cable wars
Update: A deal has been reached. Crisis averted. Viacom is demanding that Time Warner Cable pay more for the right to broadcast its networks, but TWC has refused. Tonight at midnight, 13.3 million subscribers in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Cleveland will feel the effects of the stalemate first hand when Viacom makes good on its threat to
pull all of its networks from TWC. Translation: no more "The
Daily Show," "Dora the Explorer," "The Colbert Report," "The Hills," etc. But hey, there's always Hulu and BitTorrent, right?
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viacom
Viacom is sending bogus copyright ownership claims and illegal posting notices to independent filmmakers posting their own movies on YouTube. These films contain not one iota of Viacom content. Take, for instance,
this lovely short animation, "Juxtaposer," made by Joanna Davidovich for her senior project. It's completely her original creation. She has
copyrighted it and says that she "only entered into distribution agreements that were nonexclusive." Yet, the media corporation saw fit to have YouTube tell Joanna, "Viacom has claimed some or all audio and visual content in your video."
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marketing
It's time once again to play Categorize The Shopping Public, this time using a survey commissioned by TV Land to convince advertisers that its
Boomer-centric programming is relevant. If you or someone you know is between the ages of 40-59, you won't want to miss this very important message—but to summarize it for the ADD crowd, it seems younger folks are (slightly) more likely to choose a brand based on fashion and hype, whereas Boomers are (slightly) less brand-loyal and seek greater value. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom that younger consumers are savvier shoppers, and gives Boomers something to gloat over—before they forget what it is they're gloating about. Ha ha! Old people are so old!
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privacy
Wired's Threat Level blog says that the judge in the Viacom/
Google lawsuit has made a ruling forcing Google to turn over "every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses," to Viacom.
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blogs
Viacom workers have to agree that Viacom owns anything they ever make in the "universe," in, "perpetuity." Use of the
Yahoo! Toolbar expressly prohibits use of the technology to operate nuclear facilities.
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Consumerist
