Category: media

“Leading lawmakers and the new leader of the F.C.C. have proposed a broad expansion of indecency rules, which were significantly toughened just last year. They are also looking for significant increases in the size of fines and new procedures that could jeopardize the licenses of stations that repeatedly violate the rules.”

“To raise money for noncommercial programming, producers and distributors increasingly allow their corporate underwriters to turn their credits into something resembling regular commercials. Since the mid-1990’s, the underwriter announcements that precede and follow many public television programs (and usually conclude with the narrator thanking “viewers like you”) have gradually adopted many trappings of regular advertising, despite appearing on “commercial-free” television.”

“The rush is on to deliver music and video to mobile phones, with wireless providers and device makers jockeying for position to grab their share of the payday, all parties mindful of the surprising billions being spent on musical ringtones. At the same time, the media companies who produce the entertainment, which also includes video games, are approaching cautiously, determined to avert any Napster-like, file-sharing bonanza among cell phone users.”

The US Supreme Court hears arguments in a case this week that could determine the future development of technology. “The highly anticipated case, MGM Studios v. Grokster, pits all the major movie studios and record labels against Grokster and StreamCast Networks, two operators of file-sharing services.” The case is an appeal of a decision that “file-sharing companies are not liable for their users’ copyright infringement. The decision upheld a lower-court ruling from April 2003.”

TV journalists are complaining that access to tapes of performances nominated for daytime Emmys has been “shut off, and the National Television Academy won’t even let them know which specific episodes are being judged. The head of the committee that instituted the ban conceded it was done because some academy members were annoyed at previous years’ stories written about the awards, but characterized the decision as innocuous.”

“Back in the 1970s, a Woody Allen movie was the way you measured your humanity. Allen’s nebbish persona represented the thinking everyman, assuming you also valued intellectualism, high culture and complicated, brilliant women. The collective high point of the Allen gestalt was “Annie Hall,” Allen’s ode to love in all its messy, modern dysfunctionalism, and, two years later, “Manhattan,” his salute to the city of dreams, culture, love and Gershwin. But in the past few decades, as Allen’s casts became collective ensembles, as he started aping Chekhov, things changed. His movies got crowded with East Side untouchables.”

“It looks like television networks have embraced an idea that record companies still find difficult to accept: Giving away your product — temporarily, anyway — can be a great promotional tool… Building online buzz by putting full episodes online has become such a hot marketing tool that there’s speculation the BBC was behind the recent ‘unauthorized’ online release of an episode of its new Dr. Who series.”

Canada’s Genie Awards for movies was dominated by French Canadian movies this week. “The Genies show was a depressing example of our two-solitudes divide between French and English Canada. After decades of official bilingualism, we are still a land of mostly English-speaking provinces surrounding a separate nation of mostly French-speaking people. The Genies are supposed to recognize the Canadian film industry as a whole. But what I saw on Monday night suggested there really is no national film industry to speak of, because French and English filmmakers and stars don’t even speak to each other.”

Movie attendance in the US has dropped in the past two years from a high of 1.63 billion in 2002 to 1.53 billion in 2004. Before 2003, attendance regularly increased each year. The numbers give some theater owners pause. In the ’50s and ’60s, everybody went to the movies. “We need to do more to develop the habitual moviegoer. Once movies can be delivered directly into the home, she adds, all the cheap popcorn and clean floors in the world won’t matter. How long is it before they just won’t need us at all?”

“Hollywood better wake up. Remember the Hays Office, which imposed family-values censorship on the movies in the 1920s — a ham-fisted squelching of “indecency” that cramped and crippled scriptwriters and moviemakers for decades thereafter? Well, what one of the most powerful Republicans in the U.S. Senate is now talking about sounds very much like the same thing, except now it’s about cable TV and the Net.”