“Either you offer audiences an unmissable blockbuster derived from well-known intellectual property, or you invest in meek, sub-$10-million indies and pray for a return on investment on the art-house and VOD circuits. That once-upon-a-time sweet spot of $30-million to $50-million productions, with marquee stars and trusted directors? That era is over.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Garrison Keillor, Consummate Radio Storyteller, Signs Off This Weekend
Radio itself is old-fashioned, of course, and yet – between Web-based podcasting, satellite radio and mobile apps — it is very much of the moment. Storytelling, which is the job inside Keillor’s bigger job, and one at which he casually excels, is the engine that drives “This American Life,” “Snap Judgment,” “StoryCorps” and “The Moth.”
A Broadway Competition That Suggests The Next Generation Of Broadway Stars
“The winners received $10,000 toward their college educations and a chance to audition for acceptance and a scholarship to the Tisch School of the Arts at N.Y.U. Finalists and other award winners got $2,500 scholarship grants. To make the cut, each student first won a competition as the best male or female high school performer in one of 31 regions. More than 1,000 schools and 50,000 students competed for honors.”
Why Social Networks Built Around Music Won’t Work
“The road to success as a music-based social network is riddled with obstacles that so far, and so far no one seems to have figured out how to overcome them.”
How Much TV Are YOU Watching? Here’s How Much Your Neighbors Are Watching
“The average American watches an astonishing 4.3 hours of TV a day, according to a new report from Nielsen. Add in DVR time, and that number gets up to 5 hours a day.”
MIT Algorithm Predicts Future By Watching TV Clips
“After the AI devoured all that video to train itself, the researchers fed the algorithm a single frame from a video it had not seen and tasked it with predicting what would happen next. The algorithm got it right about 43 percent of the time.”
Apple Patents Idea To Block Fans From Taking Pictures At Concerts
“The patent describes a smartphone camera receiving coded infrared signals beamed from emitters in public places. The handset could then offer on-screen information or disable the camera functionality to stop pictures being taken.”
Report Urges BBC To Drop License Fee And Find Better Source Of Funding
The report claimed the licence fee was “vulnerable in the face of changes in technology and consumption”. It continued: “It is in any case far from an ideal system – it has failed to guarantee real independence and is charged at a flat rate. The BBC’s independence has also been compromised by the insecurity of its establishment by a royal charter and the process behind the appointments to its governing body.”
Critic Tim Page Writes About Trying To Rebuild His Life After A Traumatic Brain Injury
“I was somehow convinced that the return to my house would envelop and embrace me and make me whole once more. In fact, the mix of comfortable familiarity and my own freshly acquired strangeness made me feel more dissociated than ever. There was too much “stuff” and I could never find anything that I wanted; trips up and down stairs were plotted like military operations, while coordination of my various remote controls — television, cable, DVD, CD – seemed a sadistic, Satanic test of memory.”
Here’s What’s Really Killing The Met Opera
“You can wrangle on and on about what the Met should do to cut costs and sell more tickets, but you may be wasting your time and breath. For if you know anything at all about economics, you’ve probably already got a pretty good idea of what’s happening there. It sounds like a raging case of cost disease—one that could be fatal.”