Category: media

“A mammoth 40% of the UK’s annual music sales take place in the six weeks up to Christmas. With this season’s trading forecast to be the toughest ever, record-shop managers around the country are lining up for a serious scrap. Commercially, of course – for now.”

Philip Morris is asking Hollywood to stop using its tobacco products in movies, citing research that claims a link between smoking in films and smoking in children. But not everyone is applauding the move, with anti-smoking groups pointing out that Philip Morris is doing as little as possible to actually reverse the trend of smoking in films.

President Bush has renominated Ken Tomlinson as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, “the agency that directs U.S. overseas broadcasts even though the nomination has been stalled in the Senate amid allegations of misconduct.”

You can’t swing a boom mike in Hollywood without hitting a celebrity hellbent on getting the U.S. government to do something about global warming and the destruction of the environment. But as it turns out, Hollywood isn’t exactly the greenest industry around: a new study from UCLA found that “the industry created more pollution than individually produced by aerospace manufacturing, apparel, hotels and semiconductor manufacturing… Only petroleum manufacturing belched more emissions.”

The cost of producing original hour-long dramatic series is often crippling for Canadian television networks struggling to compete against big-budget Hollywood shows easily accessed by any Canadian with cable TV. One solution could be to move to a BBC-style model of limited-run series, or to create more miniseries instead of shows meant to run indefinitely. But the problem is deeper than mere formatting…

“Old TV shows sell modestly – in the thousands – compared to the millions of units a hit contemporary series can sell on DVD. But sales often fall off quickly for these trendy hits while older series keep on slowly selling, especially as gifts. But there are challenges in putting out vintage series. It can be hard to find existing footage in good condition. Not all shows survived.”

The democratization of technology has given civilians potent tools — YouTube and cellphone cameras — to help ensure law-enforcement accountability. “Today, any bystander is likely to be reasonably proficient with a cellphone camera and to have the know-how — or at least, a preteen at home with the know-how — to post the images on YouTube. That makes certain subjects, like arrests, more likely to be captured and displayed repeatedly.”

“TiVo plans to introduce features that will allow people to use its digital video recorders to watch some video programming from the Internet on their televisions.”

“The Rodgers and Hammerstein road-show musicals have been staples of home video almost since the format was invented, which has meant that they have been subjected to almost unbelievable abuse: their widescreen images chopped off, their stereophonic sound remixed and pumped up, their already endangered color (most were shot on the notoriously quick-fading DeLuxe Color stock) rendered a dusty, lifeless pink. But lately, Fox Home Entertainment has been making a gallant attempt to reclaim these films for those who love them.” The results of the restoration efforts are mixed.

“There was a time, not long ago, when, if you wanted to edit your homemade movie, you’d need two VHS players or a pair of scissors. You could add a soundtrack by walking your VHS cassette over to that friend with a $50,000 Avid editing system. Then you could mail that homemade movie to a few hundred film festivals around the world, or save the postage and throw it in the garbage. Now who needs film festivals? YouTube videos are viewed 100 million times a day.”