Movie piracy costs US $20.5 billion per year-study�|�Reuters.com

Movie piracy costs US $20.5 billion per year-study�|�Reuters.com: "By Lisa Baertlein

LOS ANGELES, Sept 29 (Reuters) - Movie piracy costs the U.S. economy $20.5 billion per year in lost business, jobs, wages and taxes, according to a study released on Friday by the Institute for Policy Innovation, a Texas think tank.

IPI, which describes itself as a nonprofit, nonpartisan public-policy think tank advocating lower taxes, fewer regulations and a smaller, less intrusive government, said it paid for, designed and conducted the study.

It started with a finding from a study funded by the Motion Picture Association of America, the primary lobbying organization for major Hollywood studios, showing that major U.S. motion picture studios lost $6.1 billion in revenue to piracy in 2005."


tags: control integrity data

AOL opens video search engine to developers | CNET News.com

AOL opens video search engine to developers | CNET News.com: "On Monday, the Time Warner subsidiary released a set of APIs, or application program interfaces, for building video search-driven applications. The APIs offer a number of functions, including advanced keyword search, tagging, rating, RSS and support for sharing videos via blogs and social networks.

AOL's video search engine is an access point for largely third-party video such as clips from the BBC and CNN. It should not be confused with AOL Video, which is a portal for viewing "channels" of online video--TV shows and movies--for a price.

AOL also started an initiative on Monday called the AOL Director Account program, which is geared not toward developers but rather toward online video creators and publishers.

tags: video content distribution
distribution-1 control-2 source-2 detection

Switching from cell to Wi-Fi, seamlessly | CNET News.com: "T-Mobile USA, the fourth-largest mobile phone company in the United States, is preparing to launch a service this month that will allow people talking on their cell phones to seamlessly switch between T-mobile's cellular network and their home Wi-Fi networks."

The next step is seamless connectivity at public Wi-Fi hotspots.

System evolution notes: Major changes in Tool functionality, e.g. ability to work with multiple distribution systesm, are usually a precursor to a significant change in the Sources and P.Payload ( content). This in turn causes changes in Control.

tags: mobile separation space time efficiency-2 tool-2 distribution-2 distribution-1

Digital Impasse - 8/28/2006 - Broadcasting & Cable - CA6366086: "A year after ABC began offering its primetime hits on iTunes, kicking off a scramble to put network shows on emerging platforms, networks and third-party studios are still battling over digital-distribution rights, revenue-sharing and branding for their shows. While the studios are as eager as the networks to dip a toe into digital distribution, they are wary of disrupting their proven revenue streams.

“We need to be careful that we don’t allow the growth of new business models to have a negative impact on the downstream value of the content without offsetting the lost revenue from those downstream values,” says Bruce Rosenblum, president of Warner Bros. Television Group, which produces NBC’s ER, CBS’ Two and a Half Men and TNT’s The Closer. At What Cost?

Downstream, of course, are the DVD and syndication sales that studios rely on to make back the millions they front to the networks to fund the shows. Putting their shows on iTunes for $1.99 a pop may offer quick money, but at what cost to future returns?"

The sticking points range from which party should pay for the rights to music used in a show to whether networks are adequately attentive to the profit participants, such as actors or writers.

Networks, for their part, are restricted by their affiliate agreements when it comes to distributing content digitally.

Touchstone Television President Mark Pedowitz sounds similarly optimistic that the current impasse will be resolved.

“Because of the radical transformation of the business,” he says, “no one’s quite sure where they’re standing on this earth for any given moment. You have to eventually step off the curb to see what the world is like.”

tags: tv video internet distribution-1 control-1 control-2 control-3 problem synthesis-tm1 short-term

Warner Bros. Launches Studio 2.0 - 9/5/2006 11:51:00 AM - Broadcasting & Cable - CA6368584: "Warner Bros. Television Group has started a digital production arm to create original programming for broadband web sites and wireless devices. The division, Studio 2.0, will be headed by veteran ad executive Rich Rosenthal and will work closely with advertisers to build content around their products. TV Group Executive VP Craig Hunegs will oversee the venture.

Studio 2.0 will cull content from both existing Warner Bros. TV talent and new players from outside. They will develop both multi-episode series and one-offs, both live-action and animated. Warner Bros., through its new Digital Distribution unit, is aiming to license the programming to web sites and wireless providers."

tags: synthesis source-1 tv television distribution-1 content video internet

Broadcasting & Cable: The Business of Television articleFlat: "Reality is cheap. An hour-long drama can sell to the networks for about $2 million; a half-hour sitcom runs $1.3 million. Only proven reality successes like Survivor or The Apprentice command fees that high.

A basic one-hour broadcast-network reality show costs $750,000-$800,000. Low-end cable shows can cost as little as $100,000-$200,000. (When Trading Spaces was a top-rated show, TLC made it for $90,000 per episode.) A daily half-hour syndicated reality series can cost as little as $50,000 per episode.

The concept of a “reality writer” seems like an oxymoron. The characters, after all, are real people who generate most of their own dialog. But that doesn't mean writers aren't called on to influence the drama, guide film crews and even feed lines to contestants.

Instead of a sitcom writers' room, reality shows have a “story department.” At the low end is a logger, someone who reviews raw video and takes notes of interesting scenes. At the high end might be a supervising story producer, who runs a staff of five or 10.

In the middle are story editors or story producers. On a show like CBS' Big Brother, a story editor might review hundreds of hours of tape looking for characters and story arcs. On another, such as Survivor, story editors are on-site, interviewing contestants and trying to draw out specific lines of dialog.

The level of story editors' and writers' influence depends on the format of the show. Brian McCarthy has worked in two major reality genres: competitions and v�rit�style. At Fear Factor, the arc of each episode was dictated primarily by the stunts of the week. The hard part, he says, was establishing the six contestants as characters, giving them a little flavor."

tags: source-1 control-2 tv television production efficiency-t2 synthesis-t1 content

Season's over, so Cuban cheers for HD | Newsmakers | CNET News.com: "Cuban: There are three questions there. One is, what devices will be in the living room? The second question is, what programming sources will be used? And the third is, how will they be connected?"

Good system thinking! Cuban misses only one important question: how the content flow is going to be orchestrated ( controlled). Also, there's an implicit assumption that HD content format is going to be standard.

tags: synthesis, system, elements, forecast, tv

Study: Movie piracy cost Hollywood studios $6.1 billion in '05: "Internet and DVD piracy cost major Hollywood movie studios $6.1 billion in lost revenue last year, according to a study commissioned by the film industry's trade group."

Web giants lure developers | CNET News.com: "Competition is forming among large Web services providers--Amazon.com, Google, Yahoo, eBay, and established tool providers--to attract developers to create Web applications that run on their respective platforms.
Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of the online retail giant, last week started a beta program for a service that lets developers tap into the processing power at Amazon's data centers.

Called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it works with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and other services, such as messaging, search and e-commerce. Each is offered through application programming interfaces (APIs)--a set of instructions for accessing services programmatically.
"

As network pipes become more reliable, a large amount of computing becomes available remotely. The process drives standardization of interfaces between different system elements. see also Virtualization.

tags: evolution distribution tool infrastructure interface