Verizon’s shopping spree in recent years has mostly focused on snapping up the last vestiges of the 1990s with big purchases of AOL and Yahoo. But now, the company’s CEO says, it’s ready to go bigger and more modern… and it’s not entirely picky about who it wants its new partner to be. [More]
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Lawsuit Over Star Trek Fan Fiction Flick Headed To A Jury Trial
By 1.4.17
The David vs. Goliath sci-fi copyright battle between Paramount Studios and the makers of a crowdsourced Star Trek fan fiction movie nears its glorious conclusion, with a judge determining this morning that the dispute will head to a jury trial. [More]
NFL Denies It Is Looking To Get Rid Of Thursday Night Football
By 11.29.16
It hasn’t been a banner year for the NFL, with ratings now sagging for what had seemed to be an unstoppable TV sports juggernaut. Now the league is fending off rumors that it has plans to get rid of meh-rated Thursday Night Football when its current TV deals are expired. [More]
CBS Will Let You Watch New Star Trek Show Without Commercials… For $4/Month More
By 8.31.16
As CBS prepares to put bona fide original content — like the upcoming online-only version of Big Brother and next year’s new Star Trek: Discovery series — on its $6/month All Access streaming service, the network realizes that hey, maybe people will pay a bit more to avoid having to watch all those flippin’ commercials. [More]
The Next Season Of Big Brother Will Be Online-Only
By 8.2.16
Since it debuted more than 15 years ago, CBS’s Big Brother has sold online access to the live feeds directly from the BB “house.” Now the network is going all in for the next season of the long-running reality competition, making it an online exclusive. [More]
Stephen Colbert Says Comedy Central Unhappy With CBS’s Use Of ‘Stephen Colbert,’ So He Introduces New ‘Stephen Colbert’
By 7.28.16
Last week during the Republican National Convention, CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert brought backhis arch-conservative former alter ego — also named Stephen Colbert — from Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report to comment on the goings-on in Cleveland. The brief stunt apparently didn’t go over well with the lawyers at Comedy Central, forcing Colbert to a new intellectual property work-around: introducing a completely new character who just happens to look and sound exactly like him. [More]
Star Trek Fan Film Lawsuit Will Live On
By 6.17.16
While the makers of the crowdfunded Star Trek fan fiction film Axanar had once hoped to reach a settlement with Paramount and CBS over a lawsuit accusing the filmmakers of copyright infringement, the much discussed lawsuit will live to see another day, as the two companies told a California federal judge this week that their action remains pending. [More]
NFL Refuses To Purchase The Only Known Tape Of First Super Bowl
By 2.3.16
Around 4pm ET on Sunday, Jan. 15, 1967, the National Football League’s Green Bay Packers squared off against the American Football League’s Kansas City Chiefs in the first ever Super Bowl. Some 50 million people watched the game, simulcast on both NBC and CBS, but neither network retained their footage of the historic event — and the one guy that does have a tape of the game isn’t allowed to sell it. [More]
NBC To Get In On That Thursday Night Football Lovin’
By 2.1.16
For the last couple of seasons, CBS has been — with the exception of Thanksgiving night — the NFL’s sole dance partner on Thursday nights. But starting next season, CBS will have to get used to the idea of the league spending time romancing another “friend” — NBC. [More]
The Going Rate For A 30-Second Super Bowl Commercial Spot Tops $5M
By 8.6.15
Even though last year’s slate of Super Bowl ads was largely regarded as ho-hum, and even though advertisers are increasingly subverting the “surprise!” effect of Super Bowl sunday commercials by relentlessly teasing their big-ticket spots online days in advance, the NFL’s big game is still TV’s biggest annual draw, and so the cost to be a part of it is going up again. [More]
Showtime’s Standalone Streaming Service Is Now Available For Cord-Cutters To Buy
By 7.7.15
After months of waiting, cord-cutters can now get access to Showtime’s streaming service without having to subscribe to basic cable (or use a friend’s login info). [More]
AT&T, CBS Make Nice And Sign New Contract, Avoiding Network Blackout
By 7.1.15
In a nice change for consumers, a content company and a distribution company managed to save everyone the rigamarole of a blackout and a finger-pointing yell-a-thon when they instead settled their differences and negotiated a new contract hours after the old one expired. [More]
Hulu Will Sell Showtime’s Standalone Streaming Service For $9
By 6.23.15
The folks at CBS have already shown they are willing to try something new with the upcoming launch of the standalone Showtime streaming service, making it available through Sony’s PlayStation Vue live-TV platform in addition to being sold through iTunes and Roku. Today, the company announced another partnership that will sell Showtime through Hulu at a discounted rate. [More]
Cord-Cutters Rejoice: Standalone Showtime To Launch In July For $11/Month
By 6.3.15
CBS is finally making good on its promise to launch a standalone, Internet-only version of Showtime so that fans of shows like Homeland and Penny Dreadful (and people who want to re-experience the hilarious death spiral of Dexter’s final season) won’t need a basic cable subscription. [More]
Standalone Showtime Service Confirmed To Launch In Coming Months
By 5.7.15
While CBS Corp. didn’t provide any pricing details today on the long-hinted-at standalone Showtime streaming service (a la HBO Now), the company did confirm that it will indeed be giving consumers this new cable-free option at some point in the coming months. [More]
Showtime May Soon Announce Standalone Streaming Service
By 4.24.15
Back in Nov. 2014, CBS CEO Les Moonves said that his company’s Showtime network would “fairly definitively” launch some sort of standalone streaming service in 2015. Since then, there hasn’t really been much news about it. But since HBO has launched HBO Now without the world coming to an end, it looks like it might be time for CBS to unveil that service. [More]
Aereo Settles $99 Million Copyright Claims With CBS, FOX, ABC For $950K
By 4.21.15
Even though poor little Aereo — the once-promising live TV streaming service — was gutted by a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling has already been picked apart in bankruptcy auctions, it still had to face the copyright infringement claims from the broadcasters who alleged Aereo was stealing their signals. What remains of Aereo has now agreed to pay about a penny on the dollar to resolve the nearly $100 million in claims. [More]
Sling TV Users Finding Some Shows Are Now Being Blocked From Streaming
By 3.30.15
TV production and distribution is a complicated entanglement of interests involving studios, distributors, networks, and pay-TV services, not to mention deals any of these people might have with other companies like home video or on-demand streaming sites. That’s been one of the huge impediments to getting live-streaming of all TV content — having to please all those parties who may not all agree. And that appears to be why Sling TV users are now finding that they can’t access every show on all of the networks. [More]
