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Warner Bros. Entertainment Group is tired of guessing about how the studio's content will appear on the Web or handheld devices.

That's why the company has built a new media center designed to test how consumers respond to Web sites, consumer electronics, and video-on-demand services that feature the studio's movies and TV shows.

The company behind such films and TV shows as I am Legend, Michael Clayton, and ER, has outfitted the media center with Xboxes, PSPs, iPods, Macbooks, varying brands of PCs, DirectTV, and a plethora of cable subscription services.

The company will bring in everyday … Read more

An array of classic TV shows from CBS are now available online, the network's CBS Interactive division announced Thursday.

Full-length episodes of Star Trek, Melrose Place, Hawaii Five-O, MacGyver, and The Twilight Zone have been added to the lineup of the company's CBS Audience Network, as well as its central streaming-video site. All of it is free and ad-supported; only select seasons of each show are currently available, but CBS has hinted that more episodes, as well as additional TV shows, will go up in the near future.

The CBS Audience Network consists of more than 300 partners, … Read more

Fresh off launching an ad-supported streaming music service for its Last.fm property, CBS Interactive is already touting success.

According to a release from CBS on Friday, there were 85 percent more unique listeners on Last.fm on Wednesday, January 23--the day that CBS Corporation and Last.fm announced the service--than there had been on the previous Wednesday. The next day, Thursday, saw an 80 percent increase from the previous Thursday, which CBS took as evidence that it wasn't just a single-day phenomenon.

Last.fm had previously offered streaming music primarily in 30-second clips. But thanks to licensing agreements … Read more

It's no secret: ad-supported streaming music, held up as an alternative to both paid downloads and free-for-all piracy, has hit some twists and snags. A number of well-funded start-ups, like SpiralFrog, dove into the space and few have emerged intact. Only one, Imeem, can really claim to be a success--it has licensing deals with all four major music labels--but it's still been criticized for a tepid user experience.

So it was a bit of a surprise when CBS' big announcement about Last.fm, the music-based social network it purchased last year, was the launch of a free, ad-supported … Read more

CBS has alerted media that on Wednesday morning, the company will be announcing "a new unprecedented service" involving social music service Last.fm, which it purchased last year. On hand will be Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of the CBS Corp.; Quincy Smith, president of the CBS Interactive division; as well as Felix Miller and Martin Stixsel, two of Last.fm's three co-founders.

So what is this "new unprecedented service?" PaidContent says it's hearing that CBS plans to use Last.fm's social recommendation engine (its "scrobbling" technology) and apply it to … Read more

When CBS Interactive announced on Tuesday that its CBSNews.com property had entered a content partnership with Digg, there wasn't a whole lot of information released other than the fact that election-related headlines from Digg would appear on CBSNews.com and that the news site's political news and video clips would be accompanied by Digg buttons.

The amorphous press release was intentional, CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith said later Tuesday in an interview with CNET News.com. It's not always easy to deal with Digg's notoriously opinionated community, which has shown a tendency to cause a mild to major uprising … Read more