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Source:Valleywag

Porn industry insiders disagree on how they feel about The Pirate Bay. Some would like American authorities to go after the file-sharing site to protect their copyrights. Others are uneasy about the idea of one country’s laws reaching across borders, since many countries aren’t as permissive about adult entertainment as the U.S. [TorrentFreak]

Source:Valleywag

NEW YORK CITY — I’m at the Mixx 2007 online-advertising conference here, marveling at the brazenness of author and entrepreneur Seth Godin. “How do we use this medium in the way it wants to be used?” he asks, as he’s interviewed by Charlie Rose. He’s speaking, of course, about the Web, but he might as well be talking about the medium of the conference stage. And he’s using it to promote his new website, Squidoo. Squidoo, as best as I can tell, is sort of a blog-hosting service like Google’s blogger, sort of a social-bookmarking service like Yahoo’s Del.icio.us, and sort of a hand-compiled search-results aggregator like Mahalo. Godin, of course, doesn’t miss the opportunity to brag to Rose and the audience that Squidoo’s Web traffic is larger than the Wall Street Journal’s, without the benefit of any advertising. Except, of course, the kind of free advertising you get by being a best-selling author and getting invited to speak at conferences.

Source:Valleywag

What does EchoStar’s $380 million deal to buy Sling Media mean? In some ways, Sling’s decision to sell out seems odd. Satellite TV is on the downswing, most people believe. Rupert Murdoch, after all, sold News Corp.’s stake in DirecTV, in part to raise cash to buy Dow Jones — favoring content, in other words, over distribution. But Charlie Ergen, the obstreperous entrepreneur behind EchoStar, may have a larger plan for Sling’s Net-connected set-top boxes. “This is just the beginning,” says Sling founder Blake Krikorian in an interview with PaidContent. He’s not kidding. The rich EchoStar buy, I believe, is a move by Ergen to prepare his company for life after satellite TV.

Sling Media’s main product, the Slingbox, differs in a key way from popular digital video recorders like TiVo. Instead of recording programs for later display in the living room, the Slingbox rebroadcasts what’s on your TV, live, to your laptop, cell phone, or other Net-connected screens. While TiVo lets you shift TV shows in time, Slingbox lets you move TV programming to other places. (This is especially handy if, say, you want to follow your home team’s games, only available on your local cable system, while you’re on the road.)

Obviously, a Slingbox could be hooked up to EchoStar’s Dish Network boxes. But it could just as easily be connected to a DirecTV box, or a cable hookup. So why would EchoStar buy something that’s so hard to turn into a proprietary advantage?

Obviously, EchoStar could introduce set-top boxes that have Slingbox functions, saving space under the TV set. But I think there’s more to it than that. Internet bandwidth looks set to increase continuously, while capacity on EchoStar’s satellites appears increasingly constrained. If the Slingbox rebroadcasts any video signal over the Internet, couldn’t EchoStar, one day, skip the satellite altogether and pump television programming over the Internet — what’s known in the industry as IPTV?

Of course, in IPTV, EchoStar will face competition ranging from AT&T to Microsoft. No small challenge. But Krikorian, the Sling Media founder, has faced unlikely odds in introducing a new, difficult-to-explain piece of hardware, winning critical praise and blog buzz, and now selling his company at a more than healthy price. If he’s sincere in staying on at EchoStar, as he told PaidContent, Ergen’s company has a chance to transcend its satellite-TV heritage. That seems worth a few hundred million dollars.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 9:47 am and is filed under Gizmodo, Top, Acquisitions, Analysis, blake krikorian, Echostar, Sling Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.