U.K. digital satellite TV service Sky has launched Sky Go Extra, which lets customers download shows like Girls and Game of Thrones and movies to mobile devices for offline viewing. Read more »
For years, newspaper subscribers who go on vacation have donated their papers to classrooms where students would do things like cut out pictures. Now, Boston readers will be donating iPads instead. Read more »
Watch out, AirPlay: Netflix and YouTube are working on an open second screen protocol, and they’ve already secured support from key CE makers and content platforms. Read more »
Toronto-based ebook company Kobo is rapidly expanding abroad. On Wednesday the company announced that it has hired Jean-Mark Dupuis, a former sales director at Apple, as managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Read more »
Ooyala now allows its customers to embed videos right within their tweets – and anticipates that some of the tweeted videos may be very Twitter-esque. Read more »
How did the most important public companies on GigaOM’s radar fare in the fourth quarter? Here’s our roundup of quarterly report cards. Read more at GigaOM »
Evidence of Twitter’s ambition to become a media entity continues to accumulate, but if it wants to fulfil its role as a digital-media player, it is going to have to get a lot better at finding relevant content for its users. Read more »
Yahoo has acquired content pinning and curation site Snip.it. The site lets users “snip,” save and share articles or excerpts from around the web in a graphical interface and fits with Yahoo’s goal of acquiring small companies and focusing on content. Read more »
Content recommendation services are becoming big business. The latest entrant is Reverb, a site that draws on its experience as a dictionary maker to offer useful story suggestions. Read more »
Branch, the site that wants to improve the quality of discussions on the internet, is offering new community-like features that could make the site more approachable and conversations easier to discover. Read more »
Looking for a job in digital media? Each week we highlight some of the most interesting positions posted to paidContent’s jobs board. Check out the latest gigs at media companies across the country. Read more »
According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the past decade has seen a dramatic decline in longer stories at some of the industry’s leading newspapers. But does that mean longform journalism is dying, or just evolving? Read more »
Journalism professor C.W. Anderson argues in a new book about the decline of traditional media outlets in Philadelphia that one of the main stumbling blocks in adapting to a digital future has been traditional journalistic culture. Read more »
As Google gets bogged down with the French government over a so-called “internet tax,” the newspaper Le Monde reports that the search giant tried and failed to reach a large-scale copyright deal before Christmas. Read more »
Amazon is expanding its children’s publishing division with two new imprints. “Two Lions” will publish picture books, chapter books and middle-grade fiction, while “Skyscape” is aimed at teens. The imprints’ first titles will be published in spring 2013. Read more »
Jamie Oliver’s new Food Tube channel is live on YouTube – and it’s going to feature some familiar faces for people who scour the video site for unique food videos. Read more »
The Financial Times is hoping that at least 35 staff members will accept buyouts as it attempts to prepare for a digital-first future. That future includes hiring 10 new digital employees and being choosier about stories, editor Lionel Barber wrote Monday in an email to employees. Read more »
BlackBerry App World is becoming simply BlackBerry World as RIM prepares to revamp its mobile storefront. In addition to apps and games, RIM will be selling multimedia. Read more »
Flamboyant entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is marketing his new file-sharing locker as “the privacy company.” Is he for real or are the privacy claims just a cynical cover-up for a new piracy business? Read more »
Paywalls are being erected at hundreds of newspapers around the world, but Guardian Media CEO Andrew Miller says his newspaper is still opposed to a subscription wall because it wants to expand its readership as much as possible. Read more »
Random House is attempting to aid online book discovery with a new Facebook app, BookScout, that gives users book recommendations from multiple publishers based on their Facebook Open Graph. So why’d it recommend me I Can Read: Berenstain Bears? Read more »
It’s inauguration weekend, and hundreds of thousands are flocking to Washington D.C. to take part in the festivities. Live streams if the event are going to be available on the web, on iPads, mobile phones and connected devices. Read more »
It’s been common for web series to never make it past a first season. But this year, there are four notable examples of shows continuing their runs, from independent teen dramedies to Jerry Seinfeld chatting with comics. Read more »
Oprah Winfrey and sports site Deadspin had two of the year’s biggest stories this week and attracted millions of people to their websites. Too bad they didn’t have an ad plan in place. Read more »
A blog post by Nick Carr about the future of the printed book touched off an epic comment debate between the author and media theorist Clay Shirky about whether the book format itself will die out and be replaced. Read more »
Many publishers are trying to adapt to the way media works in a digital age, but some still see Google and the web as parasites — and Harper’s publisher seems determined to stay in the latter category. Read more »
This week in ebooks: Penguin made some digital decisions, Kobo claimed massive e-reader growth and Inkling opened up its titles to Google search. Read more »
So far, the only publisher participating is Hearst. There’s no set standard for how early a look each Newsstand issue will offer, Hearst told AllThingsD. Read more »
Here’s the main problem with book discovery online: Right now, it doesn’t really work. New research shows that frequent book buyers visit sites like Pinterest and Goodreads regularly, but those visits fail to drive actual book purchases. Read more »
Rhapsody has retooled its relationship with MetroPCS. Instead of bundling its music subscription service in all upper-tier Metro smartphone plans, it’s selling the service for $5 a month to any Metro customer. Read more »
More publishers of all stripes, including star blogger Andrew Sullivan, are charging visitors for content. This has translated into good news for paywall provider Tinypass. Read more »
YouTube is about to take a stake in Vevo, according to multiple reports. That would be a smart move, because it would help YouTube to hold on to more than half a billion views a month. Read more »
Amazon is getting more aggressive in its attempt to muscle into the online music space. On Thursday, it announced a HTML5-based MP3 store that allows consumers to buy and play songs on their Apple devices. Read more »
Two years ago, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner criticized magazine publishers’ “premature” rush to iPad. Now, the 40-year-old music magazine is launching an iPad edition that includes a music purchase partnership with iTunes. Read more »
Many adult sites and social networks require users to be 13 or 18 to use their services. The UK fined Playboy for not doing enough to enforce these rules while, in the US, attitudes have taken a different direction. Read more at GigaOM »
Redbox Instant is letting its users play for prizes to get feedback on its beta test, and collect a lot of useful data in the process. Data that one day could be used to improve the service’s movie discovery. Read more »
Time Warner Cable wants Netflix’s 3-D movies – but not its Open Connect CDN. That’s why the cable provider is now alleging discrimination. Read more »
A new court ruling forces the Washington Post to pay for publishing disaster photos found on Twitter. The ruling may seem fair but it will do nothing to solve bigger issues of copyright law in the age of photo sharing. Read more »
The Atlantic caused a furore this week with a piece of sponsored content about the Church of Scientology, which raised a host of questions about the risks of “native advertising” — which many see as the future of online media. Read more »
Technicolor CEO Frederic Rose is confident that his company’s video streaming service M-GO can compete with iTunes and other VOD vendors, in part because his company isn’t distracted by any related hardware products. Read more »
