What can a 153-year-old news publisher teach five tech startups? Digital expertise may flow both ways as Ireland’s newspaper of record offers desk space and funding to new companies whose products it hopes to adopt. Read more »
Irony of ironies – after encouraging fans to tweet copiously, the International Olympic Committee requests London 2012 attendees limit their output only to “urgent” status updates. The problem – mobile updates from some attendees have clogged a mobile network used by official TV data suppliers. Read more »
The BBC’s commercial wing is promising six months of office space and advice to new start-ups. But what will it get out of the program, and how will it help fledgling companies? We ask the woman in charge. Read more »
Details are sketchy right now, but it appears that the director of Independence Day and Godzilla is one of the partners behind a new online film portal that promises to reward users for paying attention to the trailers they watch. Read more »
Boxes for the UK’s big internet TV venture have finally gone on sale, priced a hefty £299, four years after it was conceived. But YouView may be the wrong service, aimed at the wrong market at the wrong time. Read more »
When is “bye-bye buffering” not “bye-bye buffering”? When Virgin Media acknowledges its own ad starring Olympic athlete Usain Bolt was mere “puffery”, landing it in regulatory hot water. Read more »
There are plenty of sell-your-picture platforms out there already that give people the chance to become semi-professional photographers. But German startup Photocircle has a twist: it’s encouraging those taking pictures to support social projects in the photogenic places they visit. Read more »
With peripheral inquiries ongoing in to conspiracy and media ethics, Tuesday’s announcement that Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and six others will be charged for “phone hacking” shows the News Of The World furore will soon finally focus on the original criminal allegations. Read more »
UK regulators will next month consider whether to go on allowing voting in TV talent shows via mobile apps, following high-profile slip-ups by one of the industry’s leading vendors. Read more »
Traditional TV will dominate, viewing on other devices is growing, and researchers can’t agree on how many people will watch the Olympics on mobile and tablet – that’s the conclusion from sifting research forecasts on the matter. Read more »
Amazon is amalgamating development teams from two acquired companies in to a London “centre of excellence” for streaming movies, TV and music on devices around the world. Read more »
Speaking with paidContent at the Olympic Park, International Olympic Committee social media head Alex Huot explains social media rules must safeguard TV rightsholders, and says big media can find a new role for themselves… Read more »
The London Olympics’ host team will launch two digital products next week, joining broadcasters, other media, the IOC and the games’ organising committee in seeking fans’ electronic mindshare. Read more »
German startup PaperC adds a twist to the idea of academic textbooks by letting people purchase a single chapter — or even just a page. Now, in order to raise funding it’s not going a traditional route: it’s holding a public auction. Read more »
Global No2 video service Dailymotion is expanding its white label streaming service to try and capture a greater share of the market. Can its new features draw in more users and help the company meet its targets? Read more »
Papagei.tv wants to use movies and other video entertainment to help people learn new languages — and it’s doing well out of the gate, with at least €10m to extend its immersive language-training courses and a role as the official language trainer for Germany’s Olympic team. Read more »
Piano Media, the digital news payments kiosk through which several Slovenian and Slovakian publishers have begun charging for some of their content, is opening shop in its third country, Poland, as paidContent speculated last month. Six publishers (Agora, Murator, Polskapresse, Media Regionalne, Edytor and Axel Springer-Ringier) […] Read more »
Guardian News & Media is re-opening its voluntary redundancy programme after its “digital-first” survival strategy’s first year resulted in much higher company losses. Read more »
The man who has been given the job of reworking France’s controversial anti-piracy legislation says cutting off the internet connection of filesharers is probably wrong. But don’t expect him to go easy on those of accused of illegal downloads. Read more »
BBC Online spent four percent less in 2011/12 than the previous year amid cutbacks, its annual report shows. Read more »
The controversial world of paywalled academic publishing has been hit by a major shift, with the British government saying it will make open access to scientific research a condition of public funding by 2014. Read more »
France’s Supreme Court has set aside a critical piracy ruling won by Google in 2011, leaving the door open to the search giant being forced to censor some of its autocomplete listings to prevent copyright infringement and piracy. Read more »
In social TV’s second-screen dream, timing is everything. And German startup wywy has just burst out of stealth mode with an impressive set of tools for keeping broadcasters, advertisers and viewers in sync — as well as control of long-established media monitoring service Idioma. Read more »
Roku just started rolling out a firmware update to its media players that includes a translation of its user interface to Spanish and German. This comes just days after we broke the story that Roku is eyeing Germany and Span as its next foreign markets. Read more »
Agitated by a ruling that it may have locked real-time data customers in to its services against competition law, Thomson Reuters makes concessions to let users use rivals – but they will have to pay. Read more »
A newly-launched startup called Foundd is taking the algorithmic approach, while its Berlin neighbour Tweek.tv is going for the social angle. But why has no winner emerged in this space already? Read more »
Digital music retailer 7digital is shaping up to be one of the main smartphone competitors to iTunes Store, as it announces another big manufacturer carriage deal. Read more »
The Kobo e-reader looks like becoming an e-books success in Japan following its acquisition by Pinterest investor Rakuten. Read more »
With its pay-for on-demand TV player nearing release and its YouView era about to begin, UK commercial broadcast leader ITV is restructuring its online division, with a change in leadership and job likely losses. Read more »
New mobile data service Samba has launched in the U.K. with a novel idea — agree to watch a few ads, and it will give you free data. But while the company hopes it’s on track for glory, the path it’s taking is littered with bodies. Read more »
It’s easy to embed a wide variety of music players on your website, but hard to get them singing from the same hymnsheet. Musicplayr’s trying to fix that with a newly-revamped player it calls ‘eye-candy for the ears’ Read more »
When is a book not a book? When it comes to European tax law. The continent is acting against two countries that reduced e-book tax to physical rates, in a sorry and technocratic action. Read more »
The European Parliament has delivered a stunning defeat to the controversial anti-piracy treaty ACTA, voting it down by 478 votes to 39. But although campaigners are claiming victory and the proposals are on the canvas, they’re not quite knocked out yet. Read more »
A new study from Google and the UK copyright collection society PRS for Music finds that live TV is the fastest-growing segment of copyright infringement — and a large presence on social networking sites. Read more »
Reports that Eric Schmidt has offered to settle an antitrust investigation by the European Commission are everywhere. But the reality is that the details of Google’s proposals — and the regulator’s response — remain shrouded in mystery. Read more »
RollUp, the niche publishing platform started by former DoubleClick, Brightcove and Demand Media executives, has signed a deal with US wellness network Everyday Health to take over the launch of new sites in Britain and Australia. Read more »
Under new proposals from the British media regulator Ofcom, internet providers will start sending warning letters to those accused of illegal filesharing in 18 months — and will be forced to handed people’s data over to copyright holders after three successive hits. Read more »
Bad news for Netflix’s international aspirations, as Amazon-owned rival Lovefilm announced a U.K. rights deal to show 20th Century Fox movies on its streaming service. But with antitrust authorities hovering over the movies-on-demand market, things are still up for grabs. Read more »
Polish news and magazine publishers are the latest to begin charging for online content, picking between different models and different facilitators. Read more »
A global trade agreement on anti-piracy measures may need a re-think after the European Parliament was advised to vote against it. Read more »
