Category: media

“Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, lists more than five dozen personalities whose obituaries were published prematurely. Someone may want to add Netflix to that list.” Particularly, that is, now that it’s announced its second act. “Netflix is introducing a service to deliver movies and television shows directly to users’ PCs, not as downloads but as streaming video, which is not retained in computer memory.”

“The 40th annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week was packed, as usual, with cool new technology. New devices included ultra-thin/ultrawide TV displays, networked entertainment systems and innumerable gadgets that bring music, movies and television to our hands and homes in new ways. But many of these new products limit our freedom to use and share the music, movies and other content they are intended for. It wasn’t always like this.”

“Babel” wins the Golden Globe for best movie. “In a rather remarkable feat, Helen Mirren won best actress awards for playing two Queen Elizabeths: one for the television mini-series ‘Elizabeth I’ and the second for portraying Elizabeth II in the film ‘The Queen’.”

“Selling censorship — or even values — is oddly American. You can’t put a price on righteousness and cleanliness in a world of Hollywood smut, can you? Never mind that the logic was mind-bendingly askew.”

“More than £840m was spent on producing 134 feature films – 50 of them entirely home-grown – in the UK in 2006. The figure is up 48% on the 2005 total of £568.8m, making it the second best recorded year for film in the UK.”

“For the third year in a row, the U.S. government has placed Canada on its ‘watch list’ for a lack of IPR (intellectual-property rights) enforcement, which means this country is in the same company as notorious film-piracy hubs such as Lebanon, China, the Philippines and Russia.”

Ken Burns, “essentially the nation’s highest-profile documentarian since his series “The Civil War” created a sensation, has agreed to air his work exclusively on PBS until 2022, the network said. Burns is 53 now.”

PBS has a new primo Ken Burns documentary to broadcast. The network says it will bow in “premiere week” next fall, when all the commercial networks introduce their new shows. TV critics beg the network to change the timing so the show could get more attention in the press. Beg? Is PBS nuts?

The Oscars have been on a youth kick with Best Actresses in the past decade. But this year several older actresses are in serious contention. Susan Sarandon was the last actress over 40 to win a Best Actress Oscar for Dead Man Walking back in 1996 and in the intervening years the winners have been a parade of young cover stars.”

The Sundance Festival takes place in a remote mountain location. But “a push to make the influential event accessible to the masses is under way, with a series of initiatives designed to spread the gospel of Sundance-branded independent film around the world.”