Tv, Billion | 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.

Dish Network Corp, the No. 2 U.S. satellite television provider, on Monday offered to buy wireless service provider Sprint Nextel Corp for $25.5 billion in cash and stock, a move that could inspire other telecommunications or video companies to consider their own prospects of combining.

Comcast says it's buying General Electric's 49 percent stake in NBCUniversal joint venture for $16.7 billion.

In a continuation of the massive growth of sports programming options, the Southern California area will see the launch of not one, but two new regional sports networks through Time Warner Cable beginning today.

Too niche and violent or just uninspiring, the new shows underwhelm buyers as local shows are "taking back power," says one expert, threatening Hollywood's $3 billion lifeline.

A report says the U.S. Postal Service wasted $1.2 million by selling less than a third of its 1 billion "The Simpsons" commemorative stamps. Bloomberg's Angela Greiling Keane writes that the inspector general of the money-losing USPS singled out overproduction of commemorative stamps as one example of not properly gauging the needs of customers.

NBC is set to "break even" on its Olympics coverage, rather than lose money as previously expected, the head of NBCUniversal said Wednesday. The company had expected at one point to take a $200 million loss on the London Olympics. NBC paid $1.2 billion for the rights to show the games on TV and online in the U.S. It has said that it sold more than $1 billion in ads, breaking the record of $850 million set during the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Indeed, Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN -- home to "Monday Night Football" -- extended its deal through 2021 for the franchise on Thursday morning. The new deal will cost ESPN an average of $1.9 billion per season, according to a person familiar with the deal. ESPN had been paying about $1.1 billion under its current deal.