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Turnabout Is Fair Play: BoomTown Decodes Rupe's Journalism-Is-Not-a-Free-Cow...
Last week, BoomTown translated an opinion piece written by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and published in The Wall Street Journal that focused on defending the search giant from criticism that it was, well,...
View ArticleNothing Says Holidays Like Queen Elizabeth Getting Her Groove On
Holiday “e-cards” have become popular in recent years, first as a way to cut back on paper clutter but increasingly as an outlet for ever-more creative messages. Some venture firms have gotten in on...
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Hulu Makes Its First Move Outside the U.S., Courtesy of a Reality Show You...
Hulu is a big hit in the U.S. But even though the video site has spent a year trying to gain a foothold in other countries, you still can’t see it anywhere else. This should change early next year, but...
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Fox Faces Off Against Time Warner Cable. Will Hulu Get Roped Into the Fight?
The TV business loves to recycle old plots. Here’s a familiar one: TV programmer A wants more money from cable company B, which doesn’t want to pay up. Negotiations stall and both sides threaten to...
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Time Warner Cable Shows Subscribers How to Cut the Cord
The nightmare scenario for cable companies is that customers drop their TV subscriptions and grab their video directly from the Web, turning the cable guys into mere providers of “dumb pipes.” But...
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Viral Video: The NBC Late-Night Bonfire Singes "American Idol"
Yesterday, BoomTown posted on the mess created by NBC over its late-night talk show wrangling. The fracas involves Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and seemingly every dude who sits behind a desk and kisses up...
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Viral Video: Pants May Be on the Ground–But Web Views Are Way Up!
The bizarre but catchy “Pants on the Ground” rap song performance by Atlanta’s Larry Platt, delivered with verve during an audition for the “American Idol” television competition, now has two million...
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Lost, Twitter and the Tragedy of the Commons: A Semi-Modest Proposal
Dear fellow “Lost” fans: Hi there! Salivating for tonight’s show? Me too. But I have a request. Please hear me out. Like you, I’ve invested an embarrassingly substantial number of hours in this thing....
View ArticleSirius XM: Stern Confirms Interest in "American Idol"
Howard Stern told listeners this morning that he is considering leaving Sirius XM (SIRI) to become a judge on American Idol, according the TheWrap.com. “There’s not a better job on the planet than...
View ArticleCan Social Media Predict Winner of "American Idol"?
Can the Internet predict who will win American Idol? Social media analysis firm Biz360 is once again tapping into blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts and a range of other social media data to try to...
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Viral Video: Bret Michaels's Rosy Thorn on "Idol"
BoomTown is not much of a fan of Bret Michaels, but it was still nice to see the singer and reality star in good form on television talent show “American Idol” last night after a spate of troubling...
View ArticleMySpace Taps New Chief of Content
MySpace has a new content chief, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s Andrew Wallenstein. As senior VP of entertainment and video, MySpace veteran Andy Marcus will take the lead on the company’s...
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Presto Chango: KaChing Becomes Wealthfront
Today, the execs at kaChing, a social investing site, are ringing the closing bell at the Nasdaq–actually, it is more of a button-pushing–to herald in a complete shift for the Palo Alto, Calif.,...
View ArticlePaula Abdul Adds Web Entrepreneur To Hollywood Hats
Very few entertainers have a better understanding of the grueling and sometimes ruthless nature of the audition process than Paula Abdul. During the early part of her career in the 1980s she shuttled...
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Apple TV: Streaming and Renting From Devices
Of all the set-top boxes designed to bring online and computer content to your TV, perhaps the best known is Apple TV. But, unlike its maker’s other products, Apple TV hasn’t caught on in a big way. In...
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Shocking Bieber Upset: Oil Spill Tops Twitter's 2010 Trends
Although World Cup tweeting caused record high volume and infrastructure demands on Twitter, the most-discussed topic on Twitter in 2010 was actually the Gulf oil spill, said the San Francisco-based...
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Viral Video: Christoph Waltz Slays on "American Idol" (No, Really Slays!)
BoomTown loves the spoof videos that late-night television talk show host Jimmy Kimmel does–Hello, Humpilates!–and this one featuring actor Christoph Waltz is another great one. Waltz always plays...
View ArticleElvis, Muhammad Ali and American Idol Sold For $509 Million
CKX, the holding company that owns the production company behind “American Idol,” is being sold to private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $509 million. Besides 19 Entertainment, CKX also owns...
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On Twitter, "The Real Housewives Of New Jersey" Trumps "Modern Family." Why?
Twitter loves TV. And TV loves Twitter. But the relationship between the two, which Twitter has been actively trying to promote in the last nine months or so, is a funky one: Sometimes Twitter gets...
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Casino Game Makers Outline a Winning Strategy on Facebook
Remember, the house always wins. Increasingly, that phrase can be applied not only to Las Vegas casinos, but also to Facebook, which takes a 30 percent cut of game developers’ revenues for the right to...
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Last Year's Tax Rate May Not Survive in 2013, but Your Cable Service Probably...
Image copyright Vicki FranceNow that the fiscal cliff has collapsed, we can be pretty certain our tax bills are going up unfortunately. And a Reuters report in August suggested that cable/satellite TV...
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YouNow, Web Video's Live Amateur Hour, Bulks Up by Buying Blog TV
If you take “American Idol” and add “The Gong Show” and then add Chatroulette but subtract the naked dudes, you get YouNow, a Web service that lets amateurs sing and dance for each other in real time....
View ArticleRemember Draw Something? Here Comes the Sequel.
Last year’s mobile one-hit wonder Draw Something is getting a sequel, per this tweet from OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter. Porter was responding to a tweet by Ryan Seacrest with a Draw Something 2 screenshot...
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Now Showing On YouTube: Spotify
Spotify’s digital music service has 24 million users, and 6 million subscribers. But it wants a lot more. So it’s advertising on the Web’s most popular music service: Starting tonight, Spotify is...
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Is Internet Killing the Video Star?
iPad image copyright SkylinesMy career in digital media started at a pivotal moment. The year was 2001, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had just upheld an order for Napster to begin...
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