Category: media

“Overall, industry sales in the U.S. stumbled 17% in April over the previous year, with console sales dropping 8% and games sliding 23%.”

“One of the key problems has been the collapse of worldwide DVD sales. Whereas revenue in the United States has leveled off, international returns are actually declining — with sales from Europe, the Middle East and Africa falling from $17.8 billion in 2004 to $16.2 billion in 2007. Income from last year is expected to be down as well.”

“CTV and Global have been seeking for nearly three years to charge cable and satellite carriers 50 cents a subscriber for their signals in an effort to drum up new revenue. However, CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein told the networks the idea was akin to ‘hammering a dead horse’.”

A graph tells the tale of what happened when Google “messed up and routed traffic through an Asian network that couldn’t handle the flood,” causing a two-hour outage.

In January, Hulu decided, under network pressure, to stop carrying all but the five most recent episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, an oddball Danny DeVito series “that languished on FX until Hulu users made it one of the site’s most popular programs. … User reaction to the move was swift and predictable. ‘Well, off to the torrent sites,’ one wrote on Hulu’s Sunny forum.”

The Cannes Film Festival may be a touch less glamorous this year. “But the international film industry is banding together more than ever to fight the financial crisis. In the absence of domestic funding from hedge funds and private investors, many of the festival’s high-profile films … had to scrape together a hodgepodge of support, including funding from foreign pockets and tax incentives.”

“Google Inc.’s foray into selling radio ads was supposed to show how its online-advertising brainpower could revolutionize an old-fashioned people business. … Instead, radio tripped up Google. The company is pulling the plug on its attempt to automate radio-ad sales on May 31, exposing how far Google is from its goal of grabbing a big chunk of the multibillion-dollar business of off-line ad sales.”

“Not only do digital channels have many more hours to give over to such programmes, they also, arguably, can afford to be more niche and more highbrow in their choices than channels that depend upon mass appeal.” What’s more, “Arts organisations are becoming producers, he says, eager to open up access, and become production partners on shows available as video online, as well as on television.”

“For years, filmmakers flocked to the Cannes Film Festival to sell their independently financed movies, confident they’d soon see their work exhibited in movie theaters.” That’s grown less and less likely. “But there’s a potential savior on the horizon called video on demand — and it may be hiding somewhere inside your cable television box.”

Virginia Heffernan: “Early reality shows borrowed plots from fiction: the end of innocence (The Real World), the dawn of romantic love (The Bachelor), the perils of greed (Joe Millionaire). By contrast, later-generation reality producers have recognized that capricious animosity, even when it seizes an otherwise unremarkable mind, is an exceptionally efficient source of dialogue, character and suspense.”