Seth Gilbert, 08-6-2008
Market research firm NPD Group is known for systematically tracking retail sales. Among other things, they periodically report on gaming and music. This week, the company announced their compiled list of the top five U.S. music retailers for the first half of the year.
Assembled from six months of MusicWatch surveys, the list measures the best selling retail stores in the U.S. across the combined digital and brick & mortar landscape. By methodology, twelve downloaded singles are counted as the equivalent to one CD.
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Seth Gilbert,
With most of the big names in the media/tech space reported, it’s been an up and down earnings season. There have been some hits and some misses. There’s been some positive guidance and some suspect. Now three of the remaining big names have reported their performances. Summing them up, here’s the tally from News Corp., Marvel Entertainment and Time Warner:
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Seth Gilbert, 08-5-2008
Copyright law is a funny beast. Even in its most recent incarnations, freshly stamped with Congressional approval, it rarely keeps pace with changing business models and new invention. It’s evolutionary law subject to seemingly constant interpretation (and re-interpretation) to match legislative intent to new market paradigms. A case in point: in March 2007, the U.S. District Court in New York ruled a digital video recorder (DVR) that used remote storage instead of a local hard drive violated copyright laws. Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals (2nd Circuit) reversed the ruling and said Cablevision’s planned remote storage DVR (RS-DVR) is legal.
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Seth Gilbert, 08-4-2008
There are indexes tracking just about any business metric you can think of. For 4.5 a half years, University of San Francisco professor Mark Cannice has been tracking venture capitalist confidence. In early July he reported the second quarter result for his index was down to 3.07 on a 5 point scale. It was the third consecutive new low in the Index’ history. Still, despite VC’s concerns about the economy and the state of their investments, there’s no shortage of companies getting funded. In the media world, Heat Wave, Clickable, Crowd Fusion and NGMoco have all recently closed new rounds. Here are the details in the Metue Venture Wrap Up:
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Seth Gilbert,
Apple’s iPhone is on sale in 23 countries. In the first 72 hours more than one million units sold. August 22n around twenty more countries are expected to come online.
So the question is: how many units does Apple need to manufacture to keep ahead of demand and to satisfy a three to six week channel inventory need?
The initial reports, and early analyst expectations, seemed to set the answer at about 25 million units. A report from tech blog, Tech Crunch, speculated Monday the number could be much higher.
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Seth Gilbert, 08-1-2008
Revenues are climbing consistently across the video game industry but in the seasonal business, some publishers are struggling more than others to wring profits from the windfall this summer. Activision Blizzard, the newly minted combination of Activision and Vivendi Games, isn’t having as much of a problem. With franchises like Guitar Hero pushing sales, the company announced strong earnings result Thursday for Activision’s last quarter of independence. They also revealed a joint venture with Logitech to create new controllers for the next installment of the music game franchise.
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Seth Gilbert, 07-31-2008
In January, Netflix announced the first of several ambitious partnerships to integrate the software behind their “Watch Now” streaming video service into TV-connected consumer electronics. The deal, they revealed just prior to the Consumer Electronics show, was with LG for a set-top box. At the time, the battle for next-gen DVD standards was still ongoing so it was unclear if “set top box” meant we might see a DVD player (HD DVD or Blu-ray) or some other device. Little clarifying information was provided. Today, long after the standards war ended, the mail-order DVD pioneer and the South Korean electronics giant filled in the blanks with detail.
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