AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

The New York Times
How do you make money on television sets when your competitors keep cutting prices? Throw in a little Will Smith, of course.
Howard Stringer, Sony’s chief executive, tossed out that idea at a lunch meeting Wednesday with people from the editorial and business sides of The New York Times. He noted his company’s [...]

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Red Herring
Amazon.com will launch a pay-per-view streaming movie service within weeks, founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said Wednesday.
Speaking at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, California, Mr. Bezos was quoted by Barron’s as saying that he is “very serious” about the music and video download business.
Mr. Bezos offered no details on the [...]

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NewTeeVee
Josh Catone over at ReadWriteWeb has an interesting suggestion for Warner Bros. to get folks interested in the upcoming superhero feature, Watchmen: Take a page from Trent Reznor’s book. The Nine Inch Nails front man has been experimenting with innovative distribution and marketing schemes ever since his band said farewell to Universal Music, giving away [...]

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Yahoo!
TiVo now offers movies from all major studios directly to the television set
TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO - News), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), today announced that TiVo subscribers will soon be able to download movies from The Walt Disney Studios to their broadband connected TiVo® DVRs [...]

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The New York Times
More than 3,600 independent features were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival this year, a record driven by inexpensive digital equipment and an abundance of film financing. But only a couple hundred of those movies will ever be distributed in theaters. Does that mean that almost 90 percent of indies have zero [...]

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Red Herring
Online music service Napster on Tuesday launched its first MP3 music store, free of restrictive digital rights management protection and free to compete head-to-head with Apple’s iTunes.
Napster is only the second MP3 music store to offer storewide DRM-free tracks. Amazon was the first to talk the major labels out of their wildly unpopular insistence [...]

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Silicon Alley Insider

PBS and its member stations distribute video on a variety of services, including iTunes (AAPL) Joost and Adobe Media Player (ADBE). But that distribution is about to get a lot wider.
The public broadcaster and hundreds of its local broadcast stations have adopted technology from The Platform (CMCSA) to syndicate and share video. Which [...]

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The Los Angeles Times
Apple closed two gaps today with its announcement about downloadable movies for sale through the iTunes Store. The one it emphasized was the agreement by six major studios to pony up their films the day they were available on DVD. This was a no-brainer for Hollywood. In fact, according to a publicist [...]

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FastCompany.com
Blu-ray may have defeated HD-DVD, but now it stands a chance of becoming too overpriced for an overburdened economy to adopt. Exactly how did Blu-Ray get to this position, and what’s happened since the format’s victory that could keep it from taking full advantage?
By early January, everyone knew that the end was near for HD-DVD. [...]

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The Los Angeles Times
The online entertainment store reels in one of the last holdouts among major channels, agreeing to a rare pricing concession to land hit shows like “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “The Wire.”
Apple Inc. has scooped up Time Warner Inc.’s HBO to feed television shows to its online iTunes store, reeling [...]

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