Category: media

“The slick cop drama Flashpoint was the big winner at Saturday’s Gemini Awards as it snagged three of the night’s top honours in Canadian television, including best drama.”

“The studio just paid $20,000 to the Alaska Press Club as part of a settlement with several Alaska newspapers after the studio, in the course of promoting its current release, The Fourth Kind, created an elaborate series of online news stories that professed to be from real Alaska news publications.”

“Console sales crashed 23% to $380.7 million last month, from $497 million in October 2008. Game software sales fell 18% to $572.7 million, down from $698.4 million a year earlier. The grim numbers represent the seventh monthly decline in U.S. video game sales.”

“More than 5,000 movies have come and gone and been reviewed in The Times, most of them still living somewhere in the lucrative zombie limbo of DVD or cable programming. Some landed noisily on thousands of screens at once, gobbling up as much attention and money as the marketing machinery of the studios could buy, at least for a weekend or two. Others bloomed quietly in big-city art houses and were smiled on (if they were lucky) by ardent critics and die-hard cinephiles.”

Almost 30,000 people across the UK still tune into their favourite programmes on black and white TV sets.

“Current TV’s retrenchment shows the difficulty of grafting the freewheeling culture and sensibilities that have thrived over the Internet onto established mediums like television…. [J]ust as advertisers have shied from supporting websites that feature amateur video, so too they appear no more willing to support user-generated content on TV.”

“Nickelodeons were once as common as coffee shops, and the nickel-a-pop silent films they showed were as disposable as YouTube videos. That made for a lot of competition in the early days of the movie business — competition that fueled the rise of an indie-films culture as early as 1909.”

“Several sources say they expect that MGM will essentially be auctioned off within the next few weeks. This would mean that a major, such as Time Warner, could buy the MGM-UA library while another entity might acquire the logo, and yet another deal could be made for United Artists.”

“[T]he increasing popularity of laptops and handheld devices, and the prevalence of wireless Internet access, means there’s a greater chance of becoming a bystander to a complete stranger’s viewing proclivities.” Skeeved-out bystanders say they’re not prudes. “The trouble was knowing that they couldn’t escape [the porn], not until the plane landed or the Metro doors opened.”

“It’s brilliant in theory – but the actual practice of sitting at home wearing cardboard glasses watching TV is rather less so. Channel 4’s black-and-white cardboard specs might … come from Sainsbury’s rather than the bottom of a Frosties packet, but … how [do] you safely manoeuvre a cup of tea to your mouth” while wearing them?