Sony, Warner, Disney Discussing $30 Post-Theatrical Offer with Cable Operators

Sony Pictures, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co. are in talks with the largest U.S. cable TV operators to offer films on an on-demand basis for as much as $30 per showing soon after they run in theaters, Bloomberg reports.

The talks with In Demand, a partnership of Cox Communications Inc., Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable are the latest example of experimentation with release windows and price points.

Disney also is discussing streaming films on Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox console and Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3, Bloomberg says.

The new release window presumably would occur before the films go to DVD release, pay per view and other on-demand venues.

Sony, Warner, Disney Planning $30 Home Film-Viewing Option

To Build a Mobile Network, You Need Access to Rooftops

Wireless operators frequently cannot build their networks as fast as they would like because they cannot always get rooftop access rights as fast as they would like, or at prices they believe are reasonable. Here Sprint talks about rooftops in New York city.

RIM's New Tablet

Research in Motion's new tablet device.

Digital Advertising Grows, To Nobody's Surprise

It would come as no shock to anybody that the amount of digital advertising and digital media is growing at least in linear fashion, just about every year.

Nor would it shock anybody that digital growth rates far surpass that of traditional venues.

Here's the latest forecast from BIA/Kelsey.

Smartphone Adoption Patterns Differ Globally

Smartphone adoption patterns globally are different from patterns seen in the United States. Symbian, to use one notable example, is relatively widely used elsewhere, but sparsely in the U.S. market.


Apple's market share in the U.S. market is far higher than it is globally, for example. 

Mobile Content Delivery Networks Might Be Affected by Net Neutrality

Content delivery networks routinely are used to improve end user experience for all sorts of applications. The same sort of logic would indicate that the same sorts of techniques will be used by mobile applications as well.

But network neutrality rules could affect the pace and scale of such application performance enhancement, indirectly if not directly.

Today, it is the application provider that makes the decision to use a CDN. Network neutrality rules that forbid quality of service features would not change that, but would prevent access providers from creating such levels of service.

One example would be a service provider capability that applies expedited or assured delivery for any video stream, or featured video streams. Much the same functionality could be provided for other types of traffic, including voice, conferencing or enterprise data interactions, for example, depending on how any possible rules are crafted.

Up to this point such enhancements have not been terribly necessary. But the amount of real-time traffic is growing.

According to the Yankee Group, fewer than 600 million smartphones will be in use in 2010, but that number will more than double in 2014 to nearly 1.4 billion.

One key difference between smartphone usage patterns and more-traditional devices is the increased amount of video traffic consumed by smartphone users.

Yankee Group :: Research Report

AOL Thinks It Can Fix "Banner Effectiveness" Problem

AOL thinks it can "solve the problems associated with use of banner advertising, including clutter and end user inattention.

The basic premise of Project Devil is that “advertising is content.” The problem with banners is that they force the consumer to cancel what they were doing and look for a marketer’s message across the web. So AOL wants to move banners "into" the context of the web page and application the user already is engaged with at the moment.



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