Media

People who stream are streaming television, they're streaming more of it, and they're probably streaming it from Netflix.

TV streaming -- which accounts for 80 percent of subscription video-on-demand, or SVOD -- was up 34 percent in the first three months of the year compared to a year earlier, according to a report from tracking-firm NPD.

Netflix commands 89 percent of that. Smaller rival Hulu Plus increased its share three points to 10 percent of TV streams. Amazon Prime doubled its share -- to 2 percent.

The figures coincided with Netflix's biggest and most successful foray yet … Read more

Rhapsody International is breaking radio silence on Napster.

Since Rhapsody bought it in 2011, not much has been heard of the once high-flying peer-to-peer service that transformed public assumptions about consuming music. Now an above-board streaming service with more than 20 million songs in its global catalog, Napster will expand into 14 European countries from its current U.K. and German markets.

The move will triple Napster's potential base of users.

But it comes as a monolith in digital music industry is casting a wide shadow over Rhapsody and competitors like Pandora. Apple is widely expected to unveil a long-awaited iRadio streaming service … Read more

Hoping that further cost cuts will right its heeling ship, social-gaming company Zynga said Monday it is cutting 18 percent of its workforce and closing various offices.

Zynga posted the news on its blog. Zynga must shrink before it can grow again, CEO Mark Pincus told workers in his memo, a situation that somehow nobody at the 5-year-old company "ever expected to face."

He also said the Zynga "brothers and sisters" will be getting generous severance packages along with their "painful goodbyes."

AllThingsD reported that Zynga would shutter its offices in New York, Los … Read more

Feedly, the feed reader whose developers are trying to pick up where Google Reader left off, announced Monday that the service will get faster, work on Windows 8, and function without a browser extension.

The Web service, also available as an app for iOS and Android, lets people read Web sites via their RSS and Atom feeds. It's a technology that's popular among those with voracious information appetites, but it hasn't made it to the mainstream. In March Google announced that it's killing its Google Reader site on July 1.

Google's table scraps are a … Read more

Radio conglomerate Townsquare Media Group is dusting off some AOL music Web sites, plus a popular comics page, that have been skeleton operations for weeks.

The company, which operates 242 radio stations and just as many accompanying Web sites, bought music assets The Boot, The BoomBox, and NoiseCreep, and is tacking on ComicsAlliance too. Terms were undisclosed.

AOL slashed the workforce at the music sites in April. The popular comics page also appeared to be put on the shelf.

CEO Steven Price, in a statement Monday, said the property will keep pushing Townsquare's growth and scale to entice advertisers. … Read more

Twitter is bringing Vine, the popular 6-second looping video application, to Google's Android operating system, months after debuting it for Apple's iOS.

Vine launched on January 24 for people with iPhones and iPads and has climbed to 13 million users, but none for Android. That vacuum, on world's No. 1 mobile operating system platform, forced Android smartphone users into circumventions to view the snippets.

The Android version gets many of the same capabilities: easy video creation with automatic playback and sound; the Explore feature, for discovering popular posts and seeing what's trending; and Find Friends, to … Read more

Please imagine you were to spend Saturday enjoying a little reading on the beach and then, perhaps, a couple of drinks.

Please imagine you decided to waft down to Northern California's Half Moon Bay and wandered into an establishment called Sam's Chowder House.

You may or may not have been with someone you shouldn't have been escorting. Still, you hoped for a little privacy, a little quiet time to contemplate life's ideas and people (small and large), while staring out at the ocean.

You may not have noticed the little yellow signs on the door of … Read more

Most of us spend our lives sliding on a scale between impossible and gullible.

We're sometimes persuaded so easily, yet, at others, even the most accepted pieces of information can't penetrate our obstinacy.

No, I'm not thinking about global warming, Sharon Stone, or the New York Yankees. I'm musing on this supposed iWatch that Apple may or may not ever create, produce, market or give away as a free gift at Christmas with the purchase of two pink iPhones.

In his epically stoic performance at D11, Apple CEO Tim Cook offered that while Google Glass was &… Read more

It may never have crossed your mind what happens to morgue fridges when they're past their sell-by date.

It had never crossed mine either, until I came across a frisson of news from the New York Post.

For here was the announcement that New York state's Office of Mental Health had chosen eBay to sell an old morgue fridge. A Norlake Scientific 4 Drawer Morgue Refrigerator, to be precise.

Perhaps eBay bid the lowest to stage this macabre auction.

The listing has uplift at its core.

It doesn't try to lean on celebrity. There is no mention … Read more