Entertainment

CBS on Thursday announced a deal with YouTube to form a new Web channel featuring clips and highlights from the annual NCAA basketball tournament known as "March Madness." The deal comes just days after CBS' former sister company, Viacom, filed suit against YouTube -- and its owner, Google -- seekin...

I'm an early adopter. I don't just analyze technology from the safety of my own cubicle; I bring it into my home and live with it. I find that by doing so, I gain a perspective that would otherwise be lost. About a year ago, I disconnected my traditional landline phone and signed up for VoIP service...

In a contentious congressional hearing Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission was accused of overstepping its authority in its recent actions regarding the cable TV industry. At the end of 2006, the FCC -- led by Commissioner Kevin Martin -- approved in a 3-2 vote new video franchising rul...

MTV's parent company Viacom is seeking more than $1 billion in damages from YouTube and its owner Google for thousands of alleged copyright infringements. A complaint filed by the media giant in U.S. District Court in New York contends that almost 160,000 clips of Viacom's programming have been made...

The Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration is setting aside close to $1 billion to help consumers who will be forced to migrate to digital television after February 17, 2009 -- when analog broadcasting is scheduled to cease. The Digital Television Transit...

To help meet demand for online streaming video of the upcoming NCAA Division 1 Men's Basketball Championship, CBS SportsLine is doubling its bandwidth reserves and offering preregistration. The company, part of CBS Interactive, expects "an even greater audience" for the March Madness games than it e...

Warner Bros. Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Digital Cinema Implementation Partners announced Tuesday a joint venture to bring to market a new system for distributing digital movies to theaters. "We expect to be organized and have the financing and deals we need in place for an aggressive roll...

EMI on Friday formally rejected a $4.1 billion takeover bid from Warner Music Group, in the latest music industry attempt to consolidate the few remaining major labels. The world's third- and fourth-largest record labels, EMI and Warner have been flirting with a possible merger for some time. EMI sa...

Google's YouTube said Monday it had struck a deal to license video from the National Basketball Association for use on the video-sharing site, which is also intended to encourage user development of basketball-flavored content. The deal is a small but symbolic victory for Google, which has struggled...

Swedish wireless equipment giant Ericsson is hoping to boost its multimedia services for the Internet with the purchase of Tandberg Television. The buy could push Ericsson to the vanguard of IPTV, or Internet Protocol Television, which is likely to be one of the major markets for the telecom industr...

A federal jury has ordered Microsoft to pay $1.52 billion to Alcatel-Lucent for infringing on two patents that convert audio into the digital MP3 file format. One of the largest patent awards on record, Microsoft has said the ruling could also impact companies that have licensed this technology, inc...

Google, hoping to fend off ongoing criticism and potential legal battles, has decided to tackle copyright issues head on and will soon offer antipiracy technologies to halt unauthorized video-sharing, the company announced this week. YouTube, which Google acquired late last year in a $1.6 billion st...

Google's efforts to convince video content owners to license their TV shows and movies to its YouTube video-sharing site may have hit another snag, with reports suggesting that a tentative deal with CBS may be unraveling. A sweeping agreement that would have given YouTube access to video clips -- su...

Sony plans to offer a video download service for its PlayStation 3 gaming console, Phil Harrison, president of Sony's worldwide studios division, said in a recently published interview. The media company's long-range vision for the PS3 includes the download, storage and playback of high-definition m...

Sirius and XM -- the two providers of satellite radio service in the United States -- on Monday announced a plan to combine operations in a $4.6 billion merger, but by Tuesday the deal looked to face significant regulatory hurdles. The two companies agreed to a "merger of equals," which would create...