Provo, Utah – Online family history resource
Ancestry.com said on Thursday that it has partnered with NBC to provide
research for and sponsor its upcoming series, "Who Do You Think You
Are?" The company said it helped trace the roots of the seven celebrities to
be featured on the series, and collaborated to build a Web presence on NBC.com
for the series, which debuts on March 5.
Related Links:
http://www.ancestry.com
London
– Brightcove, a provider of Internet video delivery services, announced on
Thursday that U.K.-based Virgin Media will use its services to deliver video
across Virginmedia.com. The site draws around 11 million unique monthly
visitors.
Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/uill2
Dallas
– IAC’s (NASD: IACI) dating site Match.com announced on Thursday that it will acquire fellow
dating site Singlesnet.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded
in 1998, Singlesnet counted around 3 million unique visitors in January.
"While
Singlesnet’s traffic is currently in decline, we believe that by applying our
category expertise we can reverse that trend, increase the site’s profitability
and improve the overall user experience," said Match.com CEO Greg Blatt.
"This is more of a value acquisition than a strategic one, and Singlesnet
will predominantly be run as a standalone business."
"Singlesnet
boasts a vibrant user community where members are constantly emailing and IMing
each other, and I believe working with Match.com will enable us to re-start
growth in the business," added Singlesnet founder and CEO Quinn Lipin.
Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/uikvd
New York
– Cablevision (NYSE: CVC), the nation’s fifth-largest cable TV provider, plans to begin deploying
its controversial Remote Storage Digital Video Recorder service in April and
expects it to be available to all of the company’s 3 million subscribers by
year’s end, Multichannel News reported. Speaking on a conference call to
discuss earnings Cablevision COO Tom Rutledge said the set-top box-free service
would initially offer the ability to pause live TV, before a digital video
recorder service with limited functionality is rolled out in April.
Instead of
storing recorded programs on a set-top box in subscribers’ homes, Cablevision’s
RS-DVR service will store them on the company’s own servers — and then stream
them on-demand to subscribers’ televisions.
The company initially planned to
launch the service back in 2006, but was sued by broadcasters who see the
service as providing unauthorized retransmissions of their programs.
A federal
court judge agreed with broadcasters, but that ruling was overturned on appeal
in 2008.
The U.S. Justice Dept. sided with Cablevision in a court filing, and in June 2009 the Supreme
Court declined to hear an appeal from the broadcasters.
Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/uik4g
(Multichannel News)
http://snipurl.com/uikn7
(DMW previous coverage)
Sydney – A group of Hollywood movie studios and TV networks has appealed an
Australian court’s ruling that found ISP iiNet was not responsible for
copyright infringements committed by its subscribers.
The Australian Federation
Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), a consortium of 34 studios and networks, lost
its case against iiNet and was ordered to pay the ISP’s $5.08 million bill for
legal fees.
In addition to appealing the case, AFACT will also argue in court
to avoid paying attorneys’ fees.
"The court found large scale copyright
infringements, that iiNet knew they were occurring, that iiNet had the
contractual and technical capacity to stop them and iiNet did nothing about
them," said AFACT head Neil Gane.
"In line with previous case law,
this would have amounted to authorization of copyright infringement. If this
decision stands, the ISPs have all the protection without any of the
responsibility."
"It is more than disappointing and frustrating that
the studios have chosen this unproductive path," said iiNet CEO Michael Malone.
"This legal case has not stopped one illegal download and further legal
appeals will not stop piracy… A more effective approach would be for the
studios to make their content more readily and cheaply available online."
Related Links:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118015743.html
http://snipurl.com/uijor
(TorrentFreak)
Washington
– The Justice Department said that it won’t challenge a proposal on antitrust
grounds by Silicon Valley-based MyWire to form a new online subscription news
aggregation service.
The service, to be known as the Global News Service, would
link news articles, video and audio clips from different publishers that relate
to the same topic.
Site publishers would be able to add a "related
item" box to their pages, containing linked abstracts of content from
other participating sites.
Users would pay a subscription fee to access all
fee-based content within the network. There would be no charge to view free
content.
MyWire submitted its proposal to the department to gauge whether it
complied with antitrust laws.
The department said that the service "has
the potential to benefit consumers by allowing them to access a broad network
of related content without having to conduct their own online searches."
Related Links:
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/February/10-at-190.html
Washington – Searching for a way to free up valuable
wireless airwaves, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) is considering
asking broadcast television stations to voluntarily relinquish some of their
unused spectrum, Reuters reported.
In return, the stations would receive a
share of the spectrum auction proceeds.
The goal is to make available another
500 megahertz of spectrum over 10 years.
Full details will be released when the
FCC’s National Broadband Plan — aimed at vastly increasing affordable access
to high-speed Internet across the U.S. — is unveiled next month.
Speaking at a broadband event, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the
spectrum allocated for TV stations "is not being used efficiently —
indeed, much is not being used at all."
Related Links:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2419234520100224
Cupertino,
Calif. – Apple (NASD: AAPL) announced on Thursday
that its iTunes Store sold its ten-billionth song download, the purchaser of
which will receive a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card.
Louie Sulcer, of Woodstock,
Georgia won the promotion when he bought a download of Johnny Cash’s
"Guess Things Happen That Way."
"We’re grateful to all of our
customers for helping us reach this amazing milestone," said Eddy Cue,
Apple’s vice president of Internet Services.
"We’re proud that iTunes has
become the number one music retailer in the world, and selling 10 billion songs
is truly staggering."
Apple’s iTunes Store now boasts a catalog of over 12
million songs, over 55,000 TV episodes and over 8,500 movies, including over
2,500 in high-definition video.
Related Links:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25itunes.html
New York – The number of U.S. music purchasers declined by
24 million between 2007 and 2009, a drop of 21% during a period when consumers
were purchasing far fewer CDs but beginning to experiment more with digital
music, according to data presented by market research firm NPD Group at Digital
Media Wire’s Digital Music Forum East conference in New York this week. The
market lost 33 million CD buyers between 2007-2009; the number of Americans
purchasing digital song downloads also dropped, from 35.2 million in 2008 to
34.6 million in 2009.
NPD analyst Russ Crupnick attributed the digital falloff to
consumers experimenting with downloads and then losing interest.
Meanwhile, the
amount consumers are spending on digital song downloads rose from an average of
$33 per year to $50 per year.
NPD also found that free Internet radio services
like Pandora lead to a 41% increase in paid downloads, while free, on-demand
services like Spotify actually led to a 13% drop in paid downloads.
"For
some people, more listening just means more listening and tends to lead to less
purchasing," Crupnick remarked.
NPD also found a precipitous drop in the
number of songs being shared on peer-to-peer networks, which was attributed to growing
competition from legal services; fear of spyware; and music shared via other
means, like swapping hard drives.
Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/uiiku
(Billboard)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10459568-261.html
