In the ongoing fight between Redbox–which rents DVDs from kiosks for $1–and major Hollywood studios, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment just filed a brief to dismiss Redbox’s lawsuit against it.
The fascinating legal battle between Redbox and the studios centers around the issues of steep discounting, windowing and the price for premium content.
After all the investor hubbub over the oh-no-they-didn’t deal between Yahoo and Microsoft starts to die down a bit, the pair are now embarking on the path that is the only way toward proving the efficacy of them joining together.
That would be getting a variety of state, federal and international regulators to say yes to the wide-ranging online advertising and search arrangement they announced last week so they can start making it work.
According to sources at both companies, a variety of filings will be made this week, including one to the Securities and Exchange Commission that should provide more details of the partnership.
While Microsoft COO Kevin Turner did a kind of modified cheerleading act at Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach played the teenage boy and Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie the voice from the future.
It included Bach playing ball with Microsoft’s new motion-sensing, controllerless Project Natal and Mundie introducing a very creepy digital assistant with more than a passing resemblance to HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
With upward of two-thirds of the search market, depending on what survey you use, one would not imagine that Google would worry too much about any kind of hookup of Microsoft and Yahoo.
Think again.
Sources at Google said the company is bracing for a more robust rival, which will force the company to compete and innovate more aggressively.
They add that Google will likely try to keep a low profile at first in opposing the deal announced today, positing that regulators have the same opinion about fewer competitors in the market as they did when opposing a similar Google-Yahoo search deal last year.
BoomTown went down to Silicon Valley’s most exclusive country club–also known as Stanford University–where Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took to the stage for a talk at Memorial Auditorium for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar.
Ballmer–who went to and then dropped out of Stanford Business School for a job at the fledgling Microsoft–was in an ebullient mood and even joked about problems with the Windows Vista operating system.
Party on, Steve!
The Microsoft antitrust trial seems like a distant memory, doesn’t it?
Not quite yet to the Justice Department, it seems, which asked the federal judge overseeing the 2002 settlement with federal and state regulators yesterday to extend her oversight of some of the judgment another 18 months.
The Justice Department said it wants that extended to make sure Microsoft fully complies with the requirement that technical documentation to licensees is crackerjack.
Today, for interested lawyers, the American Bar Association is hosting a “brown bag” lunch and discussion in Washington, D.C. on the now-scuttled Google/Yahoo deal.
Ominously titled: THE GOOGLE/YAHOO! AGREEMENT AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE ANTITRUST ENFORCEMENT IN ONLINE ADVERTISING, the gathering could not come at a more perfect time, given that comScore’s 2008 Digital Year In Review report, released yesterday, showed the power of Google at an all-time high, no matter how much Yahoo-chasing, lawyer-rattling and lobbying Microsoft has done.
With a new administration coming into power, it makes a lot of sense for Microsoft to launch its new “Microsoft on the Issues” blog this week.
But, so far, with only two posts and few comments, it’s a tad dry–and, by that, I actually mean dull–and in desperate need of some spicy sauce to jazz up the joint.
Here are some modest BoomTown suggestions for livelier posts (including a Ballmer “BOMB-er” blog).
When reports came out last week that Google and Yahoo were downsizing their controversial search advertising deal, I told a Yahoo exec I happened to be having dinner with that that it was the surest sign that the search giant was about to dump the long-suffering Internet portal.
The exec, who made the case that the deal was always tactical and not strategic, laughed. For all its problems, Yahoo has always been a straight-up player and such sneaky machinations are not its strong suit.
Google, not so much.
You have to admire the sledgehammer stylings of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who loves to accuse Microsoft (justifiably, I might add) of bullying lobbying tactics in our nation’s capital, in the latest moves in the regulatory fight over the controversial search ad outsourcing partnership that Yahoo and Google have struck.
Today, just days before the Justice Department will decide whether to move ahead with a lawsuit to stop the Yahoogle deal from proceeding or let it move forward with some other remedy or tweaking, Schmidt announced that he would be campaigning for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama in the last two weeks of the election.
This week, it will be Yahoo stepping up the volume in the debate over the controversial Yahoo-Google ad outsourcing deal.
And it could not come a minute too soon.
Yahoo has been unusually quiet about the issue, after weeks of Google’s more aggressive and listen-to-us-big-brains approach.
That’s all resulted in more Justice Department scrutiny, more critics piling on, including the typically dulcet Canadians, who might also be launching an antitrust investigation.
Thank goodness, then, that the first foray by Yahoo President Sue Decker makes the case in a much more sensible and straightforward manner, which has been sorely needed on the Yahoogle side.
Yesterday, BoomTown took a rather strong stand against Google and its recent aggressive efforts to defend its outsourcing deal to sell some of Yahoo’s search ads.
Given that the pair have a more than 80 percent combined market share in the search business, I and many others–advertisers, publishers and state and federal regulators–are a bit nervous about further concentration of market power in one set of hands, even if they are such Googley hands.
But in the interest of fairness and because I like to argue with myself, here is a counterpoint with three key reasons why Google and Yahoo might hold firm in launching the partnership, which sources said is likely to start on Oct. 9.
As BoomTown readers know, I have been adamant that Yahoo’s online ad outsourcing deal with Google is troublesome on a lot of levels. Although, so is government intervention.
From giving advertisers less choice to creating a de facto monopoly to its potential for stifling innovation, the deal gives me the heebie-jeebies, given that the pair control 80 percent of the online search ad market.
Now, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Justice Department has quietly hired an outside litigator to contemplate whether the government should consider mounting an antitrust case against the search giant.
All week, Yahoo’s investors have waited for the other shoe to drop–its much-hyped ad deal with Google, in which Yahoo would outsource some of its online search ad monetization business to the search giant.
But will that deal land with a thud instead?
Today, The Wall Street Journal reports that Google executives “are now divided over whether to pursue a search-advertising deal with Yahoo.”
Actually, that depends what you mean by divided, of course, and which Google execs are on which side.
Yesterday, BoomTown wrote a piece about Yahoo’s worries about the scrutiny that the monopolistic combination of Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail would get, if it merged with the software giant.
The issue–which has not gotten a lot of attention–is actually a major sticking point in the price negotiations going on this weekend between the companies, as Yahoo seeks solid downside protection if the deal becomes mired in approval issues by governmental authorities due to email and instant messaging dominance on the Web.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
Don't miss a post! Sign up for our Daily Email and get AllThingsD.com delivered each day.
Get columns, blogs and video from D and All Things Digital on your iPhone. Download now »
