News Blog

In the latest example of how commercialism continues to creep into art, NBC Universal has plans to create programming designed to highlight a sponsor's products, the company said Friday.

The new shows, which will appear on NBC Universal digital properties, are being produced by the company's Digital Studio division and units, in conjunction with the Omnicom Group, one of the world's most powerful advertising and marketing companies.

One of the first shows to emerge form the partnership will be an Internet sci-fi show called Gemini Division, starring actress Rosario Dawson. The show's planned sponsors are Acura, Intel, Microsoft, and UPS.

Just how the program's creators will weave the commercial products into the story line without alienating an audience that might feel manipulated is anyone's guess.

Sony Pictures Entertainment last year began offering advertisers the chance to have their products take more of a starring role in Web productions.

Gemini Division and shows like it from NBC Universal will likely be offered by Hulu, the video portal created by the TV network and News Corp.

Updated 1:30 p.m. PDT with Yahoo comment

Yahoo has canceled its Internet video review program, called "The 9."

Yahoo launched "The 9" in 2006 and aired the final episode on Monday. The site now says: "The 9 has left the building."

Neeraj Khemlani, Yahoo's head of programming, told the NewTeeVee blog no layoffs would come as a result of the show's cancellation.

"It's a lot easier just to e-mail somebody a link to a given video," Khemlani said.

A Yahoo representative provided this comment: "'The 9' was a groundbreaking and successful Internet show, and we learned a great deal from it. Over the past two years that we have produced 'The 9,' our content strategy and business has evolved. We are turning our focus to more contextually relevant programs that complement our site offerings. For example, 'Primetime in No Time,' leverages the 'recap' format of 'The 9,' highlights TV programming from the night before, and lives on the Yahoo TV site."

Yahoo, which has had very mixed results with programming over the years, still is banking on original content and is working on a show called "Good Morning Yahoo" that will be a roundup of news stories.

Meanwhile, other shows still standing include "Nissan Live Sets," "Fantasy Football Live" and "Tech Ticker."

The Web site for Yahoo's "The 9" says good-bye.

(Credit: Yahoo)

A new music service jointly owned by News Corp.'s MySpace.com and three record labels will be announced Thursday, according to a source familiar with the deal.

MySpace Music has been expected for weeks and will offer streaming music, downloads of unprotected MP3s, concert tickets, ringtones, and other merchandise, the source told CNET News.com. The source added that MySpace is hopeful the service will open in the next few months.

The deal immediately catapults News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch into competition with Apple CEO Steve Jobs' iTunes, which offers music and video downloads. Backers are hoping MySpace Music can compete against iTunes by providing MySpace's 110 million worldwide monthly visitors a sweeping range of music services and products that eclipse iTunes' offering.

(Credit: MySpace.com)

It's been well-reported that label honchos think Jobs and his ubiquitous iPod have amassed too much control. MySpace Music is apparently part of a strategy by the big music companies to find an iTunes competitor, even if they have to help create one.

The music service enables MySpace to leap past competitors Imeem and Last.fm, which beat MySpace to the punch when they began providing free, streaming music to users. But now, MySpace can present everything those services do and much more. Facebook was reportedly also in talks with the major record labels, but the music industry source said that unless something dramatic happens, Facebook is months away from being where MySpace is now.

MySpace Music will launch with songs from three of the top four record labels: Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony BMG Music Entertainment. The only label that hasn't agreed to the deal is EMI Music Group, said the source, who added that MySpace and EMI executives are working around the clock to close the deal and everyone involved is confident that EMI will eventually be part of the service.

All the labels will receive a minority share in the company and a share of all the revenue generated from the site, according to the source, who spoke on condition on anonymity.

Universal Music Group was thought to be holding up the service because of a copyright-infringement lawsuit that it filed against MySpace last year. MySpace has agreed to pay a "huge" settlement, according to Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider.

Imagine being able to watch movies or TV shows in high-quality, full-screen glory on your computer and being able to jump directly to a particular place in the video based on the transcript and click on a word in the transcript to pull up more information.

That's what Blinkx BBTV (Broadband TV) promises when it launches on Wednesday.

Blinkx is bringing the world of TV and DVD entertainment to the PC, but incorporating the interactivity of the Web to make it a richer experience. The service, which requires a small software download, is free of charge and free of ads, for now. Ads will come later, says Suranga Chandratillake, chief executive of Blinkx.

I could have used this service this weekend when I became completely obsessed with The Beales of Grey Gardens, a cinema verite film about Little Edie and Big Edie Beale, an eccentric mother and daughter who, despite being aristrocratic relatives of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, ended up living in abject poverty with a gang of cats and raccoons in what was left of the family estate in East Hampton, N.Y.

If I had been watching the film via Blinkx BBTV I would have been able to quickly get more information about the cast and directors by clicking on an information button. And had I not known where East Hampton was I could have instantly located it on a Google map by clicking on a pop-up location tab.

Even more helpful would have been the ability to quickly search for a word in the speech track that automatically transcribes the content and goes directly to the spot in the film where those words were uttered. Little Edie was so mesmerizing and quotable that I found myself rewatching the scenes, but I was limited to searching for them by chapter on the DVD. Clicking on any word in the speech track also brings up a Google search, where I could have gotten quick answers to the many mysteries in the film.

Now the question is what kind of content will be available on Blinkx BBTV? Hard to say, but the company says it has about 250 content partners, including Dogwoof Pictures, a U.K. film distributor specializing in independent films.

The content is all high-quality, except for clips that were designed for viewing on the Web.

I'll definitely be trying this service out.

Blinkx BBTV offers transcripts, or speech tracks, of all content so that you can easily search for specific places in the story and get more information by clicking on the words.

(Credit: blinkx)

SNL meets Mark Zuckerberg.

In a surprise move that has shocked Silicon Valley, young Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will guest host an upcoming episode of Saturday Night Live, according to multiple sources.

The mild-mannered Zuckerberg, best-known for vanilla-flavored speeches filled with talking points about "the social graph" and "making communication more efficient," will provide the opening monologue as well as appear in a number of sketches on the NBC show's April 5 episode.

Appearing on the sketch comedy show is something Zuckerberg has wanted to do for a long time, a close friend confided to CNET News.com. "Mark actually has really good comic timing," the friend said on condition of anonymity, out of the fear that Zuckerberg might "de-friend" him on Facebook if his identity were revealed. "He's got this totally hilarious side that nobody ever gets to see, except his stuffed animals and sometimes his investors. Ever since Justin Timberlake did that sweet music video on the show, he's been aching to go on SNL. He had his assistant call up NBC but they were all like, 'Mark who?'"

The friend continued, "Now that he's been on 60 Minutes and that Forbes billionaire list and everybody's heard of him, SNL has finally agreed to let him come on the show. When he got the call he was so happy he poked everybody on his Facebook friends list." Zuckerberg was reportedly even more excited that the musical guest for the April 5 show will be his favorite "emo" band, Panic at the Disco.

Shouldn't Zuckerberg be in the green room already?

(Credit: Facebook)

The famously shy and awkward Zuckerberg has been warming up to the press recently, but this is still an unexpected move. Wall Street analysts, when asked whether they thought this would help or hurt Facebook's potential valuation as it reportedly heads toward an initial public offering, were left more or less speechless. "I guess it couldn't hurt, unless he really f***s it up," one Deutsche Bank analyst commented.

Sources close to NBC have confirmed that the 23-year-old CEO will be acting in a parody of his disastrous South by Southwest interview with BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy. "This time, people are going to be throwing stuff at them," one source said. "Apparently they're going to have a lightsaber fight, too."

Lacy will be portrayed by SNL regular Andy Samberg.

Zuckerberg will also play "a crazed Barack Obama supporter" in another sketch, according to script details leaked to News.com. His role in a third sketch is less clear, but the costume department has reportedly been asked to create a "pink polka-dotted fur suit" that fits Zuckerberg's compact frame.

Reports that Zuckerberg would also be sporting drag and portraying John McCain's wife could not be confirmed at the time of publication. "But he's definitely going to be playing a girl in something," a Facebook colleague hinted. "He's been working on his falsetto in board meetings."

Editor's note: Remember, today is April 1, a day reserved in the U.S. for some levity.

Looks as if the battle for elbow room in the music subscription market could get a tiny bit tougher if Sony BMG Entertainment follows through on plans to offer its digital catalog to subscribers.

In a story published Monday, the company's CEO, Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper that Sony BMG is working on a subscription service that would in many ways resemble the one contemplated by Apple, which reportedly has been discussing such a service with the four major music labels.

The basics of the proposed Sony BMG plan would include unlimited access to the label's digital library for a flat monthly fee of $9 to $12, and compatibility with all music players, including Apple's iPod, Schmidt-Holtz said, adding that it was possible subscribers "could keep some songs indefinitely--that they would own them even after the subscription expired." Another possible feature of the service: downloads via mobile phone.

No word, though, on when the service might be launched.

Friday morning, I walked past a colleague's desk and--I swear--saw a basketball game on her computer screen. When I got closer, however, all I could see were a bunch of very official-looking bars and charts.

(Credit: NCAA)

She was working hard. Real hard. Then she laughed, hit a key, and flipped back to the basketball game in a clear indication that I'm either a boss people can be honest with or a boss who doesn't exactly strike fear into the rank and file. Or both.

The "boss button" and silly office decorum strike again. For those of you who for some reason don't know what a boss button is, it's pretty simple: It helps you look at stuff on your PC at work that you're not supposed to be looking at. Hit a key, and the screen instantly flips to something that vaguely looks like something you should be looking at in the office.

Boss buttons (or keys) have been around for years, of course. Some Macintosh games back in the 1980s included them (though for most of us using Macs in those days, it was more like a "parent button" because we were supposed to be doing our homework). CNET's Download.com has a list of boss buttons, and there are even entire sites dedicated to them.

Come every March, thanks to office pools on the NCAA college basketball tournament, boss buttons are as common on desktop computers as personal e-mails and photos of your friends: They're probably not supposed to be there, but we all have them. NCAA.com has even provided a helpful boss button on its Web site.

Here's a thought: Let's stop all the silly shenanigans and make boss buttons a thing of the past. Get it out in the open and let people keep track of the office pools without worrying about getting into trouble. The average American is spending more time in the office than ever. And the average tech worker spends even more time than that. There's a reason all those Silicon Valley companies offer free food, subsidized child care, laundry, auto-detailing, and swanky gyms: So you never have an excuse to go home.

So cut those hardworking people a break. We're not talking porn here, folks. Let's put a TV somewhere in the office and stop all the sneaking around.

I know what the killjoys are thinking right now: This is a slippery slope! What's next: Christmas shopping at the desk? Sharing funny YouTube videos with coworkers? Where does the madness stop?

The ultimate office killjoys at Challenger, Gray & Christmas have even put a dollar figure on the money lost to people checking out the NCAA tournament while at work: It could be as much as $1.7 billion in wasted work time over the 16 business days of the tournament. The Challenger estimate is based on "the number of people expected to participate in office pools, the amount of money they earn and the amount of work time wasted on March Madness related activities, whether it is trash talking at the watercooler or watching live videos of the games during business hours."

While I have no idea how much money Challenger wasted doing this research, it does have a few more tidbits: A 2006 Harris poll found that 13 percent of Americans aged 18 and older plan to participate in an office March Madness pool. The press release announcing the Challenger survey goes on for six pages. In fairness, it offers some workplace tips for dealing with the tournament. OK, some of them are pretty corny, but I appreciate the spirit:

•  Pick 64 MVPs. This is high on the cornball meter. Bestow MVP honors on employees chosen ahead of time...for some reason. No, I really don't get it either.

•  Team sweatshirt day. Relax the dress code for the first Friday of the tournament so everyone can wear the sweatshirt of their favorite team. At CNET, we'd call this "formal attire day," but I imagine that would be letting down the hair at a lot of offices.

•  Offer anti-tourney prizes. Basically, start something for the people who don't care about basketball. Sure. Gotta be fair and all that.

•  Offer flexible schedules. Umm, OK, I don't know about this one. The manager in me says, "Are you insane? It's just freaking basketball."

•  Organize a company pool. Done. I mean, CNET in no way encourages gambling on collegiate or professional sports.

•  Keep a bracket posted. Good idea. But I should reiterate, CNET in no way encourages gambling on a collegiate or professional sports.

•  Keep television in break room tuned to coverage. Duh! It's what I'm saying. Let's take it out of the closet. Do away with the boss button, and accept the facts: For 16 days, nearly all of us are college basketball fans. We pretend to know the starting lineup of Western Kentucky, and feign shock when Stanford fails yet again to make the Final Four.

And please, stop with the boss button. I know exactly what you're doing.

Warner Bros. Entertainment Group is tired of guessing about how the studio's content will appear on the Web or handheld devices.

That's why the company has built a new media center designed to test how consumers respond to Web sites, consumer electronics, and video-on-demand services that feature the studio's movies and TV shows.

The company behind such films and TV shows as I am Legend, Michael Clayton, and ER, has outfitted the media center with Xboxes, PSPs, iPods, Macbooks, varying brands of PCs, DirectTV, and a plethora of cable subscription services.

The company will bring in everyday consumers and watch how they interact with Web sites, gadgets, or video-on-demand services that feature Warner content. With the help of eight pan-zoom cameras built into the ceiling, researchers will monitor the respondents, according to Bruce K. Rosenblum, the executive vice president in charge of the media center.

"We're not operating in a vacuum anymore because of this center," Rosenblum told CNET News.com on Thursday. "We want to get smarter and understand these technologies a bit better. Warner Bros can just assume about the deals we do. I think it's important that Warner knows the experience."

The studios know that they can't rely solely on the TV set or VHS recorder anymore. Fans are consuming films and shows on video-game consoles, music players like the iPod, and mobile phones. Rosenblum said Warner Bros. modeled its media center after one built in Las Vegas by CBS.

The differences between the two facilities are that Warner was designed specifically to test emerging technologies and is on-site.

Rosenblum decline to discuss costs of building the center. He did say that companies owned by Time Warner, the studio's parent company, are welcome to use the facility.

I've always preferred prognostication to nostalgia, so rather than replay the best of 2007, I'll use these late December doldrums to make 10 predictions for the coming year. Some editors will warn you that this kind of list is suicide--it's too easy for everybody to look back a year later and see where you were wrong--but it hasn't hurt Cringely, so here goes. In no particular order.

DRM will die. The trendline is clear--Apple's been selling DRM-free tunes on iTunes since May, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store has three of the four majors signed up, and eMusic has become the second-most-popular music download service (after iTunes) thanks in part to its longstanding insistence on selling DRM-free MP3s. A year from now, DRM will be irrelevant and hardly used in digital music. All four labels will agree sell their songs without DRM on Amazon. Nearly every iTunes audio (but not video) file will be DRM-free, and Apple will get rid of the "Plus" designation. Some music subscription services like Rhapsody and Microsoft's Zune Pass might retain DRM so that users can't cancel their subscriptions and keep the songs they've downloaded, but they'll be the last holdouts--and some of them might try eMusic's approach of limiting monthly downloads rather than limiting compatibility and usage with DRM.

3G iPhone and iTunes. A 3G iPhone is a fairly safe prediction, given that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson already let it slip, but I think there'll still be a small surprise embedded in the announcement: iTunes 3G, a service that will come with the phone and give users anytime-anywhere downloads of any audio content in the iTunes Music Store. Impulse buying will go through the roof.

No Zune phone. Microsoft won't release an iPhone competitor this year--at least not one with hardware designed by Microsoft. The company might release some sort of software update or client application that allows Windows Mobile users to play songs from the Zune Marketplace and transfer them from the Zune PC client software to their phones, but even that probably won't happen until 2009. And it'll sink like a lead balloon against v3 of the iPhone, at which point Microsoft will bend to the inevitable and start building its own phone from scratch.

GarageBand will win a Grammy. Not the program itself, but somebody will make a record using Apple's Garage Band--which comes included with every Macintosh sold--as their primary recording and mixing tool, and that record will win a Grammy award. There's already been a critically acclaimed movie, Tarnation, made exclusively with iMovie, so now it's time for all those bedroom musicians to get into the do-it-yourself spotlight.

Mashups will go mainstream. Have mashups already jumped the shark? The controversy about The Grey Album, in which DJ Danger Mouse combined lyrics from Jay-Z's Black Album and The Beatles' untitled white album, is almost four years old. There was a burst of experimentation from big-time artists like David Bowie and Beck around the same time, but not much since 2005. Nonetheless, I predict that artists and even some labels will begin re-releasing their back catalogs as standalone instrumental and vocal tracks, and fans will recombine like crazy using programs like Garage Band and Splice. At least one mashup will get significant radio play, with the complete approval of the original artists. (Although you might say that Puff Daddy accomplished this 10 years ago.) They might even be incorporated into video games like Rock Band--imagine the challenge of having to sing Abba while the rest of the band plays Judas Priest. By the end of 2008, putting a mere song on your social-networking profile will seem hopelessly old-fashioned.

The campaign--don't call it "marketing"--that preceded Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero release will become the gold standard for building audience engagement for tours, albums, or new artists.

Year Zero will become the precedent. On the plane trip home from visiting family over Christmas, I read Eric Davis's analysis of Led Zeppelin's fourth album, part of the 33 1/3 book series. While a lot of it seemed like a stretch--as is the case with any highly intellectualized deconstruction of rock music--it did remind me of a certain sensation created by certain artists and albums, a sense that the listener is more than a mere consumer, but is in fact an active member in a secret club that only other members fully understand, a sort of musical Masonic society. Think of that Zeppelin album, the Grateful Dead, the Residents, or Secret Chiefs 3. In 2007, Trent Reznor, working with 42 Entertainment, took this kind of mystical clubbishness and updated it for the digital era. USB drives with leaked tracks from the upcoming Year Zero record were surreptitiously placed in bathroom stalls at concert venues. Phone numbers with frightening secret messages were encoded in bursts of static or out-of-phase audio signals. Cell phones were distributed to fans who figured out some of the clues; a phone call placed to those phones summoned them to a secret concert. In 2008, we'll see more of these kinds of musical events that use digital technology to break down the wall between audience and artist.

The world's best offline record store will go online. There's nothing else like Amoeba Records. Its three locations in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles offer unsurpassed selection--including cellophane-packaged vinyl I've never seen anywhere else--and seem to be curated by music fans with amazing depth and breadth of knowledge. In 2007, Amoeba took its first tentative steps into digital distribution, releasing exclusive recordings from Gram Parsons and Brandi Shearer in both MP3 and CD formats. In 2008, I predict Amoeba will finally go online in a huge way, offering an unsurpassed quantity of MP3 downloads from every imaginable source: major labels (like Amazon MP3 and the other high-profile stores), independent labels (like eMusic), and do-it-yourselfers (like CDBaby). Look for the nascent Amoeba label to offer distribution on terms never before seen in the recording industry--more of a non-exclusive commission model like CD Baby than a typical all-inclusive marketing-recording-publishing-distribution deal like most labels have favored--and for several high-profile artists who've recently quit their labels to sign on.

The loudness wars will end. It's been repeated so many times, it's become a cliche: today's recordings are mastered too loud, eliminating dynamic range and making it hard to listen to a complete album. In 2008, artists and producers will finally begin to demand a return to proper mastering, and radio stations and record execs will be in no position to contradict them.

The concert business will follow the recorded music business down. It's a bad time to be a big rock concert promoter like Live Nation. According to a recent story in Pollstar, the concert business actually declined in 2007, despite high-profile reunion tours by The Police and Van Halen and David Lee Roth--two acts with so much internal strife that nobody expected to see them on stage again. I say the 15 percent drop in ticket revenues from 2006 to 2007 will be followed by the same or greater drop next year. Music fans are fed up with exorbitant ticket prices, false scarcity, and quasi-legal scalpers, and there are only so many more nostalgia acts to trot out. Where are the young bands that can sell out 20,000-seat arenas for the next 5, 10, 20 years? (And before you call me out on the Arctic Monkeys, let me just counter with Oasis. Huge in the U.K., briefly popular in the U.S., and irrelevant to all but the die-hardest of fans 10 years later.) In other words, the concert business is about to suffer from the main problem that's hurting the recording industry--not MP3s, not piracy, but lack of interest and investment in artists with long-term (as opposed to instant) commercial potential.

Led Zeppelin will play again, but not tour. Speaking of nostalgia, it won't be 1973, but the reunited Led Zeppelin will play a handful of shows in the U.S., focusing on a multi-night stand at New York's Madison Square Garden timed around Robert Plant's 60th birthday on August 20.