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RealNetworks to spin off its games business
RealNetworks' games business grew revenues 33 percent since the first quarter of 2007. CEO Rob Glaser thinks it could grow even faster on its own. RealNetworks announced today it plans to spin off the casual games business and "may precede the spin with an initial public offering and sale of up to 20 percent of the shares," according to a press release. RealNetworks will also buy back $50 million worth of stock.
stocks
Goldman Sachs is now 10 percent less impressed with Internet
Citing a more challenging consumer environment, greater customer-acquisition costs and investor reluctance to pay above-market prices for shares, Goldman Sachs today cut price targets for Internet stocks including Google, eBay, and Amazon by 10 percent. For more reasons why Wall Street is suddenly less impressed with your tech stock portfolio, see Goldman's entire report, embedded here: More »
realnetworks
Why Rob Glaser desperately wants to be a player
RealNetworks purchased Macrovision's games business for $4 million. Last year, it bought a casual games site called Gametrust for about $20 million. It's all part of RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser's plan to be a player in casual games. Just like he planned to be a player in online music. You know, before Apple crushed him. Or like how he planned to be a player in online video. Before Adobe's Flash laid him low. We give Glaser this much credit: He keeps spotting opportunities. The best business plan going seems to be to watch what markets Glaser enters, follow him, and do a better job.
digital music
Yahoo unloads music service on RealNetworks and MTV
The weekend saw the long-rumored sale of Yahoo's paid music service go through. Rhapsody America, a RealNetworks and MTV joint venture, purchased Yahoo Music Unlimited for an undisclosed fee, paidContent.org reports. Word has it Yahoo plans to supplant the service with a free, ad-supported service. To that end, it has purchased the maker of FoxyTunes, a plugin for the Firefox browser which searches for music online. More »
RealNetworks laid off a dozen pepole from its online music service, Rhapsody, the company says, a move prompted by the merger of Rhapsody with MTV's Urge. RealNetworks cut 100 employees in December. [SFWeekly]
great moments in journalism
AP breaks four-month-old story on Yahoo Music
Record company sources told the AP Yahoo wants to offer DRM-free MP3s for sale or for free via an ad-supported service. Thank you, in-the-know record executives! Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, publicly said much the same thing back in October. More »
yahoo
Anyone want to buy a music subscription service? Anyone? Anyone?
According to Silicon Alley Insider, Yahoo may be looking to sell its music subscription service. The move makes sense: Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, declared in October that he was done inconveniencing users with the digital restrictions labels required for online music subscriptions. Subscriptions simply haven't materialized as the profitable business model for artists, labels, and services alike that many had imagined. Freeing itself of the failed model will allow Yahoo to focus on free, ad-supported music. The only problem now is dumping the old service. More »
Video-software maker and online-music retailer RealNetworks has laid off 100 of its 1,800 employees — two-thirds in Asia and one-third in its hometown of Seattle — to reduce redundancies produced from a recent spree of acquisitions. No word on when RealNetworks, whose RealPlayer is an also-ran to Adobe's Flash and whose Rhapsody store is hopelessly behind Apple's iTunes, will figure out the other 1,700 are redundant, too. [Seattle P-I]
digital music
Real dumps Gracenote music service
Gracenote runs the service that automatically fills in song names, musicians, and album names when you rip a CD to your PC's hard drive. Without it, we'd be stuck spending years entering CD track data manually. But the company is no longer without competition — and it just lost a big client to a rival. Gracenote has been discreetly dropped by RealNetworks. A tipster alerts us that RealPlayer and Rhaposdy are now using All Media Guide's identification service, Lasso. Real joins a growing list of AMG adopters, including Sony and Apple. It's no surprise that the music services, facing thin margins, are shopping around.
timeline
How long will it take the corporate suits at Viacom to realize that MTV Networks will never, ever, ever succeed in digital music? The latest move, folding MTV's Urge online music store into RealNetworks' Rhapsody service, is just another example of its fumbling. One could point out that MTV doesn't actually broadcast much in the way of music these days; to the extent it's holding onto its youth demographic, it's doing so with a TV schedule packed with reality shows and teen soap operas. Do its viewers even know that the "M" in "MTV" stands for "music"? But never mind that. The reality of MTV is a decade-long history of complete and utter failure in digital music. The timeline of missed opportunities, botched deals, and general cluelessness, after the jump:
More »
MTV's history of digital-music failure
How long will it take the corporate suits at Viacom to realize that MTV Networks will never, ever, ever succeed in digital music? The latest move, folding MTV's Urge online music store into RealNetworks' Rhapsody service, is just another example of its fumbling. One could point out that MTV doesn't actually broadcast much in the way of music these days; to the extent it's holding onto its youth demographic, it's doing so with a TV schedule packed with reality shows and teen soap operas. Do its viewers even know that the "M" in "MTV" stands for "music"? But never mind that. The reality of MTV is a decade-long history of complete and utter failure in digital music. The timeline of missed opportunities, botched deals, and general cluelessness, after the jump:
More »
10:30 AM on Tue Aug 21 2007
By Owen Thomas
4,426 views,
6 comments
Latest by Ted Dziuba: Wow, your fail image is a fail. Leave the internet and never come back. more »
RealNetworks, Pandora, Yahoo, and other Internet radio providers suffer legal setback when judge refuses to grant emergency stay against royalty rate increases. [News.com]
rumormonger
An offer Facebook developers can't refuse
Bay Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, is cutting small checks to startups developing apps on Facebook's F8 platform, VentureBeat reports. Sure, Bay is opportunistically trying to ride on top of the frenzy for apps written specifically for Facebook's user base of 29 million. But Bay's initiative, called AppFactory, is small potatoes compared to what we think Facebook backer Jim Breyer, managing partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners, might be up to. More »
11:32 AM on Tue Jul 10 2007
By Owen Thomas
4,141 views,
2 comments
