telephone companies have innovated
AT&T deserves at least some credit for the invention of talkies. The Warner Brothers purchased their pioneering Vitaphone sound movie technology from Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925. Earlier that year, Western Electric and AT&T had created Bell Telephone Laboratories as a jointly owned but separate entity. The name Vitaphone highlights sound movies’ connection to the [...]
Tagged: movies
video distribution revenue
Video traffic accounts for a large and increasing share of global Internet-Protocol network traffic. Akamai, CDNetworks, Limelight, and other content delivery networks received an estimated $400 million in revenue worldwide in 2008 for distributing video. That revenue total is expected to grow 20% to 30% a year through 2013.[1] Telephone companies have long provided video [...]
Tagged: video
Jack and Jill on Walter
Jack: “There will never be another like Walter Concrete. He was the most trusted man in America.” Jill: “How do you know he was the most trusted man in America?” Jack: “Somebody said so on television.” Jill: “…and that’s the way it is.”
Tagged: news
talking movies: an example of media innovation
“Haven’t you been around the show world long enough to know that a talking picture is something to run away from?” Sam Warner declared early in 1925 to a radio engineering urging him to consider new talking picture technology for the Warner Brothers’ moving picture production and exhibition business. His brother Harry added, “Who the [...]
Tagged: movies
price-cap revenue for a U.S. local telephone company
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has used price caps to regulate large U.S. local telephone companies’ rates for jurisdictionally interstate services. Data filed publicly at the FCC provides yearly revenue totals for service categories defined under price caps. Such data for the historic Bell Atlantic service area for filing years from 1990 to 2009 [...]
Tagged: telcos
newspapers and magazines: bigger problems than the Great Depression
U.S. print newspaper and magazine advertising revenue is falling sharply. In the first quarter of 2009, newspaper print advertising revenue declined 30% compared to the first quarter of 2008 ( $5.92 billion in 2009 Q1; $8.42 billion in 2008 Q1). Magazine rate-card-reported advertising revenue, which does not take into account discounting likely to be more [...]
Tagged: advertising, magazines, newspapers
communicative calculus in science
The brilliant Michael Nielsen observes: The contrast between the science comment sites and the success of the amazon.com reviews is stark. To pick just one example, you’ll find approximately 1500 reviews of Pokemon products at amazon.com, more than the total number of reviews on all the scientific comment sites I described above. The disincentives facing [...]
Tagged: knowledge