The cloud is the future of videogaming, and it could arrive sooner than many players expect, with important implications for investors. Once pricey hardware is no longer necessary and top-tier games can run on two year-old smartphones, even casual gamers will become candidates for the latest releases from Electronic Arts (ticker: EA) and its peers.
Category: media
Amazon Tries A Move Into Live Sports Broadcasting
“Amazon has pulled out all the stops to make its $40m (£34m) bet on the UK rights to the US Open – setting up a studio at Flushing Meadows and drafting in former players including Jim Courier, Greg Rusedski, Annabel Croft and Mark Petchey, as the company looks to prove it can match traditional broadcasters and become a credible home for live sport.”
Watch A Real Urban Planner Play ‘SimCity’
“SimCity is one of the greatest video game franchises of all time, if only because it demonstrates something important: Designing a city from scratch is very hard, and it’s impossible to make everyone happy all the time. That’s even more evident thanks to UC Berkeley PhD student Dave Amos, who studies urban planning and whose commentary on the game offers a hilarious criticism of both game design and planning bureaucracy.”
‘Trash Radio’ – Even In Lovely Old Quebec City, Shock Jockery Gins Up Outrage And Ratings
“Jeff Fillion, 50, is among the most prominent and provocative talk radio hosts on Quebec airwaves, dominating what his critics call ‘radio poubelle,’ or trash radio. … At a time when Mr. Trump’s tirades on Twitter and beyond are changing global political discourse, Mr. Fillion and his fellow shock jocks are drawing legions of listeners in this picturesque political capital, propagating a cocktail of anti-immigrant, anti-environment and anti-feminist views. They are also testing the boundaries of free speech in a country that prides itself on liberalism but has seen a growing far right.”
Cathedral Gets Pushback For Showing ‘Wicker Man’ In Movie Series
The autumn film series at Derby Cathedral in the English Midlands includes The Wicker Man (which features female nudity and a pagan sacrifice), Don’t Look Now (sex and seances), and The Life of Brian (the Gospels get the Monty Python treatment). Says one church warden from the diocese, “I just think it isn’t appropriate to show these films in a place of worship that is consecrated and hallowed.” Responds the Cathedral’s dean, “The first thing we’re trying to do is open the cathedral to new people. It doesn’t just belong to the people who go to church; it certainly doesn’t belong to me.”
What Hollywood Could Learn From Success Of “Crazy Rich Asians”
Studios today gravitate more toward sequels and established franchises because they tend to be safer box-office bets. But audiences aren’t nearly as narrow-minded as the Hollywood development process might suggest. Time and again, films that appeal to a broader demographic range, or that belong to under-sung genres, sell many more tickets than predicted. Which is to say that multiple times every year, a film like Girls Trip, or Black Panther, or Crazy Rich Asians is dubbed a “surprise” success. But moving forward, industry experts—whether studios or box-office analysts—will have fewer reasons to be caught off guard.
David Simon On Why He Doesn’t Make TV For The Networks
“Frankly, I’ve never been good at writing to the common denominator. I’m still not. I haven’t done one show that was a huge ratings hit. And at this point, I’ve done about 130 hours of television. … As long as you had to go for the mass audience, you couldn’t have stories that were dark, that vexed people, that had lead characters who were morally inconsistent, unlucky, or tragic. You couldn’t write tragedies that any self-respecting Greek might recognize.”
New App Makes Bollywood Movies Accessible To Millions Of India’s Blind
“XL Cinema [is] an app developed in India that can synchronise an audio description of a movie with its cinema audio track. … Before the app’s arrival, the only way to watch a movie with audio description was to wait months after the film’s release to order a DVD from [the NGO] Saksham, if [it] had created one for that film.”
How Much Did Kevin Spacey’s New Movie Earn On Its Opening Day? $126! (Really)
The ensemble crime-drama Billionaire Boys Club quietly opened Friday in eight theaters scattered in select states across the U.S. The indie film earned an abysmal $126 for the day and another $162 on Saturday for a two-day total of just $287 following its release on premium VOD last month, according to those with access to theater grosses.
George Clooney Tops Forbes’s Annual List Of Best-Paid Actors With $239 Million
Granted, most of this is not for movie roles at all, or even endorsements: it comes from the purchase by a conglomerate of a tequila business Clooney co-founded five years ago. (Forbes‘s list includes income from endorsements and other “extracurricular” activities.) At no. 2 with $124 million is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who racked up the highest-ever income to come strictly from acting. (Unfortunately and predictably, the best-paid actress of the year earned much, much less.)