Category: media

“Nearly half of the short films being screened at this month’s Sundance Film Festival will be available for purchase at Apple’s iTunes store”

The US dominates the worldwide cartoon market, using its proven formula of family friendly plots, fuzzy animal characters, and name-brand voices. But France is making increasingly sophisticated high-budget animated features.

“The study by the Parents Television Council, titled ‘Dying to Entertain,’ said the 2005-06 season was the most violent since the group began tracking the issue in 1998. There were an average of 4.41 violent incidents each prime-time hour last season, based on the group’s analysis of the first two weeks of the ratings sweeps periods.”

Newly-released documents reveal some details of the internal turmoil behind the scenes at the BBC after a critical report of the public broadcaster. Then-director Greg “Dyke tried to cling onto his job and later wrote to the board asking to be reinstated – but this was turned down.”

The highly touted but potentially controversial new Canadian sitcom, Little Mosque on the Prairie, finally debuted this week on CBC television, and it pulled in a whopping 2 million viewers (the ratings equivalent of 20 million in the U.S.,) beating out even a new episode of a popular U.S.-produced drama on a rival network. Little Mosque has been touted as a major step forward for Muslim visibility, but no one knew whether Canadian viewers would embrace it.

The BBC is selling off its iconic 50-year-old television broadcast center. “It will signal the end of an era for the biggest broadcasting centre in Britain, symbolising the shift in the balance of power away from big media companies towards independent producers and individual consumers.”

Andrew Sarris is overwhelmed by how movies are released. “Anywhere from 522 to 540 new feature films were exhibited locally this year, depending on who is doing the counting and compiling. Apparently, more big movies were released in the month of December than I can ever remember. Was it a good year or a bad year for movies–or, as is usually the case, something in between?”

“The top podcast on the iTunes chart, week after week, is a radio show: ‘This American Life,’ the weekly syndicated public radio show hosted by Ira Glass. It’s a sign that radio, instead of fighting the competition from online and satellite radio, is adopting the same tools to serve — and keep — its listeners.”

CBS says it will allow fans to snip scenes from its shows and send them to friends. “CBS’s efforts are the latest example of networks experimenting with interactivity and the Web.”

“Little Miss Sunshine, an offbeat comedy about an unlikely young beauty queen, emerged as a serious Oscar contender Tuesday as its first-time filmmakers were nominated for the top award of the Directors Guild of America. Iconic director Martin Scorsese also clinched his seventh DGA nomination… while Bill Condon earned a nod for his lavish musical Dreamgirls.”