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Posts Tagged ‘time-warner’

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. 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 current 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.

The site itself is well-designed, image heavy with lots of entry points. You are greeted with a slideshow view of ten shows and movies on heavy rotation, including the movie Taken, HBO Series Big Love and The Wire, and a Dennis Miller special. If you have HBO, you can’t really avoid any of these shows, so nothing special there except that you can stream it anywhere on your laptop. Tabs across the top allow you to explore deeper into movies, series, comedy, sports, documentaries, and “late night” (aka, HBO’s hard-hitting sex documentary series like Real Sex).

For each series, you can choose any episode for at least one season, but some shows are missing. You can also create a watchlist to watch shows later. When I was clicking through the site, the streaming quality was great, but when I tried to switch to another show or movie the audio to Canadian Bacon kept playing in the background.

WWIV, Wildcat, Celerity — these hallowed names represent the best of a golden era of communication, back when “getting online” meant tying up the family phone line, remembering arcane Hayes AT codes to maximize performance out of the 9600 baud modem your dad borrowed from work, and TradeWars was the best multiplayer game available. Yes, I’m talking about Bulletin Board Systems, originally text based and later augmented with ANSI graphics. The first public BBS celebrated its birthday yesterday, and I think it’s a fair bet that few of us would be engaging in discussion today if it weren’t for that simple little computer bulletin board in 1978. Why even our esteemed leader John Biggs ran a bulletin board system for a brief while!

I met a lot of really interesting people, and learned a lot of interesting things, as a result of my participation in BBSes around town. I never got into CompuServe or AOL or Prodigy — they were too corporate for me. I was more interested in the smaller BBSes hosted by people with interests similar to my own: science fiction and fantasy, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and role playing games. I attended a couple of parties, picnics, and other social events coordinated by BBS users. Because the community of users was smaller — and local — there wasn’t nearly the prevalence of trolling or anonymous flamewars. BBSes were a great way to connect, and communicate, with people.

Of course, it was a simpler time back then. We weren’t bombarded with advertisements. There was no Flash animation. Heck, even downloading a low-resolution image of a pretty girl in a bikini took upwards of 20 minutes! There were no hyperlinks, no embedded images or videos: it was all text based, so there was a very real value to careful explication. The depth and breadth of discussion was often greater, with more personal insight and contribution (and sometimes BS). Generally we all knew one another, and welcomed new participants pretty quickly.

BBSes exist in stark contrast to today’s web, where the regular participants on many big blogs drown out newcomers, the audience’s fixation on neophilia and the John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory prevail, and a pithy image or silly video can trump even the most erudite discussion.

Thanks Wired for the trip down memory lane!

Aurora Feint started out as a puzzle game developer for the iPhone platform but has since evolved into the maker of a comprehensive social gaming platform dubbed OpenFeint that continues to attract independent iPhone game developers to join its rapidly growing community. Today, the startup is launching the private beta of OpenFeint X, which offers indie developers the ability to create Zynga-like free-to-play games including microtransactions and virtual goods.

With the success of Zynga and PlayFish on Facebook, Aurora Feint wants to help create more of these types of free-to-play games on the iPhone. Launched with Japanese investment partner and mobile gaming company DeNa Group, OpenFeint X will be rolled out to the general public in phases over the next few months. With the international investment in the project, we can assume that OpenFeint X is designed to develop games that appeal to global markets as well.

Using the new platform, developers can create games with a chat wall where players can interact with each other, a newsfeed showing recent in-game activity, and game nudges. And OpenFeint X’s premium services allows developers to use a cloud-based infrastructure to build and run a full virtual goods store, access detailed analytics, and include game-specific currency wallet.

The existing OpenFeint platform is quite popular amongst developers and already powers social gaming services for 12 million users and is growing at a monthly pace of 25 percent. The strategy of trying to develop Facebook-like free-to-play games through Open Feint isn’t surprising. Peter Relan, executive chairman of Aurora Feint, also happens to be the executive chairman of CrowdStar, a social game developer on Facebook, which makes develops Happy Aquarium, Happy Island and Happy Pets.

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.

The tablet format is much easier on the eyes than reading the same story on the Web, and you get the added bonus of full-screen slide shows or videos. You can also flip through photos within the text, while continuing to read. Sports scores and other data can be dynamically updated from the Web, or you can share stories and photos via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

The concept was designed by David Link at the Wonderfactory, and it’s all done in Adobe AIR. If I still read magazines, I’d much rather consume them in this form than on paper.

Terry McDonnell, the editor of Sports Illustrated who showed me the demo, thinks that readers will be willing to actually pay for a digital version contained within a tablet. That remains to be seen. Josh Quittner, an editor at Time (and my former boss) who spearheaded the task force behind the digital magazine thinks of it as an app. If people are willing to pay for apps on the iPhone, why not deliver magazines as apps also? He’s the one who calls it Time Inc’s Manhattan Project. Hail Mary might be a better name.

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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. The end of an era, of sorts.

A federal judge has thrown out the last of the Mohicans lawsuits, granting Ernst & Young’s motion to dismiss shareholder Dominic Amorosa’s complaint alleging it had failed to link the auditor’s statements to investor losses. U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York dismissed the private investor’s case earlier this week, saying the E&Y was not the cause for any of the man’s losses.

Amorosa, an AOL shareholder who voted in favor of the merger with Time Warner and exchanged his stock at a one-to-one ratio for stock in the combined entity, filed his suit in May 2003 as the last in a wave of lawsuits that followed media reports of widespread fraud at AOL and its successor corporation.

Aside from Ernst & Young, the suit named AOL, Time Warner, the merged company, Bertelsmann AG and 11 individual executives, but all of those defendants had previously been dismissed from the case in earlier proceedings.

(Source: Law360)

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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 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 billion market cap for AOL. Unless Time Warner shares surge over the next few weeks, it will be in that ballpark.

So the AOL business which was valued at $5.7 billion just last July when Google sold back its 5 percent stake, is now worth even less—not to mention the initial $20 billion valuation when Google first invested in 2005 or, going back even further, the original $109 billion merger with Time Warner way back in 2000.

But let’s forget about all that. Onwards and upwards. With a little cost-cutting, those AOL shares will shine. Right?

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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.

Below find the full Q&A (paraphrased):

JB: You and Sergey dress a bit differently.

TA: This is his tie (laughs).

JB: Why take the AOL CEO job? You had other options, like a sandy beach.

TA: I wasn’t thinking about leaving (Google) but the AOL thing came up. I’m a big believer that this is just the beginning for the Internet. AOL has a lot of things that people don’t realize. It’s undervalued. Google was a great experience, but I wanted to learn again. I have on this job in the first 6 months already. And the company was ready to change.

JB: Would you have taken the job if you knew you couldn’t spin it out from Time Warner?

TA: That’s not true. But it does make sense to spin it out.

JB: It hasn’t happened but it will right?

TA: Yeah that’s the intention.

JB: How does one do that? Take it public, private?

TA: If you own Time Warner stock, you will get a share of whatever AOL is. It’s like the Time Warner cable offering. So you can buy a share of AOL too soon.

JB: Is the company ready for that?

TA: Everyone has worked really hard. Still more work to do. We need to prepare to go public, so we have to do investor relations and taxes, etc. We’re in a good position, working towards it.

JB: How profitability and rev growth?

TA: Well that’s the tricky part. (laughs) The company is very profitable. Most of it is paid services, very small is from dial-up. We’re very focused in growing a large platform around content now. That’s the hard work to get down. The rev 2010 for us will see the content coming up.

JB: Lot of AOL brands now, TMZ, women’s brands, etc. Will this be more of that?

TA: We have some secret sauce that I can’t announce. But we’ve been working on something for 3 months that’s a big tech shift. I can talk about it later.

JB: Wait, tell me more. What tech?

TA: It’s a broader platform with more information about content, and around content. I can’t give you a better answer. We’ve gone from 500 journalists to over 2,000. We’re going to keep growing. Our content is 80% our own, we’re going to keep going.

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Yesterday, eBay’s third-quarter results were bitter sweet, with profits declining 29 percent from the same quarter last year. But year-over-year revenue increased for the first time in the past year, thanks in part of strong results posted by PayPal (and Skype). The payments processor saw its revenue rise to $668.1 million, up 15 percent compared to last year, and the number of active registered accounts grew by nearly 20 percent in the quarter to 78 million.

What is notable is that the number of online merchants using PayPal separately from eBay continues to rise, with the external use now at 56% of total volume, up from 51% last year. And the company has stated that 44 of the top 100 U.S. retailers offer PayPal as a payment option.

Added to the mix of PayPal’s steady success is the company’s strategy of opening up its platform to developers to fuel even more viral growth outside of eBay’s own platform. PayPal recently announced its Adaptive Payments API, which gives developers full and open access to PayPal’s payment processing features, allowing them a lot more freedom in building applications which incorporate PayPal, which includes the ability to accept and distribute payments.

Paypal’s Adaptive Payments has built-in micropayments support, and also offers “Chained Payments,” which lets developers create applications that enable a sender to send a single payment to a primary receiver who may keep part of the payment and pay other, secondary receivers with the remainder of the funds. For example, an application might be an online travel agency that handles bookings for airfare, hotel reservations, and car rentals. The sender sees only the travel site as the primary receiver. But that site could allocate the payment for its commission and the actual cost of services provided by other merchants. PayPal would deduct the money from the sender’s account and deposit it in both the primary travel site’s account and the secondary receivers’ accounts. It sounds complicated but in execution it’s much simpler and fairly innovative.

Adaptive Payments will also offer “Parallel Payments,” which would let a sender send a single payment to multiple receivers. An example of this type of application might be a shopping cart that lets a buyer pay for items from several merchants with one payment. The shopping cart would allocate the payment to the merchants who actually provided the items. PayPal would then deduct money from the sender’s account and deposits it in the receivers’ accounts. FundRazr, Lottay, TwitPay and Payvment, which helps set up e-commerce retail stores on Facebook, are both using this API to power their applications.

And PayPal’s APIs aren’t just getting attention from startups; some of the biggest players in technology are investing resources in the API. Microsoft cloud computing platform Azure are utilizing Adaptive Payments to let developers who are building applications using PayPal seamless integrate their applications with Azure’s platform. Microsoft is working with PayPal to help developers easily embed billing and payment functionality into applications built off Azure and will offer interoperability between Azure and Adaptive Payments.

At the Web 2.0 summit yesterday, PayPal president Scott Thompson, said that the company is working with consumer tech companies, mobile device manufacturers, and software companies to incorporate the new APIs in applications. Thompson also emphasized that PayPal has international ambitions, with hopes that the API will be used across the world in various currencies (currently PayPal transactions can be conducted in 19 currencies). The ambition, which is articulated well in this futuristic video, is for consumers to be able to make a payment from any device, whether that be a TV, mobile device, or computer (it’s sort of similar to Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s three screens strategy). Thompson added that a dozens of additional APIs will be released in the coming year, creating an unprecedented open platform for online payments development.

So where does PayPal’s primary competitor Amazon, fit into the mix? Amazon’s fledgling Flexible Payments API is similar in theory to PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API and offers some of the same functionality. But PayPal’s platform is being marketed very aggressively to both developers and the greater tech community, with the company even throwing a conference around the public release of the API. PayPal appears to be evangelizing its API everywhere, publicly campaigning that the payments platform will change how consumers will pay in the future.

There’s been some rumors about eBay possibly spinning off PayPal, thanks to PayPal’s continued strength in the marketplace. Donahoe “regularly asks himself whether eBay is hampering PayPal’s development,” Bloomberg reports, via the NY Post. “When I feel the business will be better off separately, we’ll do what we did with Skype,” he said.

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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:

Although the Company’s Board of Directors has not made any decision, the Company currently anticipates that it would initiate a process to spin off one or more parts of the businesses of AOL to Time Warner’s stockholders, in one or a series of transactions. Based on the results of the Company’s review, future market conditions or the availability of more favorable strategic opportunities that may arise before a transaction is completed, the Company may decide to pursue an alternative other than a spin-off with respect to either or both of AOL’s businesses.

New AOL CEO Tim Armstrong gets a pass this quarter because he was just hired away from Google in March. But he has to stop the bleeding before a spin-off or sale is possible. Meanwhile, on the product front, AOL is pushing forward with tweaks to its homepage that more fully integrate blogs, Twitter, and social networks. And AOL is positioning AIM and Socialthing as a single sign-on alternative to Facebook connect and Google Friend Connect.

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Once again, Google is facing antitrust scrutiny, this time over its proposed settlement with the Authors Guild that would clear the way for it to scan out-of-print books. Most sane people seem to agree that scanning these books and making them available in digital form is a good idea, and the settlement even provides for a token payment of up to $60 per book to go to copyright holders.

The objections, and there are many of them, seem to revolve around the right Google negotiated for itself around orphan books—books still under copyright whose copyright owners cannot be found or who simply fail to register in the Book Rights Registry set up under the settlement. If authors and other copyright holders fail to register by the deadline, which has now been extended for another four months, under the settlement Google will not be liable for any copyright infringement claims stemming from orphan works. The concern is that this will give Google monopoly rights over all orphan works, which is what it appears to do.

In letter to the judge overseeing the settlement, the Internet Archive asked to be added as party to the settlement because it too scans hundreds of thousands of library books, but it won’t be protected from “potential copyright liability.” The judge denied the Internet Archive’s request, but its arguments (embedded in the letter below) spell out the main objection:

The Archive’s text archive would greatly benefit from the same limitation of potential copyright liability that the proposed settlement provides Google. Without such a limitation, the Archive would be unable to provide some of these same services due to the uncertain legal issues surrounding orphan books.

There is also the issue of monopoly pricing. If Google is the only entity with blanket protection, it could start charging more for access to these works, or those works which prove valuable. Any single work is probably not that valuable, but taken all together they are very valuable, especially to Google which benefits by simply being able to add the text of all these books into search results and then make money off the associated search ads.

So Google is now in the position where it negotiated a favorable settlement on its behalf, but competitors are playing the monopoly card and saying that settlement would give Google an unfair advantage in book search and retrieval. And they kind of have a point. So what is the answer? Google should amend some of the terms of the settlement to make it non-exclusive and the Author’s Guild should extend the same terms to any other company or organization that wants to digitize orphan books.

In other words, Google needs to free the orphans. Don’t make this just a deal between authors and Google. Make it a deal between authors and any existing or future book digitizer. Copyright holders should also have the option to place their works under Creative Commons licenses. If Google wants to stop being treated like a monopolist, it needs to stop acting like one.

Internet Archive Intervention: Google Book Search

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