Category: media

Traditional radio is going on the offensive to try to “recapture some of the consumer and industry buzz temporarily ceded to satellite radio in the wake of shock jock Stern’s defection to Sirius Satellite Radio. (Oprah Winfrey will be going to Sirius’ larger rival, XM Satellite Radio). Industry observers wonder whether these initial steps by terrestrial radio will be enough to maintain it as a dynamic media business.”

Current TV is based on the idea of viewer contribution. “While there’s no question the number of people who can edit videos at home has skyrocketed, Current TV has discovered that the number who can make interesting or watchable “pods” is substantially smaller. To separate the wheat from the chaff, the network uses a Web based “green-lighting” process through which viewers rate each others’ submissions. Videos that rise to the top are put on air and the contributors are paid a fee that starts at $500. That process yields only about 30% of what the network needs to fill its days. The channel fills the rest with commercially-produced or “commissioned” segments about social issues, fashion, and music.”

CBC-TV has a new chief programmer, and she has a theory about programming: read the metrics right and you can choose the shows. ” ‘If a show scored 7.6 out of 10 and that ended up bringing in an audience of x-hundred thousand, I can build models on that that I couldn’t with qualitative research.’ Which is great if you want the trains to run on time backwards but not very useful if you’re trying to engage viewers forwards.

“We find ourselves in the midst of the long-anticipated convergence of Internet and television, and a weird thing is happening: people are watching television during the workday, in offices, at their computers, sitting up straight in unupholstered desk chairs. They’re watching fake ads or clips from “Saturday Night Live” that show up in e-mail in-boxes. And they’re watching with their fingers on keyboards, toggling between “Lost” or lusty Colin Farrell and Excel spreadsheets. No wonder, then, that the latest programmers — people trying to create sustainable, popular, commercial Internet television — are incorporating workday attitudes of diligence, can-doism, detail-orientation and, above all, procrastination into new shows.”

“The Academy Awards show is consistently the largest entertainment-driven live broadcast in the world, and it takes roughly 1,000 people to make it happen. At this year’s production meeting, there were more than 200 in the room, representing the disparate areas of expertise the show requires, from the medical staff to the stage manager, from the set designer to the telephone technician, the limousine coordinator to the director.”

In all Brokeback Mountain won four awards, including best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay. It is widely tipped to win many of the same awards at the Oscars in March.

There seems to be a sudden interest in “deep focus” and its original Hollywood practitioners. It’s a simple cinematic technique, and yet its history and meaning are somewhat misunderstood…

Where have the good women’s movie roles gone? “For the most part, the current fare seems to be channeling the 1950s, with female characters offered up only as accessories — ornamental but unnecessary. And so, in the movies with muscle, we see them as nurturing friends (“Capote”), neglected wives (“Brokeback Mountain,” “Syriana”), pregnant helpmeets (“Munich”), and objects of lust (“Match Point,” “King Kong”). Has even one heroine turned up this season who is as compelling as, say, a penguin?”

“For any director with no interest in following in Billy Elliot’s ballet shoes, funding is scarce, and the climate so hostile that there is little chance to experiment and develop. Some, such as Pawel Pawlikowski and the prolific Michael Winterbottom, have been lucky. But most of the great hopes for the future who have emerged in the past decade have yet to put much distance between themselves and the starting blocks.”

Most studies say too much TV for kids is bad. “Most studies of the impact of television, however, are seriously flawed. They compare kids who watch TV and kids who don’t, when kids in those two groups live in very different environments. Kids who watch no TV, or only a small amount of educational programming, as a group are from much wealthier families than those who watch hours and hours. Because of their income advantage, the less-TV kids have all sorts of things going for them that have nothing to do with the impact of television.”