Category: media

“In a sign of how Australia’s independent film industry is struggling, the best film nominees at this year’s AFI Awards – The Black Balloon, The Jammed, The Square and Unfinished Sky – took a combined AUS$3.9 million at the box office.”

“Strike.TV was born on the picket line. The new Web site, which started this week, was conceived of during the Hollywood writers strike earlier this year, which was largely over how to divvy up revenue from online entertainment and effectively shut down Hollywood for more than three months… Months later and after much anticipation, Strike.TV has gotten under way as a portal for professionally created Web series.”

It doesn’t replace the professional broadcast, but now football fans can go online and switch between different camera angles as they watch the game..

The movie musical Mamma Mia! has become “the highest-grossing British film at the UK box office. The film, which features the songs of Abba, has taken £67.2m in the UK since its release in July. It is now the second highest-grossing film in the UK behind Titanic.”

Canadian broadcast networks, “led by CTV and Global Television, wanted to start charging cable and satellite carriers for their signals, which would have been worth $300-million to the big broadcasters as they confront a deteriorating economy.” But Canadian regulators have said no to the idea.

“With the presidential election days away, the talking heads of right-wing talk radio are mood-swinging between anxiety over a potential winner they despise and hope that the polls and pundits have got it wrong.” Yet some of them are beginning to turn on John McCain as well.

“Historically, cable and satellite companies – which deliver TV signals to about 90 per cent of Canadians – haven’t paid for programming from over-the-air broadcasters but they do pay a portion of subscriber fees to specialty channels.” Now, a rule change may allow terrestrial broadcasters to charge for their signals, a cost which would likely be borne by the public.

The Obama vs. McCain presidential campaign is looking awfully familiar to fans of The West Wing, which more or less wrote the script the two real-life candidates are now enacting four years ago. And that’s no accident: the show’s writers more or less based their fictional candidates on Obama and McCain, albeit without having any inkling that they would actually match up in 2008.

“Four years in the making, the Tivo/Netflix streaming partnership is finally ready for prime time. Tivo begins software tests Thursday and expects to have the entire Netflix streaming collection available to subscribers of both services by early December.”

“The BBC suspended one of its biggest stars yesterday and saw another resign after its Director-General finally responded to an audience revolt over obscene phone calls aired on the nation’s most popular radio station.”