Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company  and its entertainment unit, NBC Universal, are investing in a start-up called “Zeebox”, which makes an app meant to be a so-called “second screen” used by viewers while they are watching television.

The companies declined to provide financial details of Comcast’s stake. UK TV provider BSkyB invested a reported $15 million in the company in January. The free app has already gained some popularity in the UK, where it has 1.5 million users signed up.

More than 300 shows across 28 Comcast-owned networks will be represented on the Zeebox app, said NBC Universal’s Executive Vice President of Strategic Integration Page Thompson.
NBC already has apps designed to complement live TV shows such as an e-book based on the supernatural show “Grimm” and viewers using Zeebox will be able to find it easier, Thompson said.  NBC will also launch an ad campaign on TV and the Internet in October which will encourage viewers to weigh in on Zeebox while watching TV.

While it pulls from Twitter feeds and lets you connect with your Facebook friends, Zeebox also has its own messaging service and trending topics called “z-tags” that make it easy to track what TV viewers are talking about. ZeeBox sees advertising opportunities for z-tags on its service.

HBO is also partnering with Zeebox to provide content for the service, which is now available on the Web and on Apple and Android mobile devices.

According to the data, the number of installs of the free software surged 1,153 percent in the United States during the games. The company, which recorded an average of 220 installs a day before the Olympics, saw the number of installs increase to 2,753 installs during the 17-day event.

Its daily number of users also quadrupled to 8,121 compared to 2,040 average users before the Olympics. The peak day was on July 31 when 10,105 users logged in to catch the  U.S. women take gold in the gymnastics team final while in swimming, South Africa’s Chad le Clos edged out Michael Phelps in the 200 meter butterfly.

While these aren’t massive numbers, it’s just one company that people turned to during the Olympics to find a workaround to NBC. Others said they used TunnelBear and StreamVia while some tech savvy people like Walnut Creek, California-resident Jason Legate devised their own methods.

AnchorFree’s best known product is Hotspot shield, which lets users in certain countries visit blocked U.S. websites by offering an anonymous American IP address. The company has caught the attention of Goldman Sachs, which led the company’s last funding round of $52 million.

Dish customers: No 'Breaking Bad' for you! (Photo: Reuters)

Evercore analyst Bryan Kraft believes the prolonged blackout that has left DirecTV’s 20 million subscribers without MTV, Comedy Central or Nickelodeon for a week, could lead to some industry consolidation.

In a research note out late Wednesday night, the analyst said if content providers Viacom, as well as home of ‘Breaking Bad’,AMC, which was dropped from No. 2  satellite provider Dish Network in July, get the upper hand, it raises the chances of a merger between satellite companies and cable providers.

If DirecTV and Dish comes out the winners, he said, it encourages cable TV networks to merge, but only when their valuations fall. DirecTV has pushed backed against what it claims are exorbitant increases in Viacom’s programming fees that it says it does not want to pass on to customers.

And DirecTV viewers aren’t the only ones suffering. Kraft estimates that the dispute is making Viacom lose about $14 million a week. Meanwhile DirecTV would need to lose 1.15 million subscribers before its cash flow was impacted. Kraft said that if DirecTV expects to lose more than 1.15 million subscribers, it should pay up the $3 per subscriber fee Viacom is likely seeking.

As one of the most high profile blackouts stretches into its second week, time will tell whether the spat will be the one that changes the pay TV landscape for good or whether it just causes viewers to change the channel.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, sported a backpack, which made him look like he was going day hiking, but really, he was just going for a coffee with Netscape founder-turned-VC Marc Andreessen and his wife, Laura, pictured here.

Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, wasn’t seen doing any activities on Wednesday but after meeting Akamai CEO Paul Sagan, he did take a brisk walk alone from Sun Valley’s coffee shop to the main lodge, carrying an iPad.

(Photos by Jim Urquhart, Reuters)

Disney CEO Bob Iger arriving at Allen & Co conference, Sun Valley, Idaho

On the first day of the mogul fest, the parade of arrivals on the steps of the Sun Valley lodge did not disappoint. Disney CEO Bob Iger smiled for the cameras while later, Warren Buffett stayed in his car while someone checked in for him.

Some of the braver execs who approached the media were Discovery CEO David Zaslav who, for the second year in a row  talked up Oprah Winfrey’s struggling OWN network and said Oprah herself would be landing in Idaho soon to attend the event organized by investment bank Allen &  Co.

“OWN”s looking great really showing a lot of growth, growth in day time, growth in prime time. Oprah is coming. She’s going to be here,” said Zaslav to the journalist scrum. “The network is making a ton of progress.”

He added that on a couple of Sunday nights, when Oprah appears on it, it becomes the No. 1 or 2 network for women in the U.S.

Of course, OWN is finally growing albeit from a fairly low point after disappointing for the first year and a bit. And as the pressure has ratcheted up to meet ratings targets it has strayed somewhat from its Oprah-esque uplifting message into more traditional reality and celebrity TV fare. Interviews with Whitney Houston’s daughter and Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have become staples in a bid to boost its numbers.

On the tech side, Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and now the CEO of payments system Square told reporters he was working on taking Square beyond the United States.  “We just keep building,” Dorsey said.

Dorsey, 35, who is already one of the most respected technology entrepreneurs of his generation said he’ll be giving a  talk on innovation during the conference.

One of the biggest issues for the last few years is how traditional media companies, who have dominated this 30-year event in the past will work closer with the technology companies whose progress threatens to usurp and disrupt the media business. The focus is now on how the TV and movie business will handle the transition.

Blake Krikorian, co-founder of the Slingbox and Amazon board member said media companies would be more receptive to working with tech companies for online video, unlike in past years.

“The media industry is coming out of this hibernation period of the last couple of years and networks and content owners are looking to play offense now,” he said.

He added that the challenge will be figuring out what apps will appeal to consumers using this content, which, in past years would have been “wasted breath” since media companies were too busy trying to figure out a business model for their content on the Internet.

Reuters photo: Disney CEO Bob Iger arriving at Allen & Co conference, Sun Valley, Idaho

“It’s ridiculous, it’s just absolutely ridiculous,” said Burns at the Reuters Global Media and Technology Summit in New York on Thursday.

Burns was responding to a question about the controversy that erupted in April over whether the all-male club would invite IBM CEO Virginia Rometty, who is both Burns’ corporate acquaintance and competitor, to become its first female member. IBM, along with AT&T and Exxon Mobil, are the three major sponsors of the Masters golf tournament, and while the past four male CEOs of the technology company have been offered membership at Augusta, the same courtesy has not yet been extended to Rometty.

And while Rometty did attend the Masters, Burns said she wouldn’t even go to Augusta as a spectator if she was extended an invite to the esteemed golf tournament.

“The way I think about it is, the Masters can do what the hell they want,” Burns said. “If they want to actually have no women in the Masters, then women and right-minded men should make a choice about what the hell they want to do with the Masters. If they aren’t interested in having me there, why would I go?”

Burns did say, however, that she was speaking for herself and had no professional opinion about Rometty’s actions. Rometty herself had not commented publicly about the situation.

And it’s not like Xerox or Burns hate sports. Burns, an avid baseball fan, said her company is a proud sponsor of the Mets and United States Tennis Association, but doesn’t do “golf things.”

“If they came to me and asked me to sponsor the Masters—which they wouldn’t—the fact that they don’t let women in and I’m a woman, I wouldn’t sponsor them plain and simple.”

Investigation Discovery, the crime-themed cable channel that launched in January 2008, is not just getting better ratings than OWN, it is also doing better than the Discovery Channel itself. Over the last two weeks, ID averaged 275,000 total viewers, or 8,000 more than the 267,000 viewers that Discovery averaged, according to Nielsen. OWN, which launched in January 2011, only averaged 180,000 total daily viewers during the fourth quarter.

Given those ratings, who needs to spend millions on shows like “Planet Earth” when you can just air cheesy non-fiction crime programming like “I (Almost) Got Away With It” and “Who The (Bleep) Did I Marry. Those kind of shows have the fingerprints of ID president Henry Schleiff all over them. After all, Schleiff built Court TV into a cable network powerhouse on the back of similar programming.

According to a report from investment bank Barclays, the momentum behind ID could give parent company Discovery Communications “substantial leverage” when it negotiates new distribution agreements with cable and satellite operators next year. Currently, analysts estimate that ID only earns 8 cent per subscriber in carriage fees while Discovery commands 36 cents per subscriber.

As the flagship network, however, the fact that Discovery Channel is losing steam could spell trouble for its parent company, which is not only seeing poor results from OWN, but also was forced to recently rebrand the struggling environmental focused network “Planet Green” as “Destination America.”

Sony, which some people consider to be the “Apple of the ’80s”, sent out a helpful e-mail on Tuesday informing invited members of the press of the scheduling conflict without mentioning the world’s most valuable tech company. 

The email said:

Another press event invitation went out today which conflicts with the Sony roundtable on March 7.
Please confirm if you are still available to join the Sony event.    

The Sony event is a breakfast with Sony Electronics president and chief operating officer Phil Molyneux. He helped spearhead Sony’s tablet launch last year, the “S” and the “P”, which are among the many tablets chasing the iPad.

Sony isn’t the first Japanese company to get overshadowed by an iPad launch. Last year, the iPad 2 was revealed at the same time Nintendo President Satoru Iwata was speaking across the street at the Game Developers Conference.

Just a few quarters after he described Dish’s wireless situation as a “Seinfeld Strategy” (it may not seem clear now but it’ll make sense in the end), the Dish chairman gave a shout out to the Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels 1994 classic comedy “Dumb and Dumber” on Thursday. When asked by an analyst whether Dish would receive government approval to use its wireless assets, Ergen said:

“I’m hoping. You know that Dumb and Dumber line? I think there is a chance.”

The scene he is referring to is posted above.

Ergen, who has played poker and blackjack professionally, also made some analogies to wagering on Thursday. When asked about the odds of the FCC approving the company’s application for wireless spectrum he said:

“I would go broke betting on Washington. I’m about 0-for-100 in Washington.”

But here’s something for Ergen can count on: the Farrelly Brothers are planning a “Dumb and Dumber” sequel that will reunite Carrey and Daniels in their roles as Lloyd and Harry.

He told a New York crowd at an event put on by Electronic Arts on Tuesday that he slept like a baby before World Series games in 2007 — but didn’t catch a wink on Monday night ahead of the release of his company’s first video game.

Schilling’s personal fortune is on the line with “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning,” a fantasy-action game that hit stores Tuesday. Schilling told Reuters last July he had invested between $30 million to $35 million of his own money into the 400-person company he founded that made the game.

“‘This is opening day of career 2.0,” he told the crowd . And it’s an opening day that’s seven years in the making–Schilling founded the company called 38 Studios (after his jersey number) in 2006.

Schilling has been a video fanboy for years. Peter Moore, EA’s chief operating officer said he first spoke with him in 2005. Schilling called Moore, who then worked at Microsoft, to see if he could get his hands on an advance copy of the Xbox 360.

Moore, who said he turned down phone calls from Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson that same day, took Schilling’s because he was a big Red Sox fan.

“We spoke one hour about massive multiplayer games. I tried to talk him out of it,” Moore said, of Schilling’s idea to bankroll a video game.

Now, Moore said EA has high hopes for the game, which it is publishing and marketing for Schilling’s company.

“Curt believes he can do anything and he probably can,” Moore said.

Photo/Reuters