it would make his strategy of shunning Hulu look smart. → Read More
When Twitter decided to start using Bit.ly as its default URL-shortener, usage exploded. But the service was able to handle the rise in usage, and has been steadily adding new features. And now other major players on the web are rewarding that reliability by also embracing it. Today on its blog, Bit.ly details a few of the new API uses and partnerships that they’ve been cooking up.
The biggest is probably Google Reader, which now makes use of Bit.ly shortened links for its new ability to send stories to Twitter. Another big one is CBS, which not uses Bit.ly to share much of its content and keeps a running list of stats here. SixApart has also added a new feature to its TypePad beta test which allows any post to also generate a Bit.ly URL. This will apparently become a part of the full product in the fall. And John Resig of Mozilla used the Bit.ly API to build a new retweet button, similar to the ones you see all over the web powered by TweetMeme, but this is independent. → Read More
A couple of months ago Erick Schonfeld wrote a post titled “Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?” based on a source that has proved to be very reliable in the past. All hell broke loose shortly thereafter.
Before posting Erick reached out to the RIAA, Last.fm and parent company CBS for comments. The only response was from CBS – “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA.” The CBS spokesperson, Katie Gunion, subsequently emailed us to say “would you please attribute the statement to Last.fm, it is currently reading as though CBS issued the statement” Gunion’s email lists her title as Public Relations, CBS Interactive, and her first statement did not name Last.fm (this is important, see below). A subsequent statement by Shannon Jacobs, VP of Communications at CBS: “this is a last.fm issue, as far as I am concerned. It is not a corporate issue. This is a last.fm issue, not a corporate issue. The posting represents last.fm’s response.”
After the story broke all concerned parties had no problem commenting publicly.
Last.fm cofounder Richard Jones said “I’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue.” He followed up with a blog post “Techcrunch are full of shit, “I denied it vehemently on the Techcrunch article, as did several other Last.fm staffers. We denied it in the Last.fm forums, on twitter, via email – basically we denied it to anyone that would listen, and now we’re denying it on our blog.” One blog called us a “tabloid masquerading as a legitimate news outlet.” Lots of others piled on.
Apart from updating the original post we’ve been quiet on this story. The person who first leaked the news was terminated from CBS for the leak, says our original source, and threatened with legal action. He understandably went very quiet. But the outrageously shrill denials by Last.fm just didn’t ring true. Once you got past the personal attacks, the denial language itself was too carefully worded.
Now we’ve located another source for the story, someone who’s very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth, sorta, when they said Erick’s story wasn’t correct.
Last.fm didn’t hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. That corresponds to what our original source said in conversations we had after our initial post and before CBS lawyers became involved. But we didn’t want to update until we had an independent source for that information, too. → Read More
CBSNews.com is undergoing a major overhaul and redesign of its sites to make them easier to navigate, more visually compelling, faster and more focused on driving users to content.
The new home page features a rotating list of top stories on the left, next to the list of the latest and most important headlines. CBS News programs, as well as the latest videos, photo galleries and blogs, are all highlighted on the page. CBS News also plugs its program sites, including Evening News, Face the Nation, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, and Sunday Morning, on its homepage. CBS says that the company applied technology from its sister site, CNET.com, to deliver pages from its servers to users’ screens more rapidly. Dan Farber, CNET’s editor-in-chief, oversaw the redesign. → Read More
Ashton Kutcher got his start on the small screen. His roles in That 70s Show and development of the MTV show Punk’d (which is being kind of reborn with Ustream) allowed him to become a movie star. But these days he seems more interested in using the web to further his career. His recent race with CNN to be the first user with a million Twitter followers was just one facet of what he’s doing online. He also has his own web-based show Blah Girls. But now he’s sending that the opposite way: Back to television.
Katalyst Media, the production company Kutcher runs with Jason Goldman, has signed a deal with CBS Television Distribution (CTD) to distribute Blah Girls on television. Specifically, the show will run as one-minute interstitials between segments on the entertainment magazine show, The Insider. While the show has run on the web since its launch during TechCrunch50 last June, a television distribution deal has always been a part of the broader goal for the content. And CBS has a larger development deal with Katalyst Media, so this is simply an extension of that. → Read More
March Madness is in full swing as the nation’s best college hoops teams face off in this year’s NCAA Basketball tournament, and there is no shortage of online applications looking to help you keep tabs on your favorite teams.
CBS has built an iPhone application that allows users to stream live video of any NCAA basketball game, provided they are on a Wi-Fi network (you can only listen to an audio feed if you are on 3G or Edge). The requirement for Wi-Fi obviously isn’t ideal and you’ll still have to watch commercials, but for $5 the application is certainly worth it if you’re an avid basketball fan. If you’re on a PC, you can also stream games free of charge from the official NCAA site. → Read More
Big Media’s love affair with the Internet ebbs and flows with the markets. When they see money pouring into Web startups, they feel threatened and rush to do the same. They ramp up their digital divisions, which usually are no more than venture arms, and hope to strike it rich. When the markets are down, as they are now, their attention drifts elsewhere—exactly at the time when they can pick up innovation on the cheap.
“M&A is gone,” the digital media chief at one of the largest media companies tells me. Other than a few targeted acquisitions to fill out business or technology holes, “you look foolish making any purchases,” he says, “especially if prices are still going down.”
And those prices are way down. Consider, for example, that CBS’s entire market capitalization is now only $2.5 billion, which is not much more than the $2.1 billion its digital division CBS Interactive paid in cash over the past two years for Cnet ($1.8 billion) and Last.fm ($280 million). (It also made a number of other smaller acquisitions and investments). As of December 31, 2008, CBS only had $419 million in cash on its balance sheet. → Read More
Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried of EQAL, the producers of Web video hits Loneygirl15 and Kate Modern, have just released a trailer for Harper’s Globe, their latest online show in partnership with CBS. The Website will feature its own original side story to accompany Harper’s Island, a new show that will debut on CBS proper in April. Apparently, everyone dies by the end of the season—one murder per episode.
Harper’s Globe seems designed to build buzz for the TV show and create an online community. In addition to the original Web video series, there is also a forum, a social network to interact with the cast, and news from Harper’s Globe, the island’s fictional newspaper run by editor-in-chief Sparky Mackle. The video series stars one of Sparky’s terrified female reporters. Someone is trying to kill her! What a drama queen. Okay, that Joker-esque clown mask is really creepy.
(Video after the jump). → Read More
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