Category: media

“It’s a sad fact of life and prime-time television, where a show can last a few episodes (like last season’s crime drama ‘Smith’) or 11 seasons (like the comedy ‘Cheers’), that everything must eventually end. But when darkness comes in Hollywood, don’t expect a plainly worded news bulletin about it. For several reasons, mostly involving the entertainment industry’s legendary egos and pride, few networks actually use the C-word – an imprecision that gets interesting.”

The ten-year-old US arts channel Ovation has relaunched. “Defying the conventional view of culture on TV as stuffy and obsessed with ‘plummy British accents,’ Ovation has assembled an eclectic array of performances, films, documentaries and more of both the fine arts and mainstream popular fare.”

This summer was supposed to generate record box office for the movies. But “in fact, attendance is running behind last summer’s and has even fallen below that of summer 2005, a year of box-office duds that had some analysts predicting audiences were abandoning movie houses in favor of home theaters and other entertainment options. With studios offering a stronger late-season lineup than normal this year, attendance likely will pick up and lift Hollywood to a respectable summer. Still, early forecasts that Hollywood would have its first $4 billion summer now look like wishful thinking.”

A new ad ratings program has changed the TV ad buying market. “Advertisers paid extra to have ad buys based on the new ratings service. They did so on the broadcast side and would do so on the cable side if the currency is adopted there as well, sellers said. Audiences for ads in prime time are about 5 percent smaller on average across the major broadcast networks than the audiences for the programs, according to Nielsen Media Research.”

“Operating sales among television broadcasters climbed 8.2 per cent last year, the third largest increase in the past decade, as Canadians tuned into pay-per-view television, video-on-demand, specialty channels, and public broadcasting for the return of the hockey season.”

“Consumers spent an estimated $10.7 billion on home video in the first six months of the year, down 2% from the year-ago period. Rental spending was projected to remain flat at $3.9 billion, while DVD sales were pegged at $6.8 billion, down 3%.”

“For years, people have been able to circumvent TV ads with digital video recorders, but that requires some effort. There are much easier opportunities for ad-avoiding multitasking at the click of a mouse, which is why the networks are experimenting with a mix of alternative formats for online promotional breaks — including having none at all.”

“The genre that VH1 calls celebreality has taken up the slack where F. Scott Fitzgerald left off: rich party people making one heroic stab at being human and then — spectacularly — losing it all. One difference between reality television and novels, however, is that these television personalities have flesh-and-blood lives offstage. They have, in other words, something to lose that Gatsby did not.”

The BBC says this is the biggest thing to hit TV since color. “After installing the iPlayer on a PC, viewers will be able to download almost any programme from the previous seven days at will and store it on the computer for up to 30 days, after which it will be automatically deleted.”

“With CustomFlix, when a customer buys a movie, it kicks off an automated process that copies the film onto a disk and puts together the packaging on the spot. The company did not provide details as to how many customers have used CustomFlix to buy on-demand DVDs, or how much an on-demand HD DVD might cost.”