Category: media

“Many entertainment companies are growing impatient watching companies like YouTube distribute clips of movies and television shows free.” Yet, “missteps made today could have grave consequences for the future, particularly when it comes to consumers’ willingness to pay for movies and television shows online.”

Summer’s coming, and along with it a succession of critic-proof blockbusters and movies that any critic would find hard to like. So maybe critics should take the summer off and reappear when the quality movies come back in the fall.

“HD radio is a digital format that lets radio stations deliver better-sounding audio on both AM and FM bands. With HD, AM sound quality matches that of standard FM audio, while FM signals approach the quality of store-bought CDs. HD radio also lets stations squeeze more broadcasting streams into their current frequency.”

“The demise of VHS, age 30, became official with the major studios’ recent announcement that they’ve stopped releasing movies on videocassette. The lone exceptions: kids’ flicks featuring the likes of Barney.”

“The series was conceived in 2004 by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that administers federal money for public radio and television, to prove to Congress that public television was worthy of its more than $300 million annual subsidy. Even now Congress is debating the White House’s request to cut public broadcasting’s funds by 25 percent. The corporation financed the series with $20 million in federal money, an enormous sum for chronically struggling independent filmmakers. But, perhaps inevitably, such a charged project became caught up in the nation’s culture wars.”

Maureen Ryan is a fan of HBO’s The Sopranos: “No one-hour drama series has had a bigger impact on how stories are told on the small screen, or more influence on what kind of fare we’ve been offered by an ever-growing array of television networks.”

“Anxious about the mental cost of aging, older people are turning to games that rely on quick thinking to stimulate brain activity. A step slower than in their youth, they are using digital recreations of bowling, tennis and golf.”

The mayor of San Francisco has a plan to give residents free Wi-Fi internet service. Google and Earthlink are building the system. The system “would force players such as Comcast and SBC to swiftly mark down their prices to the $20 range. A pricing and features war would ensue. The resulting universal broadband would in turn create opportunities for new Internet business models, perhaps spawning a 1990s-like job boom. However, for every good new thing in San Francisco, there is an army of protesters angry that it’s not the perfect thing.”

As more and more art goes digital questions arise about how to preserve art that exists in 1’s ad 0’s…

As technology makes old forms of music and movie storage obsolete, the piles of cassette tapes, 8-tracks, vinyl records, videocassettes, etc, can begin to pile up. But a slew of new do-it-yourself conversion options are beginning to become available to consumers.