Category: media

The Lord of the Rings movies have meant an economic boom for New Zealand. “The Tolkien fanatics have kept coming with pockets full of cash, desperate to see the place where the trilogy’s hero, Frodo Baggins, began his daring journey to vanquish the forces of evil by destroying the One Ring. Much of the payoff was tied directly to the estimated $500 million spent to make the three movies, the third of which will hit theaters in December. For a time, the production employed 23,000 workers, making it the largest private employer in New Zealand. Then came the tourists, and scores of new restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts to cater to them.”

Journalists occupy low standing in the public mind these days. Ok, they’ve acted badly from time to time, and their preoccupation with entertaining rather than informing us is often grating. But the entertainment media has latched on to the journalist-as-bad-guy theme, and it isn’t exactly fair (or accurate) writes Frank Rich.

The embattled head of Washington public radio station WAMU has been fired. Susan Clampitt, who had directed the station since June 2000, had come under fire from current and former staff members, donors and volunteers. They questioned her financial management of the station and her managerial style, which had led to widespread staff disgruntlement.” WAMU ran through more than $4 million in cash reserves in the process in the past three years as spending jumped 110 percent from 2000 to 2002.

Movie fans spent $20.4 billion on movie tickets last year – a record amount. “The average ticket in the UK cost $6.45 (£4.29) in 2002, compared with $5.81 in the US. Film fans in Russia have had to stomach a 138% rise over the past two years, rising to $1.72 in 2002. But the cheapest cinema tickets were in Romania (39 cents) and India, where each ticket cost 21 cents.”

After a decidedly slow start, the satellite radio industry seems to be gaining some long-awaited traction. This week, XM Satellite Radio, the larger of the two currently operating networks, will announce that it has passed the key benchmark of a million subscribers. Sirius, XM’s only competitor, has approximately 250,000 subscribers. The significance of the million-listener mark is likely to be felt on Wall Street, where investors are expected to begin taking the industry seriously for the first time.

“Busting open a digital lock to get hold of copyright works normally is forbidden, but the Librarian of Congress ruled Tuesday that there are exceptions. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, prohibits, among other things, bypassing any technology that controls access to copyright material. This provision is criticized frequently by digital-rights groups because they say it stifles many legitimate activities in the process, including academic research, competition and innovation. But the controversial law also recognizes that there are certain cases when circumvention should be permitted… Basically, those who have a non-infringing, fair-use reason to circumvent copy protections should be allowed to do so.”

Even before illegal services like Napster took off, the world of online music used to be “a place for artists to control and directly profit from their music. But in most online services today that dream has been lost, with the services functioning as online arms of the record companies while the artists receive pennies (or fractions of pennies) for each download.” Even more disappointing, there is a stunning lack of originality and forward thinking in the development of new download services, most of which are just mimicking the format and interface of Apple’s iTunes.

“Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system for sharing music within their campus community that they say can avoid the copyright battles that have pitted the music industry against many customers.”

Jack Valenti explains why the Motion Picture Academy proposed not sending copies of movies to Academy Award voters this year. And why he finally compromised on the issue. “The digital world with its zeroes and ones and perfect copies of originals has changed the movie landscape forever, which is why the movie world’s priorities have been permanently altered. The industry wants to use the Internet to dispatch films to consumers. But as we do, we must also challenge piracy and defeat it with every weapon we can summon–and we will succeed, I am convinced–or one day we will sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the decline and fall of America’s greatest artistic triumph and an awesome engine of job and economic growth.”

Call it ecological consciousness, consumer disinterest, or lousy marketing: whatever the reason, the “disposable DVD” phenomenon is withering on the vine. The discs, which can be rented and viewed like a normal DVD for two days before they become unusable, are billed as an item of convenience for the movie renting public. But apparently, even American couch potatoes aren’t quite that lazy, because almost no one is renting the self-destructing discs.