AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

The Wall Street Journal
Cable and satellite-TV operators gave an icy reception to plans by three movie companies for the launch of a new pay-television channel next year, indicating that the new channel may have a tough time angling its way into homes.
Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. and Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. Sunday announced [...]

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VARIETY
Get ready for Paramount the videogame publisher.
The studio has expanded its interactive department team and is putting together a slate of games that it will partially or completely finance and for which it will more directly oversee development. Games will be based either on new Par films or catalog titles.
Details on Par’s inaugural self-published or [...]

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In First for Studios, Paramount Offers Movie-Clip Spam - All Things Digital
Hollywood has finally begun sniffing at the long tail.
Paramount Pictures (VIA) and application developer FanRocket this week debuted a new service for Facebook users that will enable them to send each other movie clips. A combination media player and clip library, the service [...]

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Bit Player/LA Times Blog
Here’s an unusual first. Paramount Pictures announced a deal Wednesday to let MusicGiants, an online music store that caters to audiophiles, sell collections of movies loaded onto hard drives. Buyers will be able to transfer the contents of those drives onto personal computers or, more likely, home media servers. The deal [...]

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Daily Variety Reports a dust up between the Transformers Director and his distributor over HD formats.
The decision by Paramount and DreamWorks Animation to exclusively back HD DVD may have garnered the studios financial incentives valued at a reported $150 million, but it seems to have irked at least one high-profile filmmaker in the process.
“No ‘Transformers [...]

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