Category: media

“If I had to guess, I would say that what we now call podcasting will soon vanish into a much richer soup of downloadable media. Our car stereos will download programs over wireless Internet connections, and they’ll be waiting for us when we strap on our seatbelts. Our TiVos won’t need to record TV shows in real time, because we’ll purchase the pre-recorded programs, and they’ll also be delivered via the Internet.”

How is it that movie box office numbers for the weekend are announced before the weekend is over? “These box-office ‘results’ released over the weekend are simply a studio’s own estimate of its movie’s weekend performance. Distribution executives arise at dawn on Sunday mornings to crunch their numbers and report them to the media. Making a weekend projection on a Sunday morning is quite similar to how the media call political elections when they have the results of only a handful of precincts: You compare the numbers you have against some past results to make an educated guess.”

“Traditionally, Hollywood studios have tailored their films for showing in Los Angeles or Kansas City or Lubbock. Foreign markets were the icing on an American cake, a lucrative revenue stream for the cost of a few subtitles or some language dubbing. Then in recent years, as the cost of filming in Hollywood skyrocketed, foreign lands became the destination of choice for bargain-basement movie production — with their offer of cheap labor, financial incentives and unspoiled landscapes. But American moviegoers were still the endgame. Now, faced with shrinking, fragmenting audiences at home, the studios are rethinking how they operate in foreign markets.”

“The Great Box Office Slump has been covered by the entertainment press with a kind of giddy obsession ever since the summer proved blockbuster-deficient. The year isn’t quite over, but Hollywood will likely end 2005 having sold about 1.4 billion tickets in the United States, which is a 6 percent decrease from last year. Revenue at the box office is expected to reach about $9 billion, trailing last year by 4 to 5 percent (the dip is slightly less than it would have been otherwise because of rising ticket prices).”

What’s all this about movie attendance dropping? In New York at least, getting in to a movie is tough. “In the age of Fandango, premovie advertising and sellouts every weekend, it has become increasingly difficult to simply “catch” a movie. Going to see a film has become an exercise in elaborate planning and, particularly this holiday season – when many big films like “Munich,” “The New World” and most famously “King Kong,” are clocking in at two and a half to three hours – a major time commitment. It’s basically impossible to see a movie spontaneously.”

New York’s film office says new tax incentives are responsible for $600 million of new film shooting and 6000 jobs in the city this year. “The mayor’s office also claimed that more than 250 movies and 100 new and continuing TV productions were shot in New York during the past year as a result of the program. It was one of several initiatives launched this year to help boost city entertainment projects and the resulting income from them.”

Three hundred and eleven movies are in contention for this year’s Oscars. That’s a 16 percent jump from last year. “Academy credits coordinator Howard Loberfeld cited an increase in the number of feature-length documentaries playing theatrically (35 vs. 15 in 2004) for the spike, as well as industrywide distributor reorganizations, which led to the release of an unusual number of long-delayed projects.”

“While every American industry that comes here faces its own obstacles, the bar that exporters of children’s television programming must vault is particularly high: a traditional culture of respect for parents and authority reinforced by decades of Communist discipline and the ruthless competitiveness of an educational system that favors rigor over imagination. Still, Viacom, which dominates youth-oriented programming in the United States and other parts of the world with its MTV and Nickelodeon networks, is aggressively courting Chinese youngsters, hoping to introduce them to its brand of playfully antiauthoritarian programming.”

“The next 12 months looks set to be the year mobile TV takes off. While the buzz around it is similar to the hype for 3G services, there is much greater optimism that TV will live up to its promise.” Some expect “about 50 million users of mobile TV by 2009, generating an estimated £3.5bn in revenue. Content that feeds off existing shows or offer extra behind-the-scene video is likely to be widely available initially but eventually there will be bespoke made-for-mobile shows.”

There are few if any parts for them, and that’s always been how the industry works. “It worked out that by the 1930s a woman could be a star into her mid 30s or even her mid-40s. As we progressed past World War II and up to the present time it got to be a pretty standard rule of thumb that once a movie actress got to be over 40 then supposedly, psychologically, America’s young kids didn’t want to see her playing leading roles so they wrote fewer parts for them.”