Category: media

Within three years China will have more internet users than the US. “China’s net users number 100m but this represents less than 8% of the country’s 1.3 billion people. Market analysts Panlogic predicts that net users in China will exceed the 137 million US users of the net by 2008.”

As TiVo and other digital video recorders captivate an ever wider swath of the American TV-viewing public, advertisers are in full panic mode. After all, how are the companies that pay for commercial television’s otherwise unsustainable programming supposed to see a return on their considerable advertising investment if every other viewer has the capability to simply skip the commercials? The answer seems to be in a new generation of product placement, with dramatic storylines actively working sponsoring brands into the action, a concept which viewers may eventually find even more irritating than traditional advertising.

“Miramax, the alpha distributor that long dominated the indie-film scene, has been embroiled in contentious contract negotiations with parent company Disney, and all signs point to an imminent divorce, with Disney keeping the Miramax name and film library and Miramax co-founders Harry and Bob Weinstein raising money to start another company elsewhere.” But as this year’s edition of Sundance, the premiere indie film festival in the U.S., prepares to kick off, filmmakers associated with Miramax are in an awkward and uncertain position.

“Intellectual property legislation that failed to pass in Congress last year likely will reappear in the new session, but after 2004’s bitter battle, technology and consumer groups are ready to get more aggressive.” The effort to prevent stricter copyright enforcement is likely to have more corporate muscle behind it this year as well. Last year’s battles convinced many high-tech companies that they needed to go on the offensive, lest they get steamrolled by the entertainment industry’s highly effective Congressional lobbying.

For the first time in the U.S., two men have been convicted of illegally sharing music files over an online peer-to-peer file-trading system, and face up to five years in prison for their crimes. “The US Department of Justice said the two men operated the central hubs in a piracy community organised across the Direct Connect peer-to-peer network. The piracy group called itself the Underground Network and membership of it demanded that users share between one and 100 gigabytes of files.”

Five years ago, the Sundance Film Festival launched a parallel online festival designed to showcase the best examples of the new genre of web film, which everyone figured was just about ready to blow up. As it turns out, web film is pretty much dead, and these days, Sundance’s online component features streaming versions of the same short films shown at its main festival. “On the one hand, the new SOFF format is exciting news: Anyone with a computer can watch some of the world’s best new short films. But SOFF’s makeover also suggests that made-for-the-web films haven’t evolved as quickly as expected.”

The Golden Globe Awards may be a corrupt and frustrating institution, but they certainly provide plenty to talk about in the period leading up to Oscar night. Legitimate or not, a Golden Globe win makes a film, actor, or director into an instant Oscar contender, and this year’s Globes provided a vey murky glimpse of who’s in and who’s out in the race for the prized Academy Awards.

The number of films produced in the UK fell by 40% in 2004. The drop-off has been attributed to a cut in the subsidies provided to filmmakers as incentives to shoot in Britain, as well as to a tightening of the tax code. The British government has since introduced a new round of incentives, which it hopes will bring some studios back in 2005.

Russian movie box office was up 41 percent last year. “Russians spent 7.5bn roubles (£143.5m) at cinemas between November 2003 and November 2004. The most popular film was the Russian sci-fi thriller Night Watch, which became the highest-ever grossing Russian film with takings of £16m.”

The Fox network is censoring out the butts of cartoon characters now. “Fox felt it had to pixelate the bare bottom of animated tot Stewie in an episode of “Family Guy” that aired a couple of weeks ago. When Fox ran the episode about four years ago, before Janet Jackson exposed her breast at the Super Bowl, endangering the moral fiber of American youth, it did not blur the shot of Baby Stewie’s behind. ‘FCC guidelines are not clear; we are now second- and third-guessing ourselves’.”