Disney sells 24 million TV shows through iTunes Store

Walt Disney this week confirmed it continues to enjoy strong sales of its television shows and films through iTunes.

Company CEO Bob Iger confirmed the company to have sold 23.7 million episodes of its television shows and an additional two million films through Apple's media service.

In November 2006, Iger confirmed Disney to have sold 500,000 films and 12 million television show episodes since such content reached iTunes. Disney hit 1.3 million films sold in February.
Top-selling titles include Cars and Pirates of the Caribbean, Iger observed.

“We continue to view the broadband-enabled internet as an important entertainment medium, and our creative and technological investments in Disney, ESPN, ABC.com are designed with that premise in mind.”

Iger also confirmed Disney to be satisfied with iTunes prices – the company makes as much from an online sale as it does from a physical one, he explained.

"There are cost of goods that are factored out of the iTunes sale, which allows them to sell at a lower price. That’s their decision and it allows us to take revenue out that is equal to, in terms of a per-click sale, store sales. So, yes, we’re quite comfortable with iTunes," Iger explained.

Gates sees accelerated decline of traditional media's ad model

Tech reporter Ben Romano of the Seattle Times on Bill Gates and the evolving advertising business...

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Microsoft thinks the advertising business model for traditional media — those venues where advertisers still channel most of their spending — will fall apart faster in the coming five years as the kind of interactive, targeted advertising that is defining the Web comes to the fore.
Chairman Bill Gates, speaking to an audience of Microsoft's top advertising customers in Seattle this morning, expounded on this theme. It's something that he's talked about before, but today he described the decline in more certain, and biting, terms.
"We're saying newspapers will go online, and there will be massive innovation that comes out of that. We're saying that TV, the biggest ad market in the world, will completely go online and have the kind of targeting interaction that you only get out on the Web today," he said. "As dramatic as things happening on the Web are, that's actually what all advertising ... will be in the future."
Gates painted a grim picture of the transition.
"I have a lot of friends in the newspaper industry and, of course, this is a tough, wrenching change for them because the number of people who actually buy, subscribe to the newspaper and read it has started an inexorable decline," he said.
With that decline, Gates said, advertisers are shifting their budgets to new areas.
Advertisers will spend about $445.5 billion globally in 2007, according to ZenithOptimedia's most recent quarterly forecast. Of that, online is expected to get 7 percent of the pie compared with newspapers' 28.3 percent. By 2009, online is forecast to grow to 8.7 percent, while newspapers' share dips to 27 percent.
Newspapers aren't the only media that will suffer from this transition, Gates said.
The traditional Yellow Pages are doomed as voice-activated Internet searches combined with on-screen interfaces on smart mobile devices get better and proliferate, Gates said. The company's recent acquisition of voice-technology provider TellMe is accelerating the trend.
"When you say something like 'plumber' the presentation you get will be far better than what you get in the Yellow Pages," Gates said. "After all, we know your location and so we can cluster [results] around that. ... Yellow Page usage amongst people in their, say below 50, will drop to near zero over the next five years."
Microsoft showed off IPTV, its underlying software technology for television delivered over the Internet. Gates said it makes traditional broadcasting obsolete, supplanting the model in which one show is delivered to many viewers who may or may not be interested in it.
"The end-user experience and the creativity and the new content that will emerge using the capabilities of this environment will be so much dramatically better that broadcast TV will not be competitive," he said.
The IPTV model presents opportunities for advertisers to present viewers with messages specifically tailored to them.
"In this environment, the ads will be targeted, not just targeted to the neighborhood level ... but we'll actually know who the viewers of that show are," Gates said.
Microsoft's platform for delivering this kind of targeted advertising across the spread of its Web properties, and now these advancing competitors to traditional media, is called adCenter. Competitors Google and Yahoo! have similar platforms.
Gates said Microsoft is committed to making its platform the best, or one of the best, for selling and buying advertising inventory that targets specific audiences.
Microsoft, which still views itself as primarily a software company, is building tools to make and display the new kinds of interactive advertising that will define this new world. The company's Silverlight online video technology, released in a test version last week, is one such example.
Gates said he will focus on online services, search and advertising in his last 15 months of full-time work at Microsoft before moving next summer to full-time work at his charitable foundation.

Comcast CEO shows off super quick modem

Cool annoucement from the cable boys but I still have my money on the fiber guys. Photons trump electrons in the quantum economy...

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By RYAN NAKASHIMA, AP Business WriterWed May 9, 7:50 AM ET
Comcast Corp. Chief Executive Brian Roberts dazzled a cable industry audience Tuesday, showing off for the first time in public new technology that enabled a data download speed of 150 megabits per second, or roughly 25 times faster than today's standard cable modems.
The cost of modems that would support the technology, called "channel bonding," is "not that dissimilar to modems today," he told The Associated Press after a demonstration at The Cable Show. It could be available "within less than a couple years," he said.
The new cable technology is crucial because the industry is competing with a speedy new offering called FiOS, a TV and Internet service that Verizon Communications Inc. is selling over a new fiber-optic network. The top speed currently available through FiOS is 50 megabits per second, but the network is already capable of providing 100 Mbps and the fiber lines offer nearly unlimited potential.
The technology, called DOCSIS 3.0, was developed by the cable industry's research arm, Cable Television Laboratories. It bonds together four cable lines but is capable of allowing much more capacity. The laboratory said last month it expected manufacturers to begin submitting modems for certification under the standard by the end of the year.
In the presentation, ARRIS Group Inc. chief executive Robert Stanzione downloaded a 30-second, 300-megabyte television commercial in a few seconds and watched it long before a standard modem worked through an estimated download time of 16 minutes.
Stanzione also downloaded the 32-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica 2007 and Merriam-Webster's visual dictionary in under four minutes, when it would have taken a standard modem three hours and 12 minutes.
"If you look at what just happened, 55 million words, 100,000 articles, more than 22,000 pictures, maps and more than 400 video clips," Roberts said. "The same download on dial-up would have taken two weeks."
Other cable industry executives, including Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Richard Parsons, News Corp. President Peter Chernin and Viacom Inc. Chief Executive Philippe Dauman, cheered the demonstration during a panel afterward.
Brian Dietz, spokesman for the conference host, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, said the demonstration was the key technological advance showcased at the conference.
"It's an exponential step forward and we're very excited," Roberts said. "What consumers actually do with all this speed is up to the imagination of the entrepreneurs of tomorrow."