Quincy Smith, CEO of CBS Interactive is stepping down to become an adviser and may also return to his roots in banking.
(Credit: CBS Interactive)Quincy Smith, the one-time banker and trusted adviser to new media poobahs, will leave his current post as chief executive of CBS Interactive in January to work once again as a consultant.
Smith plans to start his own advisory business and not surprisingly, the start-up's first customer is CBS, he said in an interview with CNET on Wednesday. Smith will focus on helping CBS with its Web video strategy.
Smith, whose most notable move while at CBS was helping to oversee the $1.8 billion acquisition of CNET, the parent company of this publication, said the reason he's choosing to leave now is to pursue opportunities he sees in banking and technology. Besides advising new media chieftains, Smith also suggested he's ready to stick a toe back into finance.
"I think CBS is at a point where I can help them from the playing field more than I can from the dugout, if you don't mind the baseball reference," Smith said. "I was a banker before and I think I can be a better banker...I see a lot of opportunities out there now for smaller banks as well as larger ones."
Before being hired to oversee CBS's digital division three years ago, Smith already had a reputation as a tech guru while working for Allen & Co, the respected boutique banking firm that was one of the underwriters for Google's initial public offering.
In the deal for CNET, critics blasted CBS for overpaying. But Smith noted that the acquisition helped turn CBS Interactive into the 12th largest Internet property, and a top 5 video property, according to comScore Media Metrix.
CBS Interactive President Neil Ashe will take over Smith's responsibilities.
Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of CBS said: "Quincy helped put CBS Interactive on the map."
The blog All Things Digital first reported the news of Smith's departure.
Online radio service Last.fm has always seemed to occupy an awkward middle ground between on-demand streaming music services that let you pick and play any song--like free services Imeem and Grooveshark, and Rhapsody, which charges for its service--and the radio-to-your-taste service pioneered by Pandora. (Disclaimer: Last.fm is owned by CBS, which is the parent company of CNET News.)
In my opinion, this is partly because of some flaws with the service itself. The radio service has a lot of powerful features for serious music fans who are willing to do a little work, as CNET's Donald Bell recently explained, but it doesn't work very well as an on-demand service. How do you add songs to a now-playing queue? Why hasn't Last.fm secured on-demand rights for huge artists like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin?
But there's also a bit of a branding gap. Compared with the organic buzz I hear about Pandora and Rhapsody, for instance, Last.fm hardly comes up. Now it looks like CBS is trying to address that issue. In an effort to increase brand awareness, CBS Radio will devote four broadcast HD Radio stations to Last.fm. The playlist will be drawn from listeners' favorites--Last.fm does such a fantastic job of tracking usage, I've referred to it for non-scientific measurements of artist popularity--as well as live performances in Last.fm's New York studio. The stations will make the cutover on October 5, and include KITS-FM (105.3 HD3) in San Francisco, WWFS-FM (102.7 HD2) in New York, KCBS-FM (93.1 HD2) in Los Angeles, and WXRT-FM (93.1 HD3) in Chicago. All four stations will play the same playlist.
HD Radio itself is still in a niche phase. Although it's available in more than 90 percent of major U.S. markets, the receivers are still fairly rare. That might change tomorrow with the launch of the Zune HD, the first MP3 player with a built-in HD Radio receiver. If nothing else, it shows that HD Radio technology is getting small enough and cheap enough to begin building it into a variety of consumer electronics devices--imagine when it starts becoming a feature in smartphones, for instance.
NEW YORK--Broadcast network CBS will be advertising its fall TV season with a video-chip ad embedded in an issue of Entertainment Weekly.
The September 18 issue of the Time Inc.-owned magazine will feature the first video ad to appear in print, George Schweitzer, CBS marketing president, said Wednesday at a press conference at the company's headquarters here.
The ad with embedded video.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)The ad will be launched in partnership with PepsiCo to promote Pepsi Max soda and the TV network's Monday prime-time lineup. Not everyone will be seeing it: the ad will appear in a magazine insert sent to subscribers in the New York and Los Angeles areas--an edition without the video chip will be sent to subscribers elsewhere and show up on newsstands.
The technology for the battery-powered ads was manufactured by a Los Angeles-based company called Americhip, and each ad can handle about 40 minutes of video.
Here are some more details about the Americhip technology: the screen, which is 2.7 millimeters thick, has a 320x240 resolution. The battery lasts for about 65 to 70 minutes, and can be recharged, believe it or not, with a mini USB cord--there's a jack on the back of it. The screen, which uses thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) technology, is enforced by protective polycarbonate. It's a product that has been in development at Americhip for about two years, spokesman Tim Clegg told CNET News via e-mail.
"It's leadership in innovation, which we really stress at CBS in every part of our company," Schweitzer said of the ads, which were developed with the collaboration of the Ignition Factory, a division of the Omnicom Group's OMD media agency.
PepsiCo has been experimenting with edgy, experimental ads for some time now, distributing millions of 3D glasses for its SoBe LifeWater Super Bowl ad earlier this year. It more recently launched a new Mountain Dew flavor by inviting prominent Twitter users to a party at a trendy Brooklyn venue.
Pepsi Max is the company's new diet soda geared toward men, advertised earlier this summer with bold print ads that declared, "Save the calories for bacon."
"The evolution of marketing television in the fall--it used to be as simple as this," Schweitzer said, holding up a vintage copy of TV Guide. "It was axiomatic in those days. If you took an ad in TV Guide, people watched your program. Not anymore."
Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.
This post was updated at 1:38 p.m. PT with more details about Americhip's technology.
Comcast continues to sign up media partners to a trial program of the cable operator's On Demand Online service.
The service, which will make TV shows available for users to watch online, has signed 17 cable stations and has its first major broadcast network: CBS, parent company of CNET News, the cable operator said Tuesday. Comcast had previously signed Time Warner and Liberty Media's Starz.
Peter Kafka over at All Things Digital first reported last month that Comcast was wooing CBS.
Comcast's service comes at a time when mainstream consumers are catching on to the amount of material available online and as more cable customers drop their subscriptions.
This from Kafka: "The idea is to protect cable subscription revenues by giving pay TV customers--but only pay TV customers--Web access to all the shows they get on TV, and hoping this keeps them from canceling their subscriptions."
Not only is Comcast fighting back against the likes of Hulu and YouTube, which also offers a smattering of full-length TV shows and films, but Netflix is also offered a popular way to watch films and TV shows online with its streaming service.
CBS is the first broadcast network to sign on to the On Demand trial.
(Credit:
CBSSports.com)
Add YouTube to the list of Web sites offering visitors live streaming video of NCAA Division I men's tournament games.
The Google-owned video site quietly began streaming college basketball games on Thursday via a feed from CBS (parent company of CNET News).
I don't understand why CBS wouldn't have promoted this more in order to take full advantage of YouTube's enormous audience. YouTube, by far the Web's largest video site, recently said more than 100 million U.S. visitors log on to the site. YouTube didn't do a lot of press prior to Thursday's tip-off either. Is there more going on here?
When I contacted YouTube, all they would say was: "This is a program that we are running with one of our long standing partners around popular premium content. We're excited that the YouTube community will have the opportunity to watch March Madness on YouTube and look forward to hearing from them about their experience."
CBS, which declined to comment for this story, has been a big booster of YouTube and all of the company's content partners for a long time. But CBS now owns a YouTube competitor in TV.com.
CBS' streaming video of the tournament, however, can be seen on a host of sites, such as ESPN, AOL, Yahoo and Sports Illustrated's Web site, SI.com. Some of those sites compete with CBS as well.
The company has long had a syndication strategy and distributes content on numerous platforms.
Fresh from removing content from TV.com, Hulu has now requested that Boxee, the maker of media-center software, stop making Hulu's videos available, according to a statement posted to Boxee's blog.
"Two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from Boxee," Boxee said in the post. "We tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on Boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it. You can see their blog post about the issues they are facing."
Hulu, the video site formed by NBC Universal and News Corp., said in a note on its blog that the problem rests with their content partners.
"Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product," Hulu wrote. "We are respecting their wishes."
Boxee CEO Avner Ronen told CNET News that he was disappointed by the decision and attempted to convince Hulu executives that Boxee was good for the video site and its content partners.
"I hope that they will realize the opportunity is greater than the threat," Ronen said
What exactly that threat is was unknown to Ronen and Hulu didn't spell out the reason its content partners were down on Boxee in its blog post.
Hulu's decision to leave TV.com, owned by CBS (parent company of CNET News), is unrelated to the decision to pull out of Boxee, said a source familiar with the negotiations. Hulu said that in the case of TV.com, it was a contractual issue. As for Boxee, Hulu was forced to honor the request of its content providers, the source said.
Update at 11:38 a.m. PST, with comment from Hulu.
Hulu.com has pulled its content off CBS-owned TV.com, which relaunched last month, Hulu confirmed Wednesday.
(Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)
Attempts to access episodes of Heroes and other content from NBC and News Corp. partners in the Hulu joint venture, displayed a "video unavailable" message.
In a statement, Hulu said:
Hulu has contractual rights with regards to our relationship with TV.com and we are exercising those rights. Out of respect for their confidentiality, we will not disclose our discussions.
A CBS spokeswoman said the company had no comment.
Hulu also has distribution partnerships with other sites, such as Mojo, MyNetworkTV, and Lionsgate.
TV.com saw a 263 percent increase in unique viewers in January after it redesigned and expanded the site and added user interaction features, according to Nielsen VideoCensus figures cited by MediaPost Online. It has 5.9 million unique visitors compared with Hulu's 4.5 million, according to Nielsen figures reported by Advertising Age.
Watch CBS Videos Online
Our sister site CBS News has obtained audio tapes of Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger's remarkable landing of a U.S. Airways jet in the Hudson river, and created the accompanying animation of the last moments of flight 1549. Also see the FAA's archive of related files.
From the moment every student pilot begins training, instructors stress the importance of emergency landings (if the landing is on water, it's called ditching). Simulated landings due to engine failure are commonplace during flight training, and before a student is permitted to fly solo, he's required to demonstrate at least minimal competence at them.
No pilot ever hopes to use these techniques. But if it ever becomes necessary, Sullenberger's grace under pressure is an example worth emulating.
Slide, the start-up that brought sheep-flinging to the social-networking world, has inked deals with several major content companies, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
San Francisco-based Slide makes software tools that let people add some personalization--in the form of slideshows, guestbooks, skins, or virtual pets--to their pages on all the major social networks.
Now the company is expanding its reach to include somewhat more sophisticated media. On Thursday, it plans to announce deals with several major media companies that would allow people to view clips of popular TV shows on social-networking sites, according to the Journal.
The video service, called FunSpace Channels, will reportedly include shows from CBS, Comcast's E! Entertainment channel, NBC, Time Warner's Warner Bros., and other media companies. Slide will recommend videos based on how often they are forwarded by others. Slide will either sell ads against the videos, or take a cut of the ads sold by the content owners, the article said.
While Slide's early ventures might have been modest, it's never been lacking in Silicon Valley starpower. It was launched in 2005 by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, and is backed by Khosla Ventures.
CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.
DENVER--More than 15,000 journalists are expected to descend upon Denver this week for the Democratic National Convention, and lucky me, I'm one of them.
Just moments ago, the convention officially began when Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party, called it to order. Although I'm sitting in a trailer in the back parking lot of the Pepsi Center, I feel pretty far away from the convention buzz, and had to watch the opening ceremonies on a closed-circuit TV. Hopefully I'll soon be able to escape this high-security makeshift media-trailer-city to experience the convention festivities firsthand.
What I have been doing however, is attending the CBS News meetings as the team plans the day's broadcast content. As with every other day during this convention, producers, correspondents, and analysts gather at 9 a.m. in the double-wide News trailer to discuss the day's agenda, top speakers, and anticipated convention-related news.
Today, the chatter is all about whether Senator Ted Kennedy will make an in-person appearance, and whether Michelle Obama's keynote speech will help or hurt her husband's cause. The conclusions are: he will, and yes, it'll help.
As a fly on the wall, these meetings are absolutely fascinating to witness for a news producer and consumer. The executive producer of the CBS Evening News runs the show, calling on different people to present ideas and research for consideration in the broadcast. Today, Katie Couric, the show's anchor, chimed in from her cell phone about what she liked and disliked, as well as specific angles to be considered.
The space is tight, and there aren't enough chairs to accommodate everyone. I perched on the edge of a table, two spots over from CBS commentators Jeff Greenfield and Bob Schieffer and overlooking the notes of correspondent Byron Pitts.
After nearly an hour, the larger meeting wrapped up and about a dozen of us gathered to discuss the special Webcasts that Katie will be anchoring immediately after the special coverage broadcast concludes (11 p.m. EDT). The CBS News guys are extremely enthusiastic about the potential to reach a wider, younger, and more engaged audience through the Internet.
The structure of the Webcast will be loose, with Katie bouncing between journalists and analysts who lend their opinions and commentary on the night's events. Besides her usual sidekicks (Greenfield and Schieffer), tonight's Webcast will include Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign manager, and Dan Bartlett, a former counselor to President Bush. Tonight's special guests will be Valerie Jarrett, an Obama campaign adviser, and Susan Eisenhower, Ike's granddaughter and now an Obama supporter. It should be an fascinating mix of characters who will hopefully provide a colorful, candid dialog.
One of my jobs is to sort through the questions viewers have submitted to Katie through CBSNews.com. She'll be answering a handful every night on the Webcast, so please submit yours here. Stay tuned--the excitement has just begun!
