Internet & Media

Update 2-26-10, 6:17 a.m. To include quotes from Spotify and to clarify that NPD's numbers were for U.S. only.

NEW YORK--Free on-demand music sites haven't fared very well when it comes to driving song sales.

Russ Crupnick, an analyst with market researcher NPD Group, told a crowd of music and tech executives here Wednesday that free streaming-music sites, which enable people to listen to any song at any time free of charge, lead to a 13 percent decrease in paid downloads.

Speaking at the Digital Music Forum East conference, Crupnick sized up the situation this … Read more

Netflix is cruising. The cable guys are catching on. Wal-Mart just rumbled in.

The Web's video-on-demand sector is filling up fast with some serious heavyweights. If Apple wants to make a mark in digital video that even vaguely resembles the one it made in music, perhaps the company should start treating Apple TV as more than just a "hobby." That's Apple's attitude toward the streaming-media device, said Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, who spoke at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

This doesn't seem to be a good time to toy with online … Read more

Well, he's got nothing better to do, has he?

Conan O'Brien, he who was treated almost as badly by NBC as the Winter Olympics, seems to have become one of the microbloggerati.

Not only has someone called Conan O'Brien joined Twitter at twitter.com/ConanOBrien, but the legendarily slow site has already given his feed the hallowed status of Verified Account.

With just one tweet, O'Brien has, at the time of writing, amassed more than 180,000 followers. (Naturally, being a star, he is following no one.)

You will be wondering what words decorated the bouffant … Read more

A Wisconsin teenager convicted of using Facebook to blackmail classmates into sex was sentenced to 15 years in prison, according to an Associated Press report.

Anthony Stancl, 19, plead no contest in December to two felonies, including repeated sexual assault of a child, according to the report. Stancle had been accused of creating a Facebook profile belonging to a nonexistent teenage girl and then, between approximately the spring 2007 and fall 2008, using it to convince more than 30 of his male classmates to send in nude photos or videos of themselves.

Stancl then reportedly threatened to post the photos … Read more

NEW YORK--The music industry saw 1 million fewer buyers of digital downloads in 2009 than the prior year, according to NPD Group.

Russ Crupnick, an NPD senior industry analyst, told a gathering of music and technology executives on Wednesday at the Digital Music East conference here not to panic.

Those who stopped purchasing music online were mostly older consumers who came online for the first time in 2007 and 2008, tried out downloading music, then lost interest, Crupnick said. The good news, he said, is that consumers still have a huge appetite for songs, as the amount of money customers … Read more

Prices may be falling for mobile and broadband access across the globe, but if you want fast Internet access, it still pays to be rich.

The costs for information and communication technology are continuing to drop, says a report released Tuesday by the United Nations agency known as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). However, broadband Internet access is still pricey and out of reach to many poor countries.

Prices on broadband services fell on average around 42 percent across 161 countries last year, according to the ITU report summary (PDF). The report ranked countries on the use and cost of … Read more

Disney sites---ESPN, Disney.com, and ABC News---were down across the board for about an hour or so Wednesday.

It's unclear what happened, but there were multiple network failures. We tried multiple trace routes and monitoring services and they were all ugly.

Disney reps weren't immediately available for comment, but the sites appear to have returned to normal a little after 7 a.m. PST.

Read more of "Disney's Web sites hit with outage" at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Eager to watch the likes of Hulu and YouTube on the big screen, more people are hooking up their TVs to the Internet, says a new report from iSuppli.

A survey of 800 U.S. consumers who bought TVs in January found that 27.5 percent of them have connected their new sets to the Internet, either through the TV itself or via an external device such as a game console or digital video box. That compares with 24.3 percent in December.

Almost 42 percent of the sets that were purchased in January and are now connected to the … Read more

UPDATE (10:46 a.m. PT): The Rickroll is back. Scroll down for more details.

In what's either the saddest or most fantastic news of the week, the YouTube video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" has been deemed a copyright violation.

Yes, that means the cheesy '80s pop video with tens of millions of views--the center of the "Rickrolling" Internet phenomenon--is no more.

It's not quite clear when it was removed, but the blog Neowin noticed it early Wednesday. "Never Gonna Give You Up" comes from the Astley … Read more