Category: media

“The company, led by CEO Mel Karmazin, grew its user base by 622,000, ending June with a company record of 22.9 million subscribers. It had added 452,000 in the year-ago period.”

“The old media companies are constraining their content so severely that there’s more upside in retransmitting the old stuff in new ways – even boringly obvious new ways – than in creating new stuff. And that’s why we have so many re-runs, and why it looks like we’re doomed to have so much more in the near future.”

“All of the Grantham daughters’ situations are a product of their status as hybrid creatures – all are the daughters of an heiress who cannot in turn be heiresses themselves. They are prevented from becoming their mother, and they know it … The story, then, is of an American matriarchal fortune wearing the court dress of a British patriarchy, and resenting it in ways it cannot quite express.”

“The copyright holders believe new laws will stop this type of piracy. But many others believe any laws will just push people to find creative new ways of getting the content they want.”

“The discrepancy between English and Spanish language shows is most acute among shows that are scripted in English. The issue, many viewers and critics argue, is that there still hasn’t been the Hispanic equivalent of The Cosby Show, meaning a show that deals with Latino culture in a way that doesn’t offend viewers with crude stereotypes.”

“After several years of experimenting, studios have thrown themselves deeply into a medium which is still barely understood. They are now developing elaborate social media campaigns early on, sometimes as soon as a film gets greenlit. Researchers are conducting deep numerical analysis on posts and tweets to guide marketing decisions, sometimes predicting box office revenue with pinpoint accuracy. They’re looking not just at opening movies, but sustaining their word-of-mouth through subsequent weeks. And they are getting more surgical about targeting their ever-fickle, ever-elusive core audience of young people.”

Animated GIFs have made this year’s Olympics much more fun. (Will they enliven arts reporting next?)

“Ping failed because Apple didn’t make it easy enough to share the music users truly care about–rather than simply receipts for the songs they purchased. Others in the space have avoided such stumbles–it’s arguably the reason why Spotify has become so popular and why Google wanted to enable full-song sharing on Google+. ‘We have to make sure that if I want to share a song with you, that you can listen to that song whether or not you’re a Rhapsody subscriber,’ Irwin says.”

“NBC’s researchers are finding that people who know the results of London Olympics events before they are shown on tape delay are more — not less — likely to watch them.”

“To conflate the inhuman lack of affect which afflicts psychopath short-term desensitization felt by a normal person watching violent movies is a mistake: psychopaths cannot be desensitized.”