Google plans pay-per-view films

Google’s YouTube video site is in negotiations with Hollywood’s leading movie studios to launch a global pay-per-view video service by the end of 2010, putting it head-to-head with Apple in the race to dominate the digital distribution of film and television content.

Google has been pitching to the studios on the international appeal of a streaming, on-demand movie service pegged to the world’s most popular search engine and YouTube, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.

Google will use its search technology and YouTube to direct viewers to the new service, which is likely to launch first in the US, with other countries added over time, the people added.

FT.com / Media - Google plans pay-per-view films

Foursquare is Biggest, in Times Square, At Least

Foursquare might not be the biggest location-based service, but in Times Square, it has the biggest billboard. It's huge.

BlackBerry past its prime?

It is hard to say with certainty how well Research in Motion will adapt to a world where direction seems to be set by Apple iPhone and Android devices.

It does seem that BlackBerry owners are less attached to their devices than they used to be. Only 42 percent of BlackBerry users say they want to stick with the brand when they buy a new phone, according to the Nielsen Company. For iPhone owners, the same figure is 89 percent, and for Android it’s 71 percent.

BlackBerry past its prime

What Every Exec Needs To Know About The Future of eCommerce Technology | Forrester Blogs

Mobile e-commerce is going to happen in the cloud, or not at all, one might conclude from some Forrester Research findings.

On average, 8.85 different hosts were involved in delivering an e-ommerce transaction this year in the United States, and it was even slightly higher for German eCommerce transactions.

This year, nearly 20 percent of e-commerce transactions across more than 200 sites included at least one piece of content served by the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) solution. In other words, 20 percent of e-commerce transactions already rely on cloud services provided by Amazon alone.

And appetite for such solutions seems to be growing. About 54 percent of executives are interested in moving to e-commerce solutions based on software-as-a-service.

What Every Exec Needs To Know About The Future of eCommerce Technology | Forrester Blogs:

Why U.S. Mobile Operators Will Not Likely Replicate the Japanese Experience

In Japan, operators have taken control of the whole content, supply and delivery chain, making it easy for people to adapt and use mobile data without any complications, Ericsson Consumer Lab Head Henrik Palsson says.

'They have integrated services, supervised the network to see that everything works and tested applications and the interoperability among networks and operators. They have taken full responsibility for the whole chain, something few operators in other markets have done."

That isn't going to happen in the U.S. market, where the ecosystem is, and will remain, much more fragmented.

Ericsson: Tailoring to the mass market

Clearwire to Launch Prepaid Services

Clearwire plans to launch a new prepaid service for users of its WiMAX fourth-generation (4G) network. The apparent effort likely will attempt to entice more-casual users to buy service before competing HSPA+ and Long Term Evolution networks launch and basically eradicate the bandwidth advantage Clearwire has had since 2008.

http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1442505/000095012310081459/v56755e8vk.htm

U.S. Telecom Industry Revenue Flat Through 2015

If you run a publicly-traded company in the telecommunications industry, this revenue forecast by Atlantic-ACM will cause heartburn. 


Between 2009 and 2015, revenue will be flat, in fact declining a bit. 


If you run a public company, you are judged on revenue growth. That inescapable vice suggests just one thing: massive financial trouble ahead for industry players or significant shifts of market share that allow some companies to keep growing at the expense of others. 


Most companies will run hard just to stay in place. But it seems unlikely most companies can do that on a long-term basis. Public companies must grow, or get punished. Public companies that don't grow will be acquired. More than anything else, industry lack of real growth is going to lead to relatively-massive consolidation. 


To be sure, most companies are trying to find other new revenue streams that do not simply take existing market share from other competitors, but actually add new incremental revenue. In all likelihood, those streams will be quite small for a while, though, and likely will not be significant enough to get the industry out of its "flat revenue" jam.