March 28, 2024

HuffPost Live in Deal With AXS to Put Show on Cable

The Huffington Post has found a partial home on cable television for its eight-month-old Internet channel, HuffPost Live, courtesy of Mark Cuban.

The company announced Sunday night that Mr. Cuban’s cable channel AXS TV, previously known as HDNet, would soon carry HuffPost Live’s programming for six hours a day. AXS and The Huffington Post will try to replicate some of the interactivity of the Internet channel by showing online comments on the right side of the television screen, and later by releasing an app that will encourage AXS viewers to comment on what they are watching.

The unorthodox deal may help expose HuffPost Live to more people. But it also underscores how hard it is for Internet video start-ups to find a place on cable systems, which are controlled by a handful of big companies that are reluctant to add channels.

Executives at The Huffington Post have been trying for months to have their channel picked up by cable and satellite operators, with nothing to show for it yet. Other backers of Internet channels have received lukewarm receptions at best. The most successful such channel, Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, has been picked up by Dish Network and four small cable companies and has been encouraging fans to put pressure on other operators.

In an interview, Roy Sekoff, the president and co-creator of HuffPost Live, did not rule out full-blown cable distribution in the future. He said AXS provided “a way to get on now,” emphasizing “now.”

The telecast will start on May 13. It will be shown weekdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern time (the first half of HuffPost Live’s daily output), replacing the random assortment of repeats that AXS currently schedules during the day. Mr. Sekoff said The Huffington Post was not paying for the distribution, and AXS is not paying for the programming; the arrangement is mutually beneficial, he suggested, something that Mr. Cuban affirmed in a separate interview.

“It’s an opportunity for both of us to grow our audiences during the day,” he said.

AXS has existed since last July, when Mr. Cuban teamed up with Ryan Seacrest, the talent agency Creative Artists Agency and the events company Anschutz Entertainment Group to reformat HDNet, which Mr. Cuban helped to found in 2001. In February another company, the CBS Corporation, took an equity stake in AXS and said it would provide programming and promotional opportunities.

AXS chooses not to be rated by the Nielsen Company, a reflection of the fact that it reaches a relatively small number of viewers. It is available in about 41 million of the 100 million American households that pay for television.

AXS has sought to be known for live programming, especially live concerts. HuffPost Live, on the other hand, is a Web-influenced talk show about politics, current affairs and pop culture. “But it’s still real-time and I think that’s the more important element,” Mr. Cuban said.

The deal was a byproduct of Mr. Cuban’s friendship with Tim Armstrong, the chief executive of The Huffington Post’s parent company, AOL. The two companies may split the advertising revenue that comes from the AXS version of the programming. (One possibility is interstitial ads during the breaks between segments.) HuffPost Live’s content will not change significantly, but the producers might tap into AXS’s contacts and promote AXS’s concerts.

On HuffPost Live, the hosts (there are nine currently) take turns moderating conversations, some upward of half an hour long, with guests appearing in person and via webcams. Viewers can watch the live stream, but the vast majority of views come later, when clips of the conversations are attached to articles on AOL and Huffington Post Web pages. Mr. Sekoff said there were 51 million live and recorded streams in March.

HuffPost Live loses money, but it does bring in some revenue through the ads that precede the clips. Mr. Sekoff said he wanted to pursue more advertiser integrations in the future. One early example is a video series called “Tech Game Changers,” sponsored by Verizon.

He said he was thrilled to have access to big-screen TVs through AXS, complementing the existing streams for phones and computers. “We’re not exactly sure what the future’s going to look like, but we think it’s going to look something like this,” he said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/business/media/deal-puts-huffington-post-channel-on-cable-tv.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Familiar TV Anchors Move On, Hoping to Profit on Their Own

Television is undergoing a sea change this season as a dozen famous television anchors and celebrities — whose shows are watched by more than 40 million viewers every day — are leaving their longtime perches.

To name a few, on Friday, Jim Lehrer ended his daily duties on the “PBS NewsHour”; on Monday, Scott Pelley replaced Katie Couric on the “CBS Evening News”; on Wednesday, Meredith Vieira will leave the “Today” show on NBC; and later this month, her former colleague Keith Olbermann will start a new show on Current TV.

By now, viewers may barely recognize their favorite shows and channels.

It seems like the most tumultuous time on the small screen in a generation, but much of the tumult is off the screen, in business meetings about how the media industry is transforming.

Although some of those departing, like Mr. Lehrer and Regis Philbin, are leaving their shows because of a generational shift, others are moving on because they want a bigger financial stake in their own brands. Ms. Couric, Oprah Winfrey and Glenn Beck, among others, are taking equity stakes in themselves, separating from the media conglomerates that have profited mightily from their star power.

On Tuesday, Mr. Beck became the latest to take the leap, announcing his own Internet network for subscribers. The promise is that different ways of delivering content, like cable, syndication and the Web, will prove to be more lucrative for star anchors and hosts — still largely an unproven proposition.

As the media industry recovers from the recession, the search is on for the next big thing, and for equally big ratings. “The changes have been nothing less than seismic — so seismic, in fact, that the next generation needs to work even harder to try to put the pieces back together or get some semblance of an audience,” said Jonathan Wald, who produces Piers Morgan’s nightly program on CNN. Mr. Morgan replaced Larry King in January.

Just as the Internet is emboldening stars, it is emboldening media companies: Comcast, which announced its successful bid on Tuesday for eight more years of Olympic Games, intends to make more of the games available online, and Disney intends to turn its main Web site, Disney.com, into an online video destination not unlike Netflix or Hulu.

“We believe we have an opportunity to deliver content directly to consumers,” Bob Iger, the Disney chief executive, told investors last week.

Ms. Winfrey’s arrangement for her new cable channel, called OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, may be an inspiration for others: her production company owns half of OWN, so if it is a success, Ms. Winfrey, 57, already a billionaire, could earn far more money than she did on an annual basis on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” the 25-year-old broadcast talk show that ended last month.

All of these comings and goings, of course, hinge on consumers’ willingness to accept change and to follow their favorite hosts to new media homes. In an interview, Ms. Winfrey said she had smiled when she read a viewer’s comment on an Oprah.com message board that said her move from broadcast to cable created no problem “that my changing channels cannot fix.” But Ms. Winfrey acknowledged that finding OWN on the cable lineup has been a big problem for some people, and said she wished more people were watching.

Ms. Couric announced on Monday that she was creating a daytime talk show not unlike Ms. Winfrey’s for the fall of 2012. The fact that Ms. Couric, 54, owns the show with a partner made it an especially attractive proposition for her.

Similarly, Mr. Olbermann walked away from MSNBC in January for a job — and an equity stake — at Current, where he starts on June 20, and Mr. Beck will leave Fox News at the end of this month. Mr. Beck will wholly own his new online network, GBTV, which will charge $5 to $10 a month.

Robust broadband Internet access and connected devices like cellphones and laptops have the potential to let stars “break away from the traditional content-distribution ecosystem,” said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst with BTIG Capital.

Of course, people like Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Beck never would have become stars without that very ecosystem.

Sweeping changes in the media industry have made this an especially stressful time for talent. For some, there is a cautionary model in mind for the future: Johnny Carson, who rarely appeared in public after exiting “The Tonight Show” in 1992 and was said to be deeply unhappy. No stars this year seem to be taking that approach.

In the fall, for instance, Mr. Philbin, 79, is leaving his daytime talk show, “Live with Regis and Kelly,” after 28 years. “Time for the old guard to go!” Mr. Philbin said, laughing, in an interview last week.

But this does not mean he is retiring. In fact, Mr. Philbin went out of his way to say he was not. “I’m getting to the end of the line, and I thought, ‘Maybe I’d like to try to do something a little different,’ ” Mr. Philbin said, declining to disclose any details about his next show or shows.

It may be easy to leave a television show, but it is certainly hard to stay away from television. Mr. Philbin’s friend, Mr. King, has acknowledged that fact in interviews, saying that his instinct on big news nights is still to head into the studio. Mr. King is now hosting four hourlong specials for CNN each year.

For some, Tom Brokaw is the model. He stepped down from “NBC Nightly News” in 2004, but he produces and hosts documentaries, writes books and offers commentary on NBC. “I more than keep my hand in, and yet I’m not chained to a desk,” he wrote in an e-mail message on Tuesday night during an intermission from “Don Pasqual,” an opera performance at Holland Park in London.

Mr. Lehrer, 78, who had gradually reduced his role on the “News Hour” for two years before deciding to stop being a regular anchor, will continue to weigh in on editorial decisions, and will anchor on some Fridays.

Ms. Vieira, 57, who will be toasted by her co-hosts Wednesday morning, told “Today” viewers last month that “I’ve really had a great time, but time is one of those weird things — you can never get enough of it.” She said she wanted more time with her family.

Like Mr. King and Mr. Lehrer, Ms. Vieira will still have a part-time job: she is expected to meet this month with NBC News executives to talk about becoming a contributor to a prime time newsmagazine that NBC is creating.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=904fe39250b3ea2319dca113bb7efb24

Gold Mania in the Yukon

Recently, I went to see them again in their new home in Whitehorse, the territorial capital, and I sat with Ryan one night as he talked business over the phone. His right arm was stretched around the back of his head, holding his BlackBerry to his left ear. “Those guys were at 6 cents a share last year, now they are over a buck, and they got nothing,” he said. “When you look at it, it’s like a hundred claims.” The shares Ryan was talking about belonged to a mineral-exploration company, one of his many competitors. The claims are mining claims, a government license to extract minerals from a 50-acre patch of wilderness. To Ryan, a hundred claims is pathetic. He and Wood own more than 35,000 claims. “We just passed Luxembourg, and over the summer we’ll be the size of Samoa,” he continued, describing just one of his projects. Credible estimates of the amount of gold still buried in his properties run to the billions of dollars.

Ryan is the king of a new Yukon gold rush, the biggest since the legendary Klondike stampede a century ago. Behind this stampede is the rising price of gold, and behind this price is fear. As the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates very low to stimulate the economy, gold bugs make nightmarish predictions that loose money and a huge federal deficit will crush the value of the dollar and bring ruinous inflation. Gold holds its value when national currencies collapse and is easily imported and universally traded. It feels like the perfect investment for the apocalypse. A few weeks ago, gold passed $1,500 an ounce, an astonishing level. George Soros warned of a bubble back when gold was barely over $1,000. Glenn Beck cried that the run was just beginning: just wait until the United States is bankrupt and the real trouble starts. Gold bulls talk of $2,000 gold, $5,000 gold, even $10,000 gold. But 10 years ago, when Ryan made his first discoveries, nobody cared at all.

Ryan has been in the woods his whole life. At age 15, he was snaring foxes, martens and mink near Timmins, Ontario, where his father worked in a mine. Trapping in Canada is regulated through licenses called trap lines, and Ryan didn’t have a trap line of his own, he just went where he pleased. This is called poaching, and eventually he was caught. Instead of turning him in, the trapper he was poaching from put him to work. Ryan would skin animals until midnight, then go to school without bathing. Looking back, he understands why he was socially isolated. In his 20s, Ryan came west to work a trap line of his own in the sparsely populated expanse of the Yukon, but his plan changed when he learned about mushrooms.

Twenty years ago there was a kind of gold rush in mushrooms that enticed itinerant pickers to make a long circuit through British Columbia, Alaska and the Yukon, collecting chanterelles, matsutakes and morels. The market was driven by demand in Paris and Tokyo, and brokers built a network of little buying stations wherever mushrooms were fruiting. It was cash on the ground, and the pickers taunted one another with stories of thousand-dollar days. Ryan eventually settled near Dawson, once the roaring center of the Klondike gold fields, now a community of about 2,000 people surrounded by wilderness and close to good morel-picking territory.

Ryan met Wood in 1992 at the height of the mushroom season. He was down in Whitehorse shopping for supplies when he noticed a young woman standing outdoors in spangled tights selling bundles of sage. Wood, who was from New Brunswick, had been working for a Toronto bank, but she didn’t like it. After she quit, she took her savings and rode across the continent on a motorcycle. By the time she got to Whitehorse, her cash was gone. When Ryan walked up, she was reorganizing the last of the sage into smaller packets so she wouldn’t run out of stock before something else turned up. He was a striking person, compact and strong, with hair braided nearly to his waist. And he had a good thing going: the banks of the White River should be thick with morels. Did she want to come pick with him?

Gary Wolf (gw@aether.com) is a contributing editor for Wired. His last article for the magazine was about self-measurement. Editor: Vera Titunik (v.titunik-maggroup@nytimes.com).

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6a5e186a856695c51b285b21a10f347f