Category: media

When you think of a film festival, you probably picture crowded city streets, with sleek, gritty, and urbane theatres screening cutting-edge films with unusual camera angles. What you probably don’t think of is a barn 40 miles south of Duluth, Minnesota. “The barn’s mow is permeated with the aura of old-time agriculture. It’s also, as the site of the 2005 Free Range Film Festival, outfitted with high-end sound and projection equipment, rows of chairs and old couches, and a 24-by-14-foot movie screen made from an old billboard… And they won’t just show two days of films about rural life. This year the festival received 70 submissions, from places as far-flung as Italy, Australia, and Grand Rapids.”

The question for filmmakers and TV executives following some horrific global event or, worse, a full-fledged war, is always the same: how much time is enough? How long until the public will be ready to be entertained by this subject? Usually, the answer is measured in years, which makes Stephen Bochco’s new series groundbreaking on its face. Bochco is attempting to tell the stories of the still highly controversial Iraq war while the conflict is still going on.

“Computer-literate music fans who illegally share tracks over the internet also spend four and a half times as much on digital music as those who do not, according to research published today. The survey confirms what many music fans have informally insisted for some time: that downloading tracks illegally has also led them to become more enthusiastic buyers of singles and albums online. Unlikely to be music to the ears of record companies, who have previously argued the opposite, the results will raise a question mark over the companies’ recent drive to pursue individual file sharers through the courts.”

Profits at the online movie rental service, Netflix, nearly doubled in the second quarter of 2005. “Emboldened by the second-quarter surprise, Netflix management predicted it will finish this year with a profit of $2.4 million to $11.9 million, a reversal from just three months ago when the company warned it might lose as much as $15 million with Blockbuster hot on its trail… Netflix ended June with 3.2 million subscribers, a 53 percent increase from a year ago. Blockbuster’s online rental service is believed to have between 750,000 and 1 million subscribers.”

It was back in the early 1960s that the first court cases concerning payola, the odious practice of a record company paying radio DJs to play an artist’s songs regardless of quality, hit the press, and the practice was effectively stamped out inside of a decade. But in the past few years, creative new forms of payola have been stampeding through the increasingly corporate American radio industry, virtually unchecked. Now, the state attorney general of New York is pursuing the industry anew, and this week, recording giant Sony BMG agreed to pay a $10 million fine and to halt its practice of paying DJs for airplay.

Back in 2002, the cable network AMC revamped its programming, adding a slew of contemporary movies to its traditional lineup of oldies (the network’d initials stand for American Movie Classics.) In response to what it viewed as an unauthorized deviation from genre, cable company Time Warner sued for the right to break its contract with AMC and drop the channel from its lineup. The court agreed with Time Warner, ruling that such cinematic detritus as Look Who’s Talking, Too simply cannot be considered “classic.” AMC, for its part, accuses Time Warner of wanting to drop the channel solely because its programming is now directly competing with two Time Warner-owned channels, TBS and TNT.

As anyone who obsessively follows the latest in cutting-edge tech news can tell you, blogging is so 2003, and photo blogging isn’t much better. No, the online DIY-of-the-moment is vlogging, or video blogging, and it’s changing the face of… okay, actually, it isn’t. But it is wildly popular, for no apparent reason at all, leading some observers to declare that “mundane is the new punk.”

Marking one of those rare instances when television critics share the public’s taste for a program, the Television Critics Association has honored ABC’s racy suburban farce, Desperate Housewives, as program of the year. The group also selected The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart as comedic performer of the year, and honored PBS’s Frontline series as the best news and information program.

American TV networks are scrambling to scrub their content of material that might get them in trouble with the FCC. “Congress is threatening to increase sharply fines for airing indecent material, and some politicians want to regulate cable and satellite TV for indecency for the first time. Over 80% of American homes subscribe either to cable or satellite TV, but only broadcast television, which is technically free, is subject to indecency regulation. The media industry fears that new rules could damage its business model.”

Chinese media is getting racier. “The explosion of suggestive images is partly a reflection of changes in Chinese society — many sociologists say China is in the midst of a sweeping sexual revolution — and partly due to market reforms. In 2003, the Chinese government introduced far-reaching regulations that require many newspapers and magazines to try to turn a profit. Television is undergoing a similar, though more gradual, transformation. Xinhua remains state-owned, but it competes for hits with NASDAQ-traded Internet portals Sina and Sohu, which publish their share of racy content. They have less of a profit motive, but they must be looking at their visitor stats.”