Carrying The Torch: The Political Tightrope; The Olympic Games Under Fire; The Yahoo! & The Restless - Media Biz Buzz for April 14, 2008

Without insulting the Beijing Games as mere metaphor, its recent travails show how we've truly become a Global Village. Yes, I said Village -- not Cosmopolis. While the Games has striven since its charter to be apolitical (and failed miserably at times) this Summer's event proves that the bonds between entertainment, sport, politics, even geography, are now indissoluble. Likewise, as Yahoo! faces down Microsoft's April 26th drop dead date, a universe of rival configurations has crept into unlikely scenarios. It was a week where Obama went defensive after taking a page from Howard Dean (and early Bill Clinton) in discussing why folks vote against their best interests, while The View's resident stand-up Joy Behar gave John McCain his hardest-hitting interview in a month of Sundays. J.K. Rowling's appearance in court today is a reminder that notions of intellectual property, copyright, even the value of content are being contested. Said China's Hu Jintao regarding Tibet, it's "entirely an internal issue." No such thing anymore, not for advertising, for storytelling, even political fundraising.

Game On?
Time was, airing the Olympics was a license to print Benjamins. But as the torch erratically lights it way across the globe, more and more world leaders (the U.N.'s Secretary-General, Germany's Cancellor, the UK's Prime Minister) are taking a powder on the opening games. NBC may well bray that its inventory is 75% sold out, but a recent study by the Kelton Group finds that 1 in 4 viewers are considering turning off the Games because of China's human rights record. Last night the Dalai Lama indicated that he might resign if matters didn't improve, while the IOC is being pressured by Human Rights Watch to make a substantive statement on the matter. While NSA chief Steve Hadley hedgedon the Sunday morning shows on whether Bush would attend, both the Wall Street Journal and USAToday provide guidance to brands on how to weather the storm.

Yahoo! Tries Not to Blink
If Yahoo! were a reality competition, it'd be Survivor: Silicon Valley. Its board met on Friday, indicating that it would entertain further negotiations with Microsoft. But: in parallel it's been multi-tasking. Looking at combining with AOL. Even more aggressively, it began working with Google last week, using 3% of its search ad inventory to test AdSense for search as a prelude to outsourcing its search ad sales. This has given MSFT reason to play the "Antitrust" card and Congress hears 'em. Everyone has a thought here: a Sanford C. Bernstein analyst on CNet likes an AOL union; not so the Financial Times; Fortune sees the MSFT union as forward looking, an AOL merger as retro. Gartner insists that MSFT needs Yahoo!, as Vista is imploding. Valleywag's contribution here is a simple poll: Its readers currently prefer a MSFT-Y! outcome vs. AOL-Y!, and by a whopping 2 to 1 margin.

The Price of Content; The Price of Ads
Zeitgeist knocking. Across the Web last week there were parallel strands of discussion, some supporting the adage that "content is king," others nursing a thesis that content is fast becoming a commodity. Jon Handel's posting on HuffPo is a good place to start - the entertainment lawyer looks at six reasons why content has become devalued. I give him a thumbs up, although I part company on his reasons why copyright is broken and his belief that rank amateurs have no desire for compensation. Evan Kaplan has his version of the argument for music, which TechCrunch finds it innately suspect since he's a VP for Technology at Warner Bros. -- Michael Arrington thinks it's a ruse for the music tax that WB has been floating. MediaFuturist is bullish over MySpaceMusic, opining that if it leverages its community, it can best iTunes. Jack Myers weighed in on the matter in his Think Tank last week - looking specifically at the concept of "price towards free" for advertising. He offers a solution tomorrow. With the launch of Google TV Ads, which will reach Dish's 14 million set-tops, anyone can become an advertiser. While some pundits believe that we'll see a fall in quality, this doesn't jibe with CurrentTV's recent findings: According to E-Poll Market Research, viewers preferred its VCAM (viewer-created ad messages) nine to one and recalled them fivefold compared to "professional ads." With advertising in flux, Naked, a consultancy in "communications planning," got a writeup in the Times. With one hand Nielsen Media laid off folks across its trade magazines, even as it gobbled up IAG Research (for $225M) with the other. Behavioral Ads Are Targeted: Both the FTC and New York State lawmakers debated guidelines. Google and Yahoo! cried foul (even "unconstitutional") while Microsoft allowed for the possibility of oversight, although it preferred self-regulation. In addition to its foray into auction-based TV advertising and noodling with Yahoo!, Google owned online advertising -- its 30.6% share exceeding the sum total of Yahoo, AOL, and MSFT. Google expanded its 10-month-old collaboration with Salesforce.com, launched the Google App Engine, which, depending on your POV, is either a threat to Amazon's S3 or Facebook's F8 platform.

Broadcast TV BECAME The News.
Especially if you were CBS. Rumors buzzed around Katie Couric's job security, a plan to outsource newsgathering to CNN, a court ruling over Dan Rather's lawsuit. JackMyers guest blogger Charlie Warner has a cure for what ails 'em. (Check out the Daily Show taking the piss out of Fox News in The Meter Is Running; we're ready for them to mock Blitzer's "Best Political Team On Television.") GE missed its targets, even as NBC posted a 3% gain. ABC's Bob Iger was interviewed by Ken Auletta at the Newhouse School event; our Gene DeWitt covered the event. MIPTV 2008 was termed a watershed as ancillary platforms like mobile, VOD, and IPTV finally started to move the needle. Losing again in Federal Appeals Court EchoStar vowed to see TiVo in Supreme Court chambers. Even as Silicon Alley Insider posts its epitaph, online video saw some programming deals cohere, as MySpaceTV partnered with Elisabeth Murdoch's ShineReveille to create original titles, beginning with I Love ChiefTown, and distribute them globally. Look out AppleTV, seems likely by month's end that Blockbuster will be streaming movies. Even sexier: Adobe's Media Player is RSS for video; thanks to AIR, it works offline.

Recession-Proof? BUY. SELL. INVEST. LAUNCH.
CommunityConnect (parent of social networking sites including BlackPlanet) went to RadioOne for $38M. IAC-backed BlackWeb launched RushmoreDrive.com, described as a specialized search portal for the African-American community. In a firesale, PlanetOut Published sold its magazine and book publishing titles to Here Networks. OLX, Craigslist for the rest of the world, secured $13.5M in second round funding.

Datebook:
Catch the PopeMobile (and the subsequent traffic snarl) between Tax Day and April 20th in NYC and Washington, DC. Come April 17, the FCC has its target="_blank">econd field visit over the issue of Net Neutrality - this time at Stanford.

IBM Reminds Us
Of infinite possibility. Last week Big Blue made news, unfurling Intel about its Next Gen memory technology. Spintronics (not a new form of aerobics) will take us beyond hard drives, making flash memory passe. Whereas state of the art was the storage and control of flow of an electrical charge, "Racetrack" will enable that storage and control down to the microscopic level - the spin of an electron itself. Once ready, it will increase storage capacity by one hundred-fold. Without getting all New Age there's a lesson here - Towards the Within we find the stuff that we're made of, our essence.