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Looks like Blu-Ray is having an unfortunate benefit... (http://techdirt.com/articles/20081117/1721382856.shtml) But one group of people is loving Blu-ray: Asian movie pirates. The pirates rip Blu-ray movies, then burn them onto DVDs using the AVCHD format, at a resolution that's lower than Blu-ray, but still higher than standard DVDs. The lower resolution means the pirates can burn onto regular blank DVDs, not blank Blu-ray discs, holding their costs down and creating fat profit margins on the $7 bootlegs. On the subject of copyright - worth reading is this very interesting presentation (http://topspinmedia.com/2008/11/grammy-northwest-musictech-summit-keynote/) on new emerging business models; I see news about the health of the music industry as defined by the stock price of WMG or quarterly earnings of UMG, Sony, and EMI every day. What I don’t see, apart from a few articles on Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, is an update on how the world is changing from the artist point of view.

So YouTube and Hollywood may be finally getting it's act together to offer full films for free from the site (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/08/youtube-film-technology-business) ;The video website YouTube is preparing to link up with Hollywood to show full-length films for free over the internet, it has emerged....Free films, running with advertising, would mark a radical advance for the video-sharing website as it looks to profit from its massive popularity. It is not clear which Hollywood studios are involved in the discussions. But one report from the CNET news website suggested a YouTube movie service could arrive within 90 days.Far from being a radical move, this makes the site a bit of an also-ran. Users of YouTube have been chopping up longer videos (especially TV shows) and posting them online for some time to get around the 10 minutes limit. In addition sites like Veoh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veoh) allow posting of full length films and then there has been the growth of link-aggregation sites like QuickSliverScreen (http://quicksilverscreen.com/) and allUC (http://s14.alluc.org/) where links to full films and TV shows are posted.

Another story to file under 'the-times-they-are-a-changing (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7709298.stm) ';UK sales of games will outstrip music and video for the first time in 2008, says a report from Verdict Research. A huge shift in consumer attitudes has turned video games into the UK's most popular form of entertainment, say the retail analysts. It predicts spending on games will rise by 42% to £4.64bn in 2008, with sales on music and video at £4.46bn.

Director Wayne Wang, who made films such as 'Smoke' and 'The Joy Luck Club' has released his latest film online, for free on YouTube (http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/10/17/movies.internet.ap/index.html?eref=rss_tech); On Friday, the director Wayne Wang premieres his movie The Princess of Nebraska on the video sharing site... Wang...is one of the most notable filmmakers to try giving away a film for free online. While it has become standard practice in music for albums to stream for free, movies are generally only available for free illegally. Last month, Michael Moore released his documentary Slacker Uprising for free to stream or download. Coupled with Wang's YouTube release, it's starting to feel like feature-length filmmakers are wading deeper into the Internet.

Lawrence Lessig (http://www.lessig.org/) has a great article in the Wall Street Journal that is worth reading: We are in the middle of something of a war here -- what some call the copyright wars ; what the late Jack Valenti (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Valenti) [who was the long-time president of the Motion Picture Association of America] called his own terrorist war, where the terrorists are apparently our kids. ... Peer-to-peer file sharing is the enemy in the copyright wars. Kids stealing stuff with a computer is the target. The war is not about new forms of creativity, not about artists making new art....Yet every war has its collateral damage. These creators are this war's collateral damage. The extreme of regulation that copyright law has become makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, for a wide range of creativity that any free society...There is also some good commentry on the article here (http://techdirt.com/articles/20081013/0108232525.shtml) .

An interesting event occoured with the release of Iron Man on Blu-Ray; Blu-Ray players allow people to connect, using a service called BD-Live, to download extra content and the like. However it would appear that the technical side of this service was not yet ready for a big surge in demand (http://securityandthe.net/2008/10/04/iron-man-release-brings-down-bd-live-service/);Following the release of the blu-ray version of Iron Man on october 1st, Paramount’s BD-Live servers were brought down completely by the popularity of the disc....According to most sources, the content is downloaded as soon as a disc is first inserted into the player. Because of the popularity of this release, Paramount’s servers were completely overwhelmed with traffic....That alone wouldn’t have been a problem, but because this caused the loading of the movie to halt while the content was downloaded lots of people thought the disc itself was defective.

We are non-linear! Some good information coming out of the superpowerpointcinema (http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2008/10/01/powerpointcinema/) event in All Media ism. Het Nederlands Film Festival!

We have reported on the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (content/view/221/1/) to become the next DVD format of choice for consumers. Well Blu-Ray won; but was it a pyrrhic victory? (http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/23/0051212) More than six months after HD-DVD gave up the ghost, there are several signs that Sony's rival Blu-ray format is struggling to gain consumer acceptance. According to recent sales data from Nielsen, market share for Blu-ray discs in the U.S. is declining, and Sony and its Blu-ray partners are trying several tactics to boost the format — including free trial discs bundled into magazines and cheap Blu-ray players that cost less than $200. In other news, version 1.0.0 of the Dirac Codec (http://diracvideo.org/) has been released. (We interviewed (content/view/28/27/) one of the developers about their work while ago... )

A quick update on our ongoing look at emerging digital-age business models (content/view/1816/27/); We note with interest that the major US trade bodies for film and music have joined together to form a new group to push a new version of DRM (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/13/1429241) ; An anonymous reader points out news that the music and movie studios are attempting to develop a new type of DRM that would allow customers more flexibility in playing content on multiple devices. The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) would establish a list of devices in your personal domain (unrelated to web domains), and minimizes or removes restrictions within that domain. Of course this then requires a central server with net connection to the customer that provides the validation for the devices. Plenty of opportunity for things to go wrong (content/view/1810/40/) and annoy the playing customer - as pirated versions always remove the DRM. Meanwhile, still on the subject of music, UK band Marillion have decided that p2p is a good way to expand their fanbase by giving their new album away for free (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/11/internet) ; When users download the tracks, an interactive window will appear with a message from the band, telling them about the album, a forthcoming tour and the products and merchandise on the Marillion website. Those who download the album are also asked to provide an email address, so they can be updated and offered the opportunity to make a donation, in the style of Radiohead. It seems that Marillion understand that free music drives other scarce services (http://techdirt.com/articles/20080910/0340092223.shtml) (such as live gigs).

This might be of interest to you;Pact and NESTA have released a range of tools designed to make it easy for TV and Film producers to work with digital producers on convergent or multi-platform projects. The tools include legal templates for producers who want to kick off multi-platform development, as well as a 'how to' guide for exploring joint ventures. The tools are freely available to producers across the industry and provide a simple legal framework for producers to work together when developing intellectual property. It is hoped that this initiative will improve the quality and number of multi-platform proposals going to UK broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4. Visit PACT for more information and to download the Guide to Collaborating.See here (http://www.pact.co.uk/detail.asp?id=6412) for more information.

Amazon has now launched it's Video-On-Demand service (http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=amb_link_7192562_1?ie=UTF8 node=16261631 pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER pf_rd_s=right-1 pf_rd_r=0F7NE58858M9CECGE8MT pf_rd_t=101 pf_rd_p=435642201 pf_rd_i=507846) . We notice that it comes with Digital Rights Management (DRM) (content/view/1810/40/) onboard though (http://www.drmwatch.com/ocr/article.php/3761041). As one commenter on Slashdot (http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/05/1558214), somewhat scathingly, remarked;And this demonstrates exactly why the MPAA is struggling against piracy. $14.99 to DOWNLOAD a movie that comes crippled with DRM?

Worth checking out;No definite dates yet, but the 8th edition of courtisane festival will take place end of april 2009. And here's the call for entry... You can send your film/project to Courtisane. The submission form and regulations can be found on www.courtisane.be (http://www.courtisane.be) ! The submission deadline is 31 december 2008.

Legendary cult director David Lynch slams films on mobile phones; (http://www.movingweb.org/2008/07/18/david-lynch-get-real/)

So say technology company Alcatel-Lucent (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/17/internet.television) ;The British internet TV market could generate revenues of £1.78bn by 2011...Alcatel-Lucent claims internet TV services could have a market share of between 22 and 37 per cent in the UK within three years, depending on how aggressively they are promoted. The findings were calculated by the number of people who said they would like to use the services and the amount they were willing to pay.

It is very interesting to note the slow (but sure) change in how large media companies react to YouTube - from complaining and asking for items to be removed, to now asking for a cut of the ad revenues (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/technology/16tube.html?_r=1 partner=rssuserland emc=rss pagewanted=all oref=slogin) ;In the last few months, CBS, Universal Music, Lionsgate, Electronic Arts and other companies have stopped prodding YouTube to remove unauthorized clips of their movies, music videos and other content and started selling advertising against them.... We don’t want to condone people taking our intellectual property and using it without our permission, said Curt Marvis, the president of digital media at Lionsgate Entertainment, which owns films like 'Dirty Dancing' and the 'Saw' series of horror movies, But we also don’t like the idea of keeping fans of our products from being able to engage with our content.” he said. “For the most part, people who are uploading videos are fans of our movies. They’re not trying to be evil pirates, and they’re not trying to get revenue from it. Echo's of the PotterWar saga (http://web.ukonline.co.uk/bringers/temp/c-potter.html) ?

Joss Whedon, creator of TV dramas such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer's new creation 'Doctor Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog (http://drhorrible.com/) ' is being touted as a possible TV-meets-Web Film model (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/03/digitalmedia.television) ;It is a TV show that has never been shown on TV, an internet video that looks nothing like an internet video. It was made for the fun of it, not for ratings or profit, and put on the web in the hope that someone would notice. The fact that they did, in their millions, has delivered a shock to the Hollywood system, raising the spectre of writers, directors and actors bypassing major producers and selling directly to audiences online.