Category: media

The new video portal “will aggregate thousands of full-length episodes from the network’s top series, along with complete seasons of current shows and full back-catalogues of classic series. Among the shows available on the new portal (PBS.org/video) are American Masters, Antiques Road Show, Masterpiece Theatre, Nature and Nova. Classic series, such as the various programs featuring cooking legend Julia Child, will also eventually be available in their entirety on the site.

“Variety ceded its grip on the town entirely, and now the Hollywood press corps is in a state of revolution. There is no power structure. It’s all turned inside out and upside down. Everyone claims victory, but no one seems to have it, nobody is powerful enough to measure it. And, above all, it’s one nasty, mean, shrill place.”

“The Internet musical Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, starring Neil Patrick Harris, was a Web sensation last fall. Fans crashed the official site, dr.horrible.com, while the downloadable version of the musical hit the top of the iTunes chart. Now some details for the sequel have emerged – and it looks like the creators want to stay true to the indie, low-budget aesthetic that made Dr. Horrible an instant cult item.”

“To underscore the boon that entertainment can be to a far-flung number of congressional districts, the MPAA released a report with a state-by-state rundown of the wages produced by the entertainment industry in 2007. While California and New York dominated, Texas, Florida, Georgia and Illinois each posted between $1 billion and $2 billion in wages from the biz.”

Original blog post: “Telegraph.co.uk has taken the ‘brave’ decision to publish a live Twitterfall stream of #budget tags on its Budget 2009 homepage.” Update to post: “Twitterfall has now been removed from the Telegraph‘s Budget 2009 page, but not before an awful lot of tweets made it through.”

“Yes we Cannes? No we can’t. The most glamorous film festival in the world is going to have a touch of the frugal about it this year as it feels the pinch of la crise. The 62nd Cannes festival opens next month, and where film directors and A-list actors previously sipped champagne, this time they may find their flutes filled with sparkling rosé.”

“The recent launch of the Warner Archive Collection could well portend a revolution; it’s DVD on demand” — as in, they’ll burn you one — “a way for Warner (and, one hopes, for every other studio) to make movies available without spending the $75,000 to $100,000 it costs to release an old title into an ominously contracting marketplace. … Virtually none of the movies in this collection has been available on DVD before. Many never even made it to VHS.”

“Newspaper movies get made because good drama usually involves moral dilemmas — and when it comes to complicated choices, the daily work of a newspaper reporter is a perfect vehicle. If you look back on the history of newspaper movies, virtually all of the great films, comedy or drama, involve wrestling with difficult choices and establishing some sort of moral compass. … [T]he issue always raises its head — how far will you go to get the story?”

“To say that Wii injuries are an epidemic would be an overstatement, but they are proliferating along with the popular video-game system. Interviews with orthopedists and sports medicine physicians revealed few serious injuries, but rather a phenomenon more closely resembling a spreading national ache: patients of all ages complaining of strains and swelling related to their use — and overuse — of the Wii.”

“A globe-spanning U.N. digital library seeking to display and explain the wealth of all human cultures has gone into operation on the Internet, serving up mankind’s accumulated knowledge in seven languages for students around the world. … The site (www.wdl.org) has put up the Japanese work that is considered the first novel in history, for instance, along with the Aztecs’ first mention of the Christ child in the New World and the works of ancient Arab scholars piercing the mysteries of algebra….”