Category: media

“When it started on November 2 1982, [the UK’s] Channel 4 was conceived of as a public-service broadcaster, commercially self-funded yet publicly owned, originally by the Independent Broadcasting Authority. Where, one might be forgiven for asking, did it all go wrong?”

The stakes are huge for the future of internet TV and audio in the wake of Viacom’s billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube. “If the case proceeds to trial and results in a ruling favoring the cable operator, it could substantially raise the risks for companies that publish content of any kind online.”

Over the last decade, This American Life has been public radio’s biggest success story, building a fiercely loyal audience made up largely of listeners who do not fit public radio’s usual demographic (which is to say, most of them aren’t baby boomers.) But when host Ira Glass announced that the TAL staff were at work on a TV version of the program, longtime listeners recoiled. The TV show debuts this week on Showtime, and the radio audience is holding its breath.

AO Scott finds much to like in this year’s New Directors/New Films program. But “as I watched the selections scheduled for its first week, I found myself wishing, in too many cases, that the movies would try harder, risk more, challenge themselves and their audiences. Instead, most of them seemed to hew to familiar themes and strategies, as though they were genre movies for an art-film crowd.”

“Planeloads of freeloading British hacks – not to mention the three million British tourists who visit the country every year – have poisoned that well. On first hearing an English accent 50 years ago, Americans might have thought: stately home, private school, good manners. Nowadays, they think: low income, poor diet, alcohol problem.”

Julie Taymor delivered her new movie to her studio. They didn’t like it. “After Ms. Taymor delivered the movie to Joe Roth, the film executive whose production company, Revolution Studios, based at Sony, is making the Beatles musical, he created his own version without her agreement. And last week Mr. Roth tested his cut of the film, which is about a half-hour shorter than Ms. Taymor’s 2-hour-8-minute version.”

America’s public radio audience is… well, America’s public radio audience. And it is a certain demographic. So how to expand that audience? There are several experiments about to launch that will test new ways of doing public radio…

“Almost since the beginning of Hollywood, writers have written themselves into becoming directors — the long list includes Billy Wilder, Barry Levinson and Oliver Stone. What’s changed is the number of opportunities available in the form of billionaires and quasi-billionaires eager to take a chance on proven names who want to direct. Indeed, almost everyone listed above — even those such as Frank and August, whose films earned billions for the studios — was financed independently.”

“A new ruling from the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board threatens to silence many, and perhaps most, webcasters. The Royalty Board’s decision to more than double the fees that webcasters pay to play recorded music might seem unfair to mom-and-pop Web radio operators — and to many of Web radio’s 50 million listeners — but it’s about time artists got their share of the money that radio rakes in.”

“At the moment these sites pretty much appeal only to hard-core cineastes, mainly because watching movies on a computer monitor is far from an ideal entertainment experience. But a slew of gadgets, like the coming Apple TV, promise to erase the divide between the Internet and your home entertainment center by easily transporting a movie file sitting on the computer to the 52-inch plasma television in the living room, or magically giving the set Internet access.”