Category: media

“The video and MTV have gone their separate ways. Even MTV2, the little-sister channel once devoted solely to videos, has begun a switch to original programming. But rather than shrivel away, videos have taken on an exciting if uncertain life of their own, far away from the mother ship that launched them. They thrive at online music sites, they’re sold in record stores, they connect strangers across the Internet. And just this month, speculation was rampant that they might soon be coming to iPods, the hand-held devices that are obsessing an increasingly large segment of the population. For a music industry that has gone through lurching crises in the past few years, as well as for viewers and fans, the proliferation of videos on all kinds of new screens may be one of the quietest changes, but also one of the most profound.”

Ken Tomlinson, head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, visits editors of the Washington Times to make his case about political balance in public broadcasting. “This is something the public broadcasting community is going to have to come to grips with,” said Mr. Tomlinson, a Republican. “In the future, [in order to get] the kind of Republican support they need to have a future, they are going to have to demonstrate that public broadcasting is for people across the spectrum.”

David Sterritt is retiring after 35 years as movie critic for the Christian Science Monitor. He reckons he’s seen an average of a movie a day during that time. “Different critics have different views about this, but anyone who sees the profession in mainly cynical terms is probably not a very reliable reviewer. And something everyone can agree on is the flood of new talent flowing into the field. While newspapers are on the wane in many areas, the dwindling number of first-rate print critics is more than compensated for by the growth in Internet reviewers writing for established websites or their own blogs.”

The court lets stand a charge levied on sale of music player devices such as iPods.”In December 2003, the Copyright Board approved the group’s request to collect the new levy, which was built into the Canadian prices of digital audio recorders and MP3 players. The new charge ranged from an extra $2 tacked onto the price of a music player using up to one gigabyte of non-removable memory up to an extra $25 on the price of a player using more than 10 GB of memory.

Disney has announced it will close its last studio that draws cartoons by hand. “Disneytoon Studios (in Sydney, Australia) employees were informed of the decision Wednesday and were told the studio would shut down in mid-2006 after the completion of work on sequels to the films Brother Bear and Cinderella. Disney began with hand-drawn, two-dimensional animation in films like Pinocchio and Snow White. However, the most popular animated films are now of the computer-generated, three-dimensional variety, like Toy Story, Shrek and The Incredibles.”

Major Hollywood studios have agreed on a standard for digital projection of movies. “Studios have spent the last three years working on the technology and have now settled on specifications they say are good enough for all types of movies. Some cinemas have already installed digital projectors, but the deal means an industry standard can be rolled out around the world.”

New York’s attorney general can take his fight against newfangled forms of payola as far as he wants, but it won’t change the fact that the pop music business is now the purview of a handful of gigantic media companies that want nothing to do with the old method of letting a song rise to the top by virtue of its quality. “the major labels simply have more money and manpower to wheedle programmers into adding their music to broadcast play lists. The big players, far more so than their independent rivals, also have the wherewithal to build demand for their acts by subsidizing their tours and record-store advertising, producing music videos and landing them on television shows. This imbalance in resources accounts, in part, for the disparity between sales and airplay in the music business.”

Paying radio DJs to play certain songs has been illegal since the 1960s, but by the late 1990s, the recording industry and the radio world were essentially winking at each other as more sophisticated and creative forms of payola came to be almost routine. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s settlement this week with Sony may be only the first of many legal proceedings to come.

A lawyer representing the families of victims of Canada’s most notorious serial killers, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, says that he may try to stop distribution of a new Hollywood film about the horrific killings by citing Canada’s child pornography laws. Homolka and Bernardo’s victims were underage, and were sexually abused and tortured before being killed, a terrifying ordeal which still haunts the entire country. Producers say that while the film is quite disturbing, it is not overly graphic, and attempts to show the crimes from Homolka’s perspective, rather than focusing visually on what was done to the victims.

What do you do when your TV network’s critically acclaimed programs get snubbed year after year by the Hollywood insiders who pick Emmy nominees? Well, if you’re the WB, you keep your mouth shut, smile and wave at the more fortunate networks… and then schedule the broadcast premiere of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers directly opposite the Emmy telecast.