April 2012

A Sony-led consortium won European Union clearance on Thursday for its $2.2 billion purchase of EMI’s music publishing business, giving unexpectedly early antitrust approval to one-half of a deal to split the independent British music group. To allay the European Commission’s competition concerns, Sony will sell EMI Music Publishing catalogues generating about €25 million in revenues annually from songwriters such as Ozzy Osbourne, Culture Club and Robbie Williams. While Sony was forced to sweeten the original offer it made to the Commission, winning early clearance is an important breakthrough for the consortium that will allow it to avoid a lengthy in-depth investigation.

Verizon Wireless has been "very, very good stewards of spectrum," Verizon Communications chief financial officer Fran Shammo said, responding to accusations by public interest groups that the carrier has been hoarding valuable wireless spectrum since 2008.

"We are responsible and efficient owners of the spectrum, and as a company policy we would not hoard the spectrum," he said. The spectrum Verizon seeks to buy from cable companies is very efficient from an "overbuild perspective" on the capacity of the Verizon Wireless LTE platform, particularly in the East, Shammo said. That means the lower 700 MHz A and B licenses do not "fit as nicely into our spectrum holdings as it may for others... so we think it is the prudent thing to do to sell these licenses off to the rest of the industry for the benefit of their customers and to enhance their ability to build out 4G LTE," he said. Shammo added, "We did not just wake up yesterday and decide we were going to sell spectrum because we ran into a roadblock at the FCC." Verizon is "still very confident" that the AWS deals will receive approval from the FCC and Department of Justice, he said. The auction of the 700 MHz A and B blocks is contingent on the approval of the AWS spectrum sale "because obviously, we would need this spectrum if that is not approved," Shammo said.

News that the online giant Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion drew two different reactions in social media last week: shock at the price tag and skepticism about how Facebook would impact the popular photo-sharing app. For the week of April 9-13, the internet business acquisition was the most discussed topic on blogs and the third most discussed on Twitter, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Television viewers in the U.S. have more choices than ever, both in terms of how and where they tune in and in what they watch. In the first of a three-part insight series, Nielsen looked at viewership and advertising across five traditional primetime genres and found that dramas account for the largest share of viewership, timeshifting and ad spend, while reality programs claimed the largest share of product placements. The Advertising & Audiences Report also found that, when watching at home, 43 percent of timeshifted primetime broadcast programming is played back the same day it was recorded and 88 percent is played back within three days.

Other primetime TV findings include:

• During primetime, the share of viewership devoted to sitcoms has risen steadily over the past three years.
• $72 billion was spent on TV advertising in the U.S. in 2011, with $14 billion allocated during these five traditional primetime genres.
• More than half of all broadcast TV product placements during primetime took place on reality programs (4,664).