It’s still mum on how its subscription base in Japan is developing, but Hulu did confirm that it has hired a new managing director to run its operations in the region, Buddy Marini.
Previously heading Avex Asia Limited, a Hong Kong-based subsidiary of Japanese entertainment conglomerate Avex Group, Marini (pictured) will report to Hulu senior VP of international Johannes Larcher. He’ll lead all strategy and operations for Hulu’s business in Japan, which opened shop in September.
A Hulu representative would not respond to our queries as to how this would change Hulu Japan’s executive infrastructure other than to say he’s reporting to Larcher.
Marini, who oversaw Asian film investment for Avex, started his career in the U.S., working as an agent trainee for Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor and later as a creative executive for Universal Pictures.
So what’s he walking into? Tough to say, since Hulu is reluctant to release usage data on the region.
Last month, the streaming video company announced that it had lowered its subscription price in Japan from ¥1480 (about $18.20) to ¥980 ($12.10).
While not offering an update on its Japanese operations, a Hulu rep said the company has increased its content partnerships to 21 from the six it had in the region at launch. Also, the estimated number of devices in Japan that are “Hulu-enabled” has reached 29 million.
Lawyers tried to ruin Mark Zuckerberg’s big day with a sprawling lawsuit that portrays the Facebook founder as a rogue hacker, and accuses the company of tracking users on their computers and iPhones. The lawyers want to collect $15 billion for you and me and nearly everyone else on Facebook.
Here’s a plain english Q&A of what’s going on:
What did Facebook do that was so wrong?
The company placed files on users’ computers called cookies that told the social network which websites they visited.
Is that so unusual? I thought lots of sites do that
The problem is that Facebook appears to have tracked you even after you logged-out. Under the company’s own policy, it promised not to do that and thus violated the limits of your consent when it did.
How exactly did Facebook track me?
Many websites like CNN or Justin Bieber Zone have a “Like” button that acts like an extension of Facebook. The company collects data about your visits to those sites — including, it seems, when you are logged out. The unauthorized tracking reportedly took place across smartphones and tablets too.
Well, maybe this was an honest mistake?
After blogger Nik Cubrilovic called out Facebook for stalking its users, the company awkwardly suggested that the tracking of logged-out users was a “bug” or a narrow technical measure. That claim hasn’t stood up well. Cubrilovic and German regulators soon called BS and suggested Facebook was doing this deliberately for more than a year. The lawsuit also points to a Facebook patent application for cookies that follow users after they log out.
So where did this lawsuit come from?
There are actually more than a dozen cases across the country. They were recently consolidated into one lawsuit in San Jose, California.
Why are the lawyers asking for $15 billion?
It’s a great way to grab headlines during a week the press is already in a Facebook frenzy. The $15 billion itself is loosely based on the Wiretap Act which lets people sue for $10,000 if someone records their conversation without permission. The lawsuit also cites studies that claim an individual’s web history is worth $52. There are also state law penalties. And so on. The lawyers had to pick some number so they chose $15 billion.
Will Facebook actually have to pay that $15 billion?
The short answer is no. The Wiretap Act was written with telephone conversations in mind so it’s no slam dunk that a court will decide the law should apply the same way to computer cookies (Google, HTC and Samsung are facing similar lawsuits under the same legal theory). At the same time, some judges have ruled that Facebook-style “privacy invasions” aren’t worth anything in dollar terms because no one has been harmed.
In this case, however, a judge would likely conclude that Facebook’s behavior (if the allegations are true) was egregious enough to find liability under at least one of the plaintiffs’ 11 claims. But if other tech related privacy suits are anything to go by, the case will settle long before a trial.
I’m on Facebook. Will I get some of that money?
Doubtful. While the class action aspires to cover everyone who was on Facebook from May 2010 to September 2011, a cash payout is unlikely. As noted above, judges have a hard time putting a dollar value on this type of privacy breach. When there has been a privacy settlement in other tech-related cases (like Google Buzz or Facebook Beacon), the money has been divided up between lawyers and non-profit groups that act as privacy activists.
What does Mark Zuckerberg have to do with all this?
The lawsuit paints the Facebook CEO as a creep who has a long history of using his hacking skills to steal people’s personal data. The complaint opens by reproducing this email exchange:
The lawsuit also lists a chronological history intended to show that Zuckerberg and his company have long displayed a systemic disregard for user privacy. This is, of course, just a legal tactic that doesn’t necessarily prove that Facebook is any better or worse than other tech companies on privacy issues. Facebook, which told Bloomberg the complaint is baseless, would likely add that this was an accident that shouldn’t detract from the fact it provides a popular free service to millions of people.
Are lawsuits the best way to solve the privacy problem?
Probably not. But since the government often has a hard time understanding (let alone regulating) the tech industry, the lawsuits can be an effective way of raising awareness and forcing companies to take care about how they handle consumer data.
Here’s the complaint itself:
Facebook Wiretap Act Complaint Copyhttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/94073768/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-mnlhsys45ceijt4wb02
Once protected by the hype bubble, Facebook is getting a hard lesson in the realities of the public markets. Despite the massive build-up to its IPO today, the market response has been more tepid than expected.
After a delayed start, Facebook started trading at $42, about 10.5 percent above its offer price of $38. But over the course of the day, it gradually traded down to close at $38.09, barely squeaking in above its starting price. In after hours trading, the price remained around $38.27. According to analysts and industry reports, whenever the stock threatened to fall below the opening price, Facebook’s underwriters stepped in to prop it up.
“We are seeing the stock hit reality like a brick wall,” said GreenCrest Capital senior managing analyst Anupam Palit. Facebook’s scale and engagement might have pushed its valuation to $100 billion, but, like every other public company it’s not immune to the larger economic trends.
Palit said he expected Facebook’s first day to be less dramatic than that of its public tech peers (like LinkedIn, Pandora and Groupon, which all saw a first-day pop of at least 30 percent), but added that today was “definitely more muted” than anticipated.
Still, he said that Facebook’s performance was generally positive considering that “the guys who have flown really high on their IPO have tumbled in subsequent weeks.”
Also, while first-day retail interest in other tech stocks had been essentially nonexistent, Palit said, retail buyers were much more interested in Facebook.
“It is a much more ‘tangible’ company because the average person uses it and knows what it is,” he said. “There are retail investors who want to say they took part in this because it is a big moment in market history.”
That played out today, he said, as retail buyers were willing to push the stock above $40, while institutional investors, who are more sensitive to valuation, wanted to keep the price lower. In the following weeks, Palit expects the price to continue to fall, eventually settling around $32.
On Friday, more than 460 million shares in Facebook changed hands, setting a new record for IPO trading volume.
Digital media companies like YouTube and Yahoo have yet to see how much they will have increased their ad base by upping the quality of their video content recently.
But as monthly video data released by comScore shows, both companies have managed to significantly increase the amount of time viewers spend watching video on their respective channels.
Also read: TV nets wrap upfront week: “The biz still goes through us”
According to comScore, viewers spent an average of 434.8 minutes in April watching video on Google channels, a grouping the mainly includes the assets of YouTube. That represents an uptick of 55 percent over April 2011.
On Yahoo channels, meanwhile, viewers spent an average of 73.7 minutes in April watching video, nearly double the 37.5 minutes they averaged in April 2011.
While time spent viewing these leading digital channel operators has increased dramatically, total unique viewers watching them has not.
Tabulating 157.7 million unique video users in April, Google sites experienced only an 11 percent increase over April 2011′s tally of 142.7 million.
Yahoo, meanwhile, was virtually flat, counting 53.6 million uniques in April compared to 53.2 million during the same period last year.
These year-over-year benchmarks for the leading internet video providers follow trend lines of the broader online video industry.
For the entire online video universe, comScore tabulated 180.8 million unique viewers in April, up just 5 percent over April 2011. However, total minutes spent watching online video increased 46 percent to an average of 1,307.7 (I know, who are the people with all this time who are top-weighting these averages?).
Even with the uptick in consumption, YouTube and Yahoo’s rise in usage has come at a cost to others.
Vevo traffic continues to slide
Music video giant Vevo, for example, saw its unique viewers plummet 10 percent to 49.5 million over the same period, while its average viewership time declined by 41 percent to 57.9 minutes. (The comScore report doesn’t track mobile usage, so it’s hard to tell how many viewers are migrating to mobile platforms.)
Also, Viacom digital, the leader among traditional media companies in the digital video realm, saw its average viewer time drop 27 percent to 58.9 minutes (unique viewers were flat year over year at 41.2 million).
With Harry Potter fan site and e-bookstore Pottermore.com now using watermarking instead of heavyweight DRM on all the Harry Potter e-books, anti-DRM arguments are growing louder. Now the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the organization that oversees the EPUB e-book format, hopes to create an industry standard for “lightweight content protection” — something “occupying a middle ground between strong DRM and DRM-free.”
The IDPF is taking the first steps toward creating this standard by launching a discovery process — though it acknowledges the outcome of this process could be “that no feasible standardized solution would be sufficiently useful or accepted, or that no solution is forthcoming that will sufficiently address critical requirements.” Nevertheless, copyright expert Bill Rosenblatt writes, there’s “a growing recognition among publishers that DRM has aspects that work against their interests, including its lack of user-friendliness and eBook distributors’ use of the technology to ‘lock in’ consumers.”
The lightweight DRM Rosenblatt proposes would look something like this:
Overall, Rosenblatt writes, “a standard method of protecting eBook content that becomes broadly adopted would materially increase interoperability, ameliorate some of the ease-of-use limitations in current DRMs, and may promote broader adoption of digital reading.”
IDPF is taking comments through June 8.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock/Stacie Smith Photography.
This weekly feature tells the backstory of how one e-book became a bestseller, and highlights bestselling titles that are selling more copies in digital than in print.
The book: “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong” by Edward Conard (Penguin/Portfolio, list price $14.99). “Unintended Consequences” is #24 on the New York Times nonfiction e-book bestseller list this week.
What it’s about: A former Bain exec explains how to grow the economy.
How it became a bestseller: “Unintended Consequences” was supposed to go on sale on June 28, but the New York Times Magazine decided to do a feature story on it in the May 6 money issue. Penguin was able to move up the e-book’s publication date to May 7, but the print book won’t be released until June 7.
“Unintended Consequences” on … Amazon | Apple | Barnes & Noble | Google | Kobo
Here are the titles in the top-35 that appear on the e-book bestseller list, but not on the print bestseller list (click the link to expand the chart).
USA Today includes all formats and genres in one list and notes which format of a book sold best. Here are the titles in the top-35 where e-books outsold print (click the link to expand the chart).
Facebook may have just scored a potential victory in Russia.
The country’s most popular social network, vKontakte, has lost its court appeal against an earlier ruling that its feature integrating with file-sharing software breaches copyright.
The case was brought by subsidiaries of EMI, which complained that vKontakte users were sharing their music without authorisation.
St Peterburg’s commercial court ruled in the labels’ favour in January; vKontake appealed and lost on Thursday, according to global music labels’ umbrella group the IFPI.
Integrated file-sharing is one of the key draws for vKontakte users. If vKontakte drops the feature from its site in light of the judgement, as record labels are demanding, it could level the playing field between vKontakte and competitors.
DST-backed Classmates site Odnoklassniki and Facebook currently trail vKontakte, which nevertheless is often called “the Facebook of Russia”, not least for its stunning visual similarity to Zuckerberg’s site.
4:13 p.m. ET: Facebook’s stock came full circle on its first day as a public company, ending the day at $38.23 with more than 500 million shares traded. That’s barely up from its opening price of $38, but shows that Facebook priced the IPO well, although the company may have had some help from underwriters propping up the stock in the closing hours. But with a market cap of $104 billion (according to Yahoo Finance), Facebook is staked with a lot of capital to build on its growth.
3:52 p.m. ET: Facebook’s share price is back where it started at $38. The much anticipated pop is not happening. There’s still time for the stock to dip below its opening price. Facebook priced this well for itself but it won’t get the buzz that comes from a big first day.
3:00 p.m. ET: Facebook’s share price has slipped below $40 to about $39 putting it up about 3 percent on the day. The same can’t be said of Zynga, whose share price continued to drop after trading on the stock was halted a couple of times. The shares are down about 12 percent now.
2:11 p.m. ET: Doesn’t look like we’re going to get a Facebook pop today, unless things heat up later: we’re still hovering between $40 and $41. 386 million shares have changed hands so far today, and speculation is now turning toward what went wrong at the Nasdaq this morning: some traders apparently weren’t sure if their orders had been processed.
1:06 p.m. ET: Not much change in Facebook’s price, which is now at about $41 a share. Interestingly, shares of LinkedIn, Yelp and Pandora are down today. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that underwriters stepped in to ensure Facebook’s stock didn’t dip below itss opening price of $38.
12:48 p.m. ET: Facebook shares continue to float around a bit, hovering around $40 to $41 dollars a share. Meanwhile, Zynga has taken a hit today with its stock price falling by 13 percent following Facebook’s debut. Zynga’s stock, which was halted for a time, is off about 5.68 percent.
12:04 p.m. ET: So far, no big pop for Facebook. Shares seem to be holding strong in the $38-$40 range, just barely above its offer price. The stock price is about $39.51 right now. At least it’s not pulling a Zynga, and falling below the opening price on the first day. But LinkedIn, Groupon, Zillow and other recent tech IPOs saw at least a 30 percent pop on the first day of trading.
11:31 a.m. ET: And we’re off! As had been reported earlier this morning, Facebook started trading around $42. Shares are currently at about $40.90, about 7.6 percent above the original price of $38. According to Reuters, 82 million shares changed hands in the first 30 seconds.
11:20 a.m. ET: Alright already, NASDAQ. Trading was supposed to start at 11:05 a.m. But, here we are 15 minutes, still waiting… We’ll keep you updated.
Earlier: The time for talking has passed, and the time for buying has begun. Later today shares of Facebook will begin trading on the NASDAQ stock market in an initial public offering that could set records for the tech industry and rank among the most valuable IPOs in American history.
We’ll track the price of Facebook’s stock below, updating this post throughout the day with news and information about the event. The NASDAQ opens for trading at 9:30 a.m. ET, and closes at 4:00 p.m. ET. Facebook won’t go live immediately — the exchange saves IPO trades so they get their own special boost: we’re expecting Facebook trades to start at 11.
In the meantime, please check out our Facebook IPO coverage up until this point as well as our chart listing recent digital media IPOs, none of which have been as impressive as Facebook’s IPO is expected to be. And if you need some light relief or director’s commentary, check out our links to what the rest of the web is saying.
Image courtesy of Flickr user by Alex E. Proimos
By now you might have heard of this little thing called Facebook’s IPO. On Thursday, the social giant set its shares at $38 for a $104 billion valuation. Below, we’ve linked to our coverage thus far, and we’ll continue to update this post throughout Friday as the event unfolds.
Much more in our Facebook IPO archives.
Photo courtesy of SeanPavonePhoto / Shutterstock.
Amazon is trying to sell ads that would appear on the Kindle Fire’s welcome screen, AdAge reports, at prices of at least $600,000 for a two-month campaign. Does that mean a cheaper, ad-supported Kindle Fire is coming soon?
Amazon already sells ad-supported Kindles at a discount. The cheapest Kindle is $79 with ads or $99 without. The Kindle Touch WiFi is $99 with ads or $139 without. The Kindle Touch 3G is $149 with ads or $189 without.
AdAge cites executives who seem uncertain about whether the ads Amazon wants them to buy would be used on a discounted Kindle Fire or just thrown onto the regular version. One unidentified exec says, “You’re already paying a premium for the product and then having that unexpected ad experience makes for a worse consumer experience. There needs to be a value exchange.”
Amazon has likely already thought of that. The company prides itself on customer service above almost anything else, and it probably wouldn’t start including ads on the Kindle Fire without a widely promoted discounted price. The Kindle Fire software is probably already able to support ads (since on the ad-supported Kindle e-readers you can pay $30 to turn the ads off) so Amazon wouldn’t have to launch an entirely new Kindle Fire model to have it be ad-supported.
All the company has to do is decide how much cheaper an ad-supported Kindle Fire will be. The Kindle Fire is $199 now. The company could knock off $30 or go for a bigger discount in preparation for the 2nd-generation Kindle Fire rumored to launch later this year.
Visit paidContent paidcontent.org
Bookmark and Share
|
Download the Tech News Tube App for iOS. |
Tech News Tube Home /
Mobile Version /
iPhone & iPad App /
Search /
Feed Hash /
About
© 2012 MobileInfocenter - [0.386s]
Read Article