With broadband access up to an estimated 42.3 million from 25.3 million just a few years ago, and DVR usage steadily on the rise, network and cable television companies know the on-demand age is looming. Now, they are all taking baby steps into what is an incredibly frightening new world for them. Even so, industry executives and analysts speaking to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette say media companies in the future will be supporting themselves the same way they always have: through advertising. Some say on-demand programming is just a passing fad, an interim business model until on-demand hits critical mass. They …

The third such article today on the problems facing old media, this one by the Financial Times, focuses on the inside pressure from investors on companies to change. Shares of old media companies have been performing poorly for the last five years, because investors don't see concrete plans for the future despite growth and profits from companies like Time Warner, News Corp. and Comcast. Analysts say the market "senses the threat more than the opportunity." Even though the effects are not necessarily being felt yet, the writing is on the wall for these companies, and it starts with flat or …

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting article about the successes and failures of Yahoo!'s attempt to merge the brash ethos of Hollywood with its relaxed but hard-working Silicon Valley sensibility. Largely concentrated in its Santa Monica satellite office, Yahoo!'s "convergence" team is charged with bringing the kind of content that made empires out of Viacom and the Walt Disney Company to the massive online media and technology company. The convergence of such inherently different corporate cultures hasn't always been smooth, as the article points out. The article is less about what the new breed of Hollywood Internet execs actually …

The latest column from the Hollywood Reporter's Diane Mermigas also talks about traditional media's transition to new media, but she stresses that the success of this transition hinges more on companies' ability to acquire and use consumer analytics than on the buying or aligning with Internet and other new media properties. Utilizing deeper user data is imperative to the future of both advertising and publishers' business models, she says, primarily because today's media-savvy consumers are able to simply tune out marketing initiatives that they don't find relevant. Instead of spending a ton of money producing mass media like movies and …

Friendster, one-time darling of the social networking sphere, has hired investing firm Montgomery & Co. to find a buyer, according to Cnet. Unnamed sources say Friendster has been in talks with Internet media firms about a possible acquisition, although neither company would confirm or deny the claim. One of the sources said Friendster has been looking for a buyer all year, initially in the $200 million range, but now the price has been lowered to between $50 and $100 million due to intense competition from other online community sites like MySpace. Both were founded in 2002, yet Friendster has struggled …

Podcasters, speaking at the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference in Ontario, Canada, mulled the proverbial question: to make money or not to make money. Surprisingly, several opted for the latter, according to a Wired report. Leo Laporte, podcaster of the popular show "This Week In Tech," said he won't give in to advertising on his show, because "if somebody gives you money, you owe them something." Well, techies never seem to be made of the business visionary mold, but Laporte 's keynote underscored the infancy of podcasting: no one is making money on it yet, and its protective founders …

Amazon.com has recently been awarded three interesting patents, one of which could put the brakes on personalization features introduced by companies like Yahoo! and Google. Internet News reports that the online retailing giant last Thursday was awarded patents covering purchase circles, search, and consumer reviews. The first patent covers methods of forming purchasing circles and marketing to them, for example by displaying which member of a certain circle has bought a product that another member is looking at online. The second patent covers targeted search methods of delivering results for related products from multiple categories. A search for Madonna, …

Government intervention in the evolution of the Internet since its early years has been limited, to say the least. Now an omnipresent, worldwide phenomenon, the Internet has become a subject of great political debate between nations. The debate over Internet regulation continues this week at a United Nations meeting in Tunis, where the world is expected to challenge the U.S.' authority over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which manages the domain name system by assigning network names like mediapost.com. As The New York Times points out, some say this gives the U.S. unilateral control …

Yahoo! last week ducked out of the race for America Online because AOL parent Time Warner would not relinquish majority control of the Web portal, and Yahoo! would only offer Internet stock as payment for the stake, the Wall Street Journal reports. Apparently, a Time Warner source said Yahoo! had proposed swapping 20 percent of Yahoo! for 80 percent of AOL's content business, which roughly translates into a $13 billion valuation for the AOL business. Yahoo! said the talks never amounted to any kind of structure for the deal. Time Warner, a little shy about Internet stocks following its merger-disaster …

Audible, Inc., a Web-based aggregator of audio programs, is taking the lead in providing advertisers with podcast measurement data, giving them a way to track how many times shows are downloaded, how long consumers listen, and whether shows are played back. The company, which started out selling audio books, magazines, and newspapers to online consumers, is revising its existing technology to measure podcasts. The service is expected to be available next quarter. As ad agency executives point out, podcasts present an interesting alternative for them--and there are hundreds of popular podcasts--but there's no measurement currently available. Many podcasters are …