The Breakfast Meeting: Cable Reigns at the Emmys, and Power Games Behind the \'Cloud\'

September 24, 2012, 9:57 am

By NOAM COHEN

The Emmys were awarded Sunday night, and there was an upset in the highly competitive drama category, as the newcomer “Homeland,” on Showtime, denied “Mad Men,” on AMC, an unprecedented fifth win, Brian Stelter reported. The ABC show “Modern Family,” however, increased its streak of Emmys as best comedy to three.

• Another notable award was the one won by Julianne Moore for her portrayal of Sarah Palin in the HBO movie “Game Change,” about the 2008 presidential election; she is the second actress to win an Emmy for playing Ms. Palin, after Tina Fey won in 2009 for her acclaimed parody on “Saturday Night Live.”
• The awards show, Alessandra Stanley writes, was “like a cable ec lipse of the networks.” For all the talk of a golden age of TV, she noted, the high-quality programming being praised was mainly on the cable networks. Even the networks' usual domination of the comedy awards was under threat: The comedian Louis C.K. won two Emmys for work he did on cable; and Julia Louis-Dreyfus won the Emmy for best actress in a comedy for “Veep,” a new HBO series.
• The notion of a fall season of new TV shows is a tradition more than 60 years old and originally tied to the start of the model year for new cars, Bill Carter writes. And for all the changes in the TV landscape - with cable channels introducing hit shows any time in the calendar - the idea still works, network executives say. Mr. Carter writes that “attention on the new network shows seems only to have increased, as more blogs and social media sites offer breakdowns of the lineups and predictions of successes and failures.”

The huge data centers - so called “serve r farms” - that store the information that can be quickly retrieved at Internet sites offer a contrast to the sleek, clean reputation of online businesses, James Glanz reports in a careful look at the experience of Quincy, Wash., a city with cheap, ample power due to the dams built on the Columbia River. These centers - which help support the computing “cloud” users are becoming reliant on - can raise similar pollution issues as old-fashioned factories; in Quincy, Microsoft built operations that, along with those for Yahoo, dwarf the local and small-commercial use of power for the city. Along with Microsoft's data centers came huge diesel generators to offer backup electrical power that in 2010 ran for more a combined 3,615 hours, he writes.

• A Foxconn factory in Taiyuan, China, was closed early Monday after a riot there said to involve more than 1,000 workers was broken up by the police, David Barboza and Keith Bradsher reported. The factory, part of a syste m that supplies the world's electronic giants, including Apple, employs about 79,000 workers. The Chinese government said 5,000 police officers were sent in to quell the riot, which it described as a fight among employees. An Foxconn employee reached by telephone said the riot started when workers brawled with security guards.

Verizon's $3.9 billion purchase of spectrum from cable companies will allow it to expand its fourth-generation wireless network, but another provision has great meaning as well, Amy Chozick writes. Under the terms of the deal, which was approved last month by the federal government, cable companies can now use Verizon's retail stores to sell cable TV packaged with phone and wireless service. It is a long way from the days when cable and wireless thought of themselves as competitors â€" with cable companies planning to sell wireless phone service, and wireless companies trying to compete in cable, she writes. Beginning next month, the stores will include displays that describe how you can use, say, your Verizon Samsung tablet to program your Comcast DVR.

Quartz, which is set to debut Monday, is the new digital-only business-news site from the publisher of The Atlantic Monthly magazine and it represents the lessons learned by David Bradley, Atlantic's owner. Among those lessons, Mr. Bradley tells David Carr: “It's become very, very clear to me that digital trumps print, and that pure digital, without any legacy costs, massively trumps print.” The site is free, built for mobile, and has a perspective on business that is intended for the swath of global-minded executives and investors who, Mr. Bradley says, have the same kinds of issues on their minds: the sudden abundance of energy, the role of the Chinese consumer, how to exploit low interest rates.