Senator Ted Stevens Indicted: MediaBytes with Shelly Palmer July 30, 2008

If you are having trouble viewing our video player, check out MediaBytes on YouTube.

Watch Shelly’s commentary on Alaskan Senator Ted Steven’s indictment and his famous Internet tubes speech.

Page Six is reporting that NBC’s (NYSE: GE) summer ratings are so bad, co-chairman Ben Silverman’s could be out of a job if his Fall lineup doesn’t catch on. One insider was quoted as saying “It the fall is as bad as the summer, someone will have to take the blame, and it won’t be Jeff Zucker.” This is a classic example of why managing for margins is lethal to the entertainment industry.

LIVE NATION (NYSE: LYV) may be outsourcing the distribution of its 360-deal artists back to the record labels. The New York Post is reporting that CEO Michael Rapino wants to license artists back to labels to cut down on overhead. If true, Live Nation could license marketing, promotion and distribution of records to the WARNER MUSIC GROUP, where 360-signees Madonna and Nickelback defected from.

YAHOO (NASD: YHOO), INTEL (NASD: INTC) and HEWLETT-PACKARD (NYSE: HPQ) announced plans for a cloud computing research initiative. The plan is to open 6 data centers across the world, each with 1,400 to 4,000 processors. The deal caters to written applications but will also focus on distributed management, networking and operating systems.

AMAZON (NASD: AMZN) will now offer its payment plan to other online retailers. Checkout by Amazon will work like OpenId, allowing the 81 million customers who’ve given their shipping and credit card info to Amazon, to access it on third party sites. Amazon also introduced Amazon Simple Pay, which is similar to PayPal.