CEO: AOL, peers have staying power in media market
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(InfoWorld) - With all the huge changes under way in the online media industry, one thing is staying the same: the identities of the companies making money out of the shift, according to the head of AOL LLC. "Amidst all the fragmentation, there's staying power," said Jonathan Miller, chairman and chief executive officer of AOL. He named AOL, Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. as companies that are making money by aggregating rich online content such as video, noting that Microsoft Corp. is also making moves into that business. "The big companies will stay big companies," Miller said during a keynote address at the Emerging Technologies Conference on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Cambridge campus Wednesday. Those same companies -- AOL, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft -- are seeing their own Web sites attracting less traffic than in the past, losing out to the likes of YouTube and MySpace, Miller said. However, he doesn't expect the newer entrants to escape consolidation by the more established players. "I'm a big user of YouTube, but does anyone believe it'll be an independent company in five years? No," he said. All the previous boundaries around entertainment are blurring as consumers become more involved in both the distribution and even creation of online content, Miller said. "This is the Golden Age of entertainment," Miller said. "If you love entertainment, this is the best time ever and it's just at the start." Consumers have much more control over their general viewing habits, choosing where and when they watch the content of their choice. He expects that on-demand viewing for television will become the dominant pattern for users within the next four to five years, with scheduled programming taking a secondary place. "We're becoming a nation of snackers and samplers of all-round media consumption," he added. One area that needs work is video search, a market where AOL already has an offering. "To date, video search has not been as good as text search," Miller said. "In the next few years, it will be as good." One major technological advance that's required is how to give a search engine the ability to look at the pixels of an image and tell people what it is, instead of today's approach of relying on how a video clip is tagged. As to how the "new" AOL is progressing, Miller's estimation is "So far, so good." Last month, the company announced it wouldÂ stop charging for its range of software and services as part of a planned move away from a subscription-based model toward operations supported by advertising sales. "We have a different future," Miller said. "In our past, we got people online, our future is about what they do online. It's a leap." So far, AOL users are continuing to use the company's services at least as much they used to, Miller said. In terms of whether the company has successfully transitioned its business model, the earliest AOL should be able to make a call either way is "realistically the middle of next year," he added. Â
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As an ad medium, America Online has struggled to compete with rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN. But nine-month AOL Me-dia Networks president Michael J. Kelly declares the Time Warner unit has turned the corner--and some advertisers and agencies agree.
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AOL's roots are in Dulles, but the company wants to bite the Big Apple.
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News Corp.  will not pull its television shows from Apple Inc's  iTunes as rival media group NBC Universal has done over a pricing dispute, President Peter Chernin said in an interview on Tuesday.
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Time Warner Inc.  Chief  Executive Richard Parsons said on Tuesday it was eyeing more  Internet deals next year focusing on advertising technology, to  bolster the transformation of its AOL Internet division.
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Aged Operator Leftovers The boss of media omnicorp Time Warner said yesterday he is considering selling off the AOL dial-up business Stateside.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Less than two years after its last major reorganization, AOLÂ  is again redrawing its internal business architecture to better align it with its new strategy toÂ focus on online advertisingÂ and retreat from the Internet access market. In an e-mail message to employees Wednesday, AOL Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Miller said AOL's four business units -- Access, Audience, Digital Services and Europe -- will be replaced by "smaller, nimbler product groups with more authority and greater accountability." AOL must become a global business led fully by its products, he wrote. "We made progress breaking down the matrix, but we did not, in my opinion, go far enough. Now we will go further," reads the e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by IDG News Service. While product leaders will become general managers with wide-ranging authority over product development, the ad sales operation will remain centralized, as will the legal, human resources, finance and public relations operations. Having companywide oversight and services is important, he wrote. "The recent Search data debacle is a prime example of why, even with the best of intentions, without proper oversight, costly mistakes can be made," Miller wrote, referring to the scandal that erupted last month from AOL's release of search engine records. Although the reorganization is in flux, Miller has defined several roles. Randy Boe has been entrusted with a unit dedicated to AOL's protection of consumers, and he will soon appoint AOL's first chief privacy officer. Boe's replacement as general counsel will be announced next week. There is no mention in the e-mail about what role, if any, Tatiana Platt, AOL's senior vice president of integrity assurance and chief trust officer, will play in this unit led by Boe. Boe will report to Ted Leonsis. A high-ranking AOL veteran of 13 years, Leonsis willÂ give up his day-to-day management dutiesÂ as president of the Audience business in January, while retaining his role of vice chairman, AOL announced last week. Joe Redling will be in charge of AOL's international, mobile and customer relations businesses. AOL needs to boost its international business and will announce a new international structure "soon", Miller wrote. Mobile efforts also need strengthening, because it's an area where the company hasn't had enough focus and investment, Miller wrote. Jim Bankoff will continue in charge of AOL's programming and the AIM instant messaging service, while Kevin Conroy will oversee AOL-branded products such as the AOL.com portal, Web mail service and video offerings. Mike Kelly will continue to run the ad sales operation. These four executives will provide further organizational details about their teams in coming weeks. Last month, AOL announced its intention toÂ slash as many as 5,000 jobs worldwide, or just over a quarter of its workforce, anticipating the shrinkage of its access business.
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NEW YORK - New media will be more friend than foe. That was the reassuring message for investors offered by executives from top traditional media companies at two of the industry's biggest annual conferences.
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AOL's new chief, Randy Falco, sees the  line dividing traditional and new media blurring even further  as he takes the reins of the online division of the world's  biggest media company Time Warner Inc.
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InfoWorld - Time Warner plans to split up the Internet access and audience businesses of its AOL segment to run them each independently, Time Warner CEO and President Jeff Bewkes revealed Wednesday.
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Time Warner plans to split up the Internet access and audience businesses of its AOL segment to run them each independently, Time Warner CEO and President Jeff Bewkes revealed Wednesday.The move comes as little surprise, as former CEO Dick Parsons acknowledged in September that Time Warner would at some point divest itself from the AOL access business, though he made no commitment to do so at the time.On Bewkes&#39; first quarterly financial conference call Wednesday since taking his position as CEO on Jan. 1, he said Time Warner&#39;s plans to split AOL&#39;s businesses will help hasten the segment&#39;s business-model transition from &quot;a declining ISP subscription business to a growing Internet ad business.&quot;&quot;This should significantly increase AOL&#39;s strategic options for each of these main business sectors,&quot; Bewkes said on a call to reveal Time Warner&#39;s fourth-quarter 2007 earnings. He made a distinction between AOL&#39;s for-fee Internet-access service and its ad-supported audience business, which includes AOL&#39;s online services and content.Bewkes did not give a specific timeline or other details for when and how the split will occur. AOL&#39;s Internet-access business, which still provides for-fee service, continues to decline in subscribers even as Bewkes noted that Time Warner has reduced operating expenses at AOL by &quot;well over a billion dollars.&quot;Still, even as AOL&#39;s goal is to become a viable online advertising competitor against Google, Yahoo and Microsoft -- the latter two of which may soon become a single and more formidable rival -- advertising revenue for AOL has been growing less than the industry average for several quarters.In the fourth quarter, ad revenue at AOL grew 18 percent, less than the current International Advertising Bureau&#39;s industry average of 25 percent. As a point of comparison, Google&#39;s ad revenue grew 51 percent in its fiscal fourth quarter.AOL&#39;s ad revenue growth was below industry average for both its 2007 second and third quarters as well. It grew 13 percent in the third quarter, which ended Sept. 30, and 16 percent in the second quarter, which ended June 30. The industry average was around 26 percent for those time periods.Time Warner&#39;s financial results for the quarter overall met Wall Street expectations, but net income was down for the quarter. The company reported $1.03 billion, or $0.28 a share, for the fourth quarter, down from $1.75 billion, or $0.44, last year. However, the results for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2006 were bolstered by an income-tax benefit as well as income from the sale of AOL Internet access businesses in the U.K. and France.Quarterly revenue rose 2.4 percent, from $12.34 billion in the year-ago quarter to $12.64 billion, reported Wednesday.Bewkes on Wednesday also outlined other cost-cutting and strategic measures that Time Warner plans to take to make the business run more effectively. The company&#39;s AOL business is not the only one that will be affected; the company also is considering reducing its investments in its Time Warner Cable business, he said.(Juan Carlos Perez in Miami contributed to this report.)
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NEW YORK -- The world's largest media companies will grapple in 2007 with the need to invest in ventures for rapid growth while not tearing down their aging business models too quickly.
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The media sector will be dominated by a handful of companies that produce or distribute entertainment, despite a proliferation of new technologies and companies vying to deliver programming to homes and handheld devices, a leading media analyst said on Monday.
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America Online will actively encourage its dial-up Internet subscribers to sign up for high-speed access at the cable arm of its parent, Time Warner Inc., executives from the companies said Monday.
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As part of its reincarnation, America Online Inc. is creating its own software for browsing the Web and playing movies and songs. It's a question of staying relevant in an increasingly broadband world.
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Maybe I was a bit harsh last week when I was reminiscing about the days when AOL was a classic Rule Breaker. After all, Time Warner&#39;s (NYSE: TWX) online service has only lost 2 million net subscribers over the past year.
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AOL chief executive Randy Falco e-mailed employees yesterday to tell them the company would be moving its headquarters to New York. "I know this change raises questions for many of you, not all of which I can answer here," he wrote. "Suffice it to say that for most of you, this won't affect your...