Apple Wants iTunes to Replace Your Cable Box for 30 Bucks a Month [Rumor]

Apple’s apparently pitching to networks a subscription plan that would deliver all your TV shows through iTunes for $30 a month, with the goal of launching it next year.

 

But don’t hold your breath on it happening yet: Peter Kafka has “yet to hear of a single programmer that has made a firm commitment.” As he points out, while networks are constantly looking for new revenue, like those asshole aliens in Independence Day moving from world to world consuming every natural resource, they’re nervous about the idea for a lot of reasons.

A lot of it has to do with the icky, sticky relationships between networks and cable operators, where everybody’s worried about losing out as people start to watch more and more TV content online, not in their living room—where streaming video eats up bandwidth, and advertising revenues aren’t nearly as rich (which is why Hulu wants to figure out new ways to get you to pay). [read]

Can You Tell the Difference Between Film and Digital? [Photography]

Shane Hurlbut, who’s been DP on, ahem, illustrious projects like Terminator: Salvation, is a huge proponent of consumer DSLRs, especially the Canon 5D MKII. Now, he’s challenging viewers to separate digital from film shots in his new movie. Can you? Hurlbut is shooting a project based on Navy SEALs, and the trailer (of sorts; it’s mostly an awful lot of bikini’d ladies) is shot with a mix of digital and film photography, using the digital Canon 5D MKII and Sony 950 as well as the Arri 235 film camera. He created kind of a contest to see who could pick out the digital shots from the film in the trailer (most is digital, shot with the 5D MKII)—it’s way harder than you’d think, not least because the dude is clearly an expert. [read]

Best Movie Lines

Coming up with the BEST movies lines ever is pretty tough.  There are so many, but not many are iconic.  Here are a few  starting off with my favorite.

GOLDFINGER

James Bond: “Do you expect me to talk, Goldfinger?”
Auric Goldfinger: “No, Mr. Bond….I expect you to die.”

Others, in no particular order:

“You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could’ve been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am. (On The Waterfront)

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate” (Cool Hand Luck)

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning” (Apocalypse Now)

“Fasten your seatbelts. It going to be a bumpy night” (All About Eve)

“Cinderella story. Outta nowhere. A former greenskeeper, now, about to become the Masters champion. It looks like a mirac…It’s in the hole! It’s in the hole! It’s in the hole!” (Caddy Shack)

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFI%27s_100_Years%E2%80%A6100_Movie_Quotes

Roxio releases Popcorn 4 DVD and video conversion application

New Popcorn 4 offers the best way to copy DVDs on the Mac. Easily convert video for you iPod®, iPhone™ or other device. Stream video from your Mac to your TiVo DVR. Publish converted video directly to YouTube. Burn up to 4 hours of video on a single DVD. $50 [Roxio]

Blockbuster Appears on TiVos Today

We knew good and well it was coming, and now the deed has been done. As promised, Blockbuster’s On Demand movie rental service has gone live on a bevy of TiVo boxes, enabling Series2, Series3, TiVo HD and TiVo HD XL DVRs to watch all sorts of releases without needing to purchase another set-top-box or tap into their cable company’s VOD system. We’re told that most rentals will range from $2.99 (for the classics) to $3.99 (for new releases), with the film catalog expected to expand over the coming weeks. HD aficionados will have to wait a tick before seeing any movies available in high-def, but those looking to pick up a new TiVo can now saunter into any Blockbuster retail location in order to claim one. Eager to get in on the action? Fire up your box and hit the “Video On Demand” screen from TiVo Central. [via Engadget]

Hollywood braced for budget cuts

After a summer bursting with expensive box office flops, a film made for a paltry $15,000 and starring an unknown cast is shaping up to become one of the year’s surprise successes.

Paranormal Activity, a horror film in the mould of the Blair Witch Project, has been selling out midnight screenings in a handful of US cities and looks set to become a bona fide hit when it is released across the US by Paramount this month.

The positive buzz surrounding the film is in sharp contrast to the negative reaction afforded several big budget releases this summer that flopped at the box office. As Hollywood studios tighten their belts, the lower budget film could be a sign of things to come.

The average cost of producing and marketing a studio movie has risen more than 6 per cent since 2007, according to The Motion Picture Association of America, while in the past 12 months profitable revenue streams, such as DVD sales, have sharply declined.

This has left the film industry facing some difficult choices. At Universal Pictures and Walt Disney, where several costly films have flopped recently, new strategies are being drawn up and senior executives have been replaced.

As chairman of Walt Disney Studios, Dick Cook oversaw some of the company’s highest grossing releases, such as the Pirates of the Caribbean films. But he left the studio last month after a year marred by misfires such as G-Force and Confessions of a Shopaholic.

He was swiftly followed out of Hollywood’s revolving door by Marc Shmuger and David Linde, the co-chairmen of Universal Pictures. In spite of leading the studio to its two most profitable years in 2007 and 2008, the pair were this week fired after a dire 2009.

Land of the Lost, a comedy starring Will Ferrell, was made for $100m yet garnered only $64m, as well as some of the worst reviews of the year.

Funny People, a Judd Apatow movie, was another box office turkey that the studio could not afford, given that the film cost an estimated $70m to produce – much more than previous films made by Mr Apatow. [read]

Netflix Everywhere: Sorry Cable, You’re History

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has a vision— every movie ever made on every screen everywhere. Illustration: Tom Muller

It had taken the better part of a decade, but Reed Hastings was finally ready to unveil the device he thought would upend the entertainment industry. The gadget looked as unassuming as the original iPod—a sleek black box, about the size of a paperback novel, with a few jacks in back—and Hastings, CEO of Netflix, believed its impact would be just as massive. Called the Netflix Player, it would allow most of his company’s regular DVD-by-mail subscribers to stream unlimited movies and TV shows from Netflix’s library directly to their television—at no extra charge.

The potential was enormous: Although Netflix initially could offer only about 10,000 titles, Hastings planned to one day deliver the entire recorded output of Hollywood, instantly and in high definition, to any screen, anywhere. Like many tech romantics, he had harbored visions of using the Internet to rout around cable companies and network programmers for years. Even back when he formed Netflix in 1997, Hastings predicted a day when he would deliver video over the Net rather than through the mail. (There was a reason he called the company Netflix and not, say, DVDs by Mail.) Now, in mid-December 2007, the launch of the player was just weeks away. Promotional ads were being shot, and internal beta testers were thrilled.

But Hastings wasn’t celebrating. Instead, he felt queasy. For weeks, he had tried to ignore the nagging doubts he had about the Netflix Player. Consumers’ living rooms were already full of gadgets—from DVD players to set-top boxes. Was a dedicated Netflix device really the best way to bring about his video-on-demand revolution? So on a Friday morning, he asked the six members of his senior management team to meet him in the amphitheater in Netflix’s Los Gatos offices, near San Jose. He leaned up against the stage and asked the unthinkable: Should he kill the player? [read]

The Magic and Myth of THX :: Bobby Owsinski

Anyone who goes to the movies is aware of THX, but not many people are actually aware of what it is and what the logo means in relation to a theater. THX is owned by LucasFilm and the brainchild of former LucasFilm chief scientist Tomlinson Holman (my friend and mentor), who is now a professor at USC and is the man that coined the phrase “5.1″ surround sound. Tom is good at coining names that stick, and in fact, THX stands for Tomlinson Holman eXperiment.

So what is it? It used to be that movies theaters varied a huge amount in audio playback quality. A movie that sounded great in one theater would sound like it was coming out of a tin can in another because there was no real standard for playback quality. This came to George Lucas’ attention upon the release of Star Wars, which was a very sound-heavy movie with a great score and lots of sound effects. As they followed the release of the film across the country, Lucas and his production team were frequently appalled at how many theaters had an inferior audio playback system and how bad their movie would sound as a result. If all theaters sounded equally as bad, you could compensate for that. But if the quality was hit or miss, that was a problem.

As a result, Holman came up with THX, which is a standard for playback quality between theaters, in 1983 before the release of Return of the Jedi.

Read more: http://bobbyowsinski.blogspot.com/2009/09/magic-and-myth-of-thx.html#ixzz0RqI4JxO1

D23 Expo Announcements: Muppets, Pirates and Cars — Oh My!

In Anaheim, California, over this past weekend, The Walt Disney Company threw a big event for the press and hardcore Disney fans called the D23 Expo. Lots of news came out of it, but of particular interest to geeks — and particularly geek parents — are the announcements of several upcoming movies Disney is producing.

The one I’m most looking forward to: The first new Muppet movie since way back in 1999! Yes, the long-rumored new film, to be titled The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made, is scheduled to come out next year. It’s being written by Jason Segel, who (being, evidently, a hardcore Muppets fan since childhood) has promised to bring the movie back to being about the Muppets instead of the guest stars. The title is very similar (possibly identical — I’m not 100% sure) to a planned Muppet movie Jim Henson developed in the mid-1980s but never produced. That movie was supposed to be about Gonzo directing a movie and rapidly, though not surprisingly, going way over-budget. Nobody has said whether the upcoming film will be based on that project, but I would be surprised to learn it wasn’t at least related. More Muppet news was also announced, including several iPhone apps to be coming out next year.

The one I’m least looking forward to: The first new Pirates of the Caribbean movie since way back in 2007! Yes, the new film, to be subtitled On Stranger Tides, was announced to thunderous applause, which I’m sure had nothing to do with the fact that they got Johnny Depp to show up dressed up (and flouncing around the stage) as Captain Jack Sparrow. I suppose one can hardly blame Disney for making another film in the series, since actually printing money is illegal, but really, why don’t they just call it Pirates of the Caribbean: Depp, Depp, and More Depp? The new film, for anyone who really cares, will be coming out in Summer 2011.

And the one I’m ambivalent about: Cars 2. I thought Cars, like every other Pixar film, was better than most… [read]

Head to Head: iPod nano vs. pocket camcorders

by Tim Moynihan, PC World

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from PCWorld.com.

Arguably the biggest announcement of this week’s Apple event was the inclusion of a video camera in the latest generation of the iPod nano. That bit of news was only slightly unexpected: Rumors had circulated before Apple’s event that the iPod touch would be getting a camera or camcorder. Instead, it was the iPod touch’s tiny sibling that gained video-shooting capabilities.

The new Nano shoots standard-definition, 640-by-480 VGA video in MPEG-4 format. Missing from its skill set is the ability to shoot stills; the Nano’s camera captures video only. Also disappointing is the fact that you don’t get the full range of video-editing features that you do on the iPhone 3GS; on the other hand, you do get a nice range of fun video effects to choose from.

Shooting video with the Nano takes some getting used to. The lens and microphone are smack-dab on the flip side of where your hand would be when you’re using the scroll wheel, so if you’re shooting in landscape mode, your index finger will tend to make cameo appearances in your videos when you’re pressing the iPod nano’s center button to start and stop recording. You can also shoot video fairly easily in portrait mode by flipping the nano upside-down. Thanks to the iPod nano’s accelerometers, the device automatically reorients the video to portrait mode, and your fingers are less likely to get in the way of the lens.)

To test the iPod Nano’s video chops, we shot identical footage with the nano, the standard-definition Pure Digital Flip Mino, and the iPhone 3GS (which has a bigger lens and image sensor). Just to show how the nano’s video compared to that of a high-definition camcorder, we also shot the same footage with Kodak’s Zi8, which is the first pocket camcorder to shoot full HD, 1080p video.

Here’s the tale of the tape. (Keep in mind that source videos often look better before they’re uploaded to YouTube.) [watch and read]