You may have seen reference in the media to a new Rolling Stones documentary “Stones In Exile” shot during the year long orgy that the band conducted during the recording of Exile On Main Street – which is about to be re-released. As you would expect the Stones have been doing some PR to support [...]
This is the question that the LA Times posed in a story about the writers strike. First the music industry was disintermediated by the internet, and now the movie and TV industries are waking up, courtesy of the writers, to the fact that the only game in town is Google…. and perhaps Microsoft…. or Apple. [...]
Back in 1968 I was in London and was a guitarist and songwriter in a band called Kate. We were signed to CBS Records. Our first single was called “Strange Girl” and it was almost a hit. Got great reviews including Record of the Week in Melody Maker (thank you, Chris Welch) and got a [...]
Viacom hit YouTube with a billion dollar law suit this week. Summer Redstone's other property, CBS did a deal with YouTube this week. Deduction? Viacom is aiming to squeeze Google for cash to carry Viacom show video. But if they don't? Then Viacom will suffer, denied access to the biggest video marketplace in the world. [...]
Truly the Internet is where the memes propagate. None are more apparent right now than the ability to transfer information that can help build an opinion wave front. Look at this piece from the CBS news that was posted to YouTube on Dec 12th 2006. Only a year ago a piece to camera on the [...]
Here is a very interesting piece at Venture Beat on what this deal means for the big players. Google has become so big, with advertisers willing to pay such a premium to place ads on the search engine, that a virtuous “network effect” has finally pushed Google out of their reach. EBay did it with [...]
CBS debuted Katie Couric last night. She's been brought in to market the traditional newscast. Viewership keeps going down for traditional timeslot network news. CBS want Katie to reverse that trend. So CBS have started to consider blogging, vlogs, streaming. Except dumbly they don't stream live to the West Coast. Nope. Gotta wait until the [...]
I spent about 25 years of my life in the music business, and it was a great time! During the mid 70's I worked in Sydney for Alberts, the oldest music publishing company in Australia, and one of the catalogues we represented was Bob Dylan's. I remember when one of his albums was due to [...]
Katie Couric is being touted for the CBS evening news job. It's the same seat Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather enjoyed. The pulpit that could sway a nation. Of course, that was all back when there were three networks and only a handful of local television stations. It's an interesting decision. Evening news isn't what [...]
CBS will stream March Madness games of the NCAA tournament it does not televise. The stream will be free. This is a huge step forward in proving out the nets ability to present live action video. But they are going to limit each stream to several hundred thousand connections. This will be a problem. Basketball, [...]