No news was not good news for Hallmark Channels or its viewers. According to a Hallmark spokesperson, there are still no talks with AT&T in its second day of being dark on the telco's U-Verse system. A Hallmark spokesperson said that in the hundreds of negotiations it has conducted in its nine years on the air, including ones that went beyond the deadline, this is the first time it has gone dark on any system. AT&T has said it offered to continue carrying the channel on the old terms without a contract while they continued to negotiate, but …

The Federal Trade Commission is once again handing out subpoenas to companies that market food to children and teens. Three years after initially delivering what is technically known as "orders to file special report" to 44 marketers, the FTC last week began sending subpoenas to 48 companies in order to prepare a follow-up to its 120-page report issued in 2008, "Marketing Food to Children and Adolescents: A Review of Industry Expenditures, Activities and Self-Regulation." Twelve companies on this year's list are new, but 36 companies are once again receiving subpoenas -- including Yum Brands. Some have speculated that …

Two months after Rupert Murdoch's decision to erect a subscription paywall around the Web sites of The Times and The Sunday Times, thus removing their content from search engines, the bold experiment is having a marked effect on the rest of British media. Faced with a collapse in traffic to thetimes.co.uk, some advertisers have simply abandoned the site. Rob Lynam, head of press trading at the media agency MEC, whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says,"If there's no traffic on there, there's no point in advertising on there." Lynam says he has been told …

Google Inc is in talks with music labels on plans for a download store and a digital song locker that would allow its mobile users to play songs wherever they are as it steps up its rivalry with Apple Inc. Andy Rubin, Google's vice president of engineering, hopes to have the service up and running by Christmas. The music industry hopes to benefit from a battle for control of the mobile phone and computer desktop between Apple and Google as both technology giants go head-to-head in a wide range of media and consumer technology areas including online TV …

Martha Stewart, whose talk/crafts show is moving to cable's Hallmark Channel in two weeks, coinciding with the launch of her prime-time interview specials for that network, wants to become the new Important Interviewer in the television firmament. "My favorite interviewers are Larry King [and] Barbara Walters, both of whom are kind of retiring," Stewart said in a conference call Wednesday. (Barbara Walters confirmed she will be back on "The View" starting next week.) "Who's going to take their place as the serious, great interviewer? I'm throwing my name in there," Martha told reporters on a call to talk about …

Amazon.com Inc has approached media companies with a proposal for a subscription service that gives users unlimited access to some TV shows and movies over the Internet in an effort to rival Netflix. The online retailer has approached media companies including Time Warner Inc, CBS Corp and Viacom Inc, sources say. It is still not clear if the media companies would agree to Amazon's proposals, which are still at an early stage. Amazon's site already features a range of TV shows and movies in its video-on-demand section that are generally available for sale individually from $1.99. An Amazon …

With a new round of layoffs expected this fall, CBS News is being trimmed to the bone. On Monday, Katie Couric begins her fifth, and quite possibly final, year of hard labor as anchor of the CBS Evening News. However she chooses to mark the occasion, it will no doubt be more subdued than the tears, dancing, and $10 million promotional campaign that attended her debut on Sept. 5, 2006. Four years and a reported $60 million later, Katie Couric now sits atop a news division that is unrecognizable as the one-time home of Walter Cronkite. In the intervening …

Kelsey Grammer is making plans to revive his most famous character Dr. Frasier Crane for a new TV show. The actor found fame playing the pompous psychiatrist in hit 1980s TV show "Cheers," and he went on to star in the successful spinoff series "Frasier." He spent 20 years playing the character before calling it quits in 2004. Grammer has since failed to replicate his success and has seen a number of new shows flop, including "Back To You" and "Hank," and he's now considering bringing back the cast of Frasier for a "reunion show," according to his …

Reaction was swift and mixed to the FCC's release Wednesday of a request for further comment on its proposed codification and expansion of network neutrality guidelines. The commission said there was growing agreement, or at least "narrowing of disagreement" on the majority of its proposals, but that two sticky issues remained: applying them to mobile broadband and allowing specialized services. Contributing to that meeting of the minds that the FCC cited has been stakeholder meetings both at the FCC and elsewhere involving among others, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association and AT&T. Reclassification is the way the FCC plans …

During the Sept. 1 press event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that 450 million TV episodes, along with 11.7 billion songs, 100 million movies and 35 million books, have been downloaded from the iTunes store, making it the number one digital media store in the world. How will its newly announced 99-cent rental program change the marketplace? It depends on what's on offer, says NewTeeVee. When we compared Hulu Plus to Netflix Instant during its launch, we found that while the back catalog was comparable, Hulu Plus had Netflix easily beat when it came to new episodes …