Not long after Clearwire announced their intent to begin lighting up a 4G LTE network, Sprint and a cabal of cable companies have begun to discuss the idea of a possible Clearwire acquisition.
Last we heard, Clearwire was waiting on $600 million in additional funding before any work on their LTE rollout could begin. Comcast, Time Warner, and Bright House are currently in talks with the nation’s third-largest wireless provider to get Clearwire the necessary funds to build out their LTE network. → Read More
Time Warner Cable this morning announced that it will acquire cable systems serving approximately 70,000 basic video subscribers, 42,000 HSD subscribers, and 26,000 phone subscribers in Kentucky and Tennessee from NewWave Communications for $260 million in cash.
NewWave had been buying up many of these cable systems, some property acquisitions dating back to 2003. The company says it will now concentrate on “ongoing operations in other service areas”. → Read More
BlackArrow, a provider of advertising solutions for ‘New Television platforms’, this morning announced a strategic investment by Time Warner Cable. Joan Gillman, president of media sales for TWC, has been named to the BlackArrow board of directors.
The cable system operator joins BlackArrow’s impressive list of backers, which includes Cisco, Comcast, Intel Capital, Mayfield Fund, Motorola Mobility, NDS and Polaris Venture Partners. → Read More
Time Warner will have to stop using the words “fiber optic” to describe its broadband network. Verizon, whose Fios service is a bona fide fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service, took issue with some of Time Warner’s advertising, complained to the relevant board, and walked away with a favorable ruling. Done and done. → Read More
Time Warner Cable has just announced that it has acquired NaviSite, a provider of enterprise-class hosting, managed application, messaging and cloud services, for $5.50 per share in cash, or $230 million. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2011.
NaviSite provides companies with enterprise hosting capabilities, application management and cloud services. These include email and collaboration hosting for IBM Lotus and Domino; Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint; software QA and testing, server and storage management, data protection and more. The company brought in $126 million in revenue for its fiscal year 2010 and had approximately 1,400 customers using its services. → Read More
“It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world? I don’t think so.”
TimeWarner CEO Jeff Bewkes haughty dismissal of Netflix is still reverberating through the tech world, dominating Holiday party chatter and jokes around the metaphorical water cooler. (At least the nerdy parties I go to.)
This would be Netflix, the company that already makes up 20% of peak Internet broadband. Netflix, the company that helped kill Blockbuster and the DVD purchase market. Netflix, the company that shrugged when Hollywood refused to cut them deals, bought DVDs wholesale and still won. Netflix the company led by Fortune’s top businessperson of the year Reed Hastings.
Techies I’ve spoken with aren’t so much offended as much as they are confused. Really, Bewkes, you think Netflix is done? Is it April Fool’s Day already? → Read More
Today I got to see Time Warner’s Signature Home $200 a month service package offerings up close and personal at a loft they rented in fancy-pants Soho. The offering, which is comparable to their triple-play program except that you get 24/7 customer service including concierge-style phone service and installation techs who will spend up to three hours at your home setting up all your junk. They even wear little booties so they don’t scratch up your imported zebra-wood and elephant ivory parquet floors.
To be fair, you do get two 500GB DVRs as well as a digital VOIP service with included caller ID that will AIM when you get a call. You can also control the DVRs over the Internet and iPad and iPhone apps are forthcoming. Finally, you get “wideband” Internet through DOCSIS 3.0-tier networking with 50Mbps down and 5Mbps up, an improvment from their current real-world service of about 1Mbps down and “Why Don’t You Send a Letter In The Mail, It Will Get There Faster”Mbps up. → Read More
Time Warner is turning on more channels for its TV Everywhere strategy. Once again, Verizon FIOS customers will be the first to get the channels available on their laptops, and soon on their mobile phones. The two companies announced today that starting in June, FIOS TV subscribers will get unlimited online access to popular shows from Time Warner’s TNT and and TBS channels.
It won’t be the complete lineup, but rather will work along the same lines as HBO Go (which is a dedicated site for HBO subscribers with a limited selection of HBO shows and movies). Not everything will be on there, but it will be more than what is on Hulu or the rest of the Web right now. It will stream full-length shows and be available only to paying TV subscribers. → Read More
Print publishers are in a tizzy over Apple’s new iPad because they hope to finally be able to charge for their digital editions. But in order to get people to pay for their magazine and newspaper apps, they are going to have to offer something different that readers cannot get at the newsstand or on the open Web. We’ve already seen plenty of prototypes from magazine publishers which include interactive graphics, photo slide shows, and embedded videos.
But what should a magazine cover look like on the iPad? After all, the cover is still the gateway to the magazine. Theoretically, it will still be the first page people see, giving them hints of what’s inside and enticing them to dive into the issue. One way these covers could change is that instead of simply repurposing the static photographs from the print edition, the background image itself could be some sort of video loop. Jesse Rosten, a photographer in California, created the video mockup below of what a cover of Sunset Magazine might look like on the iPad. → Read More
Today HBO announced it will be making its movies and TV Shows available on the Web to subscribers through HBO Go, which up until now has been in private beta. HBO Go is part of the cable industry’s TV Everywhere strategy to make TV content available online to paying subscribers. It contains 600 hours of movies and TV shows which can be streamed live and even in HD. HBO Go is available first to Verizon FIOS subscribers. Since I am a Verizon FIOS customer, I logged into HBO Go this morning and checked it out. (Despite reports elsewhere that it won’t be available until Thursday, it is in fact now live). Below are my initial impressions and screenshots.
The videos play decently and you can watch in HD, but if I wasn’t already paying for HBO I certainly wouldn’t pay for access to this site. The choice of shows and movies is just not that great. You can watch every episode of The Wire, and the final season of The Sopranos, but not one episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. You get a lot more in your cable subscription, especially if you get multiple HBO channels. The on-demand option is great, but essentially HBO Go is competing with much broader array of choices on the TV which can also be made on-demand through a DVR. There are some movies like The Watchmen and Taken, which I think I’ve already seen three times each this month on TV, and a spattering of older archived movies like Canadian Bacon, but for the most part the selection is worse than what you get on Netflix via its streaming option. I’m not sure I want to see The Chumscrubber in HD. → Read More
Some people don’t like Comcast and Time Warner’s TV Everywhere plan to bring cable TV to the Web. They are just paranoid.
Allow me to explain. In his 1964 Harper’s Magazine essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter argued that American politics has often been a stage for excessively conspiratorial and suspicious minds from both the left and the right. What disturbed Hofstadter most of all was the sanity of the paranoid. “It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that make the phenomenon significant,” he explained. By infecting normal people, Hoftstadter worried, the paranoid style had made conspiratorial fantasy a troublingly recurrent feature of American political culture.
Hofstadter is correct. From Andrew Jackson to Joseph McCarthy to contemporary Americans on both the left and the right, the paranoid style—with its obsessive targeting of the Roman Papacy or Russian communists or Wall Street bankers or Muslim terrorists—has replaced rational discussion with what Hoftstadter called “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy.”
As the Internet has become more and more of a central political issue in American life, so the paranoid style has, unfortunately, begun to infect our public discussion about technology and media. Much of this paranoia focuses on the supposed selfishly monopolistic intentions of mainstream media which, for many otherwise sane people, represents a deadly threat against the so-called “people’s Internet”.
Editor’s note: This guest post is by Andrew Keen, the author of Cult of the Amateur and an advisor to Arts and Labs, a collaboration between entertainment companies, software providers, telecommunications providers, artists and creators. → Read More
It has all the makings of a drama that no one could possibly care about: a giant corporation looking to make even more money than it already does; an even bigger corporation looking to stand firm and not be bullied into making any decision against its will; helpless consumers with no one to turn to, no altar to pray at; and the Internet. If you’re a Time Warner subscriber you may loose all Fox-owned stations on Friday if certain conditions aren’t meant, namely that Time Warner send Fox (News Corp.) several large sacks of money. → Read More
The magazine business is hurting just like all print publications. And even if their Websites are popular, they generate one tenth the ad revenue of the print side. Since last summer, Time Inc has been working on a “Manhattan Project” to create a digital magazine for the new breed of color tablet computers soon to come to market. (Condé Nast is also working on a similar concept). Today, I got a sneak peak at a demo of the tablet magazine designed for Sports Illustrated.
The demo was shown on an HP table computer with a touchscreen, but it could easily be ported to an iPhone or an Apple iTablet, whenever that becomes available. The idea is to create something so beautiful and fluid that readers will actually want to pay for it. The cover takes up the full screen and you tap it to show a table of contents with thumbnails of the actual layout, which you can rearrange to read in any order you like. To flip through the pages you swipe with two fingers, and you can also tap to get a navigational timeline at the bottom. There is also a navigation wheel which lets you share stories via email, Facebook, or Twitter, favorite a story, go to related videos or photos interviews, other articles, or stats such as live scores. → Read More
It’s fairly ironic to learn that there was still a lawsuit lingering over Time Warner’s merger with America Online from the beginning of this decade, given that AOL is in the process of spinning off and hitting the public markets as an independent entity before year’s end.
Anyway, there was still one pending suit out of the hundreds that were filed after the multi-billion dollar merger, and now it has been dismissed as well. → Read More
It’s been a long decade, but AOL will once again be an independently traded company on December 9, when Time Warner will spin off shares. Every Time Warner shareholder (disclosure: including me, from when I was employed there) will receive shares in AOL using the following formula: one share of AOL will be distributed for every 11 shares held in Time Warner.
In other words, we finally have an approximate market capitalization for AOL. The business will be valued at 1/11th 1/12th the value of Time Warner. At today’s market cap of $37.8 billion for Time Warner, based on a closing price of $32, that implies a $3.4 $3.15 billion market cap for AOL. Unless Time Warner shares surge over the next few weeks, it will be in that ballpark. Update: My initial math was slightly off. As some commenters point out, the implied value is 1/12th of Time Warner since at the time of the distribution everyone with 11 shares will receive an additional share. SInce we know how much Time Warner is worth, it is possible to come up with an implied value for AOL based on that ratio, even though that value will change the minute the shares start trading. → Read More
At the Web 2.0 Summit today in San Francisco AOL’s chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong took the stage for a discussion with Federated Media’s John Battelle. Armstrong, who was previously in charge of the Google ad group in America took the AOL job in March as the company prepares the split from its parent, Time Warner.
The Armstrong talk can be summarized pretty easily: Content, content, content. Armstrong made it very clear that not only is AOL in the process of spinning off into its own public company, but that they are now going to be a content company. In fact, they’ve gone from 500 journalists to over 3,000 since he took over. And that will keep growing. → Read More
Time Warner released it second quarter results today, and the numbers aren’t good. Overall, revenue was down 9% versus the year-ago period as poor results from the publishing, film and yes, AOL dragged down the numbers for all. CEO Jeff Bewkes remarks are telling:
At the same time, we’re continuing the reshaping of Time Warner that we started last year. We’re on track to spin off AOL to our stockholders around the end of the year. Separating AOL will benefit both companies – enabling Time Warner to concentrate fully on our core content businesses and improving AOL’s operational and strategic flexibility.
That’s three AOL mentions in three sentences. Clearly, Time Warner is happy to let everyone know that it will only have a couple more quarters of dealing with that division’s nosedive. → Read More
Cable providers Comcast and Time Warner might be late to the Internet video party, but that doesn’t mean they are going to let us enjoy content for free that they pay for. Oh no, the TV Everywhere Model is designed to give Comcast and Time Warner paying subscribers access to content and block-out everyone else. And this system might find its way into Hulu.
You can’t blame the cable operators for their plans. They have to pay good money for access to cable stations. Then they, of course, pass along the cost to subs via a monthly bill. The thought is that those people that pay for the content should be able to watch all of it on both their TVs and computers.
Of course the other side is that if you don’t pay for those services, then you’ll be shut out. This authentication system will be used initially on sites like Comcast’s video site, Fancast, but there is always the possibility that it could eventually make its way on to Hulu. → Read More
Looks like Time Warner cable subscribers may someday get the option of the TiVo interface on their DVR boxes. According to Bloomberg, “TiVo is in talks to provide service through Time Warner Cable Inc.” although nothing specific has really been revealed yet. → Read More
Time Warner announced first quarter earnings today, giving us a peak at how AOL is doing. It’ seen better days. Revenues were down 23 percent to $867 million. Of that advertising revenues made up about half ($443 million), but were down a gut-wrenching 20 percent. Yahoo, in comparison, saw a 12 percent decline in advertising revenues during the quarter, and Google saw 6 percent growth in total revenues on an annual basis. Even Microsoft did better on the online advertising front, suffering a smaller 16 percent drop in the quarter.
Also revealed in the 10Q filing with the SEC is Time Warner’s intention to separate the old dial-up access business and spin off the rest of AOL: → Read More
