Internet, Tv | featured news

With more than one billion unique visitors every month, YouTube asserted last night that the battle between television and the online video giant is over. YouTube claimed victory with six billion views per month. According to the Wall Street Journal, which cited Mark Mahaney's estimates, a stock analyst at RBC Capital Markets,  that YouTube generated about $4 billion in revenue in 2012, up from $2.5 billion in 2011.

Amazon is letting viewers help choose its new lineup of TV shows, scuttling a secretive, wasteful process once reserved for Hollywood taste-makers... There used to be just one way for getting shows on TV. Networks would spend tens of millions of dollars ordering scripts and shooting pilots and then show the fruits of their labor to focus groups. A small group of executives would cherry-pick a few promising shows to put on TV, hoping they'd be a hit with bigger audiences. The process was unscientific, expensive, and often didn't work. It's still how most of the industry operates today.

Google Fiber has a lot going for it, both as an ISP and a pay-TV platform. There was was one gaping hole in the service though: no HBO. Lets be honest with ourselves, its the big geeks that are looking to hop on that 1Gbps service first. And what do geeks love almost as much as blazing-fast Google-branded internet? Game of Thrones. Now Kansas City (and soon Austin) based nerds will be able to watch Joffrey become an even bigger monster live, rather than wait for some torrent site to get an illegal copy of it up (or, if they're smart, mooch off of someone's HBO GO account). Alongside HBO, Google Fiber has also added Cinemax: Home Box Office's less cool sibling. The branded families of channels are both available today for $20 a month or $10 a month respectively. Or, if you're a real premium TV fan, you can get both, plus STARZ and Showtime for $40 a month. Hit up the source for a few more details.

A top executive with the owner of the Fox broadcast network on Monday threatened to convert the network to a pay-TV-only channel if Internet startup Aereo Inc. continues to "steal" Fox's over-the-air signal and sell it to consumers without paying for rights.

Nielsen is taking a step towards extending its TV-ratings business to measure online viewing, aiming to gauge how much viewership has drifted away from traditional TV to online outlets.

...Two different firms that study social media sentiment, Taykey and General Sentiment, have issued Oscar predictions based on what people are saying on Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms. They arrived at totally different conclusions.

The Twitter haters are losing the war. You know who they are, or, perhaps, who you are. Those who dismiss the snappy social network as the Platonic Non-Ideal of oversharing undercooked ideas, of blurting out what’s better left unsaid.

If you’ve shopped for a TV in the past couple of years, chances are you’ve heard of Vizio. After all, the company, a decade old this year, has been holding its own in the US TV market against global giants like Samsung and Sony while at the same time expanding into new products like PCs and tablets. Impressive no doubt, even more so considering the company does all this with just 400 employees. At $3 billion in annual revenue, this translates to about $7.5 million per head, a number that’s over ten times that of Sony. That’s an amazing degree of productivity, especially for a company that has in no way taken the easy path of shipping me-too boxes, but instead has been one of the most progressive in adopting new technologies for the TV market such as new interfaces and smart TV.

Cable giant Comcast Corp., the nation's largest provider of TV and high-speed Internet services, more than doubled its net income in the third quarter, helped by fewer cancelations of video service than expected and by breaking even on the expensive-to-produce London Olympics.

Twitter has suspended the account of a Los Angeles-based reporter for a British newspaper who included the email address of the NBC Olympics president and asked his followers to write him to complain about the network's coverage....