The DVD Is Not Dead...Yet

An article in yesterday's NY Times does an excellent job of covering the point I was making last week. That is, the entire DVD business has a limited lifetime and Sony's Blu-Ray victory is somewhat hollow. The disc business is not a long-term business and it is already showing signs of fading.The article discusses what the various studios are doing in an attempt to bolster the DVD and Blu-Ray

And The Winner Is....Blu-Ray

No surprise here. Warner Bros. put the first nail in HD-DVD's coffin with the announcement at CES that WB hi-def content would thereafter only be published on Blu-Ray. Walmart, Best Buy and Netflix hammered in the final nails over the past week or so. When retail won't sell your product, it makes it very hard to stay in business.To Toshiba's credit, it didn't waste time in seeing that the game

Mobile Media Marches On

Another good article this morning (this time from the BBC) which is indicative of the speed with which mobile media is advancing. The gist of the article is that the sales of smartphones will surpass the sale of laptops within the next 12 to 18 months. Think about that -- 12 to 18 months. That is right around the corner. This means that everyone is quickly heading towards having robust media

The Real Hurdle to Mobile Media

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Thursday, one of the panels was apparently very revealing on the topic of advancing mobile media business models. The Hollywood Reporter has excellent coverage on that story.If you ask most people, they would probably characterize the content providers as reluctant to make their content widely available on mobile devices. Personally, if I had to guess,

Update on Viewer Migration Caused by the Strike

Another article today relevant to what I was talking about on Monday. Video Business confirmed that in December, as new television programming was waning because of the strike, viewers turned to the Web. The article notes a 34% increase in online video consumption -- apparently a lot of it at Youtube. (Check out the table showing market shares of online video traffic -- very interesting.)It's

Mobile Is The Next Frontier, and It's Right Now

The most interesting news on the digital entertainment front comes out of Barcelona, Spain today. That's the site of the Mobile World Congress where there have been two very interesting and related developments. First, Microsoft announced its acquisition of Danger, a mobile phone operating system. The Danger software is especially adept at facilitating social networking through mobile devices.

What the Writers Strike Really Accomplished

It looks like the WGA labor action will be coming to an end in the next couple of days. The show runners are heading back to work today, so that's a pretty good indication that the union anticipates a positive vote from the membership on Tuesday evening. (http://www.variety.com/VR1117980626.html)There is already a lot of talk about what the writers accomplished with their job action. The most

Why Microsoft Wants (Needs?) Yahoo

Clearly the big media business news of this week is Mircrosoft's unsolicited (and unwanted) offer to buy Yahoo for a combination of Microsoft stock and cash. Depending on the price of the MS stock at any particular time, the deal is worth around $42 billion. That represents a steep premium over the pre-offer price of Yahoo.Obviously, the deal is driven somewhat by the current low price of Yahoo