Entertainment

The recording industry appears to be changing its tune, now offering to defer hefty new royalty rates for smaller Internet radio stations that might otherwise be forced to tune out due to high costs. However, it doesn't appear the proposed new price structure has won over any fans in the opposition'...

XM Satellite Radio fully restored its service Tuesday, the company said, after outages affected an unknown number of subscribers for parts of two days. XM believed all service had been restored by early Tuesday afternoon, more than 24 hours after outages were first reported midday Monday. The compan...

The record label home to some of the world's top pop groups, such as the Beatles and Coldplay, has agreed in principle to a $4.7 billion takeover by private equity group Terra Firma Capital Partners. EMI Group spurned a proposal from Warner Music Group earlier this year, but now considers Terra's o...

The board of directors for radio and billboard giant Clear Channel Communications unanimously approved a slightly sweetened $19.5 billion buyout offer from private equity groups whose prior attempts it recently rejected. Asked by some major shareholders to rethink that rejection, the board announced...

The great Internet TV race is on, and the field is crowded -- and getting more crowded all the time. The biggest names in U.S. TV broadcasting want to make sure they stay in the middle of things. Cable TV broadcasters such as Cablevision, Comcast and Time Warner got an early jump on their broadcast ...

Nearly a century has passed since the first commercial radio broadcast went out over the airwaves. Aside from the invention of frequency modulation in the early 1930s and advances in recording and music playback devices, radio technology had remained much the same -- that is, until the late 1990s, w...

Social networking site MySpace has announced that it will launch a group of branded channels for video content produced by partners such as The New York Times, National Geographic, and Octane TV. Each channel will be housed within the MySpace Video area of the site and will feature content customize...

There's a new wave of changes headed for the TV and film industries: Television viewers can choose what they watch, when and how they view programs, and where they catch up on their favorite shows. That's just the beginning. The interactivity of the Internet, the emergence of DVR technologies, easie...

Apple, Microsoft, Adobe Systems and Real Networks are the targets of a Santa Cruz, Calif., maker of copyright protection technologies that has sent letters demanding that the tech heavyweights cease and desist "actively avoiding" the use of its products. Media Rights Technologies and its digital rad...

Joost, an Internet television service that promises high-quality streaming of licensed TV content, got a big hand Thursday from industry heavyweights CBS and Viacom. The two companies, along with three other venture capital firms, have invested a collective $45 million, Joost reported. Joost, which ...

The billion-dollar lawsuit between Viacom and YouTube feels like a rerun. Haven't we seen this show before? New technology from an upstart company is rapidly adopted by millions of users, transforms traditional media distribution and stretches the legacy copyright framework to its limits. Maybe thes...

Google's YouTube-related legal struggles have mounted in recent days, with NBC Universal and Viacom lending support to a California journalist's copyright infringement suit against the video-sharing site, and a third lawsuit filed by England's top soccer league. Both NBC Universal and Viacom -- whic...

Television once represented the Holy Grail for advertisers. As millions of consumers tuned in to watch their favorite dramas and sitcoms, it presented advertisers with unprecedented opportunities to reach millions of target customers quickly and easily. As technology has advanced, television's grip ...

New York-based Cablevision Systems has agreed to sell itself for more than $10.5 billion in cash to the family who founded the company. The Dolan family, which founded the company in 1973, will assume Cablevision's debt on top of the $10.5 billion price tag, bringing the total to $23 billion. During...

The 2008 presidential campaign season may be gearing up, but there's also another race afoot that has nothing to do with politics. It's the race for consumers' hearts and wallets that's being run by cable companies and telcos, and triple play bundles are the most recent heat. "Over the last several ...