Gates Says Broadcast TV Model Faces Irrelevancy
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Bill Gates predicts a future for the entertainment industry in which traditional broadcast television is rendered irrelevant. It's a positive vision, however, because new and better business models made possible by technology are emerging.
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Phillip Swann, president and CEO of TVPredictions.com, discusses the latest HDTV technologies and the transition to digital television.
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Bill Gates hints at possible partnership with giant electronics company.
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LAS VEGAS - For the last time as Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates delivered the opening speech at the Consumer Electronics Show. Microsoft made several announcements, including a partnership with NBC naming MSN as the exclusive online partner for the Beijing Olympics. Sports fans will be able to watch more than 3,000 hours of live and on-demand content over the Web.
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LOS ANGELES - With a fatherly demeanor, goofy jokes and brown V-neck sweater, Bill Gates didn&#39;t come across as an entertainment mogul yesterday.
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Microsoft chair Bill Gates has a tough job ahead of him at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week.
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CBS braces for a report from investigators that could be sharply critical of the outgoing anchor. By Scott Collins and Sallie Hofmeister / Los Angeles Times.
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Sir Richard Branson may be a  world-famous businessman and adventurer, but adding "TV star"  to his resume may be difficult after the premiere of his new  reality series on Fox attracted low ratings.
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In what could be his final CES keynote for a while, Gates shows off some gadgets and touts a deal with NBC to jointly run an Olympic Web site.
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Tuesday will take center stage at Los Angeles&#39; Shrine Auditorium, home of the Emmy Awards, to herald his vision for the next big thing in computing.
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While Current TV has gained a lot of attention, mainly because of Al Goreâs involvement, it is not clear that the cable channel is attracting an audience.
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Microsoft is hoping its Web-based TV service will attract ageing users to surf the Internet, read e-mail and view digital photos - all without a computer.
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US TV network Fox's chief executive admits it has relied too heavily on reality shows.
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Representatives of older and new media companies detailed their embraces of the Internet Friday at the Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco, with supposed old-line companies emphasizing opportunities and dismissing any threats to longstanding business models.Executives from CBS, Comcast, Joost, and Current participated in panel sessions on media operations and the Internet. While the Internet might be seen as potentially taking viewers away from traditional broadcast and cable television, panelists noted that TV viewership still accounts for several hours per person daily and continues on its 30-year trend upward.Comcast and CBS officials both noted that the Internet can extend their businesses."We love the Internet for a variety of reasons," said Amy Banse, president of Comcast Interactive Media, which is responsible for the cable TV provider's Internet businesses. People use Comcast's pipe to access the Internet and Comcast is the largest residential ISP, she said.But Comcast also believes in cable TV and that it will be around for a while, she said. "People thought that with television, radio would disappear and with cable television, broadcast television would disappear, and we all know that that hasn?t happened," Banse said.The Internet has enabled CBS to extend beyond its largely U.S.-based audience and to gain "new eyeballs," said Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, which covers Internet operations. "We, CBS, have not found the Internet to be cannibalistic to television," Smith said.Persons who see a two-minute clip of a CBS show, such as "How I Met Your Mother," might be encouraged to watch the program, he said. He recalled how a recent clip of David Letterman interviewing Paris Hilton showed up on YouTube and drew a lot of traffic; this was embraced by CBS, which carries Letterman's show.Asked by panel moderator Josh Quittner, of Fortune magazine, if she was worried about Google, Banse dismissed this."You want me to be a dinosaur running scared. I'm really not," she said. Google has been a "wonderful partner" for Comcast, with people accessing the search site via the Comcast pipe, said Banse.?In a subsequent panel session, officials from Joost, which provides broadcast-quality Internet television service, and Current, which blends broadcast TV with interactive Internet communications, shared their companies' visions."We wanted to bring the magic of the Internet to television, not the dumbness of television to the Internet," said Joel Hyatt, co-founder and CEO of Current. A community has been fostered to submit video that can be viewed on Current TV.Joost, meanwhile, is making peer-to-peer-based video distribution software that can run on PCs and the Macintosh, said Mike Volpi, Joost CEO. High-quality is streamed, with some of it professionally created by companies such as CBS and Viacom. Other content is developed by persons who are not so familiar. Joost is trying to develop an advertising-supported model.Both Joost and Current embrace advertising as a business model."I believe advertising is definitely the way to go," Volpi said. Advertising thus far has not blended well on the Internet because it has been offered in the form of banner ads or keywords, he said. But there are plenty of ad dollars to be gained by going after targeted users, he said.
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For the 10th time, Bill Gates will inaugurate the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by touting new Microsoft Corp. products and describing his view of the future of computing.
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Bill Gates has never taken himself as seriously as he does his company. So it was only fitting that it was with a humorous and star-studded video parody that he kicked off his final pre-show keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Sunday night in Las Vegas.Gates fictionally portrayed his last day of full-time work at CES in a video that had everyone from presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to The Daily Show host Jon Stewart turning him down for a job, and music mogul Jay-Z and film actor Matthew McConaughey patiently enduring his painful attempts at new extracurricular activities -- rapping and hitting the gym.When the laughs and well-received applause from a crowd of several thousand at The Venetian hotel and casino died down, Gates once again outlined his vision for a world of service-connected devices that allow for human interactions through speech and touch -- a vision he&#39;s been promoting for years from the CES stage.&quot;Getting the latest software, getting your data -- you&#39;ll just take that for granted,&quot; Gates said. &quot;When you take a photo it will show up in a place you like it to show up. That will be very simple.&quot;He added that eventually, devices also will know the context and location of the people using them, so location-based information from a device will be automatic.Gates&#39; vision for a connected world of devices and services has always been impressive. But as he makes his full-time exit from Microsoft, the company has yet to bring it to the mainstream user.Although some of the news in Gates&#39; keynote seems to suggest Microsoft is poised to change that, the company&#39;s strategy remains rooted in disparate product lines that haven&#39;t quite come together. And the company is facing increased pressure from competitors such as Apple and Google, which have turned ideas Microsoft has bandied about for years -- such as touch-screen technology and Web-based services -- into profits the software giant has not come close to achieving with its own efforts.Still, Microsoft introduced some new deals and services on stage Sunday that show the company is on the right track. In particular, Microsoft has struck some savvy deals with entertainment companies MGM and ABC to bring films and popular TV shows, respectively, to Xbox Live. That service and community, aimed at gamers using the Xbox console, has turned the Xbox into a viable television platform, tying together Microsoft&#39;s gaming strategy with its aim to provide premium entertainment. Along those lines, the company also announced a deal Sunday with British Telecom to deliver its IPTV service Mediaroom through the Xbox console.Other offerings that tie together multiple services and devices on display Sunday also showed that Gates&#39; connected services vision is coming into focus. A demo during the keynote showed how users can take photos from within a Windows Live hosted service and post them seamlessly to a blog or e-mail them to friends. Another showed how users can purchase movie tickets on a Windows Mobile device using voice commands and then text-message those tickets to other mobile devices.Microsoft also showed some progress on the Zune media player front, even though many still view the device as a poor competitor to Apple&#39;s enormously popular line of iPods. During the keynote Microsoft introduced Zune Social, an online community where Zune users can share playlists, track what their friends are listening to on their own devices and connect automatically to the Zune Marketplace to purchase songs.Toward the end of Gates&#39; keynote, he and Microsoft President Robbie Bach demonstrated a prototype device from Microsoft Research that seemed to represent the culmination of the company&#39;s connected-device strategy. The device used visual recognition to identify people and places in its line of &quot;sight,&quot; and remind a user of events related to them. For example, when Gates aimed the device at Bach, the device identified him and reminded Gates that Bach owed him $20. However, information neither Gates nor Bach could provide was how long it would take for such a device to be fully developed and released.When all was said and done on Sunday, Gates ended his CES legacy not with a bang but a whimper, allowing a special guest star to steal what would have been his final CES thunder.During what was poised to be a $20 contest between Gates and Bach on the popular Guitar Hero game, Gates instead introduced a ringer to take his place -- former Guns N&#39; Roses guitarist Slash. As the shaggy-haired guitarist played a loud riff from the band&#39;s song &quot;Welcome to the Jungle,&quot; Gates stood smiling on the stage and let Bach say the final goodbye, assuring attendees that he, at least, would be back again next year.
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A compromise by TV networks and advertisers on a system to count how many people watch commercials has hit a snag.