Category: media

Afraid of having your sensibilities offended by something you might see on TV? “Wal-Mart, America’s mightiest retailer, is preparing to ship a $79 DVD player that automatically strips out potentially offensive content.”

Clear Channel has permanently dropped the Howard Stern show after being threatened with $475,000 in fines for indecency. “Mr. Stern’s show has created a great liability for us and other broadcasters who air it. The Congress and the FCC are even beginning to look at revoking station licenses. That’s a risk we’re just not willing to take.”

“A deal between Telefilm Canada and Creative Artists Agency will help ‘speed up’ Ottawa’s plan to see Canadian films score 5 per cent of the total domestic gross box office by the end of 2006, the head of Telefilm says… The deal, which sees Telefilm pay CAA a ‘very modest retainer fee,’ allows a Canadian producer with a sufficient track record to access CAA’s talent pool (at present there are an estimated 2,200 registered Canadian-born actors, directors and writers in and around Los Angeles) and for CAA representatives to approach a Canadian producer with relevant scripts and/or talent.” The arrangement has been widely criticized by actors’ and writers’ unions as compromising Canadian creativity.

Mel Gibson’s controversial film, The Passion of the Christ, continues to steamroll its way through the top-ten list of highest grossing movies of all time, and to do so with relatively little traditional advertising. In fact, the word of mouth attached to Gibson’s feast of religious ultraviolence has been so strong that it’s changing the way some Hollywood types think about PR. With pastors, priests, and preachers around the world exhorting their followers to see the movie, this weekend’s Easter celebrations can be seen as the ultimate marketing tie-in, as Passion aims for thate loftiest of moviemaking goals: a $1 billion payday.

As this year’s Sundance Festival showed, digital technology is finally taking over the movies. “Recent breakthroughs have already demonstrated the ability to make movies with the same clarity as 35-millimetre film using high-definition video cameras, and then project them digitally in theatres with no loss in image quality. In 1998, the number of digital video films presented at the film festival could have been counted on one hand. This year, more than 40 per cent of the festival’s 200-plus films were either shot on digital video or projected digitally. The audience has barely noticed the difference.”

The provincial government of British Columbia has dealt a crippling blow to the province’s once-thriving film industry, declining to fund BC Film, a non-profit agency providing CAN$4 million a year in equity financing for Canadian films, in this year’s budget. The demise of BC Film will likely have a profound effect on the entire country’s film scene, since filmmakers typically assemble funding from a variety of sources, creating a money tree which, “like a delicate house of cards,” can collapse if one of the key components is missing.

Responding to concerns that its new “people meter” ratings technology would significantly undercount minority viewers, Nielsen Media Research, which tracks TV viewership in the U.S., has announced that it will delay the new product’s national rollout, even as it insists that the numbers generated by the meters are accurate. “In tests of the new system, almost all of the most popular shows in black households dropped in the ratings, some by as much as 60 percent.” TV stations don’t like the system either, largely because the meters do a more accurate job of recording how often viewers flip between channels than the traditional handwritten viewer diaries ever did.

“The television networks have suspected all year that Australians were watching less TV. They thought their problem was younger viewers distracted by computer games and the internet. Now they know the truth. Viewing by Australians aged 16 to 24 is up 4.4 per cent on last year. Australians aged 25 to 54 have been turning off the most, and the distraction seems to be the family’s new DVD player.”

Last November the History Channel broadcast a documentary that alleged that Lyndon Johnson was complicit in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A storm of protest ensued, and the History Channel asked historians to vet the program. “In a statement the History Channel acknowledged that the historians determined that the accusation against Johnson was insupportable and that the documentary should not have been broadcast.” The apology will be delivered in a new program.

In Russia, nine of every ten DVD’s sold are pirated copies. So Hollywood is fighting back – by cutting its prices. “The idea is to get Russian consumers used to buying licensed material, but at a price that most of the population can afford.”