Rebecca Day

Following its plan to be a “disruptive force” in the radio business, Pandora said in its fiscal Q4 earnings webcast Tuesday it expects to be “larger than the largest FM or AM radio station in most markets in the U.S.” by the end of the year. With significant growth in listener hours, the Internet radio company’s relevance to traditional radio advertising buyers “is skyrocketing,” said CEO Joe Kennedy.

Traditional TV distribution business models, content discovery and reaching “cord never-havers” are challenges facing the digital video distribution world, said panelists at the Future of Television conference in New York Friday. “The demographics of people signing up for cable and satellite service is changing a lot,” said Jeff Harris, senior product manager-new product development for Verizon’s FiOS. Teenagers watch more video on computers than on TVs, he said, and that trend won’t change. “You can’t fight it, so the best thing to do is innovate and adapt” by extending TV services to as many screens as possible, he said. “Portability is a big driver,” he said. Service providers need to be prepared for the changing environment and “be where the eyeballs are migrating,” he said.

SAN DIEGO -- The future role of the set-top box, standards for connected TV and preserving the traditional TV viewing experience while expanding the universe of TV apps were key topics at the “Connected TV Platforms” panel at the CEA Industry Forum Wednesday. In a world that’s becoming increasingly untethered, the question of whether the set-top box will be “disintermediated” by Internet delivery of TV programming was a recurring question.

SAN DIEGO -- Spectrum constraints, connectivity beyond traditional consumer electronics devices, the cloud, emerging input interfaces and battery life were among the topics in the Five Technologies to Watch session that opened the CEA Industry Forum Monday. Jason Oxman, CEA senior vice president-industry affairs, spoke of the “looming spectrum crisis” due to consumer demand for wireless broadcast services and reiterated CEA’s position that there needs to be more spectrum allocated for wireless consumer devices. “We're not quite at a crisis point,” said Roger Cheng, senior writer for CNET, “but we're heading toward a spectrum crunch,” he said, citing consumers’ increased usage as they use wireless devices for listening to music, watching movies and playing games.

Touting “original, premium programming,” a reach of 100 million people in the U.S. and an “innovative” opportunity for advertisers, executives from Yahoo and ABC News entered a strategic alliance. They said Monday it brings together Yahoo’s technology and reach and the journalism of ABC News, with the goal of becoming the “premier digital media company in the world.” The future of news and information “is completely up for grabs,” said Ben Sherwood, president of ABC News.

ESPN will begin airing Monday Night Football in 3D beginning in 2014, a company spokesman confirmed Wednesday, following the announcement of ESPN’s eight-year contract extension with the NFL, which includes 3D distribution rights. The multiplatform agreement also includes expanded NFL studio programming (beginning this week), highlight rights for TV and ESPN.com, the Pro Bowl, the NFL Draft, 3D rights, and enhanced international rights, ESPN said. The package of NFL rights supports ESPN’s “best available screen” strategy with NFL programs on TV, online and on mobile devices via authentication and digital rights, ESPN said. Rights also include simulcast network coverage of ESPN’s MNF and NFL studio programs on tablets through ESPN’s WatchESPN App, ESPN said. The agreement is international as well, including Super Bowl rights, for 30 million households in 144 countries including Brazil, the Caribbean, Africa, Middle East, Israel, Australia-New Zealand and Europe, ESPN said.

Google is “enjoying high consumer success” with YouTube, Android and Chrome, CEO Larry Page said late Thursday on a quarterly earnings call. But for the second quarter in a row Google TV seems to have dropped off the company radar. Instead, Page highlighted Android and Google+, the company’s social media venture that has gained 10 million users in its first few weeks in operation. On the mobile side, Google is logging 550,000 Android activations a day, said Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora. Total activations to date are 135 million, up from 100 million two months ago, Senior Vice President Susan Wojcicki said. More than 400 Android devices are available globally, she said, with 6 billion apps downloaded from Android Market to date, double that of “a few months ago,” she said. More than 250,000 apps are available at Android Market, she said. The company is expanding beyond entertainment for mobile devices, she said. “Phones are also becoming key to the shopping experience, making shopping mobile and local.” Wojcicki said the company launched a mobile app for Google Wallet and Google Offers, and both are currently in field trials.

A popular item on consumers’ holiday gift lists this year could be digital content subscriptions, if announcements made Thursday hit their marks. On the same day Spotify unveiled U.S. availability of its long-promised streaming music service, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) said it began its licensing program for UltraViolet. That starts the infrastructure installation process for a fall start of the UltraViolet ecosystem.

Calling the consumer electronics industry a “bright spot in a very cloudy economy,” CEA CEO Gary Shapiro welcomed attendees Thursday to “CE Week” during a keynote in which he promoted passage of S-911. The bill was approved by the Senate Commerce Committee earlier this month. Wireless broadband is one of the primary drivers of the CE industry, Shapiro said. Many of the new products and services coming to market require wireless broadband, he said, making the “spectrum crunch one of the most critical technology policy issues we face today.” Much of the most attractive spectrum now is being used “as it has been for the last 40 or 50 years” by broadcasters, Shapiro said. Despite their “important service to the public,” the demand for wireless broadband services has exhausted all of the available spectrum, creating a “crisis” that can only be served by allocating additional frequencies for broadband, he said.

Google TV missed the boat in first-generation products that launched in October by not understanding what the consumer wants, said panelists at the NexGen Entertainment Home Experience panel at the Digital Hollywood 2011 Media Summit in Manhattan Wednesday. The platform should come back strong in subsequent generations, assuming Google addresses issues that limited its appeal the first time out, panelists said. But Google’s stab at an undefined, fast-moving target shows how far the entertainment industry has to go in defining the home entertainment experience of the future.