The official blog of Stathis Kassios for Business, Media, Economics & Arts

In a previous blog post I had expressed some concerns about internet sites & platforms that offer free content services like Myspace, that at some bleak point in the future they might stop running their business free of charge. Now the signs seem closer to reality without personally sponsoring a catastrophic prophecy for online users. In recent media industry news, New York Times (one of the biggest and most attractive sites in terms of its readers & visitors) will start providing some articles for free while charging users that want to read more, using some kind of metering system. If you think what this has to do in relation to your favorite music site, I would answer that there in not much of a difference when you consider for example that  News Corporation, which also owns & runs Myspace, includes news sites too in its various media branches These critical decisions could be applied to all of News Corporation's internet business. The free content, the delicate fr...

This decade's rise of TV formats signified the creation of whole series/shows (I also spotted the term "Episodic Television") like Lost, Dexter, The Sopranos, American Idol, etc. which have marked the TV entertainment industry in a way that big networks, are continuously craving for the next new big cash - flow machine, to retain massive audiences around the world. Recently, I decided to start watching & found myself stuck with HBO's multi - nominated & award winning "Six Feet Under" (created by Allan Ball, writer of American Beauty), a black humor - drama comedy, about the peculiar characters of the Fishers, a family that runs a funeral business. The TV formats are here to stay & advertisers are more than happy buying time to let the shows run on the base of a high audience demand which keeps increasing, as ratings show. The media companies will keep searching for trend - setting programmes which increase their revenues, while promising to ...