It’s not easy trying to make money as a hyper-local network these days (just ask AOL’s Patch), but in a surprising move, NBC just announced that it is shutting down EveryBlock, the Knight Foundation-backed news and information site MSNBC acquired in 2009. In an email to Poynter.org, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of NBC News Vivian Schiller wrote that the service “wasn’t a… → Read More
If you’ve grown sick of these NBC/Olympics stories, too bad! We have nearly two weeks of Olympics and their respective tape delays left. I don’t even want to count how many hours of delayed Ryan Seacrest that is.
Here is a wild, EXCLUSIVE, Olympic story that could only be found by top-notch journalists with Internet connections and Twitter accounts (where could we find people with those… → Read More
Spoiler alert: Phelps and Lochte raced today. The results are all over Twitter. But the race won’t air on TV in America until tonight.
This is 2012, not 1996. NBC has put all of the events live online, provided you have a cable subscription, but won’t have them available recorded online and won’t air many events, including the most high-profile ones, until a primetime tape delay.
This isn’t… → Read More
They came together with a common worldview and complementary personalities. Then, as they grew older and grew apart, they still tried to make it work — for the sake of the child, at least. Now that that kid is a teenager, they’ve decided now is probably the best time to finally call curtains: After 16 years, Microsoft and NBC are parting ways in their joint news venture, and NBC is getting… → Read More
Facebook and NBC are expected to announce a partnership today for the London Olympic Games. In short, Facebook users will be reminded to watch NBC’s coverage and NBC viewers will be reminded to join the conversation on Facebook.
On the surface, it looks like a straightforward marketing partnership where Facebook gets web traffic plus promotion on TV, while NBC gets a more engaging viewer… → Read More
NBCUniversal continues to ramp up international streaming deals as a way of getting its content in a non-pirated (read: revenue-generating) format out to the masses. Today, the media company is making a key move into China in a multi-year licensing deal with Youku, the country’s biggest online video player with 300 million monthly viewers, to provide a rolling selection of 100 feature films as… → Read More
By now you’ve probably seen the Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel pondering the wonders of the Internet. It’s a bit hokey and of course shows the NBC hosts talking nonsense about something outside of their expertise. Well, NBC clearly didn’t find it as cute as everyone else and reportedly fired the employee that uploaded it. Best Buy almost did that once. Remember how that turned out?
NBC went and… → Read More
The title of this post is both a very old idea and a very new one. With the prevalence of fiber connectivity and pervasive broadband speeds, this year has been a hot one for bringing together the home computer and the living room TV. While companies like Apple and Google battle over share of TV viewers, they have left open and promoted the web for content distributors to control their own… → Read More
DONE! Ventures, a Manhattan Beach, California-based Internet marketing and publishing firm, is slapping NBC Universal with a lawsuit after a domain name sales deal went awry.
DONE! CEO Ben Padnos claims NBC Universal accepted an offer to sell the domain names Women.com and Women.net for $1 million, only to have President & CEO Jeff Zucker overrule and block the transaction after the agreement… → Read More
“This summer is going to be dangerous for anyone else in this space!”
That’s what Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley had to say when I spoke to him earlier about the service. Crowley is known for being outspoken. But he’s usually not that outspoken. But maybe he has reason to be.
I reached out to Crowley to ask him about NBC promoting Foursquare today. As you may have heard, The Today Show… → Read More
Fresh from inking a deal with Dailymotion, one of the world’s largest video sites, The Filter, a startup with a white label discovery engine for digital entertainment, has a new commercial partnership with NBC.com to power the short-form video recommendations for its broadcast network website.
The Filter’s technology will bubble up relevant video from NBC’s catalog, creating easier discovery… → Read More
It was no surprise that the Olympics was a ratings blockbuster for NBC. The network’s ratings more than doubled during February Sweeps, up 105% from last year, according to Nielsen and RBC Capital Markets research. The interesting footnote, however, is GE’s cross-platform success on the Web and mobile. According to RBC Capital Market’s latest report, “Media and Entertainment: 1Q10 Preview &… → Read More
Looks like nobody in the TV industry wants the NBCU-Comcast merger to go down. And who could blame them! ABC, CBS, and Fox affiliates are afraid that, if the merger goes down, it’ll cause the clouds to darken and the streets to run red with the blood of something or other. Basically, they’re scared that the merger will put the in a very bad position indeed. → 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… → Read More
Well, it was fun for a whole lot of people while it latest, but the “Here’s what I wanna show Jay Leno” thread is gone forever. NBC no doubt pulled it after the pro-Conan shenanigans got out of hand and attracted the attention of Internet media. You’re just no fun at all, NBC. → Read More
NBC clearly doesn’t get it. Don’t invite the Internet to “post photos, ideas, links, and other things” they want to show to Jay Leno after canning Conan. This is what happens. → Read More
The coverage of the Winter Olympics on NBC has been painful to watch. In addition to the tape delays which ruined the outcomes for anyone paying attention to any other news, sports or social media outlet other than NBC, there are a lot of other complaints. In between the hard-hitting reports of polar bears in the Canadian North and life among the lumberjacks, NBC did manage to squeeze in some… → Read More
NBC is driving people on the Internet crazy by tape-delaying coverage of the Olympics until primetime. Okay, maybe it’s only driving Henry Blodget crazy, and everyone on Twitter.
Well, not everyone on Twitter—68 percent, according to a recent reading I took on Twitter Sentiment. Roughly two thirds of Tweets about the NBC Olympics are negative. Some examples of the venting occurring on… → Read More
The 2010 Winter Olympics kick off in Vancouver tonight, and for those of you who can’t be tied to your TV every night to watch the opening and closing ceremonies and competitions, here’s a compilation of sites where you can not only watch video highlights of the events but also see pictures, scores, medal counts and news from the Olympics: → Read More
This is it. Tonight’s edition of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien will be the last one starring Coco. Come March 1, Mr. Bland himself, Jay Leno, re-takes the show, placating NBC’s affiliates and his elderly fans. We’re all Team Conan here, till the bitter end, so you’d better not miss it tonight. Watch it live, DVR it, watch it on Hulu, grab it off some torrent… → Read More
Game over, friends. NBC just released a statement saying it had reached a deal with Conan O’Brien that sees him bumped off The Tonight Show and bumped into a large sack of money worth $45 million. Of that $45 million, Conan will keep $33 million, the rest of which will go to his 200+ person staff as severance. Conan’s free to start a new show as of September, 2010. Oh, and Leno comes back to The… → Read More
All of us here at CrunchGear are fairly angry at the way NBC has treated you, Conan. So here’s our offer: if you and the peacock decide to part company (and you really ought to, provided the network takes care of your staff and everyone else who moved from New York to Los Angeles, and provided you walk away with some fat cash), we’d like to offer you an internship. That’s right: Conan O’Brien… → Read More
We forgot to mention this, but if you want to buy Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show set make your way to Craigslist. Conan is asking for your best offer, or Coldplay tickets if you’re willing to trade. Boo, NBC! → Read More
Comcast and General Electric announced early this morning that they agreed to form a joint venture that will be 51 percent owned by Comcast and 49 percent by GE. The joint venture, which will consist of the NBC Universal businesses and Comcast’s cable networks, regional sports networks and more, will be managed by the newly formed Comcast Entertainment Group (CEG).
GE will contribute to the… → Read More
NBC is gearing up for the 2010 Winter Olympics with some changes to its mainstay site, NBCOlympics.com, scheduled to go live tomorrow. (See screenshots below). Once again, just as it did with the 2008 Summer Olympics, NBC will be using a video player based on Microsoft Silverlight technology to offer full HD videos. Except this time, the video player will have DVR-like functionality, with the… → Read More
Oh, dear. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was on The Today Show (international viewers: The Today Show is a morning news and entertainment program that airs on NBC, a big TV network here) to unveil Windows 7. Call me crazy, but isn’t that a first-gen MacBook Pro in the background? Good job, NBC! → Read More
As Mommy bloggers steadily grow in ranks, the segment is beginning to wield more influence in both the blogosphere and on the web as a whole. And it looks like NBC is waking up to the potential power of this audience. The media company is launching a web-based offshoot of the Today Show, called TODAYMoms.com. Unsurprisingly, the site is currently sponsored by Walmart.
The site will offer… → 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… → Read More
Video search startup EveryZing just landed its biggest fish yet: NBC Universal. Boston-based EveryZing signed a master service agreement with NBC to provide video search and search-optimization technologies across all of its online properties, which include NBC.com, iVillage, CNBC.com, and the websites for Bravo, Sci-Fi, and Telemundo. (The deal does not cover Hulu, which is a joint venture… → Read More
Just last month, we wrote that Hulu had gained some 10 million viewers to become the fourth largest video portal on the web. Now, it’s slain another rival to the list: Yahoo, to move into #3 — at least in terms of videos viewed.
To be clear, the new March U.S. numbers released by comScore show that Hulu is still slightly behind Yahoo’s video properties when it comes to unique viewers. But the… → Read More
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