Category: media

“The average time spent by U.S. adults per day using a mobile device in a non-voice capacity is 2 hours and 21 minutes this year, up from 24 minutes in 2010. The study counted simultaneous media use–scanning Twitter while watching a football game, for instance–as time spent both with a TV set and a digital device.”

“There’s a prevailing sentiment in the culture that we’re more than a decade into a new Golden Age of television. The starting point was the arrival of The Sopranos in 1999 and the most recent marker in the ongoing evolution of excellent TV was the series finale of Breaking Bad. What has Canada contributed to this? Pretty much nothing. Look at the last 14 years of Canadian TV and what you see is almost complete creative failure.”

“The amount of pleasure someone derives from a creative piece goes up as its novelty increases. But at a certain point, there is a maximum of enjoyment. After that, something becomes too unfamiliar to stomach anymore.”

Mr Katzenberg hoped the subscription service would prove the “greatest pay-per-view television event for scripted programming anybody’s ever done”.

The Eden Theatre in the French seaside town of La Ciotat, near Marseilles, was where the Lumière brothers showed their moving picture – shot locally – of an oncoming train that had viewers leaping from their seats in fear. Now the 1889 house “as undergone a €6.5m … refurbishment that has more than restored its former glory.”

In an extended Q&A excerpt from Matt Zoller Seitz’s new Wes Anderson coffee-table book, the filmmaker discusses everything from the influence of Orson Welles to house-hunting in Harlem to shooting moving-through-walls shots to convincing a reluctant Gene Hackman to play a role written for him while only getting paid scale.

“Paula Petrella, daughter of the deceased screenwriter Frank Petrella … says MGM Holdings Inc and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment have infringed the copyright of a 1963 screenplay upon which she alleges 1980 movie was based.” The legal issue is “in what circumstances a defendant in a copyright case can win based on the failure of the plaintiff to assert his or her claim at an earlier stage.”

Director General Tony Hall “announced a new version of the iPlayer, which will allow users to access programmes for up to 30 days after their initial broadcasts and even watch shows before they have been transmitted on TV.”

“We spend a full five hours and 16 minutes a day in front of a screen, and that’s without even turning on a television. … For the first time we are devoting more attention each day to smartphones, computers and tablets. All of which points to a big question: What counts as TV-watching today?”

“A new study by researchers at the London School of Economics suggests the music and movie industries have been exaggerating the impact digital file sharing has had on their bottom line and found that for some creative industries, copyright infringement might actually be helping boost revenues.”