Category: media

“Pirates of the Caribbean” shatters single-day and weekend box office records, taking in $132 million. “Playing at 4,133 theaters — the widest opening in Disney’s history — the film averaged $31,945 per venue. The weekend’s second-biggest movie, ‘Superman Returns,’ averaged $5,375 per location for a total of $21.9 million.”

The growing business of licensing is fundamentally changing both the way people interact with entertainment and the face of entertainment itself…

Rhode Island is the latest American state to jump on the tax subsidy wagon for movie poductions. After the state passed incentives last year, there has been a steady stream of movies coming to film. An they spend real money, which boosts the local economy.

A federal appeals court has ruled that companies which market “sanitized” versions of Hollywood films to consumers who wish to skip the sex, violence, and profanity are violating U.S. copyright law. The companies have been ordered to stop selling the edited titles, and to turn over their entire inventory to the original production studios immediately.

“In the age of widespread broadband access, iTunes video and video sites like Youtube.com, television viewers are migrating en masse to the Internet, looking not only to watch their favorite shows online but also for ways to discuss and engage with those shows. As a result, the blogs, communities like livejournal.com and message boards devoted to television shows are becoming more popular — and mainstream — forums for viewer discussion and feedback. And the people behind the shows have taken note.”

“Inconceivably, not only did great series and worthy actors from across the spectrum get largely ignored by the new fix, Emmy voters put a blindfold over their vision thing and actually regressed. The result, even when factoring in that Emmy voters are traditionally clueless and about a year behind what’s actually happening, quality-wise on your television, is a staggering lameness.”

A look at Emmy nominations shows that quality programs are just as likely to be found on basic cable these days as on broadcast networks. “One reason for the improvement in quality, he said, is that viewers, especially the young, no longer distinguish among premium cable, network and basic cable. To compete, basic cable has been forced to spend more on quality and promotion, he said, which has paid off in increasing industry recognition.”

“In the post-‘Star Wars’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ world of computer-generated universes, it may seem hard to believe that a director still has to wait for Mother Nature. But putting actors in real deserts or on real glaciers is often cheaper and faster than building a set or animating them in a computer.” The global competition to attract Hollywood location shoots is intensifying…

“WBEZ, Chicago’s National Public Radio (NPR) member station and among the oldest public radio outlets in the United States, has decided to scrap scheduled music programming — the bulk of which was nightly jazz — and move to a 24-hour news and public affairs format. The change — which has sparked a backlash from loyal fans — speaks volumes about the worries facing independent radio stations.”

“The 1990s were the golden age of MTV; it launched channels across the globe, eventually boasting more than 70 million subscribers. On the eve of the channel’s 25th birthday, however, a crisis is looming. The music industry has been transformed since MTV’s launch, with new temptations of the iPod era hitting the target demographic of 18- to 24-year-olds. Ratings have risen only 5 per cent over the past five years, compared to its sister channel VH1’s 17 per cent growth. The company itself admits there is a problem.”