Category: media

Movie box office is down about 6 percent this year. But that doesn’t mean the movie business is down overall. “Yes, in an age of hundreds of cable channels, video games and other distractions, the domestic box office so far this year is down about 6 percent from the same time period in 2004, and off from 2003 and 2002 levels. But the money flowing into the coffers of movie studios is greater than ever.”

Viacom has bought Dreamworks SKG Studio. “DreamWorks had been in advanced talks with the NBC-Universal unit of General Electric, but told Universal on Friday that if it could not meet Viacom’s price, DreamWorks would break off negotiations.”

“More than half of the nearly 500 users surveyed — even among those who described themselves as medium to light users of Starz on Demand — said that they rented and purchased fewer DVDs because of the availability of films on the on-demand platform. Of the roughly 14 million Starz Encore subscribers, about 3.6 million regularly access the Starz on Demand service.”

Comcast Corp., the top U.S. cable operator, says it will consider offering a family tier of cable programing to address indecency concerns raised by lawmakers and media regulators.

Seattle indie station KEXP has been a huge hit since being adopted by billionaire Paul Allen a few years ago. The “station has grown exponentially into a $3 million enterprise that attracts fervent listeners all over the world and serves as a tastemaker for an eclectic mix of new, alternative, and international music. The total weekly audience has almost doubled since 2000, to roughly 100,000 listeners. Each of the past few years, the station has raised vastly more money than the previous, surpassing ambitious goals. Revenue from membership has more than doubled in two years, to $1.5 million. Beneath the surface, though, KEXP has been under financial strain.”

News leaked out this week that actor/filmmaker Mel Gibson, who ignited a firestorm last year with his bloody biopic, The Passion of the Christ, would be involved with a new ABC-TV project dramatizing the memoir of a Holocaust survivor. It didn’t take long for Jewish groups nationwide to respond, accusing Gibson of “minimizing” the Holocaust in past statements, and demanding that he not be a part of the project.

“As part of its worldwide campaign against piracy, the film industry is pushing for tougher penalties for smuggling a camcorder into a cinema in New York, which has the country’s worst bootlegging problem and some of the weakest penalties. A bill pushed by the Motion Picture Association of America would make operating recording equipment inside a theater a criminal misdemeanor, raising the maximum punishment to a $1,000 fine and a year in jail.”

“The group that traditionally presents the first big awards of the Oscar season said Wednesday it had delayed announcing its winners after questions were raised about its voting process. A spokesman for the National Board of Review downplayed the flap, explaining that voters had mistakenly been sent a memo that was mislabeled as an ‘eligibility list’ and did not include all the 2005 films that qualified… The delay lends new clout to the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Assn., which will be the first out of the gate this awards season with their picks for 2005 when they announce their choices on Saturday.”

“Message” movies, once thought to be box office poison, are all the rage in Hollywood at the moment, thanks to the emergence of a few specific companies that specialize in making films that engage the public in a specific cause. Of course, crusading filmmakers are nothing new, but the establishment billionaires backing them are quite a novel twist…

The recording industry, obsessed as it is with putting an end to illegal trading of its product, has spent the last several years coming up with scheme after technological scheme to make such piracy impossible. And yet, somehow, no matter how complex and ambitious the industry’s copy-protection tactics become, they keep getting beaten. So who’s beating them? Well, a 24-year-old grad student from Princeton, mainly.