Category: media

“A new study shows that television is having a distinctly helpful effect on women, at least in rural India, which admittedly doesn’t have America’s half-century of experience with the medium, or 300 channels to surf through. The words female empowerment and television in the same sentence may bring to mind Star Jones extolling tummy tucks on The View. But for millions of women in developing countries, the benefits of TV may be substantive rather than frothy.”

“As video games have surged in popularity in recent years, politicians around the country have tried to outlaw the sale of some violent games to children. So far all such efforts have failed.” New York is probably up next, with a law drafted to circumvent the biggest stumbling block. “Put simply, the United States Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution as allowing states broad leeway in regulating minors’ access to sexually explicit material. … Courts have not, however, said that states have a similar right to regulate media based on violence.”

“We will certainly surpass $4 billion and probably be around $4.1 billion. I also think we will be at 600 million tickets sold, which we haven’t seen in a few years.”

Tom Green wanted his own talk show. So he built a home studio and some equipment and got on the internet. Now he has hundreds of thousands of viewers…

“The decision to move the Edinburgh International Film Festival away from its traditional home in August during the omnipresent Edinburgh Festival is a tacit admission that the film festival has become a non-event.”

“A psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, has done a statistical study of thousands of movies to determine what makes them critical darlings or box-office hits.”

The premiere showing of “High School Musical 2” on the Disney Channel scored 17 million viewers. “If these estimates hold up, it would make ‘High School Musical 2’ the most watched event ever broadcast on basic cable, surpassing the debut of ‘Monday Night Football’ on ESPN, which attracted 16 million viewers on Sept. 23, 2006.”

The infrastructure’s now in place so that consumers can get movies whenever they want wherever they want them. But the movie studios haven’t supplied the actuall movies to make this happen. “The movie studios are preternaturally suspicious of the new and unfamiliar. Their fear has nothing to do with crunching the numbers, but rather with large organizations’ tendency to lose sight of their interests — not to mention their customers’.”

“Louisiana’s former film commissioner has been charged with taking $65,000 in bribes by abusing a system of tax credits meant to lure film production to the state>

Popular music has changed since the guitar’s heyday in the ’60s, and the instrument’s popularity isn’t helped by the decline of music education in the schools. But there is hope for the guitar, and it lies in a “technology launching rock stars across the land, one that most guitar players don’t even consider part of their world. I’m talking about ‘Guitar Hero,’ the ridiculously popular video game in which players use a plastic guitar-shaped controller to simulate rocking out.”