cbs

With a nod to the Valley, CBS Interactive shuffles management

CBS Interactive, the media giant's digital division, has announced the opening of a Silicon Valley office and an executive reshuffling to focus on growth, President Quincy Smith announced Thursday.

The CBS Interactive satellite office in Menlo Park, Calif., has opened, with its eye on tech partnerships and acquisitions. The Valley branch will "allow the company to better facilitate existing partnerships in the area, and future ones as well," a release from CBS explained.

Smith is himself a Valley veteran, with a mergers-and-acquisitions background that involved the sale of Delicious to Yahoo, and Netscape to AOL. CBS hired … Read more

CBS Radio, Last.fm sing a streaming-audio duet

Last.fm, the social music site that CBS Interactive purchased last year, will be seeing closer integration into one of the media conglomerate's other properties very soon. According to a joint announcement Tuesday, Last.fm and CBS Radio will be sharing audio content on the Web to provide online editions of CBS' radio stations to Last.fm users and free streaming music to CBS Radio listeners.

A collaboration with CBS Radio has been rumored since the Last.fm acquisition was first announced last May.

In what Last.fm co-founder and CEO Felix Miller said was "the first of … Read more

Report: CBS testing high-definition video

CBS has begun testing high-definition streaming video.

Buried in the lab's section of the network's Web site is a gallery of short HD clips from shows such as Jericho, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Dexter.

TechCrunch was first to report the story and said the clips are available in H.264 format at 480p, with 720 p and 1080p coming later.

CBS has been overshadowed on the Internet in recent months by Hulu, the video portal operated by NBC Universal and News Corp. Hulu launched earlier this month and has attracted a score of content from other networks, … Read more

CBS Mobile simplifies news hunting on the Mobile Web

Wouldn't it be nice if you could find interesting things to read on the mobile Web much more quickly and easily?

Now, CBS Mobile says that it has just the feature on its mobile WAP site to help readers dig deeper into mobile Web sites and to find the stories they want to read much more easily. The media giant has partnered with a company called Aggregate Knowledge, which sifts through click-histories of every story on the site and looks at users in aggregate in order to find patterns in those clicks so that it can recommend the most … Read more

OSBC Report: CBS Interactive, open source, and innovation

I've known Steve Pearson for a year or two, and have always been blown away by how aggressive his company, CBS Interactive, has been with adopting open source. MySQL, Linux, Spring, Lucene, etc. etc. The list of open-source projects that CBS Interactive deploys is long.

Why? Why does CBS Interactive use open source? According to Steve:

Speed of development (rapid prototyping); Ease of access (Access to the code as well as documentation); Expandability (Ability to contribute back to the core product); Cost.

Steve went on to describe three projects that it has moved to open source. It turns out that the company's adoption of open source has evolved over time, based on bad experiences with proprietary software (and its vendors). CBS Interactive replaced and revamped its content management system with open source. It runs its David Letterman site on open source. And so on.

As Steve noted, the pace of adoption of open source is only going to increase, with two particular things of interest:… Read more

If MobLogic is journalism, does that make Lindsay Campbell a journalist?

Lindsay Campbell is not a journalist, or at least she claims she isn't. The former host of Wall Strip and the current host and producer for MobLogic (a new web series produced by CBS Interactive) wasted no time before disclosing this perspective to her audience. On March 7, in the first official episode, she describe how she she's her role in the media. Now let me say right from the start: I'm not a journalist. I'm coming at this like you. I read the news; I read blogs, and I want to talk about the things that are going on around me in the world. You do too, and we want to hear from you. Your ideas, your opinions, that's the point of the show. We take a story we find interesting and we go out and talk to people about it. Where better to start than right where we live? Look we're not trying to hide it, this show's coming from CBS. At the time, I thought it was a strange approach, but wanted to see where the show was headed before weighing in. Since then, I've found myself tuning into MobLogic on an almost daily basis and have found the show's journalism to be exemplary on at least two occasions.

The second episode of MobLogic was titled, How the Dems Screwed Florida, and provided an in-depth look at the mechanics of the Florida Primary fiasco that I hadn't encountered in any other media outlet. Two weeks later the show profiled the case of an Al Jazeera cameraman who has been held in Guantanamo for more than six years. The story provided an insight into a journalist's legal trouble that has received little media attention, but also explored how New Yorker's feel about the matter.

… Read more

CBS to bloggers: Install our widgets, and we'll split the profits

CBS Television Stations has launched a new program to get its local news headlines onto blogs and social-media sites, the CBS division said Monday.

Called the CBS Local Ad Network, it's a way for participating region-focused blogs to pull in extra cash by embedding CBS news widgets on their sites and splitting the revenue of accompanying ads with CBS.

On Monday, the program was launched in a selection of the TV network's regional markets: Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago. Within the next few weeks, CBS has said, the CBS Local Ad Network will come to … Read more

At SXSWi, Lindsay Campbell talks about the logic of Moblogic

AUSTIN, Texas--Lindsay Campbell rose to fame as the perky, witty hostess of finance video blog Wallstrip, made headlines when the show was purchased by CBS Interactive, and made even more headlines when she passed anchor duties on to new host Julie Alexandria so that she could take the helm of Moblogic.tv, a new video blog about news and finance.

Moblogic premiered on Friday, in conjunction with the South by Southwest Interactive Festival here. I took a few minutes to talk with Campbell about her new show, whether she gets recognized on the street, Brangelina (read on, you'll get … Read more

CBS Radio to power AOL's Web radio service

CBS Radio has agreed to share online streams from all 140 of its stations with AOL's online radio service.

According to an announcement posted to CBS's Web site, the media conglomerate will now power AOL's Web radio. Financial terms were not released.

"CBS Radio will drive advertising sales for AOL's more than 200 award-winning stations," the companies said in the statement, "in addition to its own online streams of more than 150 radio stations and custom channels."

In the spring, CBS plans to release a new online music player that will allow … Read more