CIEN - Posts by Beth Gaston Moon at BloggingStocks

Maybe it was the smugness displayed during my formative years, or the between NBA and NCAA Basketball rules, but professional basketball has always been my least favorite of the major sports.

I am impressed, however, with the National Basketball Association's acknowledgment of the digital age. Today, the league announced that it has rolled out a video-download store, at which fans can of playoff games for $3 a pop. Entire series are available for $13 each, with a full playoff season .

The league's vice president of interactive services was quoted by the New York Times as saying "great games and surprising results have driven the most popular downloads." Among the heaviest downloads have been the series between the Golden State Warriors and the Dallas Mavericks, as well as last year's final championship-series match-up between the Mavericks and the Miami Heat.

The NBA is the first of the major sports organizations to offer such a service, though other leagues are reportedly converting game footage into digital clips in order to satiate fan demand.

An executive with Major League Baseball reveals the league's plans to introduce a video-search product later this year, allowing fans to search through hundreds of clips to find specific highlights (which will likely be available for free). The National Football League is introducing a video-heavy version of its web site this summer and exploring the ramifications of offering historical video footage.

Beth Gaston Moon is an analyst at .

Despite lukewarm reviews and a smattering of sub-plots spilling over in a bloated script (in this fan's opinion), Spider-Man 3 ensnared millions of fans in its web over the weekend, and raking in $375 million in ticket sales around the globe. The third installment following the escapades of our friendly neighborhood arachnid, trumped the previous record holder, Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith, which banked $254 million in its opening weekend in 2005.

In North America, the Tobey Maguire/Kirsten Dunst vehicle took in $148 million since Friday, topping the domestic box-office record set by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest last July.

Additionally, Spider-Man 3 -- distributed by Columbia Pictures, a unit of (NYSE: ) -- set a single-day record on Friday, selling $59.3 million in tickets, inching above the earlier record, also set by Dead Man's Chest. The latest installment was no frugal feat, costing nearly $260 million to produce.

I'm dating myself here, but there was a time when I would rush home from junior-high school in order to pick up the corded rotary phone and vote for George Michael videos on Dial MTV.

This was before the former Wham! star's legal foibles, before the Internet, and before MTV stopped playing music videos altogether. Hosted by the big-haired and smooth-voiced Adam Curry, the show played the top-ten most requested videos of the day, as called in by viewers.

Simple enough.

By the late 1990s, this concept had morphed into Total Request Live, or TRL, which ostensibly shows the most popular videos, as voted for on MTV.com.

But the videos are cut down into excerpts within an inch of their lives to make time for the vapid comments of screaming fans, as well as guests promoting their latest album, movie, or reality-show venture.

The nine-year old program is showing its age of late, with average daily viewers falling from a peak of 782,000 in 1999 to 375,000 currently. (To be fair, 1999 was at the height of the Britney/Backstreet Boys>
This ratings decline has forced executives at MTV -- a unit of (NYSE: ) -- to skew younger with a new .

The program will now be known as YouRL (a play on "URL"), a name which, according to Broadcasting Cable, stresses personalization. The idea is that this will allow MTV to compete with such brands as MySpace and YouTube.

Beth Gaston Moon is an analyst at .

They say there is no such thing as a free lunch, but now you can visit the opposite end of the spectrum, by treating yourself to a six-figure lunch courtesy of celebrity chef Mario Batali. The food wizard, together with mixologist (that's a fancy word for bartender) Tony Abou-Ganim and magician Billy Harris, exclusive lunch offering, available to any group of corporate executives with a cool collective $100,000 to drop on a luncheon engagement.

With taste buds yearning for the rarest of caviar and the finest of wines, CNNMoney.

com reporter Jessica Dickler was not able to learn what a $100,000 lunch tastes like, only what it might theoretically include. According to the three men, the hefty price tag could provide luncheon food, specially created drinks, and entertainment for as few as 10 or as many as 1,000, depending on the event (and the menu).

Batali, who runs 12 U.

S. restaurants and appears regularly on the Food Network, says the noontime offering is "geared to a market where $100,000 isn't a lot of money." Apparently this market is a solid one, as an event coordinator projects that the three gentlemen could find a willing $100,000 audience at least once a month.

Beth Gaston Moon is an analyst at .