In satellite sports
skirmish, XM snags golf rights
XM and Sirius satellite radio
companies continue to play tug-of-war over new sports programming to
attract subscribers. Yesterday XM picked up pro golf, becoming the
official celestial radio partner for the PGA Tour. The company will not
reveal how much it paid in the deal. The two companies have made many
sports deals in the past year. NASCAR will switch to Sirius in 2007 in a
five-year, $107.5 million deal announced last month. Sirius also has lined
up the NBA and NFL. Both providers stream college basketball and football.
XM has baseball and will partner with programming company PureGolf to help
create enough news and talk to fill a channel with golf content 24 hours a
day.
Disney offers movies for PlayStation Portable
Sony’s PlayStation Portable
is becoming more attractive to non-gamer consumers. The home video arm of
the Walt Disney Co. said yesterday that it will release movies in a format
specifically for the PSP. Five movies will be released this spring:
"National Treasure,'' "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of
the Black Pearl,'' "Reign of Fire,'' "Kill Bill Vol. 1'' and
"Hero.'' More titles will be announced during the year. The UMD
format used by the PSP holds about three times the capacity of a regular
CD. Sony will release the device in North America on March 24.
Sour 'Berry: PDA makers pay $450M to settle suit
The popular Blackberry PDA is a winner for on-the-go
emailers, but its makers were big losers in court yesterday. Canadian
technology company Research In Motion agreed to pay Virginia-based
NTP $450 million to settle a patent infringement suit. This comes after a
legal battle that began in 2002, when NTP claimed that RIM infringed on 16
of its patents, including its radio communications technology. In August
2003, a Virginia federal court agreed that 11 of those 16 patents were
violated and awarded NTP $54 million in damages, as well as an 8.6 percent
royalty on all the revenue from U.S. Blackberry sales. RIM appealed, and
in December a three-judge U.S. Appeals court panel struck down the verdict
and sent it back to a lower court. Under the terms of the agreement, NTP
has granted Research in Motion the right to continue its
Blackberry-related business without further interference.
Integrate
your Yahoo! tools for one mega-blog
Blogging could soon be a whole lot easier. The new
Yahoo! 360 service is designed to enable Yahoo! users to pull content from
the web site's discussion groups and online photo albums and put them into
their own blogs. Yahoo 360 can be combined with several Yahoo products,
including instant messaging and internet radio. The new service is being
tested by a small group of company employees now, but the test will be
opened to more people on March 29. The project has been in the works since
last year under the code name Mingle.
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