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it's easy to criticize the MPAA, but who is going to pay the millions of dollars to shoot a major movie if everyone simply copies content without paying for it?

(Emphasis mine)

1. You don't need millions of dollars to make a damn good movie. Take a look at Primer - awesome film with only a $7000 budget that went on to make $424,760 at the box office. Artistic vision can still be expressed without millions of dollars.

2. Many people, such as yourself, think one should pay for entertainment one has enjoyed. To say that everyone (but you?) will simply copy it without paying is unrealistic and cynical.

Doesn't seem too likely. TFA was written "Yesterday," and it likely references this article, which was written March 30.

Sorry to disappoint.

The attach rate for the Wii is better than the PS3.

Variety says the attach rates are within five percent, but Wii's 2 to 1 lead in hardware sales does tilt the overall sales figure in Wii's favor. But might Sony be using the interactive features of Blu-ray Disc to boost the number of "PLAYSTATION 3 compatible games"?

Arrested Development is actually a great example. Despite great fanfare and awards galore, Fox didn't want to give its creator (Mitch Hurwitz) the money he felt he deserved for both his own salary and the show's budget. He left and the production team didn't feel they could pick the show back up without him (article here).

Btw, Mad TV just got canceled:

http://www.variety.com/VR1117995723.html

God loves you!

The fact that so many great shows have been canceled on Fox over the years and yet MadTV somehow KEEPS GOING ON AND ON FOR SOME INEXPLICABLE REASON was what finally turned me into an atheist.

Good news, Everyone! I just found out that they were announced to be canceled in November 2008.

I am surprised as I haven't been following this news since Jordan's death. I will say I am excited as I picked up Eye of the World for a quarter at a used bookstore in high school. I've been a huge fan ever since but have often wondered if there is any possible way a game or movie can do this series justice.

Wheel of Time has such extensive (sometimes laboriously so) plot lines running in tandem and across multiple characters that may not cross for thousands of pages. Can this be set in film successfully? The introspection of the characters when you're seeing things from their points of view ... the political games ... the extensive dream sequences ... keeping the dream world and waygates straight ... so much they could get wrong!

In truth, I wondered the same of George R. R. Martin's Song of Fire & Ice series recently licensed by HBO. I guess we'll see if they can do that series justice as well.

As for the games, I was a bit disappointed with the 1999 version which was basically a Hexen engine playing as an Aes Sedai in one of the Ajahs. A visually pleasing game, though. I certainly hope they do better with The Wheel of Time MMOs & don't dish me another buggy clone like Lord of the Rings or Warhammer.

Red Eagle & Universal, please don't screw this up! Disclaimer: I am a Perrin fan.

Unfortunately Zathras finally got some rest a few years ago.

"Warner Bros.' production and anticipated release of 'The Watchmen' motion picture violates 20th Century Fox's long-standing motion picture rights in 'The Watchmen' property," Fox said in a statement, though the graphic novel's title is simply "Watchmen."

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117990722.html?categoryid=13&cs=1&nid=2563

Nice goin', Fox. You don't even know you're talking about.

Episode II looked like garbage on film because it got such a poor transfer. Not sure what they did wrong, but it really sucked. Movies since then that have had digital intermediates or transfers from digital video source haven't looked nearly as bad. Guess it's just hard to go from digital to film and get it right. Even Pixar seems to do a poor job of it -- their movies look far softer on film than they should. The only lab I've seen get consistently good results is EFilm. Most places that insist on rolling their own solution would probably do better to just let EFilm handle it.

Also, the resolution of the digital video cameras used for that Ep.II was far below 2K due to subsampling, so you were seeing nearly all the pixels even at 1280, so your observation isn't that surprising.

On the other hand, I've seen obvious jagged edges in 2K material transferred to film so many times I've lost count. And this is in regular theaters, not screening rooms. That alone a pretty good indication that 35mm can reproduce full 2K, even under "real world" conditions.

As for 4K, we've already got 4K from film, no need to wait for a digital camera. There have been movies shot on film that had 4K digital intermediates ever since Spider-Man 2. There are more and more each year. "Hancock" was the most recent big release, and it was shown in 4K on some electronic projectors. The 35mm prints looked pretty good too, obviously having come from a 4K laser-out.

James Cameron agrees with you about 48fps (near the bottom of the article).

ThunderCats movie, scheduled for 2010 release. At least it still looks like it'll be CG, not live action.

Here's the article in last years Variety about it. Personally I wasn't impressed with the trailer for Speed Racer and I would much rather watch the Thundercats (if only because Cheetara was fit).

Live-action - Meaning real actors. Maybe some CG (as usual these days), but live actors. Not animation.
3D - Meaning stereoscopic 3D technology. No red-green glasses. Polarized glasses. Like what Cameron is using for Avatar and Battle Angel.

It's true that people still consume media the old-fashioned way -- but fewer and fewer do so every day. Most of the content industries are seeing flat or declining revenues and audiences.

1. Movie ticket sales at record high.
2. Cable company reports record sales.
3. Digital sales boost music industry.

It's no surprise the Pixar has announced this as Dreamworks announced the same thing last year.

In fact, from this 3/12/2007 article (DreamWorks going 3-D in 2009), it even says "Disney is also expected to release most of its future toons in digital 3-D, though the studio hasn't announced any definite plans beyond "Robinsons."

Nothing to see here, move along
.Nothing to see here, move along

(the above sentence was written in Slashdot3D for those of you with the special glasses)

So Antigua is going to ignore the copyright on USA goods if the USA doesn't comply with the WTO rulings by the end of March. They say they have the WTO's support in this. They hope that the MPAA (etc) will be angry enough about this to put pressure on the US government to fix the problem.

And to show that he wants to crack down harder, he "blasts Net neutrality" in the very next breath, saying that "it would impair the ability of broadband providers to address the serious and rampant piracy problems occurring over their networks today."

Hey, argue against the dictionary all you want. :) Examples of usage from media outlets, just in the headlines alone, and ignoring other uses of the phrase and puns (such as "Home pool tables cue up lots of family fun"):

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/19/business/ptpogue20.php ("Cue up the music, choose the rooms")
http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080212/LIFE/802120309/-1/LIFE03 ("Cue up your appetite")
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/13/business/video.php ("Bank internship? Time to cue up the video")
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1492913/20041021/handsome_boy_modeling_school.jhtml ("Handsome Boy Modeling School Cue Up LP #2")
http://blogs.chron.com/franblinebury/2008/02/yo_adrian_cue_up_the_rocky_the.html ("You, Adrian! Cue up the Rocky Theme!")
http://mediawiredaily.com/2007/01/cue-up-sound-of-cbs-cash-register-ka.html ("Cue up sound of CBS cash register!")
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117853509.html ("MTV arms cue up 'Unplugged' on Net")

Need me to keep going? Just because you haven't heard the phrase doesn't make it any less real, or any less in the dictionary.

Daily Variety has confirmed that Universal's commitment to backing HD DVD exclusively has ended. And Paramount has an escape clause in its HD DVD contract allowing it to release pics on Blu-ray after Warner Bros.' decision to back that format exclusively.

Neither studio is ready to throw in the towel immediately, however. Universal is committed to a series of promotions for the high-def format in coming months, and Par has said its current plans are to keep supporting HD DVD, which it backed exclusively in August.

Some folks such as Seagate CEO Bill Watkins claim that the Blu-ray HD-DVD format war dragged on long enough to make network transfer of movies the preferred format. Personally I have my doubts. If I own a physical disc DVD, I can loan it to my neighbor, bring it on the road and let my kids watch it on a hotel DVD player, and generally treat it as if I own it outright. Blu-ray will be the same. If I electronically download a movie, DRM greatly limits the hardware on which it will play: either my desktop or my laptop or maybe my Tivo, but probably not all of the above. And if I replace my media PC in two years time, how many hoops do I jump through to re-license my collection on new hardware? Nope, the DRM on network movies is worse than the DRM on the disks.

Toshiba should have demanded that the 360 carry an HD-DVD drive standard.

That move would have won the format war outright.

Doubtful. But it would certainly have subjected the 360 to the same cost and time overruns that the PS3 suffered from.

No-one would argue that much of the 360's current success is due to it launching a year earlier with a cheaper price. Making the HD disc player optional might (in the long run) make it harder for devs to squeeze large games in, but definitely kept the console cheaper and simpler for the so-crucial first couple of years of its life.

As for putting it in the Elite, its sales weren't large enough to make much difference to Toshiba, and increasing the cost would not have helped that. Armchair analysts can call it "penny pinching", but in the world of business, the user always pays in the end. Sony's decision to sacrifice their Playstation brand on the altar of Blu-Ray success has cost them dearly, at least in the short term.

I found an article in Variety that has an interesting quote in it:

"Warner sister company New Line confirmed it will shift allegiance to Blu-ray only as well."

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117978461.html?categoryid=1009&cs=1&query=blu+ray

That seems to confirm that New Line is -*ALSO*- blu-ray exclusive.

Most slashdotters are probably aware that Morena Baccarin showed up on Stargate SG1, and that Jewel Staite is the new doctor on Stargate Atlantis, and some might even be aware that Summer Glau did a stint on CBS's The Unit, but the one who really caught my eye was Christina Hendricks, as the ne'er do well called "Saffron":

http://www.entil2001.com/series/firefly/season1dvd/ff1-6p2.jpg

So if you liked her work on Firefly, then you might be interested to learn that she's now got a gig as "Joan Holloway", the head of the secretarial pool, on AMC's "Mad Men":

http://weblogs.variety.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/08/31/joan.jpg


Let's just say that she's everything you remember from Firefly and then some.

Hubba. Hubba.

Soap opera writers have been breaking away from the union and crossing the picket line.

The union's fight is not their fight - soap operas don't sell DVD's or get watched online.

There's a way more informative article with additional screen shots here. Looks like Ernie Hudson (Winston), Annie Potts (Janine), and William Atherton (Peck) are signed on!

I doubt the Canadians' opinions are of much use either, as they have the highest on-line music piracy rate in the world :-)

Can we separate "net neutrality" into two distinct issues? I would rather discuss "Internet tolls" in one forum, and "traffic shaping" in another. BTW, screw Internet tolls, and to hell with the politicians trying to ram it down our throats!

Reality is dangerously complete:

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117966320.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

(There's also a spoof: http://www.brutesquad.com/Movies/Thundercats/index_noframe.htm)

Also:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425061/

Or were you being even more ironic than I thought?

Probably somebody had to start a gaming site dedicated to casual gaming and casual reviews.

For example me, after gaming on PC for more that 15+ year, see most console games as total suckers. And mostly they are - thankfully to terrible game utility (e.g. no save/load functionality), overloaded controls and too much backward franchises (accompanied by flameboys).

But recently, in large thanks to Nintendo and its Wii, there were surge of pretty good playable and enjoyable games even on consoles. I normally tend to ignore console games and write off console gamers as people who grew to live in denial. But I hope that can change.

Some casual reviews already started showing up - as for example Variety's MP3:C review. (Flamed by fanboys here). Thanks to the review written in plain human words I would save my 50 for something better than MP3:C when it hits Europe. On on side. On another side, the review had bunch of hints for hardcore folks who have time the game requires to learn to play it.

Split - hardcore vs. casual - is inevitable. It is just better to be prepared. I would side with casual folks, since what they say makes much much more sense. And there is no the elitism aura around them too.

What I'm trying to get to here is that probably if you would grab a random guy from street and give him PS3 + Lair to play for some time - he might like it. Not necessarily he would want to invest $600+ into something like that. Yet. To hardcore folks easy game play (or what I call "enjoyable") is of course no-go.

Well, as Wii fan, I would omit the question about controls. Needless to add that IMNSHO classical controller - main that makes console the suckers - sucks big time.

P.S. Notice how skillfully I have managed in the post avoid saying that console games sucks... Uhm. Stop. ... (rereading post)... Uhm. Never mind.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117970671.html?c ategoryId=18&cs=1

Are you kidding me? Where do you live!!?? I'm an American living in England, and although this country has oppressive taxes and insane prices on electronics (electricals, for my Brit friends) EVERYONE I know already has at least one HD tv.

A quick review of the MP3 players currenty for sale at Amazon and Best Buy shows that every MP3 player except for the iPods plays WMA. Maybe "nobody cares," but WMA was pushed very hard as a candidate for the leading digital music standard. It would not be unreasonable to claim that the main reason it failed to become the de facto standard is because of Apple's iPod and iTunes Music Store. (Which use AAC, a codec definition which is a standard.)

Also, although the market share of the segment is small, WMA-based stores do sell a lot of digital music tracks. See http://www.sptimes.com/2006/10/30/Technology/Digit al_music_users_f.shtml for some music store market shares in 2006, giving WMA around 15%, MP3 around 10%, and iTunes (AAC) around 70%. (Yes, I know that a lot of digital music collections were converted from CD's in whatever format the user chose, but it is hard to measure those collections.)

Considering that total digital music sales were about 581 million digital tracks, that still means a lot of WMA tracks out there, about 87 million. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117956655.html?c ategoryid=16&cs=1 Note that this gives AAC downloads about 406 million tracks downloaded, so it would also not be unreasonable to claim that many iPod owners listen to AAC. (Links do not specify region, but data appears to be U.S. only.)

Spielberg - In a sometimes unreasonable business, Jack Valenti was a giant voice of reason

Iger - A man of great intelligence, integrity and humor

More tributes

Do these gazillionaires know of an entirely different Jack Valenti ? Someone genuinely benign, kind, funny ? I wonder.

This is the reason why tape will be some component of a digital archive until a new technology emerges that offers this economy of scale. I work in the media asset management field, and we're talking about archive quality, uncompressed bitrates which can yield up to 6TB/hr of data for 4k DCI (that's video alone). Sun Microsystems and a post-production company, Elektrofilm announced a partnership and pending product at NAB (Daily Variety) and seem to be pouring a lot of money and development into the technical and operational issues associated with this type of archive.

Systems like this will have to manage hundreds of thousands of hours of content at the same quality that existing film and video tape technologies are capable of, while maintaining the same diversity or workflows, and timeframes. Nothing of this scale has existed outside of the government space, and it's a much more complex issue than simple raw storage capacity. A single studio's library can represent hundreds of petabytes of data depending on the bitrate, and nothing outside of a tiered storage system with an HSM is capable of doing this economically, while still managing data integrity, the extreme throughput needed to move that volume of data in real-time, and the tools to manage the metadata.

The third screenshot is of an article that was published by Glickman in "Variety":

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117931921.html?c ategoryid=9&cs=1

Now, it's possible that he was lazy and just dumped an article he was paid for straight into his BLOG, but it's equally likely the screenshot was faked using data that was already out there. :-/

The fiercely competitive pricing came at a cost. Best Buy and Circuit City, the nation's two largest electronics retailers, both missed analyst expectations in their third-quarter earnings, reported in mid-December. Circuit City posted a sharp loss for the three months ending in November, which the retailer blamed on low HDTV pricing. Even so, the retailer said it had no plans to back off as it tried to gain market share.

A New Line Hobbit film is likely to be profitable so there's a good chance they might try that and hope that Jackson doesn't want to take the risk to compete with a later attempt.

Except, in a classic case of overly-complex intellectual property laws, New Line doesn't own distribution rights to The Hobbit. MGM does. Which means New Line could make the film, they just couldn't send it out to any theaters without MGM's permission. And MGM is saying that "the matter of Peter Jackson directing 'The Hobbit' films is far from closed."

The Variety article:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117952892.html?c ategoryid=13&cs=1

Note it hasn't yet been picked up by a studio, so this could be a straight-to-video release if we're lucky.

Sirius trouble turning a profit
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Str eetPatrol/SiriusTroubleTurningAProfit.aspx

Get Sirius? Not until the company does
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/P134732.asp

Jock pay stings Sirius
Company's loss creates debate on Stern's value
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117942418.html?c ategoryid=18&cs=1&s=h&p=0

etc., etc., etc....

Actually, this would be T5. T4 came out in 2003. And franchises, by definition, never die.

(excerpt) "'Star Trek' to me was always about infinite possibility and the incredible imagination that Gene Rodenberry brought to that core of characters," he says. "It was a show about purpose, about faith vs. logic, about science vs. emotion, about us vs. them. It was its own world, and yet it was our world."

[. . .]

"We absolutely feel beholden to the fans, but at the same time, we have to recognize that you can't only go out and make a movie or TV shows for a group of people that live and breathe a show," Abrams says.

His goal: to make a pic that "simultaneously speaks to the people who hold 'Star Trek' close to their heart and at the same time tell a story that resonates" with new fans.

Atlas Shrugged was just picked up about a month ago by Liongate Films (same folks who did saw)

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117942127?cs=1&s =h&p=0

Um, have you ever read Hollywood's Variety magazine? They were doing keywords before tagging was invented. http://www.variety.com/

You want to avoid freaking poeple out with large sequel numbers. For example, how are people going to react when Star Trek 11 is announced?

Don't you read Variety? Jack Valenti is "the entertainment industry's bionic emissary"... if his mighty robotic fists didn't kill you, his laser eyes surely would!

If you can believe The Inquirer and Variety, the PS3 is delayed until the end of the year because of "a hold-up with chips crucial to the success of the console's Blu-ray functions".
See http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30108
or http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117939258?catego ryid=18&cs=1&s=h&p=0

The final question summed up the problem: "This is a room full of people whose living depends on this working. You're getting pushback to the point of hostility. If you can't sell this to us, how are you going to sell it to the target 16-45 demographic?"

Hunt* said the marketplace would ultimately sort it out.

Geeze. Let's take the whole DRM issue out of this as an issue. Why on earth would you drive to your local BB to do this?

Probably more to the point, why would Apple choose to latch onto a dying business? That's the real reason this plan would never happen. When was the last time Steve Jobs purposely looked backwards in terms of content and product distribution?

Here is the original variety article.

You're right. I was totally appalled to learn that one of my favorite Congressmen, John Conyers, and one of my least favorites, Sensenbrenner, have teamed up to cosponsor a law that plugs the "analog hole," making any copy, anywhere, illegal. You can't make a digital copy now, and you can't make an analog one if this bill is passed. I sent Conyers a "Say it ain't so, John" message, and Sensenbrenner a polite cease-and-desist. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117934938?catego ryid=1009&cs=1

Hmmm...so partion the 3D space based on task types, or some other category system?

"Dave, would you like to play a game?"
"No, HAL, I'd rather go to my Happy Place."

Animated naked dancing avatars fill the screen, to the sound of delighted squeals.

(HAL reads the week's Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times yet again.)