According to an article in the New York Times the DVD market is slumping because of the changing viewing habits of consumers. DVDs are now where the industry makes its money, and Nielsen VideoScan reported a 9 percent drop in DVD sales in the third quarter over the quarter a year earlier — before the economy ran into a buzz saw.
Read more about it.
Bertelsmann AG is a worldwide media conglomerate that controls a hefty dose of what your read, watch and listen to on a daily basis. In an article posted today, it's reported that Hartmut Ostrowski, chief executive of Bertelsmann, is planning a cultural makeover at the company. Mr Ostrowski is looking to possibly get out of the music business for starters. Read more about it.
As I was watching a DVD of an Hollywood classic movie this weekend I pondered on the evolution of the movie industry. Gone are the dictators that ran the Hollywood studios such as Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn who with just a word from them an actor could foreseeably "never work in this town again!" Now movie studios are just a part of a conglomerate and the studio boss reports to a bigger boss. Studios are under more and more pressure to turn out movies that will make a profit for the parent company while on the other hand more and more people are not going out to the neighbor hood cinema. What is a movie studio to do?
Check out this blog The Box Office Junkie, which answers the question why is popcorn so expensive at the movies?
 Also the book The Big Picture : The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood by Edward Jay Epstein, located in Jackson Library. These two sources might shed light on the workings of the modern motion picture studio.
In 2007, a growing number of local television stations, including WNCN in Raleigh, N.C., and WCMH in Columbus, Ohio, began producing noon programming exclusively for the Web. Among newspapers, The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Va., and The Ventura County Star in California started posting videos at lunchtime that have young journalists as hosts and are meant to appeal to 18- to 34-year-old audiences.
Yahoo’s daily best-of-the-Web segment, called The 9 and sponsored by Pepsi, is produced every morning in time for lunch. “Based on the traffic I’m seeing,” said Miguel Monteverde, executive director of AOL Video, “our nation’s productivity is in question.”
From an advertiser’s perspective, the Web is a more flexible medium than television, because technology makes it easy to monitor people’s behavior and adjust programming accordingly. Better still, marketers have found that consumers are up to 30 percent more likely to make a purchase after viewing an advertisement at lunchtime than at other times of the day.
“Not only is advertising volume and Internet use increasing during the 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. time period, but people are actually buying and purchasing and reacting to advertising,” said Young-Bean Song, vice president for analytics at Atlas Solutions, a unit of Microsoft that helps companies with digital marketing campaigns.
The New York Times
How did Kenny G make the cover of the Billboard February 16, 2008 cover? He has left his music label and is selling his new album exclusively through Starbucks. It has turned out that besides imbibing your latte at the store many consumers have been buying music too. Starbucks has become one of the most powerful retailers in music, selling over half a million copies of Paul McCartney's last CD. You can read more about this in a series of articles in Billboard about music and Starbucks entitled 'The Future Sound of Starbucks'. A report on the Sunday morning show entitled G Whiz goes into more detail about the business relationship between the coffee maker and music.
Researchers at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom have designed an interactive color Sudoku game, one of many programs designed to explore the interplay between logic and perception as humans interact with computers. Empirical Modelling, what the scientists call this approach, pays more attention to what humans take into account and provides a practical means to explore problems that aren’t so cut and dry.
In the case of color Sudoku, it can mean a mix of perception, expectation, experience, logic, and of course, color discernment.
Reported at MSNBC
Related blog on Sudoku
Gamers of Nintendo's Wii complained about "aching backs, sore shoulders, and Wii elbow." In Wii Sports, a game that comes with the console, users mimic the motions used in sports like bowling, tennis and baseball. Wii features digital sensors that let users virtually play the game. Since its debut in November of last year, 9.27 million units have been sold. In addition to turning Wii into a new form of exercise, it is also used in hospitals to treat physical therapy patients.
Active video games like the Wii can fight child obesity, according to a report published by the Mayo Clinic in the January 2006 issue of Pediatrics.
A research team at the University of Toronto is developing a "therapeutic video game" to treat children who suffer from hemiplegic cerebral palsy, a condition that can partially paralyze one side of the body. If the children regularly use their weaker side, their motor function can improve.
Read more on Nintendo Wii in Mindshare , Time, News@UofT
Free, interactive music sites like Pandora and Last.fm are a hybrid of radio station and jukebox. They provide a selection of streaming music to match your tastes, reported at washingtonpost.com.
You start at each by creating a profile telling the site which artists or genres you like. For example, at Pandora you customize a radio station by naming an artist you like. The site then serves up music with similar traits, which you can approve or reject by clicking thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. Last.fm uses a different tactic by asking you to download a small program that hooks into iTune and other music software, analyzing your collection and figuring out which artists would fit.
Both sites incorporate social networking so that you can also listen to your friends' stations. Put in enough time at these places, you probably will find yourself discovering new artists.
A newer site, Musicovery, invites users to pick music by genre, tempo, date and mood which can result in it segueing from a West Coast R&B band to a folk-rock group from Algeria.
And what about making all these portable? Imagine a site like this becomes available on your shuffle!
“In an ecologically threatened Springfield, Homer fouls the local lake with the refuse of a pig he’s fallen in love with. The place is declared a disaster area, and an evil government bureaucrat orders that the town be domed. Having alienated everyone with his idiocy, Homer must prove himself a hero: risking his life to save people he hates for reasons he doesn't understand.”
A good review in Time magazine and it topped the weekend box office sales, reported in Variety.
Online gaming has attracted 17% more individuals than last year according to comScore. "The comScore World Metrix study took into account all sites that provide online or downloadable games, excluding gambling sites. The sector attracted 28 percent of the total worldwide online population in May and recorded an average of 9 visits per visitor." Read about how 217 million worldwide are spending their time online.
I felt compelled today to blog about the Sopranos. As a relatively new viewer of the show I must say I was sucked in to the story line. More importantly, what will HBO come up with to fill the gap in programming. I searched a few blogs today and there wasn't a very enthusiastic response to "John from Cincinnati" the inheritor of the Sunday 9-10 time slot. Only time will tell.
In searching Nielsen's ratings I did see that last night the winner for viewers 18-49 was the Simpsons within the broadcast TV segment. Maybe HBO needs to develop a Simpsons clone to lure viewers to their side? Just a thought.
Network execs fed up with the jaded attitudes of the traditional media are turning to the blogoshere to promote new (and old) shows. According to an article in the Tuesday, May 15 Wall Street Journal, Hollywood is actively courting bloggers, offering them freebies such as DVDs and other promotional material. And for big players, the biggest perk of all -- access. Mainstream media may have strict guidelines for accepting gifts, but there are no such rules in the blogosphere. Bloggers are invited to visit actual shows in production, meet the stars and maybe even a get a bit part. And the payoff? Great reviews in widely read blogs. I am now re-evaluating my blogging focus, since I know that if I get even one small part, I will surely be ... "discovered" !
Sony’s 'Spider-Man 3' sets records in Europe and Asia including Japan, France, Germany, Italy and South Korea. Italian estimates gave "Spider-Man" $4 million from 900 screens, making for the country's biggest one day bow ever. Sony spent some $3.3 million on marketing "Spider-Man 3" in Italy. Domestic launch this Friday on 4,253 theaters, the widest North American opening of all time.
Reported at Variety.com.
The famous Swedish crisp-bread maker has seen U.S. sales rise 50% virtually overnight after Oprah Winfrey took out a Wasa cracker and made herself a sandwich, reports the Wall Street Journal (March 12.) She declared it 'crunchy' and 'yummy' during a segment with Bob Greene, exercise physiologist and Certified Personal Trainer. Oprah likes it -- and that’s all it took. Hey, I'll give it a try.
Apparently not many adults -- or at least Mark Burnett -- would have us believe that to be the case. This new show is a ratings bonanza for Fox. "It's amazing how much you forget from grade school," says Mike Darnell, a Fox VP. "My understanding is that every (network) exec who played the game during the pitch meetings ended up with zero dollars at the end." According to CNN the show was seen by 26.5 million viewers, making it the most-watched series debut in Fox network history -- and the most popular debut of any series since 1998, according to Nielsen Media Research. No wonder I prefer Jeopardy; at least I know I can answer more than a 5th grader on that show.
Toy industry veteran Jay Horowitz introduced the Sudoku Cube, a hybrid of Rubik's Cube and the popular puzzle Sudoku, at the American International Toy Fair, which run February 11-14 in New York City.
Horowitz first encountered Sudoku just last year when a woman sitting next to him on a plane explained the puzzle to him. Sudoku's number grids got him thinking about the Rubik's cube mold sitting in his warehouse. ... He then worked feverishly to find a way to combine the two and when he got it, he said he didn't sleep for three days. He expected the sale to be in the millions. Read the story at The-Review.com.
Related video and articles:
YouTube shows a video clip using quantum computing to solve a Sudoku puzzle instantly.
Also check out an article at IEEE Spectrum Online: Sudoku Science - "a popular puzzle helps researchers dig into deep math".
Weinstein Co. made an exclusive deal with Blockbuster, the terms of which dictate that for four years starting with the coming January, TWC will make available its titles only to Blockbuster, excluding the company's main competitors Netflix and Movie Gallery. Blockbuster in turn will provide the most exposure to the TWC titles and some payments to Weinstein Co. For more details on the deal read the article in November 16, 2006 Daily Variety.
This small comic book publisher has survived for 20 years against the likes of larger competitors Marvel Entertainment and DC Comics. Read about it in the New York Times.
From Forbes Magazine, a list of which celebrities are earning the most money with one catch they are not here to enjoy it!
Their estates continue to make money by inking deals involving both their work and the rights to use their name and likenesses on merchandise and marketing campaigns.
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