You may have heard, as part of the sales pitch for transitioning broadcast television from analog to digital, about the capability of a single DTV channel to carry as many as six distinct program streams. DTV would thus be good for the consumer because it would result in an expansion of viewing choices.
Think again: meet MovieBeam. The service, developed by Disney, uses “unused portions of [DTV] signals” to deliver movies on demand to subscribers. Users pay a fee for the special set-top box used to receive and decode “rented” movies, and then pay between $2-4 per movie. Users have 24 hours to watch their chosen flick before it is automatically deleted from their box. Continue reading “DTV Spectrum Appropriated For Non-DTV Uses”
Tag: disney
Disney/ABC Dumps NAB
Today ABC/Disney resigned its membership in the National Association of Broadcasters, who now represent none of the major television networks: Fox and NBC bailed out in 2000 and CBS followed a year later.
This particular marriage dissolved over the NAB’s resistance to increasing the television ownership caps. On June 2 the FCC raised the cap allowing TV broadcast companies to own enough stations to reach 45% of the viewing audience, up 10% from the previous limit. The networks wanted the caps raised so they could buy more stations and bring them under direct network control; the companies that own most affiliates didn’t want increased pressure from the networks. Since the vast majority of U.S. TV stations are NOT network-owned and operated, it was easy to see how the NAB would come down in this fight. Continue reading “Disney/ABC Dumps NAB”
ABCNN? Don't Laugh
Well, spank my ass and call me Charlie, the L.A. Times reports today that AOL Time Warner has been in talks with Disney about possibly spinning off the ABC News division and merging it with CNN as a stand-alone company. Apparently this has been a morsel of discourse between the two for about 18 months now.
This isn’t the first time Time Warner has tried to spin off CNN; it apparently danced with CBS for a while before that deal fell through. Continue reading “ABCNN? Don't Laugh”