The Dish Network Corp and Walt Disney Co have reached a landmark deal that envisions a day when the satellite service provider will offer a Netflix Inc-like service to people who would rather stream TV shows over the Internet than put a satellite receiver on their roof.
The deal announced late on Monday paves the way for Dish to offer live local broadcasts from ABC TV stations and programming from ABC Family, the Disney Channel, ESPN and ESPN2 over mobile devices, set-top boxes and other means, similar to how Netflix’s video streams are delivered.
No start date for the planned service was announced and it is likely that Dish will have to cut similar deals with other programmers to make the service attractive. A Dish spokesman refused to speculate on what the offering would cost.
As part of the new rights deal, Dish agreed to disable a function on its Hopper digital video recorders that allows customers to automatically record and strip out commercials from prime-time weeknight programming, for three days after the initial broadcast, but only for programs on ABC, which is owned by Disney.
Dish CEO Joseph Clayton said in a statement that the deal was “about predicting the future of television.”
Disney Media Networks co-chairperson Anne Sweeney said in a statement that Disney CEO Bob Iger and Dish’s majority shareholder, Charlie Ergen, were directly involved in carving out “one of the most complex and comprehensive” deals ever.
“We planned for the evolution of our industry,” she said.
With the pact, both sides are dropping a legal battle between them over the so-called AutoHop function that had threatened to cut into the revenue of media companies like Disney by stripping out ads.
Dish has not made public how many of its 14 million subscribers use the Hopper option. The companies said they would work together on new advertising models.
Dish last month announced a technology partnership with rival DirecTV to launch a system that helps target political ads to viewers based on where they live.
Dish and Disney said they are looking at dynamically inserting ads into programs based on viewer data, developing new ways of advertising on mobile devices and measuring viewing for longer than the current industry standard that includes the live broadcast, plus three days of DVR viewing.
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to