Posted 01/06/10 at 06:56:21 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Warner Bros. had made it clear last August that it was not going to let movie rental services eat into its revenues by hurting DVD and Blu-ray sales. Now, it has concluded negotiations with Netflix, the largest movie rental service, and got its way. Netflix will only be allowed to rent out the film studio's DVD titles 28 days after they go on sale. As for the studio's end of the bargain, it has agreed to charge a reduced fee besides pledging more of its films to Netflix for its streaming service. Other studios are also expected to reach a similar understanding with Netflix.

The four-week delay is not without precedent. Universal, 20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers had imposed exactly the same rider on the sale of DVDs to Redbox, prompting a lawsuit from the movie rental company against the three studios. “The 28-day window allows us to continue making our most popular films available to Netflix subscribers while supporting our sell-through product,” Warner Home Video president Ron Sanders said in a statement.

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Posted 09/23/08 at 04:51:30 PM by Will Smith

I just returned from a special theater screening of War Games—quite possibly the only good film Hollywood has ever produced about computers, computer nerds, or hacker culture. Shockingly, the movie, which was first released in 1983, holds up quite well, despite the use of archaic hardware (acoustic couplers and vocoder boxes), a laughable sentient military supercomputer, and an occasional lapse into typical Hollywood lingo.    

The abundance of 8-inch floppy discs also gave people in the theater a laugh, as did the fact that characters were practically chain-smoking throughout the entire movie. But none of the showing’s pervasive air of yestertech could take away from the fact that War Games remains awesome.

More nostalgia after the jump!

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Posted 09/17/08 at 01:34:16 AM by Pulkit Chandna

The incongruity between disparate media formats has denied us a truly universal media experience till now. This is simply not acceptable in this epoch of technology convergence. A consortium called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystems (DECE) is working on improving interoperability between different media and consumer electronic devices. The group includes HP, Intel, Microsoft, Paramount, Sony and Toshiba, besides other prominent CE heavyweights and film studios.

The group will shed more light on its plan, to have greater interoperability between devices, during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). DECE will develop an industry standard, which will allow users to enjoy digital content across various devices without having to worry about compatibility issues.

If most people find merit in the notion that digital downloads are going to replace the need for optical storage formats, they will also agree that digital content will have to offer a universal media experience like the hugely successful DVD. “We see this vision of 'buy once, play anywhere,” Mark Coblitz, senior VP of strategic planning at Comcast – a member of DECE, gave the gist of the plan.

DECE President Mitch Singer even welcomed Apple, which runs a popular digital distribution service iTunes, tied to its products, to join the consortium. Do you think that services like iTunes are doomed?

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Posted 07/23/08 at 05:24:50 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Google is currently exploring all possible methods of milking the Youtube cow despite having deemed revenues from the website to be immaterial during it Q1 filing.

It has now dawned upon Google that professionally made content is more lucrative to advertisers than amateur videos, and can help it recover the $1.65 billion Youtube acquisition costs. The search engine major’s enlightenment will greatly benefit Hollywood companies, who have been clamoring about the ease with which their interests are compromised on piracy hotbeds like Youtube.

Google knows that to monetize copyrighted movie and TV videos with advertisements it will have to legitimize their use first, which it plans to do with revenue sharing deals with major Hollywood studios. It recently struck a revenue sharing deal with Lionsgate and is in talks with other media companies, although very little is known at this stage.

Does it mean that Google will completely prevent users from uploading copyrighted content - something it has failed to do hitherto? Most probably that won’t be the case as it is currently working on a new technology that will help identify copyrighted content and allow its rightful owners to display ads next to it without the video being taken down.

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