Category: media

Toshiba is reportedly preparing to halt production of its HD-DVD discs and players, leaving Sony’s BluRay as the lone high-definition DVD standard. Stock in both companies is up as a result of the end to the confusion over which technology would become the standard.

“Hollywood’s moguls just got served notice that if they want a Democratic administration that will get the fine-happy, rightward-pandering FCC off their backs, they’re going to have to play ball on tough TV ratings, parental-lock technologies, and (this one will hurt) advertising.”

“It does seem that Hollywood has been overwhelmingly working out maleness issues, rather than feminine ones – whether it’s rampant capitalism (There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton) or essays on violence (No Country For Old Men, Jesse James) or paeans to male solitude (Into the Wild).”

So the writers’ strike is over, and TV sows will be produced again. “Not to be ungrateful about the resumption of writing, but shouldn’t there be a greater sense of foreboding in the industry, and in your living room, right about now?”

“The growth in non-American members of the academy, the 6500-plus invitation-only film industry body charged with voting for the Academy Awards, may just be the reason more story-based, smaller films such as Little Miss Sunshine, Babel, Crash, The Queen and this year, Juno and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, are making their mark on cinema’s big night.”

Iran has urged the Netherlands to prevent the screening of a film in which a right-wing populist lawmaker plans to lay out his view of the Koran

“Any TV viewer who uses an antenna and an aged TV (one lacking a built-in digital receiver) will have to either get a new television or a converter. Why? Because broadcast television – the over-the-air waves you pick up by rabbit ears – is switching formats, and old TV sets won’t handle the new signal. An estimated 70 million of America’s approximated 250 million TV sets fall into this category.”

What if the glory days of public television — the days of “Monty Python,” “Upstairs Downstairs,” “The French Chef” — are past recapturing? Lately the audience for public TV has been shrinking even faster than the audience for the commercial networks.

“In the post-strike world of television, fans seem to be hiding their disappointment about lost episodes, truncated seasons and mothballed shows… Not to crank up a jeremiad here, but shouldn’t viewers be a little more annoyed?”

Watching TV’s late-night comedians ply their trade without writers was certainly instructive, if nothing else. Jon Stewart and Jay Leno proved that even talented performers need a writing team, but Conan O’Brien took an entirely different approach. “He alone of the late-night hosts respected the call for ‘pencils down.’ He not only surrendered to the strike, he embraced the moment, used it to engage in MacGyver television.”