Annie’s, Inc. (NYSE: BNNY) Started as Overweight at JPMorgan; Started as Outperform at William Blair.

Cabela’s, Inc. (NYSE: CAB) named Bull of the Day at Zacks.

Carnival Corporation (NYSE: CCL) Cut to Neutral at Goldman Sachs.

Citi Trends, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTRN) named Bear of the Day at Zacks.

Dr. Pepper Snapple (NYSE: DPS) Raised to Equal-weight at Morgan Stanley.

First Solar, Inc. (NASDAQ: FSLR) Cut to Hold at Argus.

Illumina Inc. (NASDAQ: ILMN) Raised to Outperform and $55 target at Credit Suisse.

Leap Wireless International Inc. (NASDAQ: LEAP) Raised to Neutral at Piper Jaffray.

Newell Rubbermaid Inc. (NYSE: NWL) Raised to Outperform at Oppenheimer.

Pepsico (NYSE: PEP) Raised to Overweight at Morgan Stanley.

Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) Cut to Market Perform at Wells Fargo.

Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) Reiterated Buy with $46 target at Argus.

Western Digital Corporation (NYSE: WDC) named Value stock of the day at Zacks.

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JON C. OGG

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) promises to build new handsets to stimulate demand. (Reuters)

Results in Asia help BMW earnings. (Reuters)

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) balks at a settlement with Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) as they wrangle over which company holds IP to an important chip. (Reuters)

The shale boom causes an increase in the burning of environmentally harmful waste gas. (Reuters)

China, Japan and South Korea will increase investments among themselves in the bonds of the other nations. (Reuters)

Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) to create original video programs for its movie service. (Reuters)

Natural gas drilling has dropped, which may push prices higher. (WSJ)

Carlyle cuts the price of its initial public offering. (WSJ)

Hawker Beechcraft may file for Chapter 11. (WSJ)

The judge in a suit against BP (NYSE: BP) says that a trial will continue as the UK settles claims for the Gulf spill. (WSJ)

The head of AT&T (NYSE: T) says the government’s failure to allow a deal with T-Mobile will cost customers money. (WSJ)

India to further cut oil imports from Iran. (WSJ)

Wynn (NASDAQ: WYNN) receives permission to build a new casino in Macau, but many of its competitors have already started to build. (WSJ)

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (NASDAQ: GMCR) shares are hit by poor earnings. (WSJ)

Time Warner’s (NYSE: TWX) CNN losses audience as the viewership of MSNBC and Fox grows. (WSJ)

Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) launches several models of its new BlackBerry as the company presses for a turnaround. (WSJ)

EU finance ministers do not reach agreement on new bank capital rules. (WSJ)

Canada’s pipeline companies to shift the flow of oil to the east coast. (WSJ)

Target (NYSE: TGT) will stop selling the Amazon Kindle. (FT)

Shares of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A) are running behind the S&P for the third year in a row. (Bloomberg)

One key to Samsung’s successful competition with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) in the smartphone race is products with different screen sizes. (Bloomberg)

Douglas A. McIntyre

The unofficial closing bells put the DJIA down nearly 11 points to 13,268.65 (-0.08%), the NASDAQ rose more than 9 points (0.31%) to 3,059.85, and the S&P 500 fell -0.25% or more than 3 points to 1,402.31.

There were several analyst upgrades and downgrades today, including Chesapeake Energy Corp. (NYSE: CHK) cut to ‘neutral’ at R.W. Baird; ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) cut to ‘underperform’ at BofA/ML and started as ‘overweight’ at JPMorgan; RadioShack (NYSE: RSH) raised to ‘buy’ at Auriga; STMicroelectronics NV (NYSE: STM) raised to ‘buy’ at Goldman Sachs and raised to ‘neutral’ at Citigroup; and Assurant Inc. (NYSE: AIZ) cut to ‘underperform’ at BofA/ML.

Earnings reports since markets closed last night have led to some price changes as of the last half hour of trading today: Barrick Gold Corp. (NYSE: ABX) is down -2.8% at $39.30 (more coverage here); Marathon Oil Corp. (NYSE: MRO) is down -4.4% at $28.85; Mastercard Inc. (NYSE: MA) is down -0.8% at $452.14; Allergan Inc. (NYSE: AGN) is down -4.3% at $92.29; Yamana Gold Inc. (NYSE: AUY) is down -2.6% at $14.36; Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) is down -1.6% at $37.30; The Clorox Co. (NYSE: CLX) is down -3.3% at $67.74; Rowan Companies Inc. (NYSE: RDC) is up 1.3% at $34.97; R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. (NASDAQ: RRD) is down -7% at $11.79; Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. (NYSE: MSO) is down -1.2% at $3.41; and IAC/InterActiveCorp. (NASDAQ: IACI) is up 3.3% at $50.34 after posting a new 52-week high of $52.77 earlier today.

Tomorrow we get earnings from First Solar Inc. (NASDAQ: FSLR), Diana Shipping Inc. (NYSE: DSX), Corinthian Colleges Inc. (NASDAQ: COCO), Apache Corp. (NYSE: APA), Orbitz Worldwide Inc. (NYSE: OWW), and Western Refining Inc. (NYSE: WNR) among many others.

Other standouts from today include the following stocks:

Chesapeake Energy is down -13.5% at $16.95 after posting a new 52-week low of $15.86 earlier today. The natural gas producer reported weak results and more troubles for CEO Aubrey McClendon. More coverage here.

Comcast Corp. (NASDAQ: CMCSA) is down -1% at $30.29. The cable company reported good earnings this morning. More coverage here.

Savient Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: SVNT) is down -18.8% at $1.51. An analyst has said that the company insolvent. More coverage here.

Stay tuned for Thursday. Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart, and San Francisco Fed President John Williams are speaking at a conference. We have noted the following events on the schedule (all times Eastern):

• 7:30 a.m. – Challenger job cut report
• 8:30 a.m. – New claims for unemployment benefits
• 8:30 a.m. – Productivity and costs report
• 10:00 a.m. – ISM non-manufacturing index
• 10:30 a.m. – EIA weekly natural gas storage report
• 4:30 p.m. – Federal Reserve balance sheet and money supply

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Paul Ausick

But both Amazon and Netflix face pretty tough competition from the likes of Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS), Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) and its HBO network, CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) and its Showtime channel, and Viacom Inc. (NASDAQ: VIAB) and its Nickelodeon network, among others.

In its announcement today, Amazon said it will option one new project a month to add to its development list and to test with an audience. If the company picks up the option, the creator will receive a payment of $55,000 plus a share of merchandise licensing, royalties, and bonuses.

Like Netflix, Amazon’s streaming video offering needs a constant stream of good quality content. Licensing that content from the existing studios is getting more expensive as the studios get the idea that they can do it just as well or better, and keep more of the money.

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, the mantra was, “Content is king.” But that content was generally static. Today’s streaming video and live Internet programming were a distant dream. But content is still king. The issue is whether that content can be licensed or created at a reasonable cost.

Amazon and Netflix are fighting an uphill battle here, and, as in all uphill battles, the odds favor the folks on the high ground.

Paul Ausick

Read The American Companies With the Most Customers

The customer bases of many of these companies are in the tens of millions. Each company operates in an industry that provides a product or a service to an extremely wide spectrum of American consumers. The leader in each sector reached its position through innovation, longevity or some combination of the two.

Each of the industries on this list serves a very large base of customers. For example, there are thousands of retailers, serving pretty much the entire population, but only Costco is the leader in membership with over 65 million members. Founded in 1983, Costco (NASDAQ: COST) is a relatively new company. It became a success largely because it charges customers a membership fee for access to its stores and in exchange offers extremely low prices that are never marked up more than 15% above the price Costco pays.

Some industries are huge, but only have a small number of competitors. While there are only a handful of national wireless carriers, there are over 330 million wireless subscriptions in the U.S. — more than the population itself. But there are only four competitors of any size — AT&T (NYSE: T), Verizon Wireless, Sprint-Nextel (NYSE: S) and T-Mobile. Each company has to battle for a share of a market that is no longer growing. The weapons the companies use to gain market share are products, customer service and price. AT&T is the leader. Its share of the market is based to some extent on history. It is a descendant from the original AT&T phone monopoly. But without strong products and intelligent pricing there is no assurance it can stay ahead of number two competitor Verizon Wireless.

24/7 Wall St. examined 10 of America’s largest consumer industries and the customer counts for the biggest two or three companies in each sector. We then reviewed the history of each industry in an attempt to find how the top company in each reached its leadership position. To rank the companies, 24/7 Wall St. took each leader and compared it in size to the leaders in the other industries chosen. We used company and industry data to confirm customer counts. Each company in this ranking is the largest company in its industry, based on customer count.

These are the American Companies with the Most Customers.

Apple has long been the source of news for major media. Readers only have to turn to the Apple section of Fortune or the tech coverage on TV, print and the Internet. Apple dominates the news pages as much as it does the value of the Nasdaq. The death of founder Steve Jobs was headline news across the world.

Barely covered by the shadows of big news media sit large tech websites that devote huge amounts of coverage to Apple. These include The Verge, TechCrunch, Mashable and Ars Technica. Each of these sites has millions of visitors a month, and a valuation well into the tens of millions of dollars. TechCrunch recently was sold to Aol (NYSE: AOL) for as much as $30 million. There were rumors, almost certainly false, that Time Warner’s (NYSE: TWX) CNN would buy Mashable for as much as $200 million.

These tech sites barely devote much coverage to Apple when compared to Apple-centric sites that commit nearly every word and page to news about the giant company. “9 to 5 Mac” has a million visitors a month, according to audience research firm Quantcast. MacRumors is much larger, with nearly 8 million visitors, which rates it among the top 400 sites on the web, based on visitor numbers. The Unofficial Apple Website, owned by Aol, also has millions of visitors a month.

Based on many measurements, some of these Apple websites are worth more than $50 million and spin out annual profits into the millions of dollars.

The media is adroit at following the money with coverage, and Apple is at the core of coverage about technology. That has turned clever editors into millionaires.

Douglas A. McIntyre

TV advertising totaled nearly $61 billion in 2011, while online video advertising totaled $2 billion, double 2010 ad revenues.

Paul Ausick

The interesting part of this is that Paramount, like the other studios, simply won’t give in on streaming. Movie rentals have to be downloaded and played as if from a DVD. How long do the studios think viewers are going to want to do that? These guys have had years to figure out a way to make money on streaming and the best they could do is Hulu. And the studios have even crippled that.

And of course, the studios are still fighting with YouTube and Google over copyright violations.

The studios know that content is king, but they appear to be determined to keep the king locked in an iron mask for as long as they can. Hey, that’s a great idea for a movie…

Paul Ausick

In order to watch any of the video, an Xbox 360 owner will have to be a subscriber to Comcast or HBO’s premium service or MLB.tv. The big attraction, of course, is being able to watch the program you want, when you want to watch it. The baseball channel will give subscribers access to more than 2,400 major league games.

Microsoft has sold 66 million Xbox 360s globally and 20 million of those pay for the Xbox Live service. A rumored ‘Xbox Lite’ is being developed to compete on price with Internet TV devices like the Apple TV from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Google TV from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). Given its shortcomings in some sectors, like smartphones, it’s unusual to think of Microsoft with a lead in something unrelated to PC software, but that could be the case here.

Paul Ausick

Measured by minutes per viewer, YouTube users spent nearly 7 hours (418 minutes) watching videos, more than twice as many as Hulu viewers who spent 226 minutes in front of the screen. Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) claimed third place with 67 minutes of user viewing. Other online video content providers included in the survey were Vevo, Facebook, Viacom Inc. (NASDAQ: VIA), Aol Inc. (NYSE: AOL), Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), Comcast’s NBC Universal, and Turner Digital, a division of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX).

Interestingly, Google trails every other service in advertising minutes, with just 119 million minutes of total time. Hulu’s ad minutes total 650 million. In total ads viewed, however, the two are much closer: Hulu users viewed about 1.6 billion ads and Google users saw about 1.1 billion ads.

As Google continues to search for ways to monetize its huge video audience the company needs to balance its vast number of viewers with more advertising that won’t drive users away. That may not be as simple to do as it sounds.

Paul Ausick