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"New technologies allow -- indeed, they require -- new strategic planning to ensure the most efficient use of spectrum, a vital public resource, especially given our broadband needs,"

Electronic Arts will be moving away from distributing externally-developed games to focus more on its internal titles, which can generate higher margins, the company said Monday, and it plans to keep its headcount steady through its upcoming fiscal year.

When Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) announced its Nook e-reader in October, the ability to pursue a dual in-store and online sales strategy appeared to be one of the clear advantages it might have over Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). But, as we first reported then, the chain didn't plan to sell Nooks to go in all its stores for the 2009 holidays-and, as it turned out, the combination of demand and distribution issues kept the device from store shelves. Instead, most people who bought Nooks at B&N stores were placing online orders for delivery weeks or months into the future-not buying them for same-day use.

"Although Apple won plaudits from the book publishing industry for offering it more control over pricing and a richer split of sales - publishers retain 70 per cent of sales and have control over the customer pricing of books - the revenue sharing plan makes less sense for recurring charges such as subscriptions, publishers said. The concept of giving away close to a third of subscription sales over an indefinite period was difficult to accept, publishers said. "Thirty per cent forever changes the economics," one media executive in discussions with Apple said. "You can imagine we feel less good about it. Should (subscriptions) be treated differently than single item sales?""

Google announced plans to provide fiber-to-the-home-connections of 1Gbit/sec speeds. Some argue that the announcement may be a negotiating tactic to prompt federal regulators to push for net neutrality.

Former children's laureates Quentin Blake, Anne Fine and Jacqueline Wilson, bestselling authors Jeffrey Archer and Louis de Bernières and critical favourites Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson have all opted out of the controversial Google book settlement, court documents have revealed. Authors who did not wish their books to be part of Google's revised settlement needed to opt out before 28 January, in advance of last week's ruling from Judge Denny Chin over whether to allow Google to go ahead with its divisive plans to digitise millions of books. The judge ended up delaying his ruling, after receiving more than 500 written submissions, but court documents related to the case show that more than 6,500 authors, publishers and literary agents have opted out of the settlement.

The Comcast-NBC show returned to Capitol Hill Thursday as legislators pressed executives over the companies' plans to create a $30 billion media juggernaut. During a lengthy round of questioning, Comcast (CMCSA) CEO Brian Roberts and NBC Universal chieftain Jeff Zucker denied that the merger would be anti-competitive and would lead to layoffs. But critics were unswayed, including one who went as far as to say the deal would "undermine American democracy."

The BBC is poised to sell its selection of UK-based magazines, including such titles as BBC Good Food, Gardening World, Top Gear and Radio Times. The corporation is looking to cut over $150 million USD in overhead costs and evidently plans to accomplish this by "looking to move away from physical media" and focusing more deeply on digital media as well as looking overseas for merger opportunities. The BBC has already begun stripping itself of media such as audio books, non-BBC channels outside the UK and two radio stations. It also cut the number of websites it owns by half, resulting in an estimated loss of 600 jobs.

"Who has time to sit on the couch and watch TV anymore? In the last 10 years, broadcasters have lost 25 percent of their audience. So to win back some viewers, the industry has a plan to grab their attention while they are on the move. Beginning in April, eight television stations in Washington, D.C., will broadcast a signal for a new class of devices that can show programming, even in a car at high speed. In all, 30 stations in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington have installed the necessary equipment, at a cost of $75,000 to $150,000

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski spoke today about some of the likely recommendations in the National Broadband Plan. Among them is a goal of 100 million households at speeds of 100 Megabits per second."

The difficulties currently facing the news industry include formulating a comprehensive new business plan and competing economic models for online journalism.

A very small number of news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and Newsday, already charge online readers, each with a system developed largely in-house, and The New York Times announced recently that it planned to do the same. But with advertising plummeting, many other publishers eager for a new source of revenue are considering making the switch, despite the risk of losing audience and advertising.

In another blow to Google's plan to create a giant digital library and bookstore, the Justice Department on Thursday said that a class-action settlement between the company and groups representing authors and publishers had significant legal problems, even after recent revisions.

Google's plan to digitize the world's books into a combination research library and bookstore has hit another snag, in the form of a U.S. Justice Department statement that "despite substantial progress made, issues remain" with the proposed settlement agreement of the class action lawsuit The Authors Guild Inc. et al. v. Google Inc.

"Apple's iPad is due in late March, pending FCC approval, and on the FCC's official broadband blog, Director/Scenario Planning Phil Bellaria and Wireless Bureau Deputy Chief John Leibovitz say there may be trouble ahead if the device drives up demand for mobile broadband. They write that the iPad announcement on January 27 "set off a new round of reports of networks overburdened by a data flow they were not build to handle," saying the problems are reminiscent of the outages AOL users ran into when the then-dialup service went to unlimited use in 1996 -- problems that persisted for months."

Google's plan to digitize the world's books into a combination research library and bookstore has hit another snag, in the form of a U.S. Justice Department statement that "despite substantial progress made, issues remain" with the proposed settlement agreement of the class action lawsuit The Authors Guild Inc. et al. v. Google Inc.

FCC's net neutrality regulations will allow ISPs to block BitTorrent. "The new proposed net neutrality regulations would allow the same practices that net neutrality was first invoked to prevent."

"The holding company of MediaNews Group Inc., the publisher of dozens of newspapers including the Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News, plans to file for bankruptcy protection as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter."

"The Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan, announced last week, is aimed at providing nearly universal, affordable broadband service by 2020. And while it takes many admirable steps - including very important efforts toward opening space in the broadcast spectrum - it does not address the source of the access problem: without a major policy shift to increase competition, broadband service in the United States will continue to lag far behind the rest of the developed world."