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Posted
Sep 24 2009, 09:20 AM
by
Minyanville
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
This article is written by Minyanville's Laurie Petersen
Watching TV on a PC is so last century. The future of media is all about size, according to Dallas Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban, who is also chairman of HDnet.
He’s talking screen size.
As Cuban sees it, the obsession with PCs and the small screens of handheld devices is looking at things all wrong. He foresees a future of media where people watch content, including YouTube (GOOG), on oversized public TVs and even pay for the privilege to do so with their friends.
Cuban’s inspiration was last weekend’s Cowboys-Giants game, the one where the Giants pulled it off at the very last moment. But everyone was talking about the new stadium’s seven-story tall screen from Mitsubishi Electric, he says.
“That screen (the one in the new Cowboys stadium), you can’t take your eyes off it,” Cuban said. Just as we’ve watched screens get smaller, faster, and cheaper, soon we’ll be seeing bigger, better, and cheaper, he predicts.
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Posted
Sep 22 2009, 04:02 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
DVD sales are flagging and rentals are up -- news likely to be unwelcome at the major movie studios. The Digital Entertainment Group announced that in the first half of this year, DVD sales fell almost 14% to $5.4 billion. DVD rental revenue rose 8% to $3.4 billion.
While kiosk operator RedBox and DVD mailer NetFlix (NFLX) are a large part of the rise in rentals, it is Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) that really crush studio DVD sales.
Revenue for online stores was up 21% for the period to $968 million. At that rate of growth and the drop in DVD sales, Apple and Amazon have become essential to studio revenue and a real danger to premium DVD profits.
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Posted
Jul 02 2009, 12:41 PM
by
Minyanville
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
View the complete slideshow here!
The month will likely pass with very little mention. Folks will remain uninformed of its importance. The chance for honorary celebrations and time off from work will have elapsed.
 So just for your and your family's edification: July is National Bikini Month.
Conveniently timed to coincide with warm weather, family picnics and your child's summer vacation, National Bikini Month commands that the country expresses reverence to the wondrous innovation of dividing feminine swimwear into 2 pieces. An evocative example of liberation, women are no longer a slave to 1890s beach conventions. They are free to remove the swim cap and striped wading jumpsuit and enjoy a tan that doesn't stop at the wrists.
Yes, the bikini is truly a giant leap for mankind.
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Posted
Feb 26 2009, 12:39 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 DreamWorks Animation (DWA) is moving to the Nasdaq from the NYSE this week, and the Los Angeles Times takes the opportunity to analyze the stock.
Shares dropped to a new 52-week low Wednesday and closed at $17.62 after the company reported disappointing Q4 earnings. "Kung Fu Panda" didn't do as well on DVD as the company had hoped, bringing in only about $102 million in sales over three months. That's much less than what "Shrek the Third" brought, the Times says. But there's hope that "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" will deliver for the company on DVD, as will "Monsters vs. Aliens" at the box office. And CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg says that Dreamworks' stock is "undervalued" (what CEO doesn't think that?). Is he right?
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Posted
Feb 20 2009, 02:14 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
DVD sales are slowing down, and that's got Hollywood pretty nervous. People have filled out their home video libraries, reports The Wrap. That's one of the reasons that DVD rentals and sales dropped to $21.6 billion last year from a peak of $24.1 billion in 2006. The entertainment industry was hoping that high-definition discs would pick up the slack, but folks aren't rushing to buy a $25 Blu-ray movie in this economy. And who can blame those who sunk money into the now-failed HD-DVD format for laying low for a while? DVD sales woes are hurting the bottom line at companies like Viacom (VIA), which saw home entertainment
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Posted
Jan 08 2009, 02:53 AM
by
Bernhard Warner and Matthew Yeomans
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner site The Big Money.
Just how important is India's economy becoming? Important enough to generate a financial scandal that pushes Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme off the home pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Both report on Ramalinga Raju, head of Satyam Computer Services—one of India's most important outsourcing companies—who resigned yesterday after admitting he cooked the books, including maintaining a fictitious cash balance of more than $1 billion. "It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten," said Raju with a candor that would cause U.S. corporate defense lawyers to have a breakdown. Satyam runs back-office operations for one-third of the Fortune 500, handling computer systems and customer service for companies such as General Electric, Nestlé, and Cisco, and the U.S. government. Both newspapers note that Raju's indiscretions have cast a pall over other high-flying Indian companies and are "prompting investors to question other corporate results as the once-hot economy slows."
Which brings us back to that bastion of stability and integrity—the U.S. economy. CNN Money has the lowdown on a bad day on Wall Street, in which investors pulled back from six-week sustained rally on grim news from Alcoa and Intel (more on that below). The Dow Jones industrial average lost 245 points (2.7 percent), Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 3 percent, and the Nasdaq composite was down 3.2 percent. And you can bet there's more bad news to come today when the nation's retail chain stores report December sales figures. The results are expected to be "pretty dismal," says CNN Money. That explains part of the pain for
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Posted
Dec 04 2008, 08:57 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Sure enough, as Christmas gets closer the layoffs start to come in. Today's chopping comes from AT&T, which said it will cut 12,000 jobs, or 4% of its workforce.
Other layoffs announced this week include 850 positions at Viacom, which is also freezing the raises of top executives. NBC Universal is cutting, as well as Time Warner.
AT&T's news isn't much of a surprise, given how rapidly its wireline business is deteriorating. People had already been dumping their landline phones at a remarkable rate, and the recession has only sped that along. Home sales have plunged, leading to a drop in new connections. And cell phone plans are
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Posted
Oct 01 2008, 11:56 AM
by
Anthony Mirhaydari
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Why pay ever-rising ticket prices for sticky floors, beeping cell phones, overpriced popcorn, and chatty teens when we have 60-inch HDTVs, Blu-ray discs and 700-watt Dolby Digital stereos?
Thanks to technological advances, Hollywood has finally found a way to keep theatres relevant and unique with the advent of digital, 3-D live-action movies.
With the recently hatched deal between a consortium of theatre owners and production studios, a $1 billion financing package will convert half of the nation's 40,000 screens to digital projection.
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Posted
Sep 14 2007, 10:53 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Why can't MTV strike gold online? You'd think the music network would have been a huge success by now, bigger than MySpace and Facebook combined. The problem is that parent Viacom keeps investing in one stupid idea after another and slapping the MTV brand on, hoping that the association alone will bring it those fresh-faced Web users that advertisers crave.
Case in point: A new social networking site called Flux, which will allow MTV.com users to set up Web pages and add video, blogs, pictures of friends and other items. Flux will partner with other Web sites so that users can take content from those sites and add it to their own pages.
Viacom execs tell Fortune that Flux isn't a response to MySpace, which was bought up by News Corp. two years ago. Yeah, and those execs will insist that MTV still plays music videos, too.
This is all about MySpace - or, rather, stealing some of those precious ad dollars from the social networking giant. But to trot out yet another social network - one whose only value seems to be that you can legitimately take videos and other content for your own site -- is a desperate move by Viacom
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