Bits Blog: Target Customer Information Shows Up on the Black Market

Comic-Con: Harrison Ford Shows Off Ender's Game

Along with Divergent, Summit also gave fans a sneak peek at Ender’s Game, the sci-fi military feature based on the classic 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card.

Naturally, the big draw of this panel was the return of the big man himself Harrison Ford, who plays Colonel Hyrum Graff in the film. But also in attendance were co-stars Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld and Abigail Breslin, as well as producer Bob Orci and director Gavin Hood.

Set in the near future, a mysterious alien race has attacked Earth. To prepare for the next assault, humans begin training the best students to find their future leader. Ender Wiggin (Butterfield), a shy but brilliant boy, is recruited to join the elite Command School, where he quickly distinguishes himself in training and soon becomes a prime candidate to lead his fellow soldiers against the looming alien threat.

At the top of the panel, we screen exclusive, never-before-seen footage from the movie -- basically, though, it was a more revved up version of the first trailer, with a few more action-y bits tossed in for good measure. (Warning: SPOILERS from the exclusive footage to follow.)

The clip opened with the same Harrison Ford narration with various shots of the alien attack on Earth. From there, we saw Ender in training and working his way up through the ranks and leading his own team a the head of a battle simulation.

This was intermixed with excerpts from a secret between Ford's Graff, Sir Ben Kingsley's Mazer Rackham and Viola Davis's Major Gwen Anderson, as they discussed the importance of Ender's destiny and whether or not he should know "the truth." From there, we see one final series of massive space sequences before we cut to the title card.

Like I said, a lot of this footage we'd already seen before. However, there was a noticeable influx of aerial combat and whiz-bang explosions -- definitely more supercharged. Overall, if fans were slightly let down by the tepid first trailer, this new sizzle reel seems to instill a bit more hope for Ender's big-screen debut.

Ender’s Game hits theaters stateside on November 1.

Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love by following @Max_Nicholson on Twitter, or MaxNicholson on IGN.

ABC to Live-Stream Its Shows via App

The functionality will be featured at ABC’s upfront presentation for advertisers on Tuesday. It is, among other things, an attempt to keep up with the rapidly changing expectations of television viewers.

It also reflects the increasing role that subscriber fees play in the broadcasting business: the live stream will be available only to paying subscribers of cable and satellite providers, even though the stations’ signals are available free over the public airwaves.

ABC, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, said the live stream would be available in the other six cities where it owns stations sometime this summer. It is also in talks with the companies that own ABC’s more than 200 affiliates to make the “live” button work in their markets.

ABC finished the first of its affiliate deals, with Hearst Television, on Sunday afternoon; it said the live streams would work in Hearst’s 13 markets, including Boston and Pittsburgh, in the coming months.

The mobile app may prod the other broadcasters to follow ABC, much as they did seven years ago after the network started to stream full episodes of shows the morning after their TV premieres. ABC had originally planned to introduce a live-streaming feature for its apps in 2014, but decided to speed up that process this year.

“We keep a very close eye on consumer demand,” said Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, which includes the broadcast network. “We watch how people are behaving with their devices, and we really felt that we needed to move faster.”

Internally the project was code-named Project Acela, a reference to the high-speed train between Boston and Washington. A team led by Albert Cheng, Ms. Sweeney’s executive vice president for digital media, was given a deadline of May 14, the date of the ABC upfront. While Apple devices came first, other phones and tablets will be supported in the coming months, Mr. Cheng said. Securing the necessary rights from programming providers was laborious, but ABC will be able to stream all of its stations’ local newscasts, syndicated talk shows like “Katie,” and national series like “Grey’s Anatomy.”

The live-stream functionality comes at a time when ABC and its broadcast rivals are trying to keep the attention of audiences that are increasingly turning to cable channels and Internet streaming services like Netflix.

It gives ABC another talking point about how it is adapting to audience preferences; in this case, viewers will be able to carry “Good Morning America” with them as they move around the house in the morning, or tune into a weekend basketball game while out with friends. The live stream will work anywhere in a local market, the same way an old-fashioned TV antenna would.

During a demonstration of the app in her New York office on Friday, Ms. Sweeney said she was struck by how personalized television becomes when it is live-streamed to a person’s phone.

The app is also an implicit rebuttal to Aereo, the start-up backed by Barry Diller that is being sued by major station owners for streaming their signals to paying subscribers in New York. Ms. Sweeney reiterated her view that Aereo is illegal but said the plans for the app’s live-stream feature predated the service.

The app, to be named Watch ABC, in line with Disney’s existing Watch Disney and Watch ESPN apps, will allow users to watch ABC shows on demand, like the network’s previous app had. In the future, ABC will withhold its most recent TV episodes from the free versions of Hulu and ABC.com, further limiting access to paying subscribers of cable and satellite providers only.

The mobile live stream will not carry the same ads as the television broadcast; instead, it will include the same sorts of digital ads as on ABC.com. This is in part because the Nielsen Company is not able to measure mobile viewing of live television yet.

“What you see here is the same live programming,” Mr. Cheng said as he used the app, “but what we are doing during the commercial break is actually inserting new ads into the stream.”

Over time, live-streaming of ABC stations could cannibalize big-screen viewing of those stations, but ABC could make up the difference through streaming ads. Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, pointed out this month that an increase in online advertising partly compensated for declines in TV ad revenue in the first quarter of the year.

Transmitting television via live stream requires new deals with traditional distributors, like Comcast, DirecTV and Verizon FiOS, and with the owners of ABC’s affiliates. Gaining Hearst’s backing ahead of Tuesday’s upfront was important to ABC because it lent some local support to the app effort.

David Barrett, the chief executive of Hearst Television, said in a statement on Sunday that his company, recognizing “that consumers want the ability to view our stations’ programming on any device that has a screen,” was eager to work with ABC on the app.

Some station owners may bristle at ABC’s arrangement, however, given the other mobile television efforts that are under way. In some cases, these efforts require a miniature antenna, or a dongle, to be plugged into the phone.

A technology company called Syncbak has a live-streaming app for phones that does not require a dongle, but currently, it can carry only local programming, not syndicated or national programming.

CBS took a minority stake in Syncbak last month, stoking talk that it might use the technology to live-stream the stations it owns.

The Fox network, a unit of the News Corporation, is also known to be working on live-streaming functionality for its stations, though it is not expected to be available soon.

Media Giants Chase Online Ads With Original Shows

Digital and traditional media companies, including newspapers and magazines, have for years been building a video presence on the Internet. But until now the offerings have largely been low-budget, single-camera affairs featuring talking heads.

Last week, however, major media companies like Condé Nast, The Wall Street Journal and Univision presented ambitious slates of original programming to advertisers for the first time.

Companies that were already producing Web content, like Yahoo and Hulu, also announced greatly expanded offerings.

As a result, viewers are being bombarded with an array of new Internet programs — 11 from Yahoo, 14 from AOL and a whopping 30 from Condé Nast, including one that will let viewers watch a Vogue editor, Hamish Bowles, as he shops around the world.

Hulu’s four new original offerings include one called “Behind the Mask,” a show it describes as a “comedic docu-series,” which looks at the world of sports mascots.

These companies are moving rapidly because they believe viewers are now so accustomed to watching programs on devices like mobile phones and tablets that the lines between traditional television and Internet video will blur.

But the companies are also acting out of desperation because many of them can command higher prices for video ads than traditional online banner ads, which are increasingly being undermined by fast-paced algorithmic buying technologies.

Advertisers are also shifting dollars from traditional display advertising to sites like Facebook that can deliver huge audiences. Media companies were wooing ad executives in New York last week during an advertising event called Digital Content NewFronts that is trying to imitate the success of the network television upfronts, which are being held later this month. At lavish open-bar parties, companies not previously known for programming tried to convince advertisers to sponsor shows, or better still, whole channels.

Yet even with the amount of so-called premium content booming, it is not clear ad dollars are following. According to data from the research company eMarketer, spending on digital video — while growing — is expected to reach only $4.14 billion in 2013, a far cry from the $66.35 billion expected to flow into the television market.

Many advertisers say they worry that with so much new content being thrown at the market on so many different platforms, audiences for individual shows will become even more fragmented and microscopic than they already are.

“I don’t care how good your attention span is,” Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer of Group M, said of the crush of new offerings, “I think it becomes all a blur.” Group M is one of the world’s biggest media-buying and planning agencies.

Ben Winkler, chief digital officer of the advertising agency OMD, which represents brands including Pepsi and Nissan, called it “cable to the nth degree.”

“We are talking narrow, narrow television, niche television if you will,” he said. “If you are reaching just 100 people, is it worth our time and energy?”

AOL is one of the companies making a big bet on “premium video,” or video it hopes will generate greater ad revenue because of higher production values. Tim Armstrong, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview: “Consumers are adopting video very quickly: big investment in devices and networks, big investments by the most talented creative people to get involved in this medium; and big investment in measurement. So I think this industry is about to explode.”

Many online sites are citing the success of “House of Cards,” the Netflix series that drew critical praise this winter, as proof that the moment for video content has arrived. But “House of Cards,” with top-flight talent and sophisticated production values, was hugely expensive. And Netflix relies on subscriptions, not advertising.

For now, most digital companies are looking to produce programming that, while more expansive than one-camera fare, is still cheaper than TV.

Bill Carter contributed reporting.

Trinidad James Shows Off Skid Marks During Show

Somebody forgot to wipe his ass!

Via icanrepeatit.com

Rapper Trinidad James must have been hella excited about doing a show. It seems he was so excited that he didn’t wipe his  after dropping a load.

And for this, we shall call him “Shitty James.”

Wipe yo’ ass bruh!

Internet Speeds Fail to Meet Promises in Germany, Study Shows

The study by the German telecommunications regulator, the Bundesnetzagentur, measured the Internet connection speeds of 250,000 consumers from June through December last year, making it one of the largest reviews of broadband service anywhere.

The results showed that only 15.7 percent of those using fixed telephone lines and 21 percent using mobile devices achieved the advertised maximum speeds.

Nearly half of German consumers using the supposedly fastest wireless broadband networks, which run Long Term Evolution technology, received Internet service at speeds that were no more than half as fast as the advertised maximum, the regulator found.

The German report is believed to mirror the results of an even broader study being compiled by the European Commission on broadband performance across the 27-nation bloc. According to a person with knowledge of the commission’s study, which is in the final review stages, it found that operators were largely failing to deliver on promises of broadband speeds across Europe.

For consumers, slower connection speeds can make for the correspondingly sluggish execution of nearly every click while using an Internet browser, resulting in delays in summoning Web sites or interruptions of streaming video, for example.

The study is significant because Germany was one of the first countries in Europe to adopt high-speed, Long Term Evolution service on a national basis.

In Europe, and in the rest of the world, telecom operators are not legally bound to provide broadband service at a specified rate of speed. Most advertise service in packages with speeds of “up to” a certain level, which in Germany can range from 2 to 50 megabits a second.

Attempts in Brussels to include a legal “minimum speed” obligation on European operators have so far been rebuffed by the telecommunications industry.

Jochen Homann, the Bundesnetzagentur president, said in a statement that he planned to begin a “dialogue” with operators to improve the accuracy of their advertising claims.

The German market is dominated by four main operators — Deutsche Telekom, which runs the former fixed-line monopoly and the mobile market leader, T-Mobile, and the mobile carriers Vodafone; O2, a unit of Telefónica; and E-Plus, owned by the Dutch operator KPN.

Philipp Blank, a Deutsche Telekom spokesman in Bonn, said technical reasons prevented operators from guaranteeing a specific broadband speed to each customer. The quality of a land-line connection is influenced by the length of the copper wire from a home to the phone junction box in the street, with longer connections leading to slower speeds, he said.

With mobile broadband, the level of traffic flowing over a single base station can significantly affect individual performance. Deutsche Telekom gives each customer a “very narrow range” of their expected broadband speed based on an analysis of local wiring, and consumers can void newly signed contracts for two weeks without penalty if they are unsatisfied, Mr. Blank said.

“For physical and technical reasons, we simply have to offer customers some kind of range of speeds in our tariffs,” Mr. Blank said.

A spokesman for the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association, a Brussels group representing operators, said it would not comment until it had read the study.

Michael Bobrowski, a spokesman for the Verbraucherzentral Bundesverband, the Federation of German Consumer Organizations, said he was skeptical that the regulator would be able to wring concessions from operators.

“This study is not surprising because we have known this to be the situation for years,” Mr. Bobrowski said. “We called for operators to stop doing this back in 2008, but none have done anything. So I’m not sure what voluntary agreements will achieve.”

Mr. Bobrowski agreed there were technical constraints that made it difficult for operators to guarantee broadband speeds. But the main reason for the discrepancy between advertised speed and performance is the operators’ advertising policies, he added.

“It’s the competitive situation,” Mr. Bobrowski said. “They are all trying to win customers by promising very enticing speeds. The problem is that consumers cannot verify in advance what kind of speeds they will ultimately receive.”

Mr. Bobrowski said that operators should be required to provide binding guarantees in service contracts.

Mr. Homann, the German regulatory chief, said he hoped to convince operators to offer a more narrow range of speeds in their broadband advertising.

“I am very hopeful that Internet providers will make an effort to provide the necessary transparency over what an Internet connection can deliver — and what it can’t,” Mr. Homann said. “Customers should be able to better evaluate the quality of their Internet connections.”

A change in Germany’s main telecommunications law last year gave the regulator the power to improve the “transparency” of telecommunications products. But whether that mandate would let the regulator impose “minimum speed” obligations, which would set a global precedent, is unclear and could be legally challenged by operators.

DealBook: Filing Shows Twisting Path to Three-Way Race for Dell

Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesA Dell computer for sale at an Electric Avenue store in Miami.

Though the race for Dell Inc. has narrowed to three contestants, many more arose over a month ago.

Advisers to Dell directors spoke to 71 potential bidders during a 45-day period aimed at finding alternatives to a $24.4 billion offer by Michael S. Dell and the investment firm Silver Lake, according to a securities filing by the company on Friday.

The long-awaited proxy filing includes a lengthy history of the merger, detailing in 26 pages the negotiations that led to the Dell transaction. In particular, it shines a light on the 45-day “go shop” period, which ended last week with preliminary bids by the Blackstone Group and the billionaire Carl C. Icahn.

Dell is expected to point to the efforts recounted in the filing as proof that its board fought hard to find the best possible outcome for shareholders, as several investors continue to argue that the existing $13.65-a-share bid by Mr. Dell and Silver Lake is too low.

According to the filing, bankers at Evercore Partners reached out to strategic and financial buyers starting soon after the deal with Mr. Dell was signed on Feb. 5. Several suitors were rejected because they were interested in only a piece of Dell’s businesses.

On Feb. 6, Blackstone contacted Evercore, saying it wanted to participate in the go-shop process. The private equity giant had already expressed interest the previous month in potentially bidding for Dell.

A month later, Blackstone and potential partners met with Mr. Dell to further discuss a bid.

Other private equity shops emerged as well. The filing refers to a “Sponsor B” that held discussions with Dell directors late last year and was willing to take another look despite declining to bid the first time. People briefed on the matter identified that firm as TPG Capital.

Ultimately, TPG decided again not to participate in any bids.

A corporate bidder, identified as “Strategic Party A,” contacted Evercore on Feb. 8 to say it was interested in information about Dell’s financial services arm. That company — which people briefed on the matter said was General Electric’s GE Capital — later expressed interest in working with whatever group Blackstone convened to make a bid.

At least three other strategic buyers sought access to Dell’s books. Most were denied because they appeared interested only in bidding for part of the company.

Mr. Icahn first contacted Evercore on Feb. 26 about signing a confidentiality agreement. More than a week later, the billionaire wrote to the special committee, disclosing that he owned a “substantial” stake in Dell and warning that he would fight the proposed takeover by Mr. Dell.

By the go-shop deadline of March 22, Evercore bankers had received three expressions of interest. One was from GE Capital, which proposed to buy Dell Financial Services only if combined with any takeover bid, including Mr. Dell’s.

Blackstone also submitted an offer, now known to be over $14.25 a share, that would leave an unspecified portion of Dell public to let investors continue to own a piece of the company if they so wished. The firm disclosed that it was working with Francisco Partners and Insight Venture Partners.

In a twist, however, Blackstone demanded that the Dell special committee reimburse the costs of assembling that rival bid, up to $25 million. That request was granted on Monday.

Mr. Icahn offered to buy about 58.1 percent of the company for about $15.6 billion, or $15 a share. His proposal envisioned several major shareholders, including Southeastern Asset Management and T. Rowe Price, contributing their stakes as well.

Privately, some Dell advisers considered Mr. Icahn’s proposal simply a placeholder to keep negotiating with the special committee, according to people briefed on the matter. He has said he is reviewing Blackstone’s offer as well, leaving the door open to joining that consortium.

Advertising: ABC Works on an App for Live Streaming Shows to Mobile Devices

The app will live stream ABC programming to the phones and tablets of cable and satellite subscribers, allowing those subscribers to watch “Good Morning America” on a tablet while standing in line at Starbucks, for instance, or watch “Nashville” on a smartphone while riding a bus home from work. The app could become available to some subscribers this year, according to people briefed on the project, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it publicly.

With the app, ABC, a subsidiary of Disney, will become the first of the American broadcasters to provide a live Internet stream of national and local programming to people who pay for cable or satellite. The subscriber-only arrangement, sometimes called TV Everywhere in industry circles, preserves the cable business model that is crucial to the bottom lines of broadcasters, while giving subscribers more of what they seem to want — mobile access to TV shows. The arrangement could extend the reach of ads that appear on ABC as well.

Disney already distributes similar live streaming and on-demand apps, known as “Watch” apps, for ESPN and the Disney Channel. Special hurdles exist, however, for the ABC app, in part because of contracts between the network and the companies that produce some of its shows that were written before mobile phone video streaming was even possible. Other complexities involve ABC’s local stations, which might — if not courted properly — feel threatened by an app.

But ABC, seeing shifts in consumer behavior, is pressing forward. It has started to talk with stations about how to include them in the live streaming app. Illustrating the difficult contractual issues, ABC offhandedly first mentioned a forthcoming Watch ABC app in a news release nine months ago, when it signed a deal with Comcast to make several Watch Disney apps available to Comcast subscribers.

But the network live streaming ability is inching closer to fruition, the people briefed on the project said. A spokesman for ABC declined to comment.

Executives at other networks who have heard about the ABC plan regard it with a mixture of awe and fear. No other broadcaster is believed to be as far along as ABC, which is also the first broadcaster to sell TV episodes through Apple’s iTunes store and the first to stream free episodes on its Web site.

Subscriber-only apps like Watch Disney and, eventually, Watch ABC stand in stark contrast to the free-to-all content available on Hulu, the online video site that is co-owned by Disney, Comcast and News Corporation. Comcast is a silent partner. The other two companies are debating what to do with the six-year-old Web site, which has lost most of its original executive backers at NBC and Fox and will soon lose its founding chief executive, Jason Kilar.

Last week, when Mr. Kilar, who is stepping down this month, named an acting chief executive, Andy Forssell, he wrote in a message to staff members that “Disney and News Corporation are currently finalizing their forward-looking plans with Hulu, and the senior team has been working closely with them in that process. Once the plans are finalized, a permanent decision will be made regarding the C.E.O. position.”

Hulu has been an innovator in both the Web streaming and the advertising arenas, forcing media companies to think about how their TV shows should be distributed online. But it has been marginalized as the companies seek out more lucrative revenue streams.

Under one plan discussed recently, according to several people with ties to Hulu, Disney would buy out the other co-owners’ stakes in the company. But the opposite could happen, too, with News Corporation as the buyer. Or the two companies may choose to sell Hulu to a third party, if one shows interest.

The companies could also retain their stakes in Hulu and change the business model. Disney is said to be more supportive of the free, ad-supported model that it is most closely associated with; News Corporation is more supportive of Hulu Plus, the monthly subscription service that is an add-on to the free Hulu site. Mr. Kilar, in his message last week, did not indicate when any change could take place.

Whatever happens, the owners appear more interested in maintaining their existing relationships with cable and satellite companies. That is what an app like Watch ABC would do. It would protect the cable model while providing a good example of how authentication — the idea that people log in to prove they have a subscription — works.

A few cable and satellite companies already have their own products that allow ABC and other broadcasters to be streamed on devices. But for most Americans, it remains difficult to place-shift a show — say, to watch a local nightly newscast live on an iPhone.

A start-up company that is being sued by Disney and several other major media companies, Aereo, has made that possible by installing an antenna farm in New York; some analysts have said Aereo might motivate broadcasters to make their own live streams more freely available on their own terms. But James L. McQuivey, a digital media analyst at Forrester and the author of the book “Digital Disruption,” said he thought ABC’s plan wasn’t a rebuttal to the start-up.

“This and Aereo are both a response to the fact that people are habitually connected to live viewing,” he said. “The Internet will gradually undo that,” he predicted, “but it’s being very gradual about that for the time being.”

Brooks Barnes contributed reporting.

Facebook Shows Off News Feed Redesign

The new design of the Facebook News Feed presents bigger photos and links, including for advertisements, and lets users see specialized streams focused on topics like music and posts by close friends.

The changes are designed to address the company’s two most vital challenges: how to hold on to users at a time of competing, specialized social networks and how to draw more advertising dollars to please Wall Street.

Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said at a news conference that he wanted Facebook to be “the best personalized newspaper in the world.” And like a newspaper editor, he wants the “front page” of Facebook to be more engaging — in particular on the smaller screens of mobile devices.

The topic-specific News Feeds could well persuade users to spend more time scrolling through various streams of content. And the redesign will offer bigger real estate for advertisers, including more opportunities for brands to feature bigger pictures, which marketers say are more persuasive than words.

Facebook’s proprietary algorithms, which try to guess what every user will want to see, will continue to filter the items that show up on each person’s main News Feed. And users will be able to drill down into specific topics they are interested in, akin to the sections of a newspaper.

For instance, they can switch over to specialized feeds that are focused on just the music they are interested in, or they can scroll through a feed that consists of posts from the pages of products and people they follow — a bit like Twitter. If they want to see everything that their friends have posted, they can choose to do that, too; those posts will rush down in chronological order, without any filtering by Facebook’s robots.

Facebook introduced the new design to some users of the Web version of its service on Thursday, and will extend it to all Web users and to mobile apps in coming weeks.

It’s unclear how users will react to the changes; in the past, major design changes have often been greeted by complaints, at least initially.

Investors seemed to welcome the new look. Shares of Facebook rose 4.1 percent on Tuesday, to $28.58. But the company’s stock price remains substantially lower than its $38 initial public offering price last May.

Facebook is clearly hoping the new format will encourage users to stay longer on the site. At the news conference to announce the changes, officials offered examples of content they hoped would be compelling: photos of a cousin’s babies on one area of the page, Justin Timberlake concert news on another, a list of stories your friends liked on National Public Radio on still another.

“The best personalized newspaper should have a broad diversity of content,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “The most important stuff is going to be on the front page,” he went on. “Then people have a chance to dig in.”

The announcement met with swift praise from the advertising industry. In addition to bigger ad formats, the redesign’s specialized content streams could keep users glued to the site longer, marketers said.

“This will result in more time spent over all on the Facebook News Feed — and of course, increase engagement with content and ads,” said Hussein Fazal, chief executive of AdParlor, which buys advertisements on Facebook on behalf of several brands.

Facebook executives suggested that there would be no immediate changes to the number of advertisements that appear on the News Feed.

Julie Zhou, the company’s design chief, said only that ads would be more visual. “Everything across the board is going to get this richer, more immersive design,” Ms. Zhou said.

Online-Only TV Shows Join Fight for Attention

When Amazon sizes up the television marketplace, it sees opportunity. Internet-delivered TV, which until recently was unready for prime time, is the new front in the war for Americans’ attention spans. Netflix is following up on the $100 million drama “House of Cards” with four more series this year. Microsoft is producing programming for the Xbox video game console with the help of a former CBS president. Other companies, from AOL to Sony to Twitter, are likely to follow.

The companies are, in effect, creating new networks for television through broadband pipes and also giving rise to new rivalries — among one another, as between Amazon and Netflix, and with the big but vulnerable broadcast networks as well.

“These are the very first lab tests in a very grand experiment,” said Jeff Berman, the president of BermanBraun, a media company that makes programming for NBC, HGTV, AOL and YouTube, among others.

As he suggested, the competition has only just begun. Amazon is making pilot episodes for at least six comedies and five children’s shows, with more to be announced soon. Sometime this spring it will put the episodes on its Amazon Prime Instant Video service and ask its customers which ones they like, then order full seasons of some of them.

Netflix has been ordering entire seasons of its shows without seeing pilots first. Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive, said last week that “House of Cards,” the political thriller starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, had been a “great success” for the company. Its next program, a horror series called “Hemlock Grove” from the film director Eli Roth, premieres in April.

Microsoft has said comparatively little about its plans. But all three companies are commissioning TV shows because they have millions of subscribers on monthly or yearly subscription plans. Though the shows may be loss leaders, executives say that having exclusive content — something that cannot be seen anywhere else — increases the likelihood that existing subscribers will keep paying and that new ones will sign up.

The proliferation of shows is generally seen as a good thing for viewers, who have more choices about what to watch and when, and for producers and actors, who have more places to be seen and heard. But the trend may inflame cable companies’ concerns about cord-cutting by subscribers who decide there’s enough to watch online. At the same time, the rise of Internet-only shows may make viewers more dependent on the broadband cord. In many cases, though, both cable and broadband are supplied by the same company.

Unlike the early stabs at Internet television, these shows look and feel like traditional TV. That is partly because more viewers are watching Internet content on big-screen TV sets, but it is mostly because the companies involved are throwing money at the screens: each of the Amazon comedy pilots cost the company upward of $1 million, according to people involved in their production, which is less than the $2 million invested in a broadcast comedy pilot, but more than is typically invested in cable pilots.

Not only are the budgets comparable, so are the perks for actors and creators — like trailers and car-service pickups. The writers are guild members. The actors have what the people involved say are standard television contracts, with options for several seasons if shows succeed.

“There’s absolutely no difference” between TV and these new productions, said Jeffrey Tambor, who starred in HBO’s “Larry Sanders Show,” then Fox’s “Arrested Development.” Now, at 68, he is an online pioneer: earlier this year he reprised his character for Netflix’s new season of “Arrested,” which will make its premiere in May. While taping that show, he read the script for “The Onion Presents: The News,” an Amazon pilot. He signed up, and played the older rival to Cheyenne Jackson.

The “Onion” producers took over half of the newsroom of NY1, a New York news channel, in mid-February and reimagined it as the headquarters of an unscrupulous news corporation. (In the pilot episode, a reporter kidnaps a child to increase ratings.) NY1 had rented out its space to the producers of “Gossip Girl,” “Damages” and “The Good Wife” before — but never to a show being made for the Web. For most of the actors there, like Mr. Jackson, a Broadway star whose TV credits include “30 Rock” and “Glee,” the taping was their one pilot of the season — and thus represented a bet on Amazon over the broadcasters.

Mr. Jackson recalled that his manager called about “The Onion” with a note of apprehension in her voice. “It’s online,” she said. “We have to talk about this.” But when he read the script, he said, he felt confident — the tone of it reminded him of “30 Rock.”

“This is kind of a leap of faith,” he said between tapings. “We’re all taking a leap together.”

Analysts say they expect more TV investment to come, including from companies that do not have monthly subscribers to please. YouTube, for instance, the biggest video Web site of all, makes its money from ads, not from subscriptions. But it has paid dozens of outside producers to start channels so that it has original, professional content. And its owner, Google, can afford to pay many more.

Similar logic is spurring cable channels, which each receive a small piece of cable subscribers’ monthly payments, to come up with more dramas and sitcoms that they can call their own. This brings up a conundrum, of course: too much great TV to watch, and not enough time.

“Viewers find organizing and managing all of their beloved TV options to be a bit stressful,” said Christy Tanner, the chief executive of TVGuide.com, which conducted research that found respondents who said “it feels like work” and “I’m afraid of missing something.”

Nonetheless, the number of companies trying to elbow into the TV space is only going up — further proving the nearly 20-year-old adage that “content is king.” Witness DirecTV, the biggest satellite distributor in the country, which is planning to introduce its first homegrown show, a thriller called “Rogue,” next month. Christopher Long, who runs DirecTV’s original programming, said he wanted to buy several more shows: “Our opinion is, if we build good enough television, people will find it.”

Disruptions: Disruptions: Google Flu Trends Shows Problems of Big Data Without Context

Erik S. Lesser/European Pressphoto Agency Google’s Flu Predictor overestimated how many people had the flu this flu season.

Several years ago, Google, aware of how many of us were sneezing and coughing, created a fancy equation on its Web site to figure out just how many people had influenza. The math works like this: people’s location + flu-related search queries on Google + some really smart algorithms = the number of people with the flu in the United States.

So how did the algorithms fare this wretched winter? According to Google Flu Trends, at the flu season’s peak in mid-January, nearly 11 percent of the United States population had influenza.

Yikes! Take vitamins. Don’t leave the house. Wash your hands. Wash them again!

But wait. According to an article in the science journal Nature, Google’s disease-hunting algorithms were wrong: their results were double the actual estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which put the coughing and sniffling peak at 6 percent of the population.

Kelly Mason, a public affairs spokeswoman for Google, said the company’s Flu Trends site was meant to be only one source in addition to the C.D.C. and other flu surveillance methods. “We review and potentially update our model each season,” she said.

Scientists have a theory about what went wrong, as well.

“Several researchers suggest that the problems may be due to widespread media coverage of this year’s severe U.S. flu season,” Declan Butler wrote in Nature. Then add social media, which helped news of the flu spread quicker than the virus itself.

In other words, Google’s algorithm was looking only at the numbers, not at the context of the search results.

In today’s digitally connected world, data is everywhere: in our phones, search queries, friendships, dating profiles, cars, food, reading habits. Almost everything we touch is part of a larger data set. But the people and companies that interpret the data may fail to apply background and outside conditions to the numbers they capture.

“Data inherently has all of the foibles of being human,” said Mark Hansen, director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University. “Data is not a magic force in society; it’s an extension of us.”

Society has encountered similar situations for centuries. In the 1600s, Dr. Hansen said, an early census was recorded in England as the Great Plague of London killed tens of thousands of Britons. To calculate the spread of the disease, officials started recording every christening and death in the city. And although this helped quantify the mortality rate, it also created other problems. There was now an astounding collection of statistical information for scientists to review and understand, but it took time to develop systems that could accurately assess the information.

Now, as we enter a world of big data, we have to learn how to apply context to these numbers.

Dr. Hansen said the problem of data without context could be summed up in a quote from the playwright Eugène Ionesco: “Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.”

I experienced this firsthand in the spring of 2010, when I was an adjunct professor at New York University teaching graduate students in the Interactive Telecommunications Program.

I created a class called “Telling Stories With Data, Sensors and Humans,” with the goal of determining whether sensors and data could become reporters and collect information. Students built little electronic contraptions with $30 computers called Arduinos, and attached several sensors, including ones that could detect light, noise and movement.

We wondered if we could use these sensors to determine whether students used the elevators more than the stairs, and whether that changed throughout the day. (Esoteric, sure, but a perfect example of a computer sitting there taking notes, rather than a human.)

We set up the sensors in some elevators and stairwells at N.Y.U. and waited. To our delighted surprise, the data we collected told a story, and it seemed that our experiment had worked.

As I left campus that evening, one of the N.Y.U. security guards who had seen students setting up the computers in the elevators asked how our experiment had gone. I explained that we had found that students seemed to use the elevators in the morning, perhaps because they were tired from staying up late, and switch to the stairs at night, when they became energized.

“Oh, no, they don’t,” the security guard told me, laughing as he assured me that lazy college students used the elevators whenever possible. “One of the elevators broke down a few evenings last week, so they had no choice but to use the stairs.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Nickelodeon and PBS Pursue Preschool Apps Alongside TV Shows

In 2014, the preschool cable network Nick Jr. plans to introduce a television show featuring a little boy, his miniature pet dragon and a magic stick.

But the show, “Wallykazam,” will not be new to users of smartphones and tablets. Educational applications built around it will start appearing in app stores late next year, making “Wallykazam” Nickelodeon’s first major show to be introduced as a mobile product first, said Steve Youngwood, Nickelodeon’s executive vice president and general manager for digital media.

Driving the change, at Nickelodeon and other preschool television brands, are parents who are increasingly putting mobile devices into preschoolers’ hands and laps.

According to new research commissioned by Sesame Workshop, producer of PBS’s “Sesame Street,” mobile device ownership is booming as TV set ownership declines. Eighty-eight percent of the parents surveyed said they owned a television, down from 95 percent in 2010.

Twenty-one percent said their children first interacted with “Sesame Street” someplace other than television, with YouTube and PBS.org the top alternative sources. (PBS said separately that its free PBS Kids Video app, which has been downloaded 2.4 million times, reached 120 million streams of PBS Kids shows in November, surpassing 100 million for the first time.)

“On-air does still drive digital,” said Diana Polvere, Sesame Workshop’s vice president for market research, citing the 79 percent of viewers who still come to television first. But given the rapid changes, she said, Sesame’s research will now be conducted every six months instead of every two years.

Nickelodeon’s research, done in April and updated in October, shows striking growth in educational app use. In October, 27 percent of United States households with children ages 3 to 5 had an iPad, up from 22 percent in April. In those households, 40 percent of preschoolers used the iPad for educational apps, up from 27 percent in April.

The study also found that Apple device users were willing to pay 15 to 23 percent more for educational apps than for general apps.

“Parents want to feel good about what they are purchasing and downloading for their kids,” said Scott Chambers, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president for digital worldwide distribution. Adding an educational element to an entertaining app, he said, “makes everybody feel better.”

Parents’ feelings aside, apps are strong educational tools, said Lesli Rotenberg, who oversees PBS’s children’s programming, including its more than two dozen apps.

While television “is somewhat of a passive experience” for children, she said, interactive apps give them immediate feedback and tailored experiences that become more difficult as they gain skills.

Though numerous producers are entering the app business, three of the top 10 paid educational apps in the iTunes store last week were Nickelodeon’s. They included the $1.99 Bubble Guppies: Animal School Day, already profitable six weeks after its introduction, Nickelodeon said. A Team Umizoomi math app was still in the top 10 after a year on the market.

Originally scheduled for August release, the Bubble Guppies app, filled with the same silly jokes as the show, was revised after focus group testing with preschoolers showed, among other things, that their small fingers had a hard time maneuvering a virtual latch and that the children wanted more control over their exploration.

“We were hearing kids say in testing: ‘I want to play with the dolphin. I want to play with the penguin,’ ” said Jordana Drell, Nickelodeon’s senior director of preschool games.

Nickelodeon’s educational apps normally take six to eight months to create and, even with lush graphics like the shimmery underwater background in Bubble Guppies, cost about half as much as a single episode of one of the company’s preschool shows, officials said.

The Bubble Guppies creators, Jonny Belt and Robert Scull, said they approached the app as they would a television episode, reading the 90-page game document aloud, technical material and all. “That really brings it to life, and you know what you’re getting,” Mr. Scull said.

A Nickelodeon rival, Disney Junior, has taken a less integrated approach to apps, developing television shows first and apps later to expand on the content, said Albert Cheng, executive vice president for digital media at the Disney/ABC Television Group.

The free Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Road Rally Appisode, released in May, is a repurposed version of an episode of the “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” television program, reconfigured to be highly interactive.

It proved so popular that “we definitely feel there’s something here we want to invest in,” Mr. Cheng said.

Although the app had educational elements, it was not intended as such. The sprawling Walt Disney Company has published educational apps through other units, however.

Since releasing its first app three years ago, Sesame Workshop has added more than three dozen, including Elmo Loves 123s, which was introduced Dec. 10 and draws on new research for developers and parents that Sesame plans to release this week. App users, Mr. Chambers said, tend to come back regularly, a loyalty that executives have noted as they consider future expansion in the category.

The rush to apps is changing the development process for PBS, which will no longer develop television-only shows, Ms. Rotenberg said. PBS’s newest property, “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” came out as an app — already the company’s third best-selling — the day of the television premiere in September.

Ms. Rotenberg said her team had “sent away” a number of producers who came to PBS with ideas for television shows with no thought-out mobile component, telling them, “ ‘Come back when you have a plan.’ ”

H.P.’s Misstep Shows Risk in the Push for Big Ideas

The ill-fated marriage of the companies is a lesson for H.P. and other older technology giants as they throw billions at supposedly game-changing acquisitions, trying to gain a foothold in the future.

In that future, smartphones and tablets, connected to cloud-computing data centers, are the essential tools of work and play. Companies rent software over the air, rather than buying it with expensive maintenance contracts.

And vast streams of data are continually analyzed to find new patterns and make predictions about consumer behavior and product design. Autonomy, for instance, makes software that can analyze marketing patterns and advise a company on matters like where it should increase marketing resources.

These forces threaten older businesses, like H.P.’s traditional personal computer and data storage products. Other companies, like Oracle, Microsoft and Cisco, also face pressure. They are all trying to buy the future — and have the cash to do it.

In July, Microsoft decided to pay $1.2 billion for Yammer, which makes a Facebook-like social media product for the office. Oracle recently paid over $3.4 billion for two small cloud computing companies that provide software for human resources and sales management. Last Sunday, the computer networking giant Cisco agreed to pay $1.2 billion in cash for Meraki, a company that manages the free wireless service at Starbucks and other businesses.

There are lots more such deals, from these companies as well as I.B.M., SAP and others.

The pace of change is so fast that Google, so recently seen as an upstart and a giant killer, in 2011 paid $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility to supercharge its Android smartphone business, which competes with Apple. Earlier this year, Facebook spent $750 million on Instagram so it wouldn’t miss the next thing in social media.

But identifying the next big thing can be difficult, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor of management at Yale University. Likely as not, he said, deals like the one for Autonomy have “maybe a 40 percent success, 60 percent failure rate.”

He added, “The odds are against you succeeding, but the odds are also worth taking.”

The real hazard, he said, is in the way companies describe these acquisitions as “natural, inevitable victories.” They should be seen, he said, as “an investment, like in research and development.”

The pace of acquisitions hardly matches the level seen during the late ’90s Internet bubble, when Cisco paid $9.6 billion for three networking companies that former officials said yielded almost no benefit. In 2002, AOL Time Warner wrote down $54 billion in good will related to its troubled merger. Several telecommunications equipment makers and service providers also had multibillion-dollar write-downs.

But there are also notable successes.

EMC, a maker of data storage equipment, paid $625 million in 2003 for VMWare, which makes some of the critical technology in cloud computing. Today, after taking some of the company public, EMC’s stake is worth about $30 billion. VMWare recently took a gamble of its own, buying a next-generation networking company, Nicira, that had virtually no revenue, for $1.26 billion.

Microsoft, which also paid $8.5 billion for Skype in 2011, said Yammer was being integrated into SharePoint, Microsoft’s successful collaboration software, and will be included in its premium version of Office communications and productivity software at no cost. It did not say whether, or how, Yammer would be profitable on its own, however.

The real issue with Autonomy may be less its questionable sales than its core technology, said Leslie Owens, who follows data analysis software at Forrester Research.

“H.P. thought it was an entirely new platform, but Autonomy’s clients said it wasn’t as good as Google’s corporate search product,” she said.

Autonomy, which was founded 16 years ago, “was based on using powerful algorithms,” she said, but the software was not attuned “to new kinds of search signals, like what your friends are doing, what people like you are doing, what other data you might draw off on.” Over time those new methods attracted customers.

In a demonstration of the Autonomy product last month, H.P. appeared to have addressed some of those issues, but others remained. An application to help figure out what to pay for Web ads initially failed to work, then delivered results that appeared similar to those of several other search products.

“We remain 100 percent committed to Autonomy and its industry-leading technology,” H.P. said in a statement. “The company’s products are cutting-edge and provide many customers with unique solutions.”

In an interview Tuesday, Meg Whitman, the chief executive of H.P., indicated that the company also had strong hopes for its security software, most of which it got from other acquisitions.

H.P. has accused Autonomy of improperly accounting for much of its sales in the years before H.P. bought the company last year. It took a $5 billion noncash charge related to the purchase price.

Ms. Whitman gave Autonomy tepid support.

“It’s very disappointing,” she said of the write-down. “We’ve integrated the technology into a couple of places; we will integrate it into more.”

Bits Blog: Data Shows Twitter Posts That Resonate With Electorate

In Florida, voters responded most when Mitt Romney posted about education and when President Obama did the same about foreign affairs. In Ohio, Mr. Obama’s posted about gay rights, more so than any other topic, held the most traction. For Mr. Romney, it was his posts about the economy.

Twitter introduced an interactive map on Thursday showing which of the candidates’ Tweets drove the most engagement — measured by the number of times the Tweet was reposted or favorited — on Twitter at the national and state levels.

Nationwide, Mr. Obama’s most popular post was, “No family should have to set aside a college acceptance letter because they don’t have the money.” His second most popular post was actually a quote from Vice President Biden about women’s rights:  “VP Biden: I do not believe that we have a right to tell other people, women, that they can’t control their bodies.” Interestingly, at the state level, that post resonated most with voters in Wyoming, followed by Iowa, South Dakota and West Virginia — states where women’s rights are not considered the pivotal issue.

Mr. Romney’s most popular post was this remark on Sept. 11th: “On this most somber day, America is united under God in its quest for peace and freedom at home and across the world.” Second most popular was a comment about wealth distribution: “I am running for president to get us creating wealth again – not to redistribute it.”

In swing states, Twitter’s map tells an interesting, and sometimes counter intuitive story. According to the latest polls, Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Colorado and Florida are still toss-ups.

In the last presidential election, the President won Virginia by seven percentage points. This year, the race is expected to be much closer. There, voters’ response was highest when the candidates posted about issues related to retirement.

The same was true for Wisconsin. Democrats carried the state in the last six presidential elections, but the addition of one of their own, Representative Paul D. Ryan, to Mr. Romney’s ticket has kept the race tight. There, retirement was also the issue that seemed to have the most traction on Twitter.

In Iowa, where six electoral votes are up for grabs, voters were most engaged when Mr. Obama posted about topics related to energy and the environment and when Romney posted about health care.

Nevada voters responded most to Obama’s comments on taxes. Mr. Obama’s most popular post in that state was “1,240,000 middle-class families in Nevada could face a tax increase under Mitt Romney.” Mr. Romney’s posts about education drove the highest level of engagement. “With over 60k jobs lost & the highest unemployment rate in the nation, Nevadans aren’t better off under @BarackObama,” was Mr. Romney’s most popular post.

In Colorado, women’s issues have taken center stage after women proved crucial to two Democratic victories in the 2010 races for Senate and governor. But according to Twitter’s data, Colorado voters responded in the largest numbers when Mr. Obama posted about taxes. For Mr. Romney, it was his remarks about terrorism.

If, as in the 2004 election, the race comes down to Florida, then the candidates may do well to defy conventional wisdom that retirement is all Florida voters care about. Within Florida, Mr. Romney’s posts about retirement did not resonate as well as those about education and foreign affairs. Likewise, Mr. Obama’s posts about topics relevant to retirement had less traction than his those about terrorism and foreign affairs.

Despite the perception that Twitter is just a place for East and West coasters to talk to each other, Twitter’s map shows a surprising level of engagement in states like Wyoming, Utah, Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma. The opposite proved true for New Hampshire and Vermont, where Twitter noted it was not able to collect enough data to draw conclusions.

Photo Sharing Shows All Sides of USA Basketball

Step 1: Find a sleeping USA Basketball teammate. Step 2: Move stealthily into position. Step 3: Frame picture. Step 4: Click. Step 5: Tag the photo with “GotEm” or “gotem,” providing an exclamation point when warranted. Step 6: Post to Instagram, so anyone in the world with Internet access can see LeBron James wearing a not-so-manly sleeping mask, or Anthony Davis with an airline blanket pulled snugly around his neck.

Then, boom, “got ’em,” as Love would say.

Approached for an interview about the USA Basketball-Instagram trend he embraced and furthered, Love laughed. “I was about to post one right now,” he said.

Two weeks ago, Love had never heard of Instagram. Now, because of the photo-sharing Web site and other social networks, he considers himself the unofficial team photographer. In recent days, Love posted snapshots of himself dressed in preppy Ralph Lauren attire (Caption: “Getting my Justin Timberlake on”) and of Carmelo Anthony asleep with teammates celebrating in the background (“Weekend at Bernie’s. GotEm.”).

Love is far from alone. His teammate Deron Williams persuaded him to join Instagram. Chris Paul is on it, too, along with James, Paul’s brother and Anthony’s best friend.

Those who follow their feeds regularly could be forgiven for believing all the United States men’s national team players do is sleep.

Such self-documentation is nothing new, of course, not in this age of social media, of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. But this is uncharted territory, too, a glimpse inside areas of the Olympics once closed to the public — like the team bus.

That means fans can now view drool frozen on James’s chin. Or see famous American basketball players dining together at Johnny Rockets, oversized sunglasses covering their eyes.

For all the comparisons between this United States team and the Dream Team from 1992, imagine a picture of Michael Jordan inside a casino or sprawled on the team bus. Imagine Magic Johnson in a sleeping mask, or Larry Bird giddily typing a “gotem” tag. As times changed, so did fans’ access to athletes, if not their actual relationships with them.

“It’s moving in a more accessible direction,” Love said. “Fans dig that. I dig that. It’s a way to share the experience with everybody. They almost feel like they’re with you here.”

Sports, at least from the behind-the-scenes perspective, were not always this way, not even in recent years when it was safe for an all-N.B.A. forward to catch a catnap without fear of a photo op. In those days, athletes might say “got ’em” when they scored an actual basket or won an actual game.

Nate McMillan, a United States assistant, played and coached in the N.B.A., and in all his years, he witnessed something for the first time this week: players preparing for naps by covering their faces with blankets.

“It’s reality,” McMillan said. “That’s what everybody wants now. They want reality TV. They want the instant photographs. The cameras are there, in our locker rooms, huddles, interviewing coaches during games. What happens on the bus was once sacred. Now, it’s part of what the fans want to see.”

The American team took its Instagram cues from Paul, who said his Los Angeles Clippers engaged in a similar practice throughout last season. Their photographs, Paul said, often ended up on “SportsCenter,” fueling the number taken.

Love saw the photo wars as another route to camaraderie, another way to bond. His favorite picture captured seven sleepers: Paul gripping a pillow in a bear hug, James Harden with that unsightly beard tucked into his chest, Russell Westbrook wearing sunglasses inside and even Coach Mike Krzyzewski in the background in what looks like the coach section of the plane.

“They got me yesterday,” Anthony said, his smile stretched as wide as a basketball court. “There will definitely be payback. It’s going to be trouble for Kevin.”

Advertising: Survey Shows Voters Are Wary of Tailored Political Ads

The results of a new study to be released on Tuesday by professors at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania show that 86 percent of respondents did not want political campaigns to tailor ads to their interests.

The results of the study come at a time when national and local political campaigns are steadily increasing their use of technology that traditional marketers use to tailor advertising.

For political campaigns, the process is called microtargeting. Information about voters — like the charitable donations they make, the type of credit card they use and the Congressional district they live in — is combined with voter registration records, and the result allows campaigns to send certain types of messages to voters.

For example, one person may see an ad that focuses on a candidate’s employment message while another will see an ad about reproductive rights. Both presidential campaigns use some form of microtargeting.

“The overall sense is that there is a real discontent about this,” said Prof. Joseph Turow of the Annenberg School. “You have a real disjuncture between the American public and the campaigns that are on a trajectory to increase it.”

It is not just discontent with the ads themselves that should concern politicians. Nearly two-thirds of respondents, 64 percent, said the likelihood of their voting for a candidate would decrease if that candidate purchased information about them and their neighbors for the purpose of sending them different messages.

The study was conducted this year by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from April 23 to May 6. It included cellphone and landline telephone interviews in English and Spanish with 1,503 adult Internet users in the continental United States.

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The survey also examined attitudes toward political advertising on social media sites like Facebook. Seventy percent of respondents said the likelihood of their voting for a candidate they supported would decrease if the campaign used Facebook to send ads to the friends of someone who had “liked” a candidate’s Facebook page.

“People take politics seriously,” Professor Turow said. “Even more seriously than advertising, discounts and news.”

In 2009, Professor Turow, with other professors from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a study that examined attitudes toward similar types of advertising used by traditional marketers. They found that about two-thirds of respondents objected to having their activities tracked online with the goal of sending them ads tailored to their interests.

Since then, the issue of online tracking in digital advertising has risen to the national stage. Industry groups like the Interactive Advertising Bureau, government agencies including the Federal Trade Commission, the Commerce Department and the White House, and privacy advocates have agreed to work together to satisfy both advertisers and users concerned about Internet privacy.

In March, the Federal Trade Commission issued a report on Internet privacy that called on Congress to enact legislation regulating companies known as data brokers, which collect and sell personal information to advertisers.

The commission also urged that technology companies offer a “Do Not Track” mechanism by the end of the year that would allow users to opt out of having their personal information collected online.

“Compliance with Do Not Track would be voluntary, so each entity, whether political or commercial, would make its own decision about whether to comply,” Ed Felten, chief technologist at the commission, said in an e-mail.

A handful of personal interviews conducted with survey respondents showed mixed feelings about tailored political ads, and the collection and use of personal data.

Roman Kickirillo, 42, an engineer in Franklin, Tenn., described his attitude toward online advertising of all types as “total indifference.” Mr. Kickirillo said he would only be bothered by ads tailored to his specific political interests if the candidate’s messages were contradictory.

“I might never find out that they were saying the opposite because they think that’s exactly what I want to hear,” he said.

Doug Sheaff, 77, a retiree who lives in Bristol, Va., said he would be concerned with how data was collected. “As long as it’s publicly accessible information that they are getting and they are able to tailor the message, I have no problem,” Mr. Sheaff said. “The other question is, are they building up a file on me.”

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Carol Stewart, 49, who lives in New Boston, Tex., and is unemployed after getting “caught up in the economic crisis,” said she notices advertising of all types in e-mails, on Web sites and on the right-hand column of Facebook pages.

“You visit the site and they know everything about you,” Ms. Stewart said. “I don’t like that.” Ms. Stewart, who said she considers herself a Democrat, recalls seeing ads online for Mitt Romney but not for Barack Obama but that she has not clicked on the ads.

“When I got the discount card at the grocery store I knew they were going to track my habits,” Ms. Stewart said. “But these politicians out here? I didn’t agree to let them into my life.”

Media Decoder Blog: Survey Shows Growing Strength of E-Books

E-books continued their surge in popularity last year, surpassing hardcover books and paperbacks to become the dominant format for adult fiction in 2011, according to a survey of publishers released Wednesday.

For several years, consumers have been rapidly switching from print to digital for reading novels, a sign of the growing strength of the e-book for narrative, straightforward storytelling.

Over all, digital books kept up their explosive growth in 2011, the survey confirmed. Publishers’ net revenue from sales of e-books more than doubled last year, reaching $2.07 billion, up from $869 million in 2010. E-books accounted for 15.5 percent of publishers’ revenues.

But as digital revenue grew, print sales suffered, dropping to $11.1 billion in 2011 from $12.1 billion in 2010.

The annual survey, known as BookStats, includes data from nearly 2,000 publishers of all sizes. It was conducted by two trade groups, the Book Industry Study Group and the Association of American Publishers.

The survey also revealed that revenue in the overall trade book business was relatively flat. Publishers’ net revenues in 2011 were $13.97 billion, up from $13.9 billion in 2010, an increase of 0.5 percent.

Children’s books, a category that includes young-adult fiction like the hugely popular “Hunger Games” trilogy, grew 12 percent in 2011, to $2.78 billion from $2.48 billion in 2010.

Despite the closing of hundreds of Borders stores, brick-and-mortar stores remained the largest sales channel for books, the survey found. Many in the publishing industry worried that the disappearance of Borders would have a significant effect on the overall business, but analysts said it appeared that many of those customers had moved to other retailers.

Online retailing, however, increased to $5.04 billion in 2011 from $3.72 billion in 2010.

“I would never dare to call an industry healthy, but it certainly seems to be robust,” said Dominique Raccah, the publisher of Sourcebooks and co-chairwoman of the Book Industry Study Group, adding that unit sales of books had increased. “We, as an industry, appear to be getting books into more hands.”

Media Decoder Blog: Survey Shows Growing Strength of E-Books

E-books continued their surge in popularity last year, surpassing hardcover books and paperbacks to become the dominant format for adult fiction in 2011, according to a survey of publishers released Wednesday.

For several years, consumers have been rapidly switching from print to digital for reading novels, a sign of the growing strength of the e-book for narrative, straightforward storytelling.

Over all, digital books kept up their explosive growth in 2011, the survey confirmed. Publishers’ net revenue from sales of e-books more than doubled last year, reaching $2.07 billion, up from $869 million in 2010. E-books accounted for 15.5 percent of publishers’ revenues.

But as digital revenue grew, print sales suffered, dropping to $11.1 billion in 2011 from $12.1 billion in 2010.

The annual survey, known as BookStats, includes data from nearly 2,000 publishers of all sizes. It was conducted by two trade groups, the Book Industry Study Group and the Association of American Publishers.

The survey also revealed that revenue in the overall trade book business was relatively flat. Publishers’ net revenues in 2011 were $13.97 billion, up from $13.9 billion in 2010, an increase of 0.5 percent.

Children’s books, a category that includes young-adult fiction like the hugely popular “Hunger Games” trilogy, grew 12 percent in 2011, to $2.78 billion from $2.48 billion in 2010.

Despite the closing of hundreds of Borders stores, brick-and-mortar stores remained the largest sales channel for books, the survey found. Many in the publishing industry worried that the disappearance of Borders would have a significant effect on the overall business, but analysts said it appeared that many of those customers had moved to other retailers.

Online retailing, however, increased to $5.04 billion in 2011 from $3.72 billion in 2010.

“I would never dare to call an industry healthy, but it certainly seems to be robust,” said Dominique Raccah, the publisher of Sourcebooks and co-chairwoman of the Book Industry Study Group, adding that unit sales of books had increased. “We, as an industry, appear to be getting books into more hands.”