AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

paidContent.org
So Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) couldn’t buy Disney (NYSE: DIS) a few years ago, but it has now succeeded in buying a part of it, sort of: Fandango, the online movie tickets service that Comcast bought a year ago, has bought out movies info site Movies.com from Disney, for an undisclosed sum.
Movies.com, under its previous name [...]

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Red Herring
Nokia added yet another company to its growing roster of mobile services firms with an announcement Monday that it will acquire Plazes, a location-based services provider for an undisclosed sum.
The Plazes acquisition will be Nokia’s ninth purchase of a mobile services or content firm in the last two and a half years and continues [...]

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Seeking Alpha
For Adobe (ADBE), it may now be time to take On2 Technologies [ONT] out of the market. With yesterday’s announcement that Bill Joll has resigned as President and CEO of On2 and as a member of their Board of Directors, and the recent problems surrounding falsified revenue at On2, Adobe could swoop in and [...]

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Search Engine Land
In a move that is interesting and perhaps even surprising for several reasons, IAC/Ask is buying Lexico Publishing Group, which owns and operates “iconic” domains Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com. These sites get most of their traffic through direct navigation and will increase Ask’s reach by 145 million unduplicated users (or 11 percent). Ask [...]

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Red Herring
CBS on Thursday agreed to acquire pioneering Internet media company CNET Networks for $1.8 billion in cash.
“There are very few opportunities to acquire a profitable, growing, well-managed Internet company like CNET Networks,” CBS CEO Leslie Moonves said in a statement.
Shares of CNET gained $3.46, or 43.52 percent, to $11.41 by closing trading.
The deal comes [...]

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The Wall Street Journal
Comcast Corp. said on Wednesday that it will acquire networking Web site Plaxo, in an effort by the cable operator to broaden its range of services.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Plaxo, a closely held company based in Mountain View, Calif., offers technology that helps users more easily share contact information [...]

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I, Cringely
There was a game we used to play in the office, years ago, casting a movie of our own lives. What well-known actor or actress would play you? Who would play your friends? The game eventually faded, as games always do, but at the time it was great fun. So let’s try it again: [...]

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The Wall Street Journal
Cablevision Systems Corp. is close to an agreement to buy the Sundance Channel, jointly owned by General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal, CBS Corp., and actor Robert Redford, in a cash and stock deal valued at close to $500 million, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
Terms of the deal may be announced [...]

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TechCrunch
With Microsoft walking away from the Yahoo deal, there’s been a lot of talk about what it’s next best option would be. Going after AOL is an obvious choice. It has the ad inventory (aka pageviews) Microsoft needs, has its own collection of growing online advertising businesses, and has a very willing seller in parent [...]

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Yahoo
Kontiki Provides Peer-Assisted Content Delivery to Enterprise and Consumer Media Customers Worldwide

Kontiki, the leading provider of managed peer-assisted delivery for high-quality video and digital content, announced today that it has completed the anticipated divestiture from VeriSign, Inc. As a result, the assets previously comprising VeriSign’s Broadband Content Services business unit will be re-launched as Kontiki [...]

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