Napster today reported financial results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended March 31, 2007. Losses continue at the company, despite increased revenues.

Net revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007 grew to $29.1 million, up from $28.4 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2007. Net loss for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007 was $8.5 million, or $1.3 million less than the same quarter of fiscal 2006.

Net revenue for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2007 was $111.1 million, up 17% from $94.7 million in fiscal 2006. Net loss for fiscal 2007 was $36.8 million, compared to net loss of $54.9 million in fiscal 2006.

ESPN today launched a set of free, downloadable video podcasts available daily.

The first video podcast offerings include:

• a downloadable version of the popular ESPN.com SportsCenter Minute;
• the “Big Finish” from ESPN‚Äôs Pardon The Interruption (PTI);
• the “First Word” segment from ESPN‚Äôs Around The Horn;
• ESPN Digital Media‚Äôs “Fantasy Focus” daily original fantasy sports news and analysis program (also available daily on ESPN.com and ESPN Mobile TV); and
• the “Mike & Mike Moment” from the popular morning radio and television program.

Each podcast is between two and seven minutes in length, in MPEG-4 format, and can be watched on fans’ computers or on portable digital devices.

“Sports fans want their video everywhere they are and on any device,” said John Kosner, senior vice president, ESPN New Media. “Through downloadable video, online video at ESPN.com and on your phone, plus live and on-demand events on ESPN360.com, we continue to bring fans the very best content in sports.”

Details are available at the ESPN PodCenter.

The New York Times has an interesting article today about how the CW network plans to offer advertisers two more ways to try holding the attention of viewers during commercial breaks.

One idea is to run quickie commercials of only five seconds each. The other is to schedule a series with no commercial breaks at all, and instead incorporate sponsors’ products into each episode.

The proposals are the most recent to be advanced by the major networks, broadcast and cable, as they grapple with the problem of keeping viewers from changing channels during commercials — or, if the viewing is being done on digital video recorders, from fast-forwarding through the spots.

The need for the networks to “engage with viewers to stay with the commercials,” as Dawn Ostroff, president for entertainment at CW, described it, is intensifying for a couple of reasons. One is that Nielsen Media Research is about to change the way it reports the ratings data long used by advertisers to decide where to run commercials. On May 31, Nielsen is to start measuring the viewership of the commercials as well as the programs.

The other reason to tinker with traditional commercial breaks is the penchant of DVR owners to skip through spots when they play back recorded programs. That problem is getting worse as more households acquire DVRs.

The interest in “quickie” commercials and sponsored product placement is smart, and something that commercial video podcasters should evaluate, too. People are choosing Internet video because it lets them avoid commercials and make better use of their time. Instead of fighting this and tacking long ads onto Web videos, advertisers and publishers need to experiment with short, smart ads that are contextual and relevant to the viewer. This isn’t as obvious or as easy as it sounds, though, so the time to start experimenting is now.

VocalBooth.com, a manufacturer of modular sound reduction enclosures, has released their 14 Carat Diamond Series vocal booths. The Diamond Series, named for its shape, is a five-sided booth engineered to utilize the corner of a room. The five sided design also creates non-parallel walls that help to reduce standing waves.

The new 14 Carat series is the largest of the Diamonds with the approximate volume of a 7’x7′ square room. the booth comes in single wall and more sound proof double wall design. The booths can be assembled and taken down an unlimited number of times. Customization options range from colors, foams, fabrics, windows, wood floors and more.

VocalBooth.com rooms are completely enclosed systems with active ventilation, lighting, optional windows and cable passage. Standard and custom sizes range from 4’x4′ up to 16’x16′, with pricing starting at $2,799 (shipping included).

Applications include recording, voice over, broadcast, studio control, audio post production, rehearsal and drum isolation. The new 14 Carat series starts off at $7,595 (shipping included) and is available now.

YouTube’s co-founders on Thursday challenged the Pentagon’s assertion that soldiers overseas were sapping too much bandwidth by watching online videos, the military’s principal reason for blocking YouTube and other popular Web sites from Defense Department computers.

“They said it might be a bandwidth issue, but they created the Internet, so I don’t know what the problem is,” said Chief Executive Chad Hurley. YouTube is trying to work with the Pentagon in hopes the military will reverse course or at least partially repeal the ban.

“We’d like to explore what’s at issue here and talk about what we can do to sort out what’s the issue here,” said YouTube spokeswoman Julie Supan.

The Pentagon said this week it was cutting off service members’ access to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other Web sites, some of which are used by soldiers on the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan to post videos and journals for friends and family back home.

via SeattlePI

Engadget has issued a mea culpa for “AppleGate” – its announcement that Apple was delaying the iPhone and the next version of OS X for several months. The story, which turned out to be unfounded, lost Apple stock owners an amazing $4 billion with minutes.

Engadget’s Ryan Block had the task of explaining their situation:

Credibility and trust is the currency of our realm, and it’s clear we lost some of that. (And to be 100% clear, no one at Engadget is allowed to own stock in any of the companies we write about.) We take what we do very seriously and would never knowingly pass along information that we believed could be false or inaccurate; in this case, as stated above, we had confirmation from within Apple that this was in fact information that been distributed via Apple’s internal corporate email system. If we had had any inkling that ANYONE could have exploited that system that would have greatly affected how we proceeded.

Engadget’s decision to run a story based on flimsy information is becoming all too common in the blogosphere. As blogs compete for audience, there’s more and more pressure to run stories, even if they’re based on little more than rumors. This ultimately damages the credibility of independent blogs.

Valleywag has gained a reputation for publishing stories that turn out to be unfounded, with its stories on Natalie Portman’s 24/7 “lifecast” and others. Many Apple sites seem to thrive on these types of stories.

When a site like Engadget starts doing this, though, and it costs people (at least temporarily) $4 billion dollars, it’s easy to see that this is a dangerous trend for the blogging world. Sites like Valleywag and Engadget have focused an incredible amount of time and attention from bloggers & podcasters on stories that have turned out to be fake. When this happens, it affects the mainstream perception of all indie blogs and podcasters.

Unfortunately, Valleywag & Engadget’s unfounded stories are a catch-22 for other tech sites. You can treat these stories as unreliable, as we chose to do with Engadget’s iPhone delay article, and risk leaving readers uninformed about potentially important news events; or you can treat them as legitimate or questionable, as we chose to do with Valleywag’s story on the Natalie Portman lifecast, and end up giving credence to bogus stories.

Over at TechCrunch, Mike Arrington comments that AppleGate may prove to be an important milestone for the blogosphere:

“I‚Äôm not sure we (bloggers) understood quite how much influence we really had until yesterday. ‚ÄúAppleGate‚Äù will become an important historical footnote for the development of blogs and the evolution of the news and editorial business more generally.”

If AppleGate proves to be a milestone in the development of blogging, it may be remembered as the point at which bloggers realized that they had become mainstream media, and had earned a level of trust that needs to be treated with care.

MusicXPC‘s Professional S3 studio production computer is a Windows-based system specially tweaked for media production, configured from the BIOS up to handle audio tracks, effects and virtual instruments with ease.

The system features an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.4GHz with a 4MB L2 Cache on a 1066 MHz FSB. The machine comes with 2GB of custom-manufactured DDR2 Dual Channel 800 MHz RAM, an 18x dual-layer DVD+/-RW [48x40x18x18], and four separate SATA II 7200RPM hard drives providing over 1.2 Terabytes of total storage. The hard drives [1x 250GB and 3x 320GB] each have a 16MB cache for fast throughput and high track counts.

The Professional S3 comes with virtually all popular interfaces, ports, and connectors, including FireWire, USB 2.0, PCI and Gigabit LAN. Additionally, the Professional S3 provides a 256MB DDR2 PCI-E x16 Dual Channel Graphics Card (Dual DVI/ VGA), with Dual-Link DVI- DVI-I, TV-Out, and HDTV support. The operation of the machine is quiet, utilizing patented heat pipe technology with custom-tuned low-RPM fans.

The latest generation of MusicXPC computers features a comprehensive back-up/restore system. The back-up/restore system allows the user to restore the computer to factory setting even after a catastrophic failure, a drive crash or even a re-formatting. The factory state is stored in an invisible part of the main hard drive. This feature will allow musicians to minimize downtime caused by system failures.

The Professional S3 is available at music retailers and retails for USD $2,799.00.

Apple Inc.¬†has received the official go-ahead on the iPhone, its first mobile handset,¬†from the Federal Communications Commission. The innovative phone promises to combine cell phone capabilities with the iPod’s media power and cutting-edge mobile Internet features.

In an SAR Test Report conducted on February 6th, 2007, FCC Test Lab Manager Lothar Schmidt wrote the following:

“The Apple Inc. A1203 GSM Cellular Telephone with Bluetooth and Wifi, FCC ID: BCGA1203, is in compliance with the limits for general population uncontrolled exposure specified in FCC 2.1093. The device was tested according to the measurement standards and procedures specified in FCC OET Bulletin 65, Supplement C (Edition 01-01) and IEEE p1528/D1.2, April 21, 2003.”

Per Apple’s request, the test report omitted the following for “short term” confidentiality reasons: Test Setup Photos, External Photographs, Internal Photographs, and the iPhone User Manual. Permanent confidentiality omissions included the iPhone’s Block Diagram, Operational Description, Radio Schematic, Radio Bill of Material, Radio Tune-up Procedure, and Exhibit notes.

The iPhone is scheduled for release in late June.

via Apple Insider

The market for premium Internet content is exploding, according to ABI Research, as major studios and content aggregators are working to make some of their content available as digital downloads. They expect the television to become the ultimate destination for Internet video content, and for set-top box Internet video to deliver $1.5 billion in service revenue by 2012.

“The biggest challenge for online video providers and consumer platform companies today is bridging to the TV,” says ABI Research director Michael Wolf. “Over the next few years new solutions from the likes of Apple, Netgear, and Sony will help cross this divide, making √† la carte video download and viewing much easier.”

“That doesn‚Äôt mean this transition will be an easy one,” cautions Wolf, “factors such as video quality, pricing of content, and technical glitches will persist for some time.”

comScore today released the results of a study profiling the “iTunes podcasting audience”. The study, sponsored by mobile advertising service Ad Infuse, focused on users who downloaded podcasts via iTunes in October 2006. It found the podcast audience to an attractive demographic for advertisers, with a core audience of high-income, well-educated people.

Research Highlights:

• Males represented a significantly larger share (63 percent) of the audience than did females (37 percent).
• 18-24 year olds represented a substantial share of the audience (29 percent) and were more than twice as likely as the average Internet user to download podcasts.
• People between the ages of 35-54 represented about half of the podcasting audience and were also more likely than average to download podcasts.

“The comScore study reveals significant advertising opportunities among several consumer segments,” said Nick Tabbal, comScore senior vice president of media and entertainment solutions. “While the conventional wisdom says that only young, tech-savvy consumers are downloading and listening to podcasts, there is also a sizable market among 35-54 year olds, indicating that the audience is broader than previously thought.”