Time Warner

Rated ugly: Will TV Everywhere free us from bad cable box menus?

As cable companies take on Netflix and Hulu with TV Everywhere, they'd do well to remember that where video content is concerned, a polished interface is part of the package, and the main area where they've been beat.

At a time when more than 21 million people now regularly stream film or television content from services like Netflix Instant and Hulu, cable companies still think they have the consumer by the eyeballs, MORE

Football's new game has tech moguls in the owner's box

It has five teams, big time owners like Bill Hambrecht and Tim Armstrong, and even its first sold-out game. Welcome to the UFL.

By William D. Cohan

Are you ready for some more football?

Welcome to the United Football League, or UFL, now playing its second eight-game season in five smaller cities around the country. If you haven't heard of it, maybe you know some of the names behind it: Mark Cuban, billionaire MORE

What IBM sees in Netezza

Earlier today, IBM (IBM) announced it would purchase Netezza (NZ), a publicly-held Massachusetts-based data analytics company, for $1.7 billion.

For IBM, Netezza is the most recent of 23 acquisitions by the company over the last four years, amounting to $12 billion. (Last week, the company bought OpenPages, another company in Massachusetts that creates risk and compliance software for businesses.) Analytics technology enables companies to observe and analyze past business performance so they MORE

Battle for the future of TV

It's Amazon vs. Apple, according to the latest reports, with Netflix in the middle

Tuesday was busy day as two of the biggest names in online retail -- Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) -- jockeyed for position in the fast-evolving market for Internet-based television.

Both have been actively courting the major studios, including NBC Universal (GE), Time Warner (TWX), News Corp. (NWS) and Viacom (VIA-B), each for a different reason. Apple has MORE

Hollywood's choice: 99-cents or nothing

Steve Jobs is not the TV networks' enemy. BitTorrent is.

The second episode of The Big C, Showtime's bittersweet hit comedy about a suburban mom with melanoma, aired Monday night at 10:30 p.m. Less than three hours later, a digital copy was posted on an Italian website, where it spread like crabgrass. By Wednesday morning, there were 3,387 "seeds" of The Big C, Season 01, Episode 02, on the Internet, MORE

99¢ TV shows coming Sept. 7 - report

Rather than a "best of TV" subscription service, Apple will be streaming programs a la carte

[UPDATE: The event is actually scheduled for Sept. 1. See here.]

Fuzzy rumors about Steve Jobs' next move in the TV market have been swirling for the better part of a year, but the picture snapped into focus on Tuesday.

A report by Peter Burrows, a veteran BusinessWeek reporter now writing for Bloomberg Businessweek, lays out the MORE

VC stunner: Nothing is overhyped

Enterprise, mobile, China, storage and social -- so many places to deploy cash.

Fortune's Michael Copleand opened his venture-capital panel at Fortune Brainstorm Tech Friday afternoon with a fun round-robin question: Name one sector that is overhyped or underhyped.  Shockingly, the six-member panel found nothing whatsoever that is overhyped. Only the opposite. VCs, after all, are congenital optimists.

Jerry Murdock of Insight Ventures, and investor in Twitter, thinks social media is underhyped. MORE

The Info Highway - 17 years later

Revisiting a 1993 Time Magazine cover story with the benefit of hindsight

I don't know whether to be flattered or embarrassed.

The Producers Guild of America has resurrected a story I wrote for Time Magazine in the spring of 1993 called The Info Highway. The piece, which ran on the cover, made a number of bold predictions about what form the information age might take -- some prescient, some naive, foolish and MORE

Can Steve Jobs unplug cable TV?

CBS and Disney may join Apple's $30 per month TV service, says the Wall St. Journal

This could be totally disruptive. Or it could be another "hobby" like Apple TV that never quite takes off.

In a front-page story published Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that CBS (CBS) and Disney (DIS) are "considering participating" in Apple's (AAPL) plan to offer television subscriptions over the Internet.

It was the first hint of interest MORE

And the walls came tumbling down

Is the NBCU-Comcast deal really about a new business model for cable?

By Tom MacIsaac, CEO, ExtendMedia

That cracking sound you hear is the walls of the clubby world of cable beginning to crumble. Everything in the media world -- ­ especially the world of media distribution --has changed as a result of Comcast (CMCSA) taking control of GE's (GE) NBCUniversal.

Many people think this is a deal to preserve the status quo MORE