Archive for 'Content'

The MPAA and NATO are panicking because they don’t know how to replace revenues lost not to piracy, but to newer legitimate commercial content platforms, like Netflix, or ad-supported platforms like YouTube. This is, I believe, a better explanation for the brinksmanship between Old Media and New Media companies over the now-tabled SOPA/PIPA legislation: it’s not really about piracy, but about which business models are going to be successful in tapping the entertainment content market in the 21st century.

The only ...

OK, bad pun.

But the rumors suddenly swirling around the potential sale of Hulu to an as yet (as of this date) unnamed suitor reveal a deep and ongoing generational chasm between old media and new media.  Sadly for old media, while we all understand how tough it is to turn a supertanker around, Disney, Comcast and ...

We all have a front row seat at the bar-room brawl that is the media business in 2011.  In one corner, the barons of Old Media – the Ruperts, Sumners, the feisty Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner, and the (for now) low-profile but deadly Brian Roberts of Comcast.  In the other corner: Netflix’s Founder/CEO Reed Hastings, Larry ...

Tick-tock-tick-tock. Exhibitors: upgrade your concession stands (hint: start with espresso machines).  Your “theatrical window” subsidy is continuing to crumble. Can anyone get me any advance tickets to next year’s ShoWest exhibitors convention in Vegas?  I’d love to be there to witness the panic, outrage and denial.

Sunday’s NYT Business section (9/26/10) has this enjoyable article that just continues to affirm what I’ve been saying for years, along with every other new market realist: we are moving inexorably towards a software ...

Many of us on the left side of the net neutrality debate, myself included, have gone more or less postal over the Google/Verizon announcement and its implications for the future of the open Internet.

Leading up to Monday’s “legislative framework proposal” from the two companies, I read, and was sent, a number of different speculations, including the interesting Robert Cringely piece in the Sunday NYT on data ...

I’ve been pretty exercised over the reports that Google is about to cut a deal with Verizon that would change the Internet as we know it by allowing bandwidth providers (Verizon, AT&T, Time-Warner, Comcast etc.) to create tiers of service that would favor big/rich content providers over smaller/independent content providers – thus dumping them into what Moveon.org calls the “Internet slow lane.”

If you are happy with what you are seeing on TV, or at the movie theater, or even ...

I know, I know – I’m reading the Trades too much.  Actually, in this case, I have to thank/blame my esteemed friend and colleague Sebastian Sylwan (late of Autodesk, and currently at WETA) for forwarding this article.

Under the portentous headline “Transmedia Storytelling is Future of Biz – Studios create mythologies, multimedia worlds” the article reports on various companies’ work with franchise and brand extension under the guise of creating Transmedia content.

Well… Not quite.  Here’s my ...

As we head into the home stretch, it’s Steven Soderbergh vs. Amy Pascal in the fascinating little cancellation or turnaround or whatever it is kinda cold feet that Amy had last week (ending 6/19) about Soderbergh’s “Moneyball,” a baseball movie starring Brad Pitt that was supposed to start photography today (Monday, 6/22).

Maybe I’m pushing my own envelope, but do I detect a fear and loathing of new narrative format wafting from the Thalberg building (on the Sony lot)?  Let’s remember ...

Now Milos Forman is getting into the act.  I know I am on this content/IP/Piracy tear, but I guess it really is an evolutionary paradigm shift to see beyond the old perceptions of content and copyright protection.

Variety reports today (6/11/09) on the World Copyright Summit.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118004774.html?categoryid=18&cs=1

And here’s the link to the conference:

http://www.copyrightsummit.com/

The funny thing about this, and what clearly got Milos the headline in Variety (“Forman Flays Web Pirates”) is how ...

So pleased to have some good news to report.  This is juicy and exciting and  is certainly getting very close to what us transmedia geeks have been squawking about.

  http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/web-series-tied-to-blade-runner-is-in-the-works/

It all started, innocently enough, the other day (6/4/09) in the NYT.  And was picked up by SciFi Wire and the Trades the next day.  Ridley and Tony’s company (Scott Free), including Ridley’s son, Luke, are partnering with a new company called ...

I’m sure I read that headline at some point in the 15th century…  That pesky Gutenberg!  Taking work away from all those monks toiling away illuminating manuscripts…

Now we have Sony Entertainment Chairman Michael Lynton, a great guy, a brilliant guy, and a former CEO of AOL no less, making a stupid comment the other day at a conference and being quoted in the Hollywood Reporter.  See below.  If I were Michael Lynton’s mother, ...

There are 5 big and shiny electronic billboards within about a half mile radius of where I live in West L.A. – and they are all within about 5-10 blocks of one another.  I’m trying to figure out if they are all on different ad rotations, but I know that two of them seem to be on the same rotation (at least for this week). 

It wouldn’t occur to me to link these billboards in with this blog, except that today, ...

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a big fan of Mark Gill.  He and I were on an AFI 3rd Decade Council committee years and years ago when he was still doing ad-pub, and he had a great attitude, great energy and was clearly going places.

And his speech at the LAFF financing panel on 6/21/08 at the Landmark in West L.A., which I’ve linked to farther down the page, ...

Alain Robbe-Grillet is dead.  As we trace our current new narrative/non narrative narrative back to its roots, we’ve got to remember Robbe-Grillet, perhaps best remembered for authoring the novel on which the film Last Year at Marienbad (L’annee derniere a Marienbad)” was based, a film directed by French New Wave director Alain Resnais (whose classic Hiroshima Mon Amour, that delivered to us the delicious Anouk Aimee, immediately preceded it).

Remember this movie?  ...

When the ontology of video games hits the NYT Week In Review, you know something is up (click the picture at right to go to the article).

It must be that the writers at the Times are getting younger.  Here is this reporter Dave (not David) Itzkoff going on about the game designer (Hideo ...