The MUSIC and New Digital Media REPORThttp://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3id4800d851700dee992e99acf8408de0a
By 2015, there could be as many as 64 million, with 26 million in-car radios and 37 million in smart phones.
“Stursberg’s CBC is ratings-driven, populist, pop-culture-obsessed in its news coverage, lightweight, disdainful of the arts and mortally afraid of appearing highbrow.”
“…anyone who thinks that Stursberg’s departure means a reversal of his various TV and radio implementations is kidding him- or herself. The five-year plan has more to do with capital spending, hardware and financial management systems than it has to do with dramas and sitcom on TV or the genre of music played on CBC radio
channels. Things are not going backward. If you worship at the altar of the old CBC of Peter Gzowski and Barbara Frum, you are not going home again. We’ll all be living with Stursberg’s CBC for a long time to come.”
At Netflix, the picture is darkening
“Netflix (NFLX-Q152.78-1.83-1.18%), with a series of deals to stream movies and television shows over the Internet, seems poised to make a technological transition that its floundering competitor Blockbuster Inc. failed to do.”
“And that is where the growth is: Standard & Poor’s credit analyst Jayne Ross believes the broadband home-video market is expected to increase by more than 50 per cent annually over the next several years, even as the overall movie rental business will be flat to slightly up.”
From Globe and Mail article about Google and Sony joining forces with an Internet televison:
Those relatively modest sales figures show how reluctant people have been to inject the Internet into the three to five hours they spend, on average, in the so-called “lean back” mode of watching television.
But that almost certainly will change as younger people who have grown up Web surfing on their computers while channel surfing on the TVs look for products that bring together the different media. The only question seems to be how much longer it will be until the market reaches the tipping point where Internet TV goes mainstream.
Sony’s own research has identified consumers who are under 44 years old as the most likely buyers of the new Google TV sets. McQuivey thinks the market is probably even narrower than that right now, ranging mostly from people between 30 and 45 years old who have settled down into their own households and can afford fancy TVs.
Convinced the Internet TV will be the next big thing, other consumer electronics manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics Co., Vizio and Mitsubishi also are promoting Web-connected sets and Blu-ray players.
The MUSIC and New Digital Media REPORT 