Wall Street Journal

As Netflix -- and to a lesser extent Amazon -- see their streaming video audiences surge, is Hulu on the decline?

According to a new survey conducted by Morgan Stanley, perhaps. The investment bank has just released its fourth annual survey on the media, cable and satellite businesses which contains several interesting nuggets.

For one, Netflix usage continues to grow, based on Morgan Stanley’s online survey of over 2,500 adults, while its lower profile competitor Amazon Prime Instant Video is also seeing its audience swell quickly. Thirty percent of respondents reported using Netflix, an increase of 5.5 percentage points versus the 2013 survey. In contrast, roughly 18 percent of respondents claimed to be using Amazon’s service, a 10 percentage point-jump compared to 2013.

What particularly stood out against those increases was that usage of the free streaming site Hulu.com slipped 0.6 percentage points. That’s not a precipitous decline, but in this era of increased Web video consumption, to be even flat should be worrisome.

Other datapoints confirmed the trend: Hulu.com has fallen out of comScore’s top ten video ranking, and has seen its audience slip of late, at least according to Quantcast. It may be that the decision by some of Hulu’s broadcast partners, ABC and Fox in particular, to delay when they put their content on the site has made the site less appealing.

A security researcher says he has discovered a potential privacy glitch in text-messaging service WhatsApp that occurs when users switch phone numbers. Xuyang Li, founder of TrustGo Mobile, says that when he downloaded WhatsApp, he inherited the account information of a woman named Jessica, the previous owner of Li's phone number. Li's WhatsApp messages appeared to recipients to be messages from Jessica -- complete with a profile photo of Jessica wearing a red scarf.

WhatsApp was lauded for its simplicity when Facebook agreed to acquire it in February 2014 for $19 billion. New users register only their phone numbers, and don't create usernames or passwords. Li's incident highlights how that simplicity might work against WhatsApp in this case.

Comcast’s proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable has sparked fears across the media industry that the combined giant would have too much influence over everything from cable industry pricing to the broadband-related services consumers can access.

TV network owners worry the merger could give Comcast too much control over TV-viewing data and the broadband market, industry executives say. Small cable operators, meanwhile, fear they could face higher costs as TV networks try to make up the difference from discounts that a larger Comcast would win. Companies with online-video offerings fret that Comcast could charge more aggressively for broadband use.

Regulators will have to weigh such concerns as they consider the $45 billion deal, which brings together the Nos. 1 and 2 cable operators. Comcast and TWC are expected to submit their merger documents to the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission in coming weeks. After that, the FCC will invite comments from the public and competitors. Industry comments could shape any conditions regulators impose on the deal. The government approved Comcast's NBCUniversal acquisition in 2011 with conditions. Already the top executives at satellite-TV providers DirecTV and Dish Network have come out strongly against the deal, citing concerns about the power Comcast will have in the broadband market, where it would have nearly 40% of US subscribers.

In a few years, Samsung Electronics' new Internet-connected TVs might come with an extra function that you may not have expected: switching on and off living room lights.

“It will be a new interface that drops the usage of cursors, allowing the user to point to objects that exist beyond the TV screen,” Kim Seok-joong, the chief executive and founder of the start-up behind the technology said. VTouch executive testing the company’s gesture-control software.

Kim and his company, VTouch, are currently in talks with Samsung, bidding for a deal to supply a gesture-control software solution to the world’s top TV manufacturer. The Seoul-based startup also recently won an undisclosed amount of investment from another Samsung affiliate.

For Samsung, television sets have long been in need of a makeover that goes beyond adding curves to its design. TVs, which accounted for 17% of the company’s fourth-quarter revenue, haven’t been a profit driver for the company in a long time because of low margins and stiff competition. To bolster the company’s overall consumer electronics business, Samsung has been touting the concept of what it calls the “Smart Home,” where all electronics devices connect to each other over wireless networks, allowing the user to control them from remote places.

[March 11]

Its name has become a verb meaning "to search," but as users shift to mobile devices, Google is suddenly faced with the threat that its search engine -- and its advertising business -- are becoming less relevant.

The company was built with the help of an army of "spiders" deployed to crawl the Web, and sophisticated algorithms to rank the value of pages. But in the mobile age, those spiders can't easily navigate the apps where users are spending most of their time, threatening Google's roughly $50-billion advertising business.

In response, Google in the fall launched an initiative to better see -- and direct -- what smartphone and tablet users do on their devices. The effort seeks to mimic what Google built on the Web, with an index of the content inside mobile apps and links pointing to that content featured in Google's search results on smartphones.

[March 10]

[Commentary] How many black people own a broadcast television station in the United States? The answer is one: Armstrong Williams. I know this because he's a friend.

So imagine my surprise when I heard that the Federal Communications Commission is currently considering pulling the financial rug from under him by changing its regulations to -- get this -- promote diversity.

The reason for the proposed rules shift is that Williams's two television stations operate under a so-called sidecar agreement with a larger broadcast company. Sinclair Broadcasting the larger, white-owned firm, leverages its clout in the market to get better deals from advertisers for the two stations in return for a percentage of Williams' revenues.

This arrangement is not a token deal. Similar agreements are common in the television industry. The difference is that typically all the players are white. Nevertheless, the FCC is proposing new restrictions that would make it harder for broadcast companies to control two stations operating in the same market.The government is concerned that the large broadcast companies are using these sales and services agreements with smaller owners to circumvent current rules intended to create diversity of broadcast property ownership. But without these agreements, there would be no black owners because of "the realities of the current marketplace," says Jane Mago, general counsel of the National Association of Broadcasters.

My suspicion is that liberals at the FCC who claim to be interested in promoting diverse broadcast ownership lose interest if the owner is a conservative like Armstrong Williams. They want diversity -- but not of the political kind.

[Williams is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill]

[March 10]

Competition in the US wireless market has increased, but so have Americans' overall phone bills.

While carriers have trimmed the price of their plans here and there in recent months, billings per user continue to grow amid a shift to smartphones and a surge in wireless Internet use.

The results call into question the notion of a price war in the US market. Rather than aggressively compete outright on price, carriers are tailoring their moves to accomplish other goals as well, like weaning customers off expensive smartphone subsidies and encouraging them to use more data. T-Mobile US raised the cost of its core unlimited data plan. The carrier says it has been competing more effectively by doing away with subscriber "pain points" like service contracts and international data fees. But its executives have also been signaling that they don't plan to start a price war.

"When you really analyze a lot of the pricing moves that have been made, there has not been a significant repricing," Chief Financial Officer Braxton Carter said. To be sure, subscribers can find deals that weren't available before. AT&T said it will cut the price of plans offering unlimited voice and text with two gigabytes of wireless Internet use by $15. A subscriber who brings or buys his own phone can pay as little as $65 a month, about 19% less than previously.

[March 10]

At a meeting with Sprint executives in October, the chief executive of parent company SoftBank lost his temper about the mobile carrier's advertising, complaining that it wasn't luring enough new customers.

"Are you stupid?" yelled Masayoshi Son, who engineered the Japanese company's takeover of the No. 3 wireless provider in the US in 2103 for about $22 billion, according to three people in the room. He slammed his fist on a table and suggested that Sprint fire all its ad agencies and start over.

The 56-year-old Son, a maverick billionaire and one of Japan's best-known CEOs, wants to use Sprint to upend the US wireless industry much the same way he did in Japan with a takeover of beleaguered Vodafone Japan in 2006. He blames a lack of competition between AT&T and Verizon Communications, which together have more than two-thirds of US mobile-phone customers and nearly all the industry's profits, for what he says are slow networks that cost consumers too much.

Son has established a shadow headquarters in San Carlos (CA), a Silicon Valley city near Apple and Google. Son is bringing in about 1,000 SoftBank employees from Japan, who will try to help turn around the struggling mobile carrier and develop new services that SoftBank can use back at home. [March 7]

To a degree shared by few, John Inglis knows the risks of collecting a lot of data on people. Until January, Inglis, who goes by "Chris," was the number-two official at the National Security Agency. He spent much of 2013 pushing back against disclosures from former contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of NSA surveillance.

Now, the former NSA deputy director is warning technology companies that amass vast amounts of personal information to learn from his agency's mistakes. Be transparent about what they collect, and why they collect it, Inglis said.

"There's an enormous amount of data held in the private sector," Inglis said, in his first published interview since leaving government. "There might be some concerns not just on the part of the American public, but the international public."

Samsung spent an estimated $20 million on ads to run during breaks in the Academy Awards broadcast. But Samsung may have got more promotional mileage from Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres during the show itself.

DeGeneres toyed with a white Samsung phone during the broadcast, including when she handed a Galaxy Note 3 to actor Bradley Cooper so he could take a "selfie" photo of himself and other stars including Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Kevin Spacey and Jennifer Lawrence surrounding the host. While the stunt felt spontaneous, it wasn't entirely unplanned.

As part of its sponsorship and ad pact for the Oscars with ABC, the TV network airing the show, Samsung and its media buying firm Starcom MediaVest negotiated to have its Galaxy smartphone integrated into the show, according to two people familiar with the matter. Samsung gave ABC smartphones to use during the broadcast and was promised its devices would get airtime, these people said.

At least one of the product plugs was planned: during the "red carpet" preshow, ABC ran a clip of six aspiring young filmmakers touring Disney Studios. The group were seen in the video using Samsung devices. Advertisers say that product placement combined with ad buys help viewers better remember the products being promoted.