Category: media

“In a surprisingly short period of time, the hi-fi as we know it has been rendered obsolete, tossed into the dustbin of history. According to the U.S.-based Consumer Electronics Association, sales in 1999 for individual audio components — CD players, tuners, etc. — exceeded 270,000 units. By 2003, that number had shrunk to roughly 20,000 pieces, barely enough to sustain a niche market. Where once the mark of musical sophistication was huge speakers and a stack of components, now it’s an iPod and bookmarked file-sharing sites on a PC.”

It’s been fifty years since television came to Australia, and with the internet age in full swing, some are suggesting that the medium will likely have lost much of its allure (and its power over the public consciousness) fifty years from now. But as cultural forces go, none in recent memory can match TV for sheer reach across all swaths of public and private life. “It seems to survive despite its own vagaries and its speciousness on occasions… It’s a completely voracious medium, but it suits people that, one, don’t sleep and, two, are fairly quick with ideas.”

It’s tough sledding owning a movie theatre these days. Hollywood squeezes you for every dollar they can get from ticket sales and forces you to show long preview reels that lengthen screening times; advertisers clamor for access, and will pay handsomely for it, but they insist on having the volume turned up to insane levels in order to insure that the audience can’t ignore the commercials; and then there are those damnable “serious” filmmakers, who insist on making movies that run longer than 128 minutes, or worse, giving their films engaging plotlines that encourage moviegoers to stay in their seats rather than heading to the concession stand to refill their barrel of popcorn and vat of pop.

The BBC is making thousands of historic video clips available on the web. “The scheme allows people within the UK to watch, download, edit and mix the clips and programming for non-commercial programming. The release of these reports, offered as The Open News Archive, means the BBC has now doubled the number of programme extracts it originally made available through an initial trial with Radio 1 Interactive.”

The premium cable channel Starz is offering movies for download on demand. “The service, dubbed “Vongo,” is available for a monthly subscription of $9.99 and will eventually include more than 1,000 movies, short films and other programs. The films will be available at the same time they are offered on the Starz premium movie cable channel, about five to six months after they are released on DVD.”

When any programming is available whenever the viewer wants it, what does that portend for those carefully strategized prime-time lineups?

“This season, “Lost” is the fourth-ranked show in total viewers and the all-important 18- to 49-year-old demographic. But “Lost” has become something more, a model for a new media age, one that has far-reaching financial implications for artists and producers as new technology almost demands that they produce original content for Internet sites and blogs, DVDs, podcasts and books.”

The movie industry is anxiously watching the release of Steven Soderbergh’s “Bubble” later this month. It could change how we see movies. “Bubble will be the first feature released simultaneously in cinemas, on pay-per-view television and on DVD. As such, it is widely being seen as a portent of things to come.”

“The best things in life — TV, radio, newspapers — used to be free, or pretty darned close to free. And now they’re not. So the media question for 2006 is: What are you going to pay for, and why?”

“As the box office closed out 2005, moviegoing was down 7% with about 1.4 billion tickets sold for the year. While studio executives disagreed over why theater attendance declined (some blamed the movies themselves, others cited the allure of DVDs and video games, and several others said the 7% slide was statistically meaningless), a number of industry leaders did concede that exhibition must improve if Hollywood is to prosper — stadium seating, in other words, is simply not enough.”