Category: media

“To succeed in the digital realm, Hollywood needs to offer total convenience, almost infinite choice, and the freedom to watch any way we want. Instead, we have iTunes, which delivers video you can’t watch on any portable device that wasn’t made by Apple, and Amazon Unbox and Netflix’s Watch Instantly, which feature downloads you can’t watch on any device that was made by Apple.”

“For most of us, the consumption of violent entertainment is more than a scientific, moral or aesthetic choice. It’s also dictated by our nervous systems, our life experiences — and by the medium. Plays rife with carnage just can’t fake us out so well.”

There’s plenty of great user-generated video content available on YouTube. But there’s a lot more useless garbage. And finding a way to highlight the best (and make money from it) without damaging the populist feel of the site is a challenge to which no one has yet risen.

“Around the industry, executives are wrestling with versions of the same dilemma: Should they go forward with movie projects that might be disrupted by an actors’ strike if shooting does not end by the guild’s June 30 contract deadline? Or should they wait, with the risk that prospective films will fall victim to afterthoughts and lost momentum?”

New Line Cinemas, which was folded into Warner Bros. last week, was a tough studio to define, and a fascinating one to watch. “New Line was not a specialty division or a genre label. It went highbrow and low, sometimes playing for the niches and sometimes for the mass audience. It was an oddity and an anomaly.”

The 20-something drama “quarterlife” didn’t seem like a good fit for a traditional TV network, so its creator turned it into one of the most popular online shows around. Naturally, the TV networks noticed, and NBC snapped it up and debuted it as an hour-long drama last week. They canceled it three days later.

“New Line will maintain separate development, production and marketing departments but will integrate those functions with its new parent division to cut costs and improve profitability, Time Warner said.”

The proposed law would allow a panel to pull funding from projects it deemed “offensive.” “You have a panel of people working behind closed doors who are not monitored and they form their own layer of censorship.”

“The report from Informa Telecoms & Media indicates that by 2012, 909 million homes will have access to true VOD or near-VOD technology, equivalent to 78% of the world’s TV households.”

The report says Ottawa should commit to funding the CBC for at least seven years, and the amount should be indexed to the cost of living.