By Georg Szalai

The window between the average movie’s DVD and VOD releases has shrunk to just five days, down sharply from the 30 to 45 days that were common a few years ago, according to BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield, who on Thursday chastised studios for mismanaging release windows.

Most movies are already being released day and date on DVD and VOD amid an accelerating shift over the past six months to DVD rentals rather than purchases, he said.

“The studios’ willingness to collapse the VOD window is a clear sign to us that the industry is admitting that DVD purchasing is disappearing,” he wrote in his note to investors on Thursday. “Consumers simply do not need to own the overwhelming majority of content released by Hollywood, when that content is so readily available via rental platforms.”

What particularly enrages him is that some studios are making DVDs available to Redbox or Netflix without a 28-day waiting period that other studios have used. “What drives us nuts is how certain studios (Disney, Paramount and Sony) allow Redbox and Netflix to offer their content day-and-date with a DVD’s release, but put a window on VOD,” he said. After all, “VOD has far better economics (profitability) on a per-unit basis than Netflix or Redbox offer the studios, not to mention traditional rental stores such as Blockbuster.”

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By Christina Bonnington

Forget sitting, lazily note-taking, listening to a professor’s lecture. UC Irvine Med School is giving the educational system an about face by providing an iPad to each of its new students for their entirely digital, iPad-based curriculum.

Dr. Ralph Clayman, the dean of the School of Medicine, is committed to embracing evolving technology, and shows it through the interactive learning environment that they’ve developed.

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By Johnnie L. Roberts

Welcome to the age of re-priced media.

From the theatrical box office to every new platform of digital publishing and video entertainment, signs of  fundamental pricing change are increasingly evident across the media economy. And if the frenzy is unprecedented, the catalyst for it is also without parallel—a wave of new media-friendly e-gadgets and e-devices, a near historic recession that devastated the ad-dependent publishing sector and the stark recognition of the existential threat to an industry in digital transformation.

“There is a re-balancing, a re-calibration, going on, and it’s a healthy one,” John Loughlin, executive vice president and general manager of Hearst Magazines, tells TheWrap. “In part, it was given a real nudge with the ad recession. We must bring our revenue streams more into balance.” So these days, media products from Hulu to the New York Times to 3D movies are introducing payments that will bring “balance” for producers — and for consumers, sticker shock.

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By David Kravets

Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad.

Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money.

“We believe it’s the best solution out there,” Gibson says. “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues.

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Get to know more about us, as our star intern, Yanise takes the Hot Seat to answer Proust’s Questionnaire, popularized by James Lipton on “Inside the Actors Studio” at www.facebook.com/icarusfilms

By Avinash T.R. (From the Bodisathva blog)

Avinash Sorab: As I am concerned with an alternative tradition of documentary film making in India I have noticed lot of similarities in style (particularly in the interviews of War and Peace) with the documentary of Marcel Ophuls The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) in French. What is your opinion about it? Do you know the film? Are you influenced by his style?

Anand Patwardhan (AP): I saw Sorrow and the Pity and other Marcel Ophuls films like Hotel Terminus (on the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie) many years ago. I am of course an admirer of his work but am not sure if we have any similarity in style, though it is possible that when you admire a film, a little bit of it stays with you forever. Another film I admired in those days was The Battle of Chile by Patricio Guzman. Perhaps what is common in these works is the scale of the issues they tackle, the attention to detail and the understated humanist sympathies of the filmmaker, which while never hidden are never loudly proclaimed.

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How Google’s music-streaming venture will change the gadget and entertainment worlds forever.

By Farhad Manjoo

While the iPod has come to symbolize the digital music age, it’s iTunes that’s allowed Apple to control the musical marketplace. iTunes has a nice interface, it’s easy to learn, and it’s ubiquitous—it ships with every Mac, and it’s one of the most downloaded Windows programs around. Other companies may make great phones and music players, but they don’t have the desktop software to sync your music, apps, and photos. That’s why Palm worked up a hack last year to connect its phones to iTunes—and why Apple quickly shut down the workaround.

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By David Carr

For half an hour last Thursday afternoon, CNBC was the most exciting place on television. Watching Erin Burnett and Jim Cramer try not to freak out — they acquitted themselves nicely — while the market tumbled like a drunken rag doll down a long staircase was amazing television.

The rest of the time, as when the market is not suffering the largest drop within a single day of trading? Um, not so much. Even if you are an avowed business bobble-head, most of the time, CNBC and other financial channels are a kind of wallpaper. Business people mostly live in narrow verticals. If you follow and trade in uranium, it’s not going to pop up all that often on the linear channels of television.

So Thomson Reuters is trying to change television. Its new product, Reuters Insider, is a Web-based video service that captures myriad streams of information produced by the company’s reporters and 150 partners. The service, which will begin Tuesday, is something like a You Tube for the financially interested, albeit one that is available only to Reuters subscribers, who pay as much as $2,000 a month.

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By Joseph Plambeck

At the ripe age of 28, Jon Zimmer is sort of an old fogey. That is, he is obsessive about the sound quality of his music.

A onetime audio engineer who now works as a consultant for Stereo Exchange, an upscale audio store in Manhattan, Mr. Zimmer lights up when talking about high fidelity, bit rates and $10,000 loudspeakers.

But iPods and compressed computer files — the most popular vehicles for audio today — are “sucking the life out of music,” he says.

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