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Five years after its last exit from the music industry, Bertelsmann will take control of its restarted music company, BMG Rights Management, in a deal that values BMG at $1.4 billion.

The company announced that it was buying the 51 percent stake of BMG owned by its partner, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Apparently, the purchase price was between $700 million and $800 million, including debt. The deal signals a full return to the music business for Bertelsmann, the German media giant that also owns Random House and the magazine publisher, Gruner + Jahr. After building BMG into a global powerhouse in the 1980s and 1990s, Bertelsmann sold most of its music holdings through a series of deals with Sony and Universal in the mid-2000s. Then it restarted BMG in 2008. With $270 million invested from KKR, BMG then made a string of acquisitions, mostly in music publishing, the side of the business that deals with the copyrights for songwriting and is seen as less vulnerable to the marketplace changes that destabilized the recorded music industry.


Bertelsmann Acquires Full Control of BMG Music Company
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Hollywood studios, which for years have waged a war against online piracy, are now going after so-called "rogue" mobile apps that use images from movies and television shows without their permission. For many studios and other content providers, mobile apps are a new source of income and a powerful way to engage audiences, sell games and merchandise. But these revenues are threatened if developers do not pay licensing fees.


Hollywood targets "rogue" mobile apps in war on pirated content
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In anticipation of the Federal Communications Commission incentive auction, spectrum speculators have bought 39 broadcast television stations — 14 full-power and 25 Class A low-power — since 2011, paying nearly $345 million, according to a SNL Kagan study.

NRJ TV has been the biggest spender, at $234.2 million for full-power stations, SNL Kagan found. OTA Broadcasting, a subsidiary of computer retail billionaire Michael Dell's MSD Capital firm, is runner up with deals totaling $52.8 million. Locus Point has acquired seven stations, all in November and December 2012, and all Class A properties. The speculators are buying the stations with the intention of selling the spectrum to the FCC so that it can turn around and auction it to wireless broadband carriers. The FCC hopes to conduct the auction in 2014.


TV Spectrum Speculation Nears $345 Million http://www.tvnewscheck.com/article/65850/tv-spectrum-speculation-nears-345-million?utm_source=NetNewsCheck-rss&utm_medium=latest-news-feed&utm_campaign=latest-news-feed-TV-Spectrum-Speculation-Nears-345-Million http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/492121-Kagan_Spectrum_Aggregators_Drive_Up_Prices.php?rssid=20065

The Federal Communications Commission Library proudly celebrates National Library Week with its Annual Open House to take place on Wednesday, April 17, 2013. Once again, in partnership with the FCC Technology Experience Center, the FCC Library will showcase how local, state, federal, and academic libraries use electronic or digital content to provide 24/7 cyberspace access for a wide array of personal use devices.

The FCC Technology Experience Center, located within the FCC Library, is a communications technology repository where FCC staff and visitors have hands-on opportunities to preview communications content and devices. In recognition of National Library Week, there will be library-specific experiences for accessing content, using devices, and reviewing application solutions. In addition, there will be an electronic compilation of library websites dedicated to providing free access to local, state, and federal electronic content. Manufacturers and vendors are invited to participate in this event. Of particular interest are smart phones, eBook readers, tablets, technology kiosks and library-specific application solutions.


FCC Library Invites Technology Manufacturers and Service Providers to Showcase their Tablets, Telephones and eBook Readers
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Facebook announced a long-rumored deal to acquire Microsoft's Atlas Solutions division and that its interest in the technology stack boils down to measurement.

Microsoft will continue to buy its own ads through Atlas. The price had been expected to be less than $100 million, based on prior bids for Atlas, which were in the $30 to $50 million range. Atlas had looked like a potential building block for Facebook to start building an external ad network powered by its social data, but the social network's director of product marketing Brian Boland said that's not the plan. He said that Facebook's advertisers have been clamoring for more tools to let them see how effective their spend is across online channels, and that's where Atlas comes in.


In Atlas Deal, Facebook Gets Serious About Measuring Ads
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While just 0.8% of pay TV subscribers surveyed said they canceled their cable or satellite TV service in the last 12 months, steady price increases are a major factor prompting millions to ponder pulling the plug, according to a new study.

The survey, commissioned by video search and discovery vendor Digitalsmiths, found that about 80% of pay TV customers are satisfied with the value provided by their current provider. Of the 20% of respondents who were dissatisfied, 68% cited increasing fees as a reason they were unhappy. About 45.5% of all pay TV customers said their cable, satellite or telco TV bills were higher than a year ago; 38.9% pay about the same and 16.6% said their bills had gone down.


Rate Hikes Fuel Pay TV Subscriber Discontent: Survey
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Do you have broadband cap anxiety?

Then better don’t buy a PS4 when it comes out later this year. Sony’s next generation gaming console will reportedly offer support for 4K video, and the company is looking to launch a 4K video download service to give consumers access to popular fare in the ultra-high-definition video format. There’s just one caveat: 4K downloads will weigh in at a whopping 100 GB a piece, according to a report from the Verge. Granted, many details of Sony’s plans for 4K aren’t set in stone, in part because the company hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with details about the PS4. But Sony Electronics President and COO Phil Molyneux told the Verge’s Nilay Patel that a typical 4K movie will be “100 gigabytes and plus.” Just a quick reminder for everyone about to bust out their calculators at home: Comcast’s current cap for most of its customers is 300 GB per month, which would get you just three 4K movies, and nothing else. AT&T’s Uverse cap is 250 GB per month. Both companies charge consumers that use more bandwidth $10 per 50 GB, which would bring the bandwidth costs of a single 4K movie after you’ve exhausted your cap to $20.


Want some 4k video with your broadband cap? Good luck with that Sony 4K movie service will work with PS4, require 100GB-plus downloads (The Verge)
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The fourth season of Arrested Development, which is coming exclusively to Netflix in May, won’t disappoint fans, said actor David Cross in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. If anything, producing the show for Netflix, which is going to release the entire season at once to facilitate binge viewing, helped show creator Mitch Hurwitz to push the creative envelope, he argued: “What Mitch did and how he’s able to tell the story through the Netflix model — I think it’s going to redefine what television can be and stories can be and how they’re presented.” Cross added that the result will be “historical,” and that it will be remembered for decades.


Arrested Development on Netflix is going to redefine what TV can be 'Arrested Development': David Cross Says Netflix Return Will Be 'Historic' (Hollywood Reporter) For House of Cards and Arrested Development, Netflix favors big data over big ratings (GigaOm)
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Google is clearly trying hard to portray a new German law involving the republishing of news as a victory, and some observers seem to agree, saying the company “defeated” publishers who wanted it to pay for the right to publish excerpts. But if you look more closely, this is not an obvious win for the search giant — just as recent deals with French publishers and Belgian publishers were a lot closer to being a saw-off for both sides than an outright win. And with every deal it strikes, Google makes it harder to argue that paying publishers for excerpts is unnecessary and even counter-productive — or that there is something to be gained by allowing even large companies to engage in the “fair use” of content for the larger good.


Google may be winning battles with publishers, but it is losing the war
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The idea that the technology behind search is a done deal is far from the truth, according to Google, as the company appears to still have plenty of tricks up its sleeve to improve it.

"Everybody's mindset is that search is a solved problem," said Google Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette. "But the optimism at Google of seeing the possibilities of what search can do is relentless," he said, adding later that the technology is "still in its infancy." He gave the example of searching for the tallest mountain in Africa, but instead of returning a long list of websites, the answer, Mount Kilimanjaro, would be prominently displayed to the user -- an idea the company began investing in a couple years ago and is still working to improve through Knowledge Graph.


'Search is still in its infancy,' says Google CFO