Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

I'm the FT's global media editor, now based in New York but roaming freely
From Inside Business March 22, 2013

It is 600 miles from Olathe, Kansas, to Englewood, Colorado, and both towns can seem a million miles from the media hubs of New York and Hollywood. Yet two announcements from the US heartland this week provide important pointers to the future of the cable industry and the content companies that depend on it.

In Olathe, Google unveiled plans to roll out the fibre optic network it is testing in nearby Kansas City, offering broadband speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second. That is roughly 100 times faster than the country’s typical download rate, for $70 a month or $120 with a video service.

 Read more

Tags:
Posted in Digital media, Internet |

Aereo raises $38m and broadcasts plans for 22 new markets

January 9, 2013 12:56 am by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

Aereo is not sitting around waiting for a judge to decide its fate. The digital video service that might disrupt traditional television economics if it can get through a legal thicket thrown up by those most wedded to traditional TV economics is going for growth.

Chet Kanojia’s start-up, which last year began offering streams of high-definition broadcast TV signals to devices from smartphones to tablets, plans to expand from New York City to 22 new markets, having secured $38m in a series B financing round, led by Barry Diller’s IAC and Highland Capital Partners. Read more

Posted in Digital media, Tech |

AP juggles impartial news and Samsung-sponsored CES tweets

January 7, 2013 7:58 pm by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

The right balance between commercial imperatives and editorial purity has been debated since Benjamin Franklin first made a habit of carrying advertising in the Pennsylvania Gazette. But when the Associated Press announced on Monday that it would be sending out sponsored tweets from Samsung during the Consumer Electronics Show, the news agency still managed to raise eyebrows. Read more

Tags:
Posted in CES 2013, Digital media, Social, Tech |

Yahoo at Internet Week: pass the stress balls

May 14, 2012 9:03 pm by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

Stress balls, breath mints, cupcakes and a sponsored “oxygen bar”: yes, it’s Internet Week in New York, the annual feast of branded freebies, parties and panels for the city’s digital media and marketing set.

Today a Yahoo presentation drew the biggest crowd at the warehouse-like SoHo venue. Some were clearly there for an address on “big data” by Billy Beane, the number-crunching general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team and inspiration for Brad Pitt’s character in Moneyball. Read more

Tags:
Posted in Digital media, Internet, Tech |

CNN may seek Mashable mash-up

March 13, 2012 12:08 am by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

The company that brought you AOL-Time Warner has become more careful about old media-new media investments. So it was little surprise that CNN, Time Warner’s cable news division, greeted a Reuters report that it was about to buy Mashable warily.

“We do not engage in speculation about our business and we aren’t commenting on those reports,” was the canned response. Read more

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Digital media |
From Analysis February 27, 2012

As he celebrated Sony’s sweep of Grammy awards at a star-draped after-party in West Hollywood on February 12, Sir Howard Stringer looked like a man relieved.

Adele, the Sony-signed British singer, had won six trophies, capping a year of music successes for the Japanese group and its Welsh-American chief executive, who had lured industry veteran Doug Morris to run his record labels, and pulled off a bid for EMI Music Publishing without committing much capital. Read more

Tags:
Posted in Consumer Electronics |

Spotify’s Ek is music to Grammy lawyers’ ears

February 11, 2012 12:27 am by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

It is a measure of how far streaming digital music services have come that Daniel Ek, co-founder of Spotify, could be feted by a room full of music industry lawyers during Grammy Awards week.

Ek, the keynote speaker at the Entertainment Law Initiative event at the Beverly Hills Hotel, hinted at the industry’s initial resistance when he pointed out that he had started Spotify in 2006 and it had taken him two years to launch in Europe and a full five years before it hit the US market last July. Read more

Tags: ,
Posted in Digital media |

Creditors’ lawyers seek their dues in Kodak bankruptcy

January 25, 2012 11:44 pm by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

One thing is going smoothly for Eastman Kodak. This afternoon, in the basement of a Wall Street hotel, it took just three hours to decide who should make up the committee to represent creditors in its Chapter 11 bankruptcy process. Read more

Tags:
Posted in Tech |

Kobo and the curious incident of the underdog in the night time

May 23, 2011 11:50 pm by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

BookExpo America is upon us, and all the talk at the New York publishing fair is of booming e-book sales and where that leaves hardbacks and paperbacks.

Barnes & Noble, the bookstore chain whose digital prospects helped encourage John Malone to make a $1bn offer last week, is marking the occasion by unveiling a new model of its Nook e-reader on Tuesday morning. Kobo got in a day early with the launch of a new touch-screen version of its 6-inch e-ink reader on Monday. Read more

Posted in Tech |

Journalism Online Times its sale well

March 25, 2011 10:07 am by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

Few people outside the New York Times headquarters can have been happier to see the publisher announce its (very) long-awaited model for charging for online news last week than Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz.

The founder of The American Lawyer and the former head of WSJ.com set out two years ago to persuade publishers around the world that such paid models were feasible, and to provide them with the software to implement them. Read more

Tags: ,
Posted in Digital media |
BackOlder entries