Hulu didn't end up getting sold in 2011, but it nonetheless turned out to be a pretty big year for the premium video streaming service. Overall, the business grew by 60% over the previous year and raked in $420 million in revenue.
That money came from a combination of ad sales and paid subscriptions to the service's Hulu Plus offering. They now have 1.5 million paying subscribers. It's a far cry from Netflix's more than 23 million paying members, but then again Hulu Plus only went live in 2010. According to Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, this is the fastest any paid video streaming service has reached 1.5 million users.
This year's Consumer Electronics Show is getting ready to wrap up in Las Vegas tomorrow. There may not have been a single blockbuster product announcement, but when it comes to the future of television, CES is always good for a few hints about what to expect. By piecing together some of those clues, we can begin to see a picture of what the future holds.
There are a number of trends toward the future of television that are already well underway, some of which will be built upon in 2012. Web connectivity is increasingly standard on new TV sets, time-shifting content is becoming the norm and viewers are supplementing the TV experience using the "second screens" of smartphones and tablets. Nobody knows what Apple has in mind for the TV hardware industry, but consumers and industry incumbents alike have been conditioned to expect it to make a big impact.
Looking for a quick pick-me-up in those late afternoon hours, I've found myself heading over to my Spotify account to check out what Facebook friends are listening to. While this has been a neat way to notice shared music tastes, there's still something awkward about it. Unless I've already had some sort of communication about music with a friend on Spotify, or at least some recent contact on Facebook or otherwise, I feel weird scrolling through their playlists.
Facebook must have foreseen this problem because today it announced yet another way to listen to music through your account. The catch here is that you're actually listening with your friends rather than voyeuristically peering into their playlists and, unbeknownst to them, clicking on their songs.
Well, that didn't take long. Bing, Microsoft's three-year-old search engine, has officially edged out ahead of Yahoo, according to the latest data from ComScore. In December, Yahoo dropped 0.6 percentage points over the previous months, giving Microsoft a slight lead, despite the fact that Bing didn't grow that much during the same time period.
Bing now commands 15.1% of the search market, while Yahoo has dropped to 14.5%. It's not even a full percentage point, but this is the first time Yahoo has been ousted by Microsoft for that #2 slot behind Google.
Ever since Google+ arrived on the social scene, Blogger has gone through a few transformations. Surprisingly, the latest update to Blogger has nothing to do with Google+.
Today the Google Buzz blog announced that blogger now supports threaded comments. These comments make it easier for the reader to figure out if a commenter is responding specifically to their comment, or just making a general comment on the thread.
There is a catch, however: Users must go to their Blogger profiles and select embedded comments, and enable a full-text blog feed. This is relatively easy to do.
Whether you love it or hate it, Facebook's so-called frictionless sharing concept isn't going away anytime soon. From songs played on Spotify to articles read on the Washington Post, everything your friends consume via participating sites is broadcast to the news ticker in real time.
Today, the social TV and streaming media center service Boxee became the latest to join in on the trend when it announced a new partnership with Facebook. Users who opt in can automatically update Facebook about TV shows and other videos they watch through Boxee's interface.
Email, long seen as the scapegoat in the downfall of the US Postal Service, could be its savior, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.
Shiva Ayyadurai, who was the first to copyright the term "EMAIL," is working on a proposal for the USPS to enter the email management industry, reports The Tech, MIT's student-run newspaper. Ayyadurai says the typical flood of daily email is too much for the typical company to handle, meaning important messages get lost or misdelivered.
The next phase of Reddit's war against the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) will begin next week when the social news community will black out its website for a period of 12 hours. In place of Reddit's user-ranked news and lively conversations will be commentary and information about SOPA, as well as video of congressional testimony about the proposed legislation.
This is just Reddit's latest strike against SOPA, a topic that has been front-and-center on the site for months now. Its community of users have turned the discussion into a type of digital activism, launching a successful boycott campaign against GoDaddy and rallying support for candidates running against pro-SOPA politicians.
Yesterday Facebook began rolling out sponsored stories in the main news feed. At the end of 2011, when this announcement first broke, a Facebook spokesperson told us that these ads would be clearly marked "sponsored" so as not to confuse them with other stories. But it looks like - surprise! - Facebook changed its mind somewhere between the announcement and the rollout, and decided to call the ads "featured" instead of "sponsored." This is confusing for the user but rather advantageous to the advertiser.
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As beloved as Firefox is by its users, the open source browser has had a harder time finding hardcore fans among IT managers at large companies and other organizations. That's because its rapid release cycle has always been notoriously tricky for them to keep up with. On top of that, Mozilla would sometimes end support on a particular older version of its browser before enterprise clients were ready.
Mozilla has heard the pained cries of IT managers everywhere and today announced that they're going to put out an Extended Support Release version of Firefox to help organizations better manage and support the software.
