The Breakfast Meeting

What’s making news in media.

Walt Disney World plans to begin introducing a vacation management system called MyMagic+ in the coming months that will drastically change the way Disney World visitors — some 30 million people a year — do just about everything. Visitors will wear rubber bracelets encoded with credit card information allowing them to buy everything from corn dogs to Mickey Mouse ears with a tap of the wrist. Smartphone alerts will signal when it is time to ride Space Mountain without standing in line. The ambitious plan, as Brooks Barnes reports, moves Disney deeper into the hotly debated terrain of personal data collection. Like most major companies, Disney wants to have as much information about its customers’ preferences as it can get, so it can appeal to them more efficiently. The company already collects data to use in future sales campaigns, but parts of MyMagic+ will allow Disney to track guest behavior in minute detail for the first time.

The future of the television will be on display this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where television makers like Samsung, Sony, LG and Panasonic will try to grab the attention of convention attendees otherwise occupied with the latest smartphones, laptops and tablets. To answer the challenge, the television makers will display new products with supersize screens and quadrupled levels of detail in their images. As Brian X. Chen reports, the manufacturers will also continue to push the idea of “smart” sets by adding applications and other interactive elements. For the electronics industry, the television is an important but increasingly difficult product to sell.

Obscure cable channels are feeling the heat from major cable distributors that increasingly are talking about dropping underperforming channels from their lineups. As Brian Stelter reports, distributors have talked for years about belt-tightening, but two things are different now: potential Web competitors are creeping up and programming costs are soaring, particularly for sports channels and broadcasters. Independently owned channels are more imperiled than low-rated channels owned by media conglomerates like the Walt Disney Company and Viacom. VH1 Classic and ESPNU are not going away any time soon, but on New Year’s Day, Verizon FiOS yanked Youtoo TV, a fledgling channel that features videos submitted by viewers, and Time Warner Cable dropped Ovation, which bills itself as an arts and culture channel. At the same time, in a move criticized by the programmers of some low-rated channels, distributors continue to give new and unproven channels a chance. Time Warner Cable, for example, started to carry BBC World News and RLTV, formerly called Retirement Living TV, in the last few months.

Edward Wyatt reports that the Federal Trade Commission’s decision to drop its two-year investigation into Google has drawn criticism from some observers who believe the commission’s inquiry focused on the wrong area. Instead of considering harm to people who come to Google to search for information, Google’s competitors and their supporters say the government should have been looking at whether Google’s actions harmed its real customers — the companies that pay billions of dollars each year to advertise on Google’s site. In its reports, the F.T.C. did not detail how it defined harm or what quantitative measures it had used to determine that Google users were better off. But interviews with people on all sides of the investigation — government officials, Google supporters, advocates for Microsoft and other competitors, and antitrust experts and economists — show that many of the yardsticks the commission used to measure its outcomes were remarkably similar to Google’s own. Not surprisingly, they cast Google in a favorable light. F.T.C. officials said they considered data from a wide range of sources — those with interests aligned with Google as well as against it. The officials also bought quantitative data about Internet usage and conducted interviews with experts who were independent of all sides.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/the-breakfast-meeting-a-digital-kingdom-and-the-future-of-tvs/?partner=rss&emc=rss