NewsFactor

Yahoo produces plenty of editorial content -- a strategy bolstered by Chief Executive Marissa Mayer [pictured above]. Sites like Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports drive significant traffic, while video from Yahoo talent, including Katie Couric, could complement Verizon's growing media reach.

Yahoo still commands a huge audience. Nearly 1 billion people visit a Yahoo website every month.

While content is a risky business, analysts believe it's a way to keep customers engaged ...read more

"Thursday Night Football" could soon share screen time with your Aunt Vera's pictures of Cabo. Facebook, the world's largest social network, is reportedly in talks with the National Football League for streaming rights for the Thursday games.
A matchup of the titans of tech and TV would mark a watershed moment for the media and Silicon Valley, whose leading companies are flush with cash and hungry for premium content to attract more eyeballs and ad dollars.

The NFL, in tur ...read more

"Hulu's DNA has been recent episodes of TV shows," said Glenn Hower, an analyst at the research firm Parks Associates.

The apparent anxiety at television companies is common to any industry that's faced what Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen calls "The Innovator's Dilemma." That's when established companies find their big, lucrative businesses undercut by innovative rivals with cheaper -- and, at least at first, less profitable -- alternatives. The big companies ...read more

Turns out that smart TVs can be, well, pretty dumb. Even moderately priced sets can now connect to the Internet and run Netflix and other apps -- that's the "smart" part. Yet many people are ignoring the built-in features and turning to Apple TV, Roku and other stand-alone streaming devices that often do a better job.

In an August report, the NPD Group estimates that roughly a third of smart TVs in the U.S. weren't actually connected to the Internet. That's down from about h ...read more

The revamped Touch comes at a time when iPod sales have slowed. In the July-September quarter last year, the most recent period for which figures are available, the company sold 2.6 million iPods -- down 24 percent from the previous year, and a negligible amount compared to the 39 million iPhones sold in the same quarter.

"IPod has passed its prime time as a portable music jukebox and Apple knew it," Harry Wang, health & mobile product research director at Parks Associates t ...read more

Indeed, the Apple Watch lets you send messages, read e-mail and answer calls to your iPhone from your wrist. There's a Taptic Engine that alerts you with a tap so you don't miss notifications. Meanwhile, Digital Touch lets you communicate by sending a sketch, a tap or using the rhythm of your heartbeat. The device even comes equipped with Apple Pay and health and fitness features.

The question is, how many people will by it with its $349 price tag? Plenty, according to resea ...read more

“Building a successful language translation application has numerous pitfalls and is a risky endeavor that can easily alienate users if not done correctly,” Tejas Mehta, mobile analyst for Parks Associates, told us. “Companies like Microsoft and Google are in the best position to be successful in this area because of the large ecosystem of users. Translation applications get better with use and the network effects are extremely important for these applications.”

Microsoft is ...read more

Glenn Hower, research analyst with Parks Associates, told us that Amazon, YouTube, and Microsoft "have steadily increased their CDN traffic, and Yahoo is on its way after acquiring PeerCDN a few months ago."

"If cloud-based or streaming media are in a company's portfolio," he said, "then deploying a CDN might become necessary to keep up."

From the article "Apple Sets Up Content Delivery Network, Signs ISP Deals" by Barry Levine.