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Discovery Communications is moving ahead with confidence into new media.  A day after acquiring a popular environmental lifestyle site to be a companion site for a their soon to be launched Planet Green channel, the company has also announced they will be making first run full length episodes of some of their programming available online.

Beginning August 3rd , Discovery will premier Meerkat Manor, a program its Animal Planet cable channel, online a week before airing the episodes on television.  Episodes of Discovery Channel’s  program Dirty Jobs and The Learning Channel’s new tattoo art spin off LA Ink will also air online (both of those programs will debut on television and then be made available online a day later). Click to Read More

With nice weather and incentive to be outside and active, the summer quarter is a cyclic weak point for gaming companies. Wednesday, after the close of markets, Game publisher Electronic Arts (EA)  (NASDAQ: ERTS), reported their fiscal first quarter earnings (for the period ended June 30th). The loss for the quarter, and other results were appropriate to the season, they also easily beat Wall Street analysts expectations, (though expectations were far from lofty.) Click to Read More

Scan the register of bands on iTunes and you aren’t likely to find many famous names unrepresented.   From Johnny Cash to Beyonce from B.B. to Bono, from Eric Clapton to Queen, there’s a sampling of music across generations and genres.

But if you’re of the generation that, when you picked up a guitar, the first song you wanted to learn how to play was Stairway to Heaven? Going to iTunes might leave you calling out “Houston, we’ve got a problem.”

Besides the Beatles, classic rock legends Led Zeppelin have been among the few major holdouts that’ve refused to go digital and go Apple.  It’s ironic in a way, the two bands, (along with fellow famous holdout, Radiohead), represent music’s British Invasions but so far when it comes to digital, they’ve been strictly isolationist. That’s reportedly soon to change.

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If you’re not a preteen, a relative of one, or someone following the media industry, you probably haven’t’ heard of Club Penguin or its rival Webkinz.     The sites provide interactive games and social network like features for preteens. Club Penguin, launched in 2005, was designed to be a fun, safe, game and activity environment for today’s internet enabled children aged 6 to 14; MySpace for the younger set. On the site, kids can adopt and interact with virtual Penguins or chat and play games with other kids on the site.

Wednesday, coinciding with their earnings release, Disney announced they were buying the British Colombia based company for $350m in cash plus revenue performance incentives that could make the kids social network worth as much as $700m. 

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It’s official. Yesterday, as expected, the boards of News Corp and Dow Jones each met to approve News Corps buyout offer. With sufficient support from shareholders secured, the deal will go ahead. It will likely take about four months to transition. Once complete, Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation will reign over what is arguably the largest single owned territory of business media in the world.

There’s nothing like a map to show how big something is. So here it is, a visual layout of the mammoth that is News Corp. (Click the map and a page will launch with a larger image to display. If that image still is not large enough, a downloadable PDF or MS Word version is hosted on Scribd.)

With the iPhone, AT&T may be in bed with Apple for the next five years but that doesn’t mean they can’t have other partners to make music with.  Yesterday, in a joint press release, AT&T and number two digital music retailer, eMusic, announced a new over-the-air (Internet to Mobile) music service for AT&T cellular customers (iPhones, not included).

The service allows AT&T wireless customers to access, preview and buy songs from eMusic directly through their handsets.  In going “over the air,” the offering diverges from AT&T’s earlier music download service deals (with Napster and Yahoo) that allowed customers to buy music online and download it to music playing phones. It also gives them a product to compete with offerings from other wireless providers.

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It was looking like News Corp was getting off its quarter-long roller coaster ride yesterday with a go-ahead vote to buy Dow Jones but elsewhere in media stocks, particularly entertainment, a different roller coaster ride kept going. After the close of market Tuesday,  DreamWorks Animation and CBS both released quarterly earnings.  It was a good day for animators, not such a good day for TV.

DreamWorks Animation(NYSE: DWA:)
DreamWorks Animation reported towering second quarter revenue with net income of $61.8m (60 cents a share) for the quarter ended June 30th.  Even subtracting a one time gain of 11cents a share for a reduction in reserves for home video sales, and another one time gain of 4cents from tax accounting,  it was huge return relative to last years income of 13.7m for the same period. 

Quarterly revenue in the film industry is highly variable and heavily influenced by the volume and quality of titles released at any given time.  DreamWorks strategy is to release one franchise title and one new film every year.  Shrek the Third was the franchise film for this year and it released this past quarter.  They’ll be living off of it for the rest of the year.

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