Category: media

The average American home now gets 96 TV channels. A new study reports that “though they may have plenty on, the average person watches only 15 of them.”

Hollywood unions are “criticizing the Walt Disney Co.-owned network for deciding to pay residuals on TV episode sales to video iPod users under the same payment formula for DVD sales. That interpretation has angered guild leaders, who contend that Hollywood talent is getting shortchanged by an antiquated formula.”

Although still far behind music, television shows represent the fastest-growing type of files downloaded online. As Internet speeds increase and software improves, almost anyone can get high-quality bootlegs of such popular shows as “Desperate Housewives,” “24” and “The O.C.” — minus the commercials that make “free” TV free. TV producers are worried.

Yahoo! says it is scaling back plans to produce TV shows for the internet. Instead, the company will concentrate on user-created content. “I now get excited about user-generated content the way I used to get excited about thinking about what television shows would work.”

“Now the elusive avant-garde item is viewable and re-viewable with a flick of your DVD remote. Unsupported by the film industry’s marketing and promotion, such proudly independent works usually plummet straight to obscurity — joining the vast unseen cinema, to borrow the title of a new DVD set devoted to making that cinema more seeable than ever before. Not only is this a great development for movie buffs and avant-garde connoisseurs. It also marks a quantum improvement in the plight of film-studies and art-history professors wanting to illuminate this shadowy continent in the classroom.”

A Canadian company specializing in mobile phone content has announced plans for a new film festival, to be held entirely in the palm of your hand. “Mobifest aims to bring fame and notoriety to the little-known art of the so-called ‘pocket films’ that are beginning to take the world by storm… The festival welcomes mobile filmmakers from around the world. All film must be 60 seconds or less, and shot and created specifically for the small screen, either using mobile phone, smartphone or other handheld device.”

“The clash between a musician’s creative impulses and the commercial imperatives that drive record companies is as old as recorded sound itself. Artists make the music and labels sell it, promoting and marketing it to the masses and reaping the lion’s share of the profits. The online music revolution has begun rewriting that equation… yet most digital music distributors still perpetuate the record company business model, grabbing a healthy chunk of an artist’s online sales.” One Boston entrepreneur is hoping to change that model, offering a new service which allows musicians to make their songs available on iTunes and other online services while retaining copyright control.

It takes a lot of miles of cable and some fancy coordination to make Oscar night work…

“In what is the boldest venture yet by an established media company to insinuate itself into millions of cellphones, the News Corporation has created a mobile entertainment store called Mobizzo and a production studio to focus exclusively on developing cellphone entertainment in much the same way that 20th Century Fox creates movies and television.”

National Public Radio has been getting into podcasting in a serious way. But “local stations worry that contributions from listeners will dry up if their programming is distributed through NPR’s uber-guide, NPR Podcast Directory.”