Category: media

Everyone wondered how hard it would be to book guests on the late-night talk shows with a writers’ strike ongoing. The answer seems to be that it’s extremely difficult, to the extent that two shows on opposing networks have just booked each other’s hosts as guests for the coming week.

“Golden Globe-nominated performers will snub the awards in support of striking Hollywood writers, the actors’ union said Friday. NBC said it was sticking by its plan to air the Jan. 13 ceremony,” although it will now be awfully hard to find celebrity presenters.

“In cubicles across the country, lunchtime has become the new prime time, as workers click aside their spreadsheets to watch videos on YouTube, news highlights on CNN.com or other Web offerings. The trend — part of a broader phenomenon known as video snacking — is turning into a growth business for news and media companies.”

The striking Writers Guild of America says that it intends to take some sort of action against guild member and Tonight Show host Jay Leno, who has been performing monologues and other scripted bits on his show since returning to the air this week. Leno and NBC believe that a contract loophole allows the host to write his own material.

“Reference Recordings, the Bay Area-based audiophile label founded by John T. “Tam” Henderson in 1976, has adopted a unique approach to computer and music server playback.” Rejecting existing high-end audio CDs, the company will begin marketing a new kind of disc that it says mimics its master audio files nearly perfectly.

When Tonight Show host Jay Leno returned to work this week without his striking writers, there was an assumption on the part of the union that WGA member Leno would not do any writing of his own for the show until the strike was resolved. Instead, Leno has been performing full-length monologues, and the guild is not pleased.

“Late-night network talk shows are soap operas dressed up as entertainment; their return after two months of reruns turned out to be yet another chapter of a national psychodrama, not about the rift between writers and producers, but about the perennial Oedipal struggle for succession — ‘The Tonight Show’ and its discontents.”

“Chinese censors have banned an award-winning film that depicts the seedy side of Beijing, amid a campaign to clean up the city’s image ahead of the Olympics.”

“A new study has found that many uses of copyrighted material in online video, including mash-ups and satire, are legal and could be endangered by new censorship practices.”

The set-top box, to be made by LG Electronics Inc. as part of a partnership announced late Wednesday, is designed to broaden the appeal of a year-old streaming service that Netflix provides to its 7 million subscribers at no additional charge.