Can Comcast-NBC play nice with Hulu?
Comcast managers said Thursday, following the company's announcement it had acquired a controlling stake in NBC Universal, that it will be business as usual at Hulu, the joint venture operated by NBC Universal, News Corp., and Disney. Ever since rumors of the acquisition began to swirl in September, questions were raised about whether Comcast would try to kill Hulu to discourage cable customers from dropping their subscriptions. Some critics of the deal said Comcast could also limit access of NBC Universal's TV shows and films to other popular distributors, such as Netflix and iTunes. It appears that some of this may happen and some of it may not.During a conference call, Comcast executives said they anticipate that some content will appear online at Hulu, and other shows will appear on TV Everywhere, the Hulu competitor that Comcast, Time Warner, and other cable companies rolled out last summer. "Comcast is too deep into their Internet-related investments for me to believe that they are hoping to clamp down on consumer enjoyment of NBC content," said James McQuivey, a digital-entertainment analyst for Forrester Research. "They have spent far too much money buying companies and developing infrastructure to suggest they are going to make it a 'my-way-or-the-highway' distribution scheme. It would be absolutely foolish to buy an expensive property like NBC Universal and then cut the legs off of it." Hulu's freedomOkay, so Hulu won't disappear once the acquisition--which still needs government approval--is finalized, but Hulu fans are concerned about how the site will develop. Many had long hoped that the service might one day offer a better selection of full-length feature films and past episodes from hot TV shows. Now, Hulu offers only a smattering of films, and to watch episodes of a TV show from a prior season, a fan must plunk down for a DVD. Most importantly, Hulu fans want to continue watching without paying subscription fees, which has been discussed publicly by some of Hulu's backers, including Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal CEO. Free content was the promise that made consumers so giddy about Hulu and YouTube not that long ago. Cable subscribers were thrilled by the possibility that they could watch the best shows and films without having to pay fees. The NBC Universal acquisition is just the latest sign that this dream might be in jeopardy. "The goal of Comcast is not to make it hard for people to get content. The goal of Comcast in the future is to make it really easy to get content and that's what people will pay for."--James McQuivey, Forrester analyst Paul Gallant, an analyst at Concept Capital's Washington Research Group told The Washington Post that Comcast could "harm consumer welfare by preventing Internet video from becoming a viable cut-the-chord threat." "It's a little bit Pollyannish to say 'I can cut cable because everything I want is on the Internet,' because it isn't," McQuivey said. The big knock on Hulu and other legal video sites is their selection of films and TV shows is still pretty poor. Under Comcast ownership, Hulu will unlikely be unable to change that. More probable is that Comcast will use NBC Universal's content to sweeten its offering to paying subscribers."The goal of Comcast is not to make it hard for people to get content," McQuivey said. "The goal of Comcast in the future is to make it really easy to get content and that's what people will pay for. "In the future, Comcast isn't going to say 'Here's 500 channels delivered to one set-top box,'" he continued. "In the future, they'll say 'Hey, you know that subscription you're paying us every month, that buys you red-carpet access to the best content. No matter what you want to watch we have the license to it. We're going to deliver it to you online, to your game console, to your connected television or Blu-ray player.'"But what about Netflix and iTunes? Doesn't the Comcast-NBC Universal deal put them in a position of competing with a major supplier? Is Netflix friend or foe?Netflix looks less like a DVD-rental business and more like the Web's version of a cable company with each passing day. For more than a year now, Netflix has streamed movies over the Web to anyone who pays the company's subscription fees. CEO Reed Hastings raised the stakes in the competition with cable companies by partnering with set-top box makers and TV manufacturers to create systems that enabled Netflix customers to watch streaming films on their flat screens. Jumping to the TV set was huge for Netflix. No longer latched to the PC, the company was now threatening cable companies on their home turf. But if content is king, then Netflix was offering only a duke. Just like Hulu, Netflix offered cable subscribers a cheaper alternative. Just like Hulu, Netflix's library lacks new and hot titles. Without the best content, the cable companies still hold an advantage over Netflix. Since Netflix is now a direct competitor to Comcast and other cable companies, it will be interesting to see what kind of terms the Web's No. 1 rental store gets from the new NBC Universal? "Comcast has to offer the world, where as Apple only has to offer what's cool." As for Apple, it's highly unlikely that Comcast will tinker with NBC Universal's arrangement for digital download sales at iTunes. The very public quarrel between the companies over pricing in 2008 is behind them. In that case, Apple gave NBC Universal more flexibility over pricing. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has shown respect for Hollywood's lucrative practice of giving exclusive film access to certain distribution platforms over specified periods, called "windows." Jobs is also purveyor of the Web's most successful video-download store, so the relationship will likely remain unchanged. But McQuivey sees a potential problem for Apple should the company decide to broaden its video business.Apple could become an over-the-top pay TV provider," McQuivey speculated. "Apple should say 'You buy an Apple TV from us and pay $28 a month and we'll give you access to this number of downloads and all of this TV-network content for free. They are one of the few companies that could really create this amazing little business model of mixing Internet downloads with Internet streaming with over-the-air HD broadcast...Lets be honest, Apple users have fairly shared tastes and as a result it would be easier for Apple to serve its customer base this way than it is for, say, Comcast. Comcast has to offer the world, where as Apple only has to offer what's cool." It should be noted that in every scenario McQuivey discussed, he mentioned price. In his vision of the digital future, Internet distribution looks a lot like cable.According to McQuivey, "All of these Internet delivery solutions are going to face some kind of reckoning over the next couple of years. It shouldn't come as a surprise that Hulu is going to evolve to include some kind of pay model."
Rafe recommends- Scan your business cards with CardMunch
Rafe recommends: Scan your business cards with CardMunch
Somewhere on or in my desk, I probably have your business card. Like a lot of people, cards rain into my life constantly. Most get "filed" into small cardboard boxes that used to hold my own business cards. And then they get forgotten. I have looked at many solutions for capturing the useful data I get from cards: Scanners, databases, and even services like Cloud Contacts, where you send your piles of cards to be scanned and entered into a database. They all take too much work (or money), so I don't stick to any of them. And then there are the business card workarounds, like Bump and CardFlick, which replace the social gesture of exchanging business cards with some smartphone-mediated artificial contortion.But now, finally, LinkedIn's CardMunch (it recently acquired the product) gets it right. Not completely right, but right enough. It's fast enough, simple enough, and accurate enough to supplant other business card scanning products. And it's free. It's paid for, I presume, by LinkedIn's marketing budget, since you can't really use CardMunch now without being bombarded by LinkedIn features. iPhones have good enough resolution to serve as document scanners now.Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNETWith the CardMunch iPhone app, you take pictures of business cards. You can snap dozens of them fairly rapidly. Then the app uploads them to the distributed data entry sweatshop known as Mechanical Turk, so real humans can transcribe your cards. The info is then sent back to your app. Total time for a business card to make the round trip? In my tests, a few hours, for a group of about 25. Fast enough. And, like I said, plenty accurate, since it's real humans reading the cards, not some OCR app that's going to get confused by clever typography.CardMunch's strength is its simplicity, but that's also a minor weakness. All it does is scan cards and send the results back to you. But it also connects data from cards to individuals' LinkedIn accounts, so you also get contacts' pictures and deeper information than cards hold themselvesYou can quickly add a contact's information from their CardMunch record to your iPhone address book. Big props to LinkedIn for not doing this by default for all contacts. You can also fire off a quick e-mail to a contact from within the app, or initiate a LinkedIn connection request (warning: Once you press "connect," you can't undo the request).See alsoLinkedIn's new CardMunch app upgrades lowly business cardBut there is no way to "favorite" a contact, nor can you sort contacts by company name or the date you took the picture of the card. The app doesn't seem to record the location where you scanned the card (which would also be useful for sorting or filtering). Hopefully these features will get layered into the app later; some of them were in CardMunch before LinkedIn bought it.Summary: I've been looking for a good business card collection utility for years. I think I've finally found it.Pro business card tip: Thinking about creating two-sided business cards, with your company name on one side and your contact info on the other? Oh, so clever. But don't do it. CardMunch only scans one side of a card. The endorsement: CardMunchPlatform: iOS iPhone appPrice: FreeSummary: Finally, a good and free solution for extracting contact information from business cards.Get it: iTunes
Somewhere on or in my desk, I probably have your business card. Like a lot of people, cards rain into my life constantly. Most get "filed" into small cardboard boxes that used to hold my own business cards. And then they get forgotten. I have looked at many solutions for capturing the useful data I get from cards: Scanners, databases, and even services like Cloud Contacts, where you send your piles of cards to be scanned and entered into a database. They all take too much work (or money), so I don't stick to any of them. And then there are the business card workarounds, like Bump and CardFlick, which replace the social gesture of exchanging business cards with some smartphone-mediated artificial contortion.But now, finally, LinkedIn's CardMunch (it recently acquired the product) gets it right. Not completely right, but right enough. It's fast enough, simple enough, and accurate enough to supplant other business card scanning products. And it's free. It's paid for, I presume, by LinkedIn's marketing budget, since you can't really use CardMunch now without being bombarded by LinkedIn features. iPhones have good enough resolution to serve as document scanners now.Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNETWith the CardMunch iPhone app, you take pictures of business cards. You can snap dozens of them fairly rapidly. Then the app uploads them to the distributed data entry sweatshop known as Mechanical Turk, so real humans can transcribe your cards. The info is then sent back to your app. Total time for a business card to make the round trip? In my tests, a few hours, for a group of about 25. Fast enough. And, like I said, plenty accurate, since it's real humans reading the cards, not some OCR app that's going to get confused by clever typography.CardMunch's strength is its simplicity, but that's also a minor weakness. All it does is scan cards and send the results back to you. But it also connects data from cards to individuals' LinkedIn accounts, so you also get contacts' pictures and deeper information than cards hold themselvesYou can quickly add a contact's information from their CardMunch record to your iPhone address book. Big props to LinkedIn for not doing this by default for all contacts. You can also fire off a quick e-mail to a contact from within the app, or initiate a LinkedIn connection request (warning: Once you press "connect," you can't undo the request).See alsoLinkedIn's new CardMunch app upgrades lowly business cardBut there is no way to "favorite" a contact, nor can you sort contacts by company name or the date you took the picture of the card. The app doesn't seem to record the location where you scanned the card (which would also be useful for sorting or filtering). Hopefully these features will get layered into the app later; some of them were in CardMunch before LinkedIn bought it.Summary: I've been looking for a good business card collection utility for years. I think I've finally found it.Pro business card tip: Thinking about creating two-sided business cards, with your company name on one side and your contact info on the other? Oh, so clever. But don't do it. CardMunch only scans one side of a card. The endorsement: CardMunchPlatform: iOS iPhone appPrice: FreeSummary: Finally, a good and free solution for extracting contact information from business cards.Get it: iTunes
Enter CNET's The 404 SuperWeakness contest for a chance to win $404!
Enter CNET's The 404 SuperWeakness contest for a chance to win $404!
We all want to be superheroes with incredible superpowers, but we all know every superhero has a superweakness. Sure, there are classics -- Superman's got his kryptonite, Green Lantern is allergic to the color yellow, and of course there's Batman's historic cat-and-mouse game with the Internal Revenue Service.The 404 will be on the ground in San Diego for Comic-Con 2013, and we want to know which modern-day problems bring you to your knees. Register with CNET and leave a comment on this blog post telling us about your crippling SuperWeakness. Enter and you'll have a chance to win $404, which also happens to be the name of our program (for those of you keeping score).Does the thought of making eye contact in public bathrooms keep you up at night? Are you terrified of being framed for a crime you didn't commit, or even just commitment in general? What about holidays you can't pronounce -- those are pretty crazy, right? We want to hear them all. Submit an entry by July 20 and tune in to The 404 Show the following week when we announce the winner.If you're going to be attending Comic-Con, you can submit another entry in person at the Base Station, located across from the Convention Center at Lou & Mickey's. If not, you just get one.On the plus side, though, you can always check out The 404 Show for free, live every weekday at 9 a.m. PT/noon ET. Or if that's too much work, just subscribe using the buttons below.Subscribe to The 404 Show on CNET.com:iTunes (HD) |Â iTunes (SD) |Â iTunes (HQ) |Â iTunes (MP3) RSS (HD) |Â RSS (SD) |Â RSS (HQ) |Â RSS (MP3)Interested in winning? Here are the rules:Register as a CNET user. Go to the Join the Conversation section below this blog post and hit the Add Your Comment button. If you're not already registered, please do so. If you're already registered, there's no need to register again -- you just need to be logged in.Leave a comment below-- Tell us your SuperWeakness.Enter only once. You may enter for this specific giveaway only once. If you enter more than once, you will be automatically disqualified.There will be one (1) winner chosen randomly. The winner will receive $404.If you are chosen, you will be notified via e-mail. The winner must respond within three days of the end of the sweepstakes. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.Entries can be submitted until Saturday, July 20, 2013, at 11:59pm ET.Thanks for entering the contest, and good luck! Some legalese: * NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. YOU HAVE NOT YET WON. MUST BE LEGAL RESIDENT OF ONE OF THE UNITED STATES OR CANADA (EXCLUDING QUEBEC), 18 YEARS OLD OR AGE OF MAJORITY, WHICHEVER IS OLDER IN YOUR STATE OF RESIDENCE AT DATE OF ENTRY INTO SWEEPSTAKES. VOID IN PUERTO RICO, ALL U.S. TERRITORIES AND POSSESSIONS AND WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW. SWEEPSTAKES ENDS 07/20/13. SEE RULES FOR DETAILS.
We all want to be superheroes with incredible superpowers, but we all know every superhero has a superweakness. Sure, there are classics -- Superman's got his kryptonite, Green Lantern is allergic to the color yellow, and of course there's Batman's historic cat-and-mouse game with the Internal Revenue Service.The 404 will be on the ground in San Diego for Comic-Con 2013, and we want to know which modern-day problems bring you to your knees. Register with CNET and leave a comment on this blog post telling us about your crippling SuperWeakness. Enter and you'll have a chance to win $404, which also happens to be the name of our program (for those of you keeping score).Does the thought of making eye contact in public bathrooms keep you up at night? Are you terrified of being framed for a crime you didn't commit, or even just commitment in general? What about holidays you can't pronounce -- those are pretty crazy, right? We want to hear them all. Submit an entry by July 20 and tune in to The 404 Show the following week when we announce the winner.If you're going to be attending Comic-Con, you can submit another entry in person at the Base Station, located across from the Convention Center at Lou & Mickey's. If not, you just get one.On the plus side, though, you can always check out The 404 Show for free, live every weekday at 9 a.m. PT/noon ET. Or if that's too much work, just subscribe using the buttons below.Subscribe to The 404 Show on CNET.com:iTunes (HD) |Â iTunes (SD) |Â iTunes (HQ) |Â iTunes (MP3) RSS (HD) |Â RSS (SD) |Â RSS (HQ) |Â RSS (MP3)Interested in winning? Here are the rules:Register as a CNET user. Go to the Join the Conversation section below this blog post and hit the Add Your Comment button. If you're not already registered, please do so. If you're already registered, there's no need to register again -- you just need to be logged in.Leave a comment below-- Tell us your SuperWeakness.Enter only once. You may enter for this specific giveaway only once. If you enter more than once, you will be automatically disqualified.There will be one (1) winner chosen randomly. The winner will receive $404.If you are chosen, you will be notified via e-mail. The winner must respond within three days of the end of the sweepstakes. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.Entries can be submitted until Saturday, July 20, 2013, at 11:59pm ET.Thanks for entering the contest, and good luck! Some legalese: * NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. YOU HAVE NOT YET WON. MUST BE LEGAL RESIDENT OF ONE OF THE UNITED STATES OR CANADA (EXCLUDING QUEBEC), 18 YEARS OLD OR AGE OF MAJORITY, WHICHEVER IS OLDER IN YOUR STATE OF RESIDENCE AT DATE OF ENTRY INTO SWEEPSTAKES. VOID IN PUERTO RICO, ALL U.S. TERRITORIES AND POSSESSIONS AND WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW. SWEEPSTAKES ENDS 07/20/13. SEE RULES FOR DETAILS.
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