Category: media

It’s early yet, but this year’s best picture race — for both the Globes and the Oscars — is quickly shaping up as a battle of old versus new, pitting the emotional uplift of the historical drama “The King’s Speech” against the exhilarating immediacy of “The Social Network.”

“The FCC is using the same shaky legal foundation set-up by the Bush administration, when it created the first net neutrality rules. Those were obliterated in a legal challenge by Comcast earlier this year, setting up the need for these rules, which don’t look to be on any firmer ground and could dissolve the first time the FCC tries to enforce them.”

“On Thursday, the Open Internet Coalition, a diverse interest group that represents Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Skype, Amazon, eBay, and scores of other internet-dependent companies, will run ads in two prominent Washington, D.C., publications — Politico and The Hill — expressing their displeasure with Chairman Genachowski’s new compromise rules.”

“A game called Angry Birds is dominating the best-selling-applications charts for Apple’s iPhone with a simple, whimsical premise: Players turn different species of scowling birds into projectiles with which to crush a collection of grunting pigs scattered around various ramshackle structures.”

“Locked inside the walls of what purports to be The Oregon State Hospital, I am experiencing what it might be like to be detained for psychiatric assessment. This is Secret Cinema, an environment in which to experience film rather than just watch it. The film is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, of course.”

U.S. telecommunications regulators plan to tackle at a December 21 meeting contentious Internet traffic rules intended to prohibit broadband providers from blocking or slowing some traffic.

“The Commercial Advertising Loudness Mitigation, or CALM, Act follows rules set last year by a United Nations body in Switzerland on how to measure and clip broadcast volumes. The U.S. bill, inspired by decades of consumer complaints, should finally ban TV ads that blare louder than the programs they interrupt.”

“A Hobbit casting agent who placed a newspaper advertisements seeking extras with ‘light skin tones’ has been sacked. Hobbit wannabe Naz Humphreys, who has Pakistani heritage, drew attention to the agent after she said she queued for three hours only to be told her skin tone wasn’t light enough.”

“There is always an undercurrent of complaint in the Canadian TV racket. There is always somebody claiming that a catastrophe is unfolding. But in the matter of documentaries, the complaining is more than a rumble of discontent. The noise is loud and persistent.”

Is “the web, once a relatively level playing field where even smaller players could participate, is being transformed in to something much more “recognizable” relative to the rest of our world — ‘a world of moguls’?”