The Last Picture Show

Small-town independent movie theaters may soon be driven into extinction by digital movie houses. The LA times reports that “On the redwood-lined banks of the Russian River, dozens of local residents and tourists gathered in a grassy field on a hot Sunday afternoon, lining up to buy raffle tickets and $10 plates of barbecued chicken as a bluegrass group rehearsed a number for a Ramble at the Rio concert.

“It might have been a church social or a school fundraising picnic. But this event was to raise money to save a centerpiece of the community: the Rio Theater.images-1

“Built from a World War II Quonset hut and adorned with murals from local artists, the Rio has been screening films in this town of about 1,200 people since 1950. Located in the wine country north of San Francisco off the Bohemian Highway, a few miles away from the Bodega Bay filming location of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “The Birds,” the Rio has survived fires, floods and multiple owners. Continue reading “The Last Picture Show”

The global technological state

Once upon a time, Google concerned itself with seemingly benign, profit-driven things: the optimal position of online ads for erectile dysfunction drugs, mapping the location of every sports bar in America, churning out free services to further cement a quasi-monopoly in global search, writes Mya Fraser in today’s Slate.comimages-1

“But these are no longer the comfortable, well-established guardrails around Google.

“More than two years ago, as governments on two continents were preparing to launch anti-trust investigations against it, Google began moving aggressively onto the turf of states. Today, Google is arguably one of the most influential nonstate actors in international affairs, operating in security domains long the purview of nation-states: It tracks the global arms trade, spends millions creating crisis-alert tools to inform the public about looming natural disasters, monitors the spread of the flu, and acts as a global censor to protect American interests abroad. Google has even intervened into land disputes, one of the most fraught and universal security issues facing states today, siding with an indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon to help the tribe document and post evidence about intrusions on its land through Google Earth. Continue reading “The global technological state”

Local news going the way of print

With shorter stories and scarce coverage of politics and government, local television newscasts in the United States, like local newspapers before them, are suffering from “shrinking pains,” according to the Pew Research Center.imgres-2

The diagnosis comes in the center’s 10th annual State of the News Media report, which will be published on Monday. The New York Times reports that “the report, covering 2012, describes cutbacks in the reporting ranks of newspapers and television networks and a surge in efforts by politicians, corporations and others to tell their own stories.

“This adds up to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands,” the report’s main author, Amy Mitchell, wrote in an introduction. Continue reading “Local news going the way of print”

The Oscars in retrospect

Everyone was thinking this, and a few said it at the time, but this year the Academy Award show really crossed the line.

It’s always been an irreverent affair – poking fun at egotistical celebrities and, by extension, an overly commercialized industry. So, off-color jokes are nothing new. But this is a program that boasts a global audienceimgres

of one-billion viewers, many of whom watch in prime time. And this time it was frequently patently offensive. While the blame is currently being dumped on host and front-man Kevin MacFarlane, one can hardly conceive that one person is permitted to write the lines for such a heavily hyped spectacle. This is an industry putting its ugliest misogyny and racism on display, with bits of antisemitism thrown in for good measure. The New York times today summed up what people inside and outside of Hollywood have been saying Continue reading “The Oscars in retrospect”

Online games boom in China

In the five years through 2012, revenue for the Online Game industry in China increased at an annualized rate of 34.4% to $9.3 billion, says PRWebimgres. “The number of online game players in China has been growing 34.7% per year over the period, and about 59.5% of internet users in China are also online game players.

“Although the first online game was designed by a domestic studio, the Chinese online game market was dominated by foreign games in the early years of the industry’s development. Domestic firms only took a leading share of the market in 2006, says IBISWorld. Over the past five years, Chinese-made online games have been increasingly well accepted by the global market, with exports growing faster than total revenue.

“In 2012, the top four players in the Online Game industry in China – Tencent, Netease, Shanda Games and Perfect World – made 61.4% of total industry revenue, which indicates a medium level of concentration. The few large-scale companies that are able to raise enough funds develop high-quality games and buy operation licenses from other companies. However, the majority of enterprises in this industry are small game studios developing lower-quality games.

“As the Online Game industry matures and comes under more regulations, competition will become more intense and profitability is expected to fall somewhat, says IBISWorld. Game companies will invest more into research and development to design better and fancier games. In particular, firms will focus on further penetrating the 15-to-34 age group, offering more social, mobile and browser games to cater to this market.”

For more information, visit IBISWorld’s Online

 

 

More: http://www.prweb.com/releases/china/online-games/prweb10414609.htm

Celebrity isn’t what is used to be

imgres-2As the magazine industry continues to suffer from declining circulation, celebrity gossip magazines and young women’s titles have taken some of the biggest hits, reports a recent item in the New York Times

“According to data released by the Alliance for Audited Media on Thursday morning, overall paid and verified circulation of magazines declined slightly by 0.3 percent in the second half of 2012. But newsstand sales – which are often viewed as the best barometer of how well a magazine is doing – dropped by 8.2 percent.

“These figures were far worse for celebrity magazines, which largely suffered double-digit declines. People’s newsstand sales dropped by 12.2 percent while US Weekly experienced a 14.6 percent decline. In Touch Weekly declined by 14.8 percent and Life & Style Weekly suffered a 19.1 percent drop on newsstands. Continue reading “Celebrity isn’t what is used to be”