Forbes' Eric Savitz discusses a post by BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield looking at this question in depth. Greenfield notes that subscriber numbers are rising at Netflix while dipping at HBO, leading to fears that HBO's service is "simply too expensive relative to the competition."A separate HBO would allow for such strategies as selling HBO subscriptions directly to consumers, for example.

Comcast has just released its Q1 earnings, which marks the first time analysts were given "a detailed outline of NBC's financials" since the merger, according to Bloomberg. The news for the combined combination was good, noted Matthew Harrigan, an analyst at Wunderlich Securities in Denver, Colorado. "When the deal was announced, I think a lot of analysts gave NBCU a stale valuation," he said. "I think it's worth well north of $40 billion at this point."

No big surprises in the Audit Bureau of Circulations' figures for newspapers in the six months ending March 31, which were just released: The Wall Street Journal retains its position at the top of the circulation race for daily newspapers, while The New York Times again reigns supreme for Sunday newspapers. (We like the way Forbes/Mixed Media brought some liveliness to this standard statistics story: with a picture of Dow Jones & Co. co-founder Charles Dow -- who, the caption claims, "is surely kvelling [Yiddish word meaning "bragging"] in the afterlife today." )

The New York Times is launching Times in Cinema, a 10- to 12-minute pre-show that will run in independent theaters. The content will be Times videos drawn mostly from entertainment, lifestyle and travel stories, against which the company will sell ads.

Former Boston Globe publisher William Osgood Taylor II, who negotiated the sale of the paper to the New York Times Co., died Sunday evening at the age of 78.Fourth in his family to run the paper, Taylor was publisher from 1978 to 1997, during which time the Globe won nine Pulitzer Prizes.

This week NBCUniversal is launching round-the-clock local news and information channels in Dallas, Miami and California (with help from San Francisco, San Diego and L.A. affiliates) to fulfill part of the FCC's local programming requirement, which was imposed because of the Comcast merger. NBCU will also produce 1,000 additional hours of local programming for its Telemundo outlets, set to be announced this summer.

Correspondent Scott Pelley will take on CBS news anchoring duties, replacing Katie Couric on what will be renamed "CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley." Pelley, a veteran of more than two decades at CBS, will also continue reporting for "60 Minutes."

The launch of Apple's iPad2 has made the iPad newspaper The Daily much easier to use, helping "to deal with the technical issues that plagued the first, highly publicized, release of the product three months ago today," writes Vator News' Larry Kramer.Still, there are "lingering editorial and user interface issues" to address, Kramer notes, from the user interface to The Daily's specific failure today: a well-writtten story about the death of Osama bin Laden, but little real-time interactive and video content that would have brought "the story to life with every form of media available to the IPad."

Starting today, print subscribers to Time Inc.'s Sports Illustrated, Time and Fortune will get free access to iPad versions of those publications. This move marks "a break in the impasse between publishers and Apple" over iPad content, according to the Wall Street Journal's Russell Adams.

By now you probably know that the news of Osama bin Laden's death was reported initially on social media, a historic first for a "Kennedy moment for a new generation," as Al Jazeera English correspondent Alan Fisher put it. But how did more traditional media handle the story? New York Times Media Decoder Brian Stelter (who provided the Al Jazeera quote above) writes a fairly thorough round-up of how newspapers and TV networks jumped on the news after President Obama's press conference at 8:35 p.m. ET last night. Entertainment Weeklydetails exactly what programs NBC and …