Weather station is cool, but costly

Netatmo smartphone weather station ($179, Amazon)

Just in time for winter, I checked out this urban weather station, which is billed as a smartphone-connected air quality monitor. It comes with two sensor-laden aluminum cylinders, an AC adapter, mounting materials and a USB cable.

The good: You'll fly through the setup process and be impressed with the sleekly designed monitors for indoor and outdoor use. It collects lots of helpful data, tracks temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, barometric pressure and even noise.

The bad: It's a little pricey when you can get most of that information from the thermostat.

The bottom line: There are some compelling potential uses for this device, including another way to monitor carbon dioxide and the ability to make sure your home is the right temperature when you're away (as anyone who's ever had their pipes freeze can attest). It's worth your consideration.

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Zuckerberg in Indonesia for Internet-access push

JAKARTA, Indonesia — On his first visit to Facebook-crazy Indonesia, Mark Zuckerberg met the president-elect, spread the word about his company's global Internet-access initiative and posted a photo of himself at an ancient Buddhist temple.

The Facebook CEO arrived Sunday, when he climbed Borobudur temple in Central Java and posted a widely shared photo of himself atop its stupas on his Facebook page. On Monday he met Indonesian President-elect Joko Widodo, who used social media extensively in his campaign.

"It was a great conversation," Zuckerberg said. "One of the big priorities that he communicated was growing jobs and growing the economy. I think that growing the Internet and connectivity is one of the best ways we can do that."

The 30-year-old billionaire is traveling to help advance the Facebook-led project Internet.org.

"We are trying to get free basic services and affordable access to the two-thirds of (the world's) people who aren't on the Internet," he said.

He added that while "obviously we want a lot of people to connect and use Facebook ... Internet.org and connecting more people is not primarily to make money, especially in the near term."

Indonesia is the world's fourth-largest Facebook user. Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said there are 69 million active Facebook users every month, and 61 million of them are on mobile devices.

But the majority of Indonesia's 252 million people do not have Internet access.

When asked at a press conference about his experience using the Internet in Indonesia, Zuckerberg said, "It works," generating laughs in a country where many complain about Internet speeds.

"We hiked up this temple and it was beautiful and someone on our team ... took a photo on his phone and uploaded it right after, and it went quickly, and now that photo is in a lot of places," he said. "There are places where you travel around and you can't do basic things like that.

"That's obviously not the most important economic or cultural opportunity created by connectivity, but it was a good litmus test."

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Review site Yelp battles against extortion claims

SAN FRANCISCO — First the chefs of a small Italian restaurant got mad at online review site Yelp. Instead of trying to get better reviews, they decided to take a different approach: get terrible ones.

The campaign helped Botte Bistro get a rating of one out of five stars, as more than 1,000 reviewers left hundreds of tongue-in-cheek reviews panning the Richmond, California, eatery, said chef Michele Massimo, adding that it boosted business.

It was the latest protest among businesses who for years have complained that Yelp was extorting them by raising or dropping ratings depending on whether they advertised with the Internet's most popular review site.

Yelp has persistently denied those claims on its website, in court and at every opportunity when the question is put publicly to the company.

"It wouldn't pass the straight face test," Yelp spokesman Vince Sullitto said of the extortion claims.

Sullitto said Yelp attracts millions of viewers and sells advertising to 80,000 businesses because of the site's credibility with consumers. Sullitto said many of the company's critics are businesses that have received bad reviews.

Last month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out a lawsuit filed by several businesses claiming Yelp extorted them by removing positive reviews after advertising sales pitches were turned down.

The court is one rung below the U.S. Supreme Court and the ruling could have been a definitive one for Yelp.

Instead, it served to fuel the company's critics because the court said that, even if Yelp did manipulate reviews to penalize businesses, the practice would not constitute extortion.

The court said it found no evidence of manipulation and that it was ruling narrowly only on the question of extortion. Nonetheless, the company's critics said the ruling supported their claims.

Even before the 9th Circuit ruling, Yelp was battling two lawsuits filed by company investors who make similar extortion claims.

The suits, filed in San Francisco federal court over the summer, allege that the company's stock traded at artificially inflated prices because the "company tried to sell services designed to suppress negative reviews or make them go away" and then lied about it.

The company has yet to formally respond to the lawsuits in court, but says it will fight these legal actions as well.

Last year, a lawyer serving as a small-claims judge in San Diego likened Yelp to a "modern-day version of the Mafia going to stores and saying, 'You want to not be bothered? You want to not have incidents in your store? Pay us protection money.'"

The judge, Peter Doft, made the comments when he ordered Yelp to pay San Diego lawyer Julian McMillan $2,700 over a contract dispute involving advertising on Yelp.

The award was later overturned by a higher court, which ruled that McMillan's dispute with Yelp should be decided by an arbitrator instead of a court. McMillan didn't pursue his claim.

But Yelp did file a lawsuit against McMillan, alleging he and his employees submitted fake Yelp reviews of his law practice. McMillan denies the charges and alleges that Yelp sued him because of his small-claims court victory.

The allegations are so widespread and have persisted for so long that the company asks on its website: "Does Yelp extort small businesses?" The company answers no.

Yelp has had a complicated relationship with merchants, restaurateurs and other small businesses on which the company depends on for advertising revenue. To attract advertising, Yelp needs to maintain a popular and credible site.

To do this, Yelp says, its uses an algorithm to weed out fake reviews submitted by business owners, relatives and friends that is often misunderstood. The automated removal programs accidentally erase many positive reviews written by legitimate customers.

Yelp concedes that removing legitimate reviews is not ideal, but argues that's the price it pays for its credibility. Furthermore, Yelp keeps details of its algorithm under wraps so its review system can't be easily exploited and gamed.

That secrecy also breeds suspicion.

"We don't know who is leaving the reviews, and we don't think it's fair," said Massimo, the chef. "You are so vulnerable."

Massimo said he and his partner decided to launch their novel protest for a one-star rating after receiving several aggressive sales calls from Yelp that they perceived to be veiled threats. The ploy worked and business continues to be brisk, he said.

"It was the best marketing idea I've ever had," Massimo said. "Thanks, Yelp."

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Report: Starz to launch streaming service in international markets

CANNES - U.S. pay TV outfit Starz is to launch in international markets with the creation of the international Starz Play service, according to a press report.

It has inked a pact with Peter Ekelund's Swedish media group Parsifal Entertainment, which helped set up HBO's streaming service in the Nordic countries, to create Starz Play, an over-the-top video streaming service that will launch in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America, the Financial Times reported Sunday.

The deal, which the company will unveil on Monday at the Mipcom television market in Cannes, comes as Netflix expands rapidly in international markets.

"What we focused on is how quickly and dramatically HBO succeeded with its Nordic program," Chris Albrecht, Starz chief executive, told the FT.

"The amount of money and capital investment needed to build these new platforms is a fraction of what it is to build a linear (television) channel," he said. "This gives us an international business that has real potential."

Parsifal has invested alongside Starz in the new service, as well as unnamed financial institutions.

© 2014 Variety Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media; Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

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Frenchman Tirole wins Nobel economics prize

STOCKHOLM — French economist Jean Tirole won the Nobel prize for economics Monday for research on market power and regulation that has helped policy-makers understand how to deal with industries dominated by a few companies.

Calling Tirole "one of the most influential economists of our time," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said he's made contributions in a range of research areas. But it highlighted his role in clarifying "how to understand and regulate industries with a few powerful firms."

Tirole, 61, works at the Toulouse School of Economics in France and has a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Left unregulated, industries that are dominated by a few single firms can produce undesirable results, such as unnecessarily high prices or unproductive companies blocking new firms from entering the market. From the mid-1980s, Tirole "breathed new life into research on such market failures," the academy said, adding his work has strong bearing on how governments deal with mergers or cartels and how they should regulate monopolies.

"In a series of articles and books, Jean Tirole has presented a general framework for designing such policies and applied it to a number of industries, ranging from telecommunications to banking," the academy said.

His work is credited with helping drive the deregulation of industries in developed economies in the 1980s and 1990s, when many sectors were dominated by state-owned companies or monopolies. More recently, however, Tirole has argued for stronger regulation in the wake of the global financial crisis.

In a 2012 interview, Tirole told the financial journal Les Echos that the 2008 financial crisis stemmed primarily from regulatory failure. "The vision according to which economists have unlimited trust in the efficiency of markets is 30 years behind the times," he said, adding his research "does not advocate necessarily more or less of the state, but rather better state intervention."

Harvard University professor and economist Philippe Aghion said on France's BFM television Monday that Tirole's work is particularly useful to governments as they try to determine the best level of regulation, notably of banks after the global financial crisis. "Tirole is at the frontier of this domain," Aghion said.

It was the first economics prize without an American winner since 1999.

"I'm so moved," Tirole said, speaking to a news conference in Stockholm on a telephone link from Toulouse.

In an interview with France-Info radio on Monday, Tirole said his work applied theories derived from game theory to industry.

"The idea is to give companies the analytical means to deal with new contexts and also to give regulators the analytical tools they need," he said. "For example, how to deregulate electricity or railroads without creating infrastructure problems. How to allow entrants who are perhaps more dynamic without expropriating from the companies already in place."

Before Tirole, the academy said, policy-makers advocated simple rules including capping prices for companies with a monopoly and banning cooperation between competitors. Tirole showed that in some circumstances, such rules can do more harm than good.

"His contribution is that he has given us a whole toolbox," said prize committee secretary Torsten Persson. "More than that, he has given us an instruction manual for what tool to use in what market."

Drawing on insights based on Tirole's work, "governments can better encourage powerful firms to become more productive and, at the same time, prevent them from harming competitors and customers," the academy said.

The economics prize completed the 2014 Nobel Prize announcements.

In Nobel Prizes awarded last week, Taliban attack survivor Malala Yousafzai, 17, became the youngest Nobel winner ever as she and Kailash Satyarthi of India won the peace prize for fighting for children's rights. French writer Patrick Modiano won the literature prize for his lifelong study of the Nazi occupation and its effect on his country.

U.S. researchers Eric Betzig and William Moerner and Stefan Hell of Germany shared the chemistry prize for finding ways to make microscopes more powerful than previously thought possible; while Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan and Japanese-born U.S. scientist Shuji Nakamura won the physics prize for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes used in mobile phones, computers and TVs.

The awards will be presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

Even though the economics award is not an original Nobel Prize — it was added in 1968 by Sweden's central bank — it is presented with the others and carries the same prize money.

Last year the economics prize went to three Americans who shed light on the forces that move stock, bond and home prices.

___

Lori Hinnant in Paris contributed to this report.

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She’s got Nancy Drew game

For nearly a century, Nancy Drew, the bright, young amateur sleuth in the mystery series of the same name, has served as a role model for the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton, former First Lady Laura Bush and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Now, a 16-year-old Concord girl who shares the same admiration for the fictional heroine has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund her first entrepreneurial venture: the Nancy Drew Board Game.

"I feel especially in the modern day, (Nancy) is a huge role model, not only for girls, but for all young people who aren't sure they can make their dreams come true," said Quincy MacShane, who has read all 56 books in the series, beginning when she was about 9. "She gave me the confidence to know I could make mine come true. She empowered me."

One night about three years ago, Quincy was in her room and her parents came in and asked if she had finished her homework.

"No, but I have this," she said, holding up the game she'd made on the back of a Monopoly board.

Designed for two to four players ages 8 and up, the game is a kind of Trivial Pursuit for Nancy Drew fans. Players choose a character and a token from the series — a magnifying glass, a flashlight, Nancy's roadster — and move around the board's perimeter, "buying" books from the series by correctly answering questions about them. The player who acquires the most titles wins.

When Quincy told her father she wanted to make the game for more people so that they could learn about Nancy Drew, he said, "That's a big endeavor."

"We as parents want to encourage our kids to be creative," Nick MacShane said. "What we were surprised by was how persistent she was."

Quincy made a second version of the game, which a family friend, a designer, helped refine. And then she and her father approached Simon and Schuster Children's Publishing, which owns the Nancy Drew trademark, and demonstrated the game.

"I was very impressed," said Stephanie Voros, vice president and director of subsidiary rights. "It's a niche market, but, 84 years after the first book was published, there are still enthusiastic fans like Quincy out there. She really represents the Nancy Drew reader these days, who is smart and inquisitive."

After obtaining the rights from Simon and Schuster, Quincy and her family formed a company, Sutherland (her middle name) Games, which she heads as president. Then she applied for a patent and launched a campaign on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to raise $20,000, with the hope of getting the game on store shelves before the holidays.

As of Friday, with 15 days to go in the campaign, she had raised $8,346.

"I did not anticipate the amount of support I'm getting," Quincy said. "To have it come this far is an amazing feeling."

To support the game, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2026070997/nancy-drew-board-game

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Local law firm serving craft beer industry

Local law firm Bowditch & Dewey is hopping on the explosive growth of craft breweries in Massachusetts and across the country with the creation of a specialty practice focusing on the beer industry niche.

"It's a thriving and growing industry," said Bob Young, an attorney in the firm's Framingham office and a co-chairman of the new group. "In a lot of ways, they're facing issues that are common to a lot of startup businesses. One of the key challenges ... for the brewers is how to convert their passion and their skill of making beer into a viable business."

Overall beer consumption is down somewhat, but craft beer sales have been growing by double digits. The market represented $14.3 billion of the total 
$100 billion beer market in 2013, up 20 percent from the prior year, according to the Brewers Association, a Boulder, Colo., trade group for craft brewers, which it defines as small, independent brewers.

"There are new breweries in planning or coming online at an astounding rate," Young said.

Bowditch & Dewey will tap 10 to 12 attorneys from offices in Framingham, Boston and Worcester to address corporate formation, real estate, environmental, employment, insurance and licensing issues in the heavily regulated industry.

"Employment issues come to the fore quite quickly as the business evolves from a couple of buddies in the basement to rented or even owned space with a 200-
barrel tank producing mass quantities of product," Young said.

Young and his firm already have represented craft brewers, including San Francisco's Anchor Brewing in a non-compete case brought against it and an employee this year by Boston's Harpoon Brewery. The parties resolved the case, and it has been dismissed.

The new practice also allows for a melding of personal and professional interests for Young, whose current fridge selection includes Morph IPA from Night Shift Brewing in Everett, some brews from Framingham's Jack's Abby Brewing and Allagash Saison from the Portland, Maine-based Allagash Brewing Co.

"I have long-considered myself an aficionado of craft beer," he said, "One of the great aspects of the craft beer movement, is it's really become more or less the equivalent of — at least in my mind — wine, where you have a glass with a meal, and the flavor of the beer can enhance the food."

Bowditch & Dewey's move is an interesting one, said Eric Hendler, who founded Jack's Abby in 2011 with his brothers. "Personally we haven't needed something like that as of yet, but … if an issue arose, it would be nice knowing that there was someone who had experience in particular to breweries," he said.

The small brewery — which expects to produce about 15,000 barrels this year and whose best-seller is an India-style pale lager called Hoponius Union — also is riding on craft beer's increasing popularity. "We've been fortunate that more and more consumers are giving beer a shot," Hendler said. "A lot of places that would not have considered us a year ago are now giving us a chance."

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Global finance leaders pledge bold efforts

WASHINGTON — World financial leaders on Saturday promised "bold and ambitious" action to boost a global recovery that has shown recent disturbing signs of weakness.

That pledge from the International Monetary Fund's policy-setting committee comes after a week of stomach-churning swings in the financial markets triggered by growing fears that parts of Europe could be in danger of slipping into another recession.

The 188-nation IMF called increasing economic growth an "utmost priority" and pledged to make the necessary structural changes that would stimulate greater growth. However, finance leaders have made similar promises in the past, only to fall short when trying to follow through.

The commitments came in a closing statement from the IMF's steering committee at the fall meeting of the IMF and World Bank.

Officials also endorsed the IMF's efforts to support three West African countries battling the Ebola crisis.

Managing Director Christine Lagarde said at a news conference that the IMF has made $130 million available to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and that the IMF and other international agencies stood ready to do more.

"If more is needed, it will be there," Lagarde said.

In addition to the $130 million in interest-free loans being provided by the IMF, the World Bank is providing $400 million for the Ebola efforts.

In its closing statement, the World Bank policy committee said that "swift and coordinated action and financial support are critical to contain" the Ebola crisis.

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said that a Thursday meeting sponsored by the bank to highlight the funding needs was useful, but he stressed that the situation remained critical. "We call on all countries that are watching. If you have any sense that you want to help with this epidemic, do it now," Kim told reporters at a closing news conference.

International relief agencies stressed that time was critical.

"The speed and amount of governments' pledges will make the difference between Ebola containment or pandemic," said Nicolas Mombrial, an official with Oxfam.

The IMF and World Bank meetings were preceded by talks among finance ministers and central bank presidents of the Group of 20 nations, which comprise 85 percent of the global economy. Those discussions focused on the recent growth slowdown and troubling signs that some countries in Europe could be close to another recession.

In a comment clearly aimed at Germany, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told finance ministers that European countries with "external surpluses and fiscal flexibility" needed to do more to address weakness in demand that was holding back growth.

Germany, Europe's largest economy, ran a large trade surplus last year.

Lew also called on China, now the world's second-largest economy, and Japan, No. 3, to make the necessary policy adjustments to increase their own growth.

A string of weak reports on economic activity in Germany, the largest economy in Europe, jolted financial markets this past week.

U.S. stocks ended their worst week since May 2012, and the market turbulence served as a backdrop for the finance meetings.

While Germany came under pressure at the meetings to move to support greater government spending to boost growth, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble insisted in his remarks to the IMF that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government still believed the emphasis needed to remain on reducing deficits.

He said that this effort "will make the economy more robust and shock resistant and thus contribute to improved global financial stability,."

Singapore Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who is the chairman of the IMF policy committee, said that the finance officials had spent a great amount of time discussing the need to move more quickly to adopt structural reforms in such areas as entitlement spending, labor markets and taxes to boost growth and avert a prolonged period of weak growth.

"It will require some political courage and some degree of realism on the part of national legislatures, but it can be done," he said.

The finance officials also stressed the importance of the Federal Reserve and other central banks to communicate clearly their intentions so that emerging market economies have time to prepare their own economies and avert the shocks that were felt last year when the Fed first announced that it was thinking of starting to reduce it monthly bond purchases.

Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer, delivering a speech at an IMF lecture series on Saturday, said, "We have done everything we can, within the limits of forecast uncertainty, to prepare market participants to what lies ahead."

In response to an audience question about the timing of the Fed's first interest rate hike, Fischer said, "If the world is growing much faster, it (interest rates) will lift off sooner and if the world is growing more slowly, then quite likely the lift-off will be later."

The widespread view is that the Fed's first increase in its benchmark short-term rate will occur around June of next year. This rate has been at a record low near zero since December 2008.

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Balky Suburban may have problem with low fuel pressure

I have a 1999 Chevy Suburban 1500 V-8. Frequently the car won't start. The engine turns over but won't catch. The odd thing is that there is a sequence of actions to get it to start that works every time. If I repeatedly crank three times and let it rest for two minutes, five times, it starts right up every time! No one has been able to find any reason for this to occur and why the solution works every time. Any ideas?

I suspect a lack of fuel pressure is the issue. Deposits on the CPFI — central port fuel injection — can "stick" the injection poppet valves. GM's Port Fuel Injector Gasoline Detergent or SeaFoam may help this scenario. In fact, GM warranted this condition for 10 years/200,000 miles.

Do you hear the fuel pump run when you initially turn on the key? It should run for two seconds and then stop if you don't engage the starter. If you don't hear it, have someone tap the bottom of the fuel tank with a rubber hammer as you crank the engine. This may "jump start" a tired fuel pump.

Monitoring fuel pressure with a gauge would tell whether fuel pressure comes up to the necessary 60 to 66 psi with the key on, ready to start. Other possibilities include a leaky fuel pressure regulator, fuel pulsator/damper in the tank, faulty fuel pump relay or low battery voltage while cranking the engine.

More on brake rotors

In response to my column addressing brake rotor warpage on a 2005 Jeep Grand Cherokee, here are a couple of interesting responses.

From Robert Grussendorf: I had problems with warping front rotors on my 2000 Chevy Z28. I switched to drilled and vented aftermarket rotors. That was the end of vibration when braking. I was told the drilled rotors do a better job of dissipating heat.

PB: The idea behind drilled and vented brake rotors is simple — better and faster heat dissipation. As I mentioned, upgraded rotors may well alleviate the repeated rotor warping. However, I'm not convinced that drilling brake rotors is the right answer. Maybe this is the result of my experiences in racing, but on the occasions where a rotor ended up cracking, the origin of the crack was one of the drilled holes. Vented rotors, on the other hand, are cast that way and less likely to be the source of cracking. Like I said, I may be somewhat biased here.

From John Seymour: My wife and I have a 2008 Cadillac DTS. We drive cross-country twice a year over the Western mountains. On the downgrades we developed rotor warp that was severe enough to make us stop at a dealership in Colorado. We were told to downshift, and we do that sometimes, even into second gear. I have never had to do this with any other car and it seems to me to be an under-designed brake system. Should we go to replacement rotors or is there something else we should do first?

PB: Regarding the Cadillac's warped rotors, I tend to agree that the long downgrades described are overheating the rotors, causing them to warp. Better aftermarket rotors may well help, but first focus on what you, the driver, can do to minimize heat buildup in the brakes.

In situations like this, try to use the brakes as little as possible and always focus on using them as briefly on each application as possible. Rather than applying continuous light braking while rolling downhill, try to rhythmically brake moderately for a short distance, then release the brakes to let them cool. And downshifting makes good sense, particularly with many modern automobiles that do not provide engine braking in "D" due to the overrun clutch on the output shaft. Engine braking is provided by manually downshifting to a lower gear. Allowing the engine to help slow the vehicle is in no way damaging to the drivetrain.

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Shift in kids' TV watching habits drives big changes to Discovery-Hasbro partnership

The seismic shifts in the way kids watch TV has led to major changes in the partnership between Discovery Communications and Hasbro in the Hub Network.

The kidvid channel that launched in October 2010 will be rebranded Discovery Family Channel as of Oct. 13. Hasbro's ownership stake in the channel will drop from 50 percent to 40 percent as the programming focus shifts to Hasbro-produced children's fare in the daytime hours and family-friendly fare in primetime.

Discovery group prexy Henry Schleiff will add oversight of the rebranded channel to his growing portfolio. Discovery exec Tom Cosgrove will serve as general manager of the Discovery Family.

The changes were sparked in part by the fact that the sides were coming up on the expiration of their original partnership agreement. With so much of kidvid viewing moving to VOD and SVOD platforms, the partners realized that a linear channel squarely devoted to kivid has limited growth potential. That reinforces how much the rise of on-demand options has changed the game for linear TV programmers in just the four years since the Hub was born.

At the same time, Discovery's research showed that the Hub attracts a healthy "co-viewing" audience of kids and adults watching together in primetime. With the brand overhaul, the plan is to program original series designed to appeal to multigenerational family auds in primetime. The partners see an opening for a channel that is consistently focused on drawing multigenerational viewers in primetime.

Hasbro, meanwhile, gains more flexibility to sell new and existing shows to digital outlets such as Netflix and Amazon. Kidvid is a huge component of overall viewing for the SVOD heavyweights, even though it doesn't get nearly as much attention in pop culture as original series aimed at adults.

Discovery bought out the additional 10 percent stake in the channel from Hasbro. That allows Discovery to consolidate the outlet's revenue and earnings with those of its 12 other majority-owned channels in the U.S.

Hub, which was a makeover of the former Discovery Kids channel, has been consistently overshadowed by its more established rivals, Disney Channel and Nickelodeon, but it is nonetheless a profitable venture for the partners, and those earnings will now flow directly to Discovery's bottom line as it will have majority control.

Discovery and Hasbro execs stressed that the decision to revise the terms of the partnership was done by mutual agreement in the best way to make the most of the asset. Hub Network has grown its subscriber base from 56 million cable homes in 2010 to about 70 million today. The channel makes most of its money on affiliate fees, so the hope is to grow the advertising side with broader-based programming in primetime.

"Hasbro is a world-class company with franchises and characters that appeal to kids and families around the world. They have been terrific partners over the past several years as we developed our kids television audience in the U.S., and we look forward to a continued strong collaboration as we evolve to the Discovery Family Channel together," said Discovery Communications' prexy-CEO David Zaslav.

The decision by Hub's founding president Margaret Loesch to step down by year's end also accelerated the makeover process. Discovery and Hasbro both recognized that they stood to benefit from modified terms.

"This was the result of conversations about the most important elements of our success and how to bring the strengths of each parent company to bear to move the channel forward," Brian Goldner, president-CEO of Hasbro, told Variety. "We saw the opportunity to build up the audience in the evenings and show advertisers that they have a great opportunity to reach adults and kids."

Hasbro-produced hits for the Hub include the toons "My Little Pony," "Littlest Pet Shop" and "Transformers Rescue Bots." Primetime programming will now be drawn in part from the Discovery vault of shows revolving around natural history, adventure and science themes.

For Rhode Island-based Hasbro, the Discovery channel is a the centerpiece of a content-focused strategy that involves feature films, such as the "Transformers" series with Paramount and the upcoming "Ouija" due out next month from Universal.

The toymaker is investing big in production through its Burbank-based Hasbro Studios arm. "We are continuing to develop partnerships with the big studios for some of our biggest brands," Goldner said. "And you'll see us developing movies with smaller budgets and strong filmmakers."

(c)2014 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

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