The Web is singing this morning. The coming death of Flash on mobile devices has made a lot of tech pundits and developers very happy. There is a big fat "I told you so" coming from all corners the of Internet while all Adobe can do is quietly sit back and rue the day the original iPhone was announced.
There could be several books written about the battle for Flash against mobile. "Steve Jobs' Last Laugh" could probably be finished in time for the holiday shopping season. "How To Kill Flash For Dummies" would be an enlightening title as well. It is a bittersweet day for many. We want to know: how are you reacting to the passing of Flash for mobile? Take the poll below.
You could say that Shira Lazar lives by the sword and dies by the sword, but these days media mavens like Lazar can create safety nets by engaging internet audiences with the same tools that sometimes get them in trouble. When Lazar's show about Internet trends, called What's Trending, was promptly canceled by CBS last month after someone on her staff wrongly Tweeted that Steve Jobs had died (before he had), it might have been the end of a TV show in days of old.
What's Trending has built its own audience online though and a faux pas that would have axed the connection between a content producer and its audience in the past is now not such a game ender when media pros can build direct connections without complete reliance on major distribution deals. Now that the What's Trending team is on its own again, it's taking dramatic steps to build and deepen that audience by juggling a dazzling assortment of new media tools simultaneously. All while streaming live to thousands of people online.
Over the past decades, the promise of video as a standard form of communication has been presented to us through many mediums, from Star Trek to The Jetsons and even through my old Avengers comic books over 30 years ago. While corporations utilize video conferencing technology at a rapid rate, it hasn't yet penetrated the daily habits of people across the globe but it will.
The core technology has been there for decades, but not the bandwidth and compression technology along with the hardware to make it an everyday utility. With the growth of Skype's video chat, Google's GTalk, Apple's Facetime and other services, combined with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, video will become the standard form of communications versus SMS, voice only and even email in some situations within a few years. Drilling down further, here are a few trends that I see.
Skype. Apache. Netflix. NBC. NASA. These are just some of the past employers found on the resumes of the folks working on Vdio, a top-secret new video service whose development is being led by Skype cofounders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.
The startup hasn't been publicly unveiled, but the company recently launched a splash page with a trademarked logo for Vdio and the slogan "Are you watching?" The site's launch wasn't announced and it's currently blocking search engines from crawling it. The trademark on the page was traced by GigaOm to Pulser Music Services, which is the company that launched music streaming service Rdio in 2009.
After months of speculation and rumors, premium online video service Hulu is no longer for sale, the company announced on its blog. Hulu will continue to be owned jointly by News Corporation, the Walt Disney Company, Comcast and Providence Equity Partners for the time being.
The announcement comes after bids from several big tech companies evidently failed to pique the interest of Hulu's current owners. In July, we wrote about why Amazon would make an ideal owner for the service and fold it into its Prime video offerings. Other serious contenders included Yahoo, Dish and Google.
When Netflix announced its plan last month to spin off its DVD rental business into a an entirely seperate subsidiary called Qwikster, customers were not pleased. The company's recent subscription price hike had already irked customers, causing about 1 million of them to quit the service.
Having heard those complaints loud and clear, the company has decided to axe Qwikster altogether and keep their DVD rental service as part of the Netflix brand. This summer's price hike will stay in place, but the company hopes to stop the slow exodous of customers by capitulating on the Qwikster issue, which had proved wildly unpopular.
As more TV viewers watch their favorite shows online, the number of U.S. households without a cable subscription is expected to rise dramatically between now and 2016, according to a new report from Magnaglobal, a media forecasting firm.
By 2016, the number of households that do not subscribe to a traditional pay TV service will triple from what it is today. All told, 9 million households won't have cable, Magnaglobal predicts. Of those, about 4 million are what we'd call cord cutters; people who once subscribed to cable but canceled it in favor of accessing television content via the Internet using a set top box or computer hooked up to their TV sets.
DreamWorks Animation is betting big on the future of the Web's popularity for consuming premium video content. The major Hollywood animation studio has signed a deal with Netflix to stream its library of content exclusively to Netflix subscribers, the New York Times reported.
The deal, which covers such popular film series as Shrek and Madagascar is expected to net DreamWorks Animation $30 million per movie for the duration of the agreement. What makes this deal significant isn't so much its price tag or the content involved. Its significance lies in the fact that this is the first time such a major Hollywood content provider has inked a deal that skips over pay TV distribution in favor of the Web.
Netflix could hardly be having a worse week. It started with another flood of customer backlash from its decision to spin off and rename its DVD business, which came only weeks after it irked customers by raising its membership fees.
While the company expected to see its subscriber growth slow down temporarily, it didn't quite expect the outrage it garnered and is now projected to lose 1 million customers from it.
It's only been a few weeks since Netflix rolled out a price hike that irked customers and forced the company to revise its projected total subscribers for the year. Realizing he could have better communicated the change to subscribers, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings took to the company blog last night to say he's sorry and offer some candid insight into the company's intentions.
Hastings had barely finished apologizing before announcing another radical change: Netflix is spinning off its DVD-by-mail business into a new brand called Qwikster and running it separately from the streaming business, which will continue to be called Netflix. Qwikster, which will be run by company veteran Andy Rendich, will also now include video game rentals.
