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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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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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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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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By Daniel Lyons

If you had to declare a winner among Internet media companies today, the victor easily would be Arianna Huffington. Her site, The Huffington Post, attracted 24.3 million unique visitors last month, five times as much traffic as many new-media rivals, more than The Washington Post and USA Today, and nearly as many as The New York Times. HuffPo’s revenue this year will be about $30 -million—peanuts compared with the old-media dinosaurs, but way better than most digital competitors. And HuffPo has finally started to eke out a profit.

Those numbers, however, don’t fully convey the site’s place in this new-media world. What began five years ago as a spot for Huffington and her lefty celebrity friends to vent about the Bush administration has become one of the most important news sites on the Web, covering politics, sports, entertainment, business—along with plenty of tabloidy stuff to drive clicks, like photos of “Jennifer Aniston’s topless perfume ad.” HuffPo’s mission, Huffington says, is “to provide a platform for a really important national conversation.”

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

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.

Avinash Sorab: Most people associate your name with Michael Moore in USA as both Fahrenheit 9/11 and War and Peace are anti-state anti-war films. But I have noticed Moore’s films are more television-oriented in their mode of dramatic presentation. Do you think your films are less dramatic because they not chiefly targeted towards television or television-conscious audiences?

AP: I don’t think Moore’s films like Fahrenheit 9/11 or Bowling for Columbine were primarily made-for-TV films. In fact the real breakthrough he made was to get them theatrically released and they became box office hits. It was a triumph for the documentary to compete alongside Hollywood and hold its own, despite having content that the ruling regime detested. But apart from the content and the sympathies, I think our films are different in style and approach. Moore’s physical presence in his own films is larger than life while I have used the first person narrative only once so far, in War and Peace and that too only as voice over. I also feel that Moore’s use of satire and comedy while extremely effective at times, at other times undermines the credibility of what he is saying especially for audiences whose sympathies he cannot take for granted. In my own work, while I never wanted to dilute what I was saying just to gain acceptance, I have tried to explain my positions more patiently and gently. But differences apart I want to say that I love many of Moore’s films and above all will always remember his heroic act of denouncing the Iraq War from the biggest stage on Oscar night at a time when the hawks in the USA were in a feeding frenzy.

Avinash Sorab: While discussing about Narmada diary some people opined that you look at the issue through the eyes of activists and very little time is spent on Adivasis and their life. And they say Adivasis are represented they are not re-presented. Do you think that Adivasis without activists lack agency?

AP: I never wanted to be an ethnographer or an anthropologist. I do of course take sides though I don’t want to do propaganda in as much as I will never consciously exaggerate facts or tell lies. Most of my films began because I had already begun to identify and work with the movements I later went on to film because filming seemed a useful way for me to help out. At the same time my films are not made by a committee. I retain control over what is said and try not to allow political considerations to cloud the truth of any given situation. So it was with A Narmada Diary. Both Simantini Dhuru (my co-director on the film) and I were already supporters of the Narmada Bachao Andolan when we began to film. In those days (we began filming in 1990 and ended in 1995) TV coverage of such stories was rare and we ended up shooting bits and pieces of different key moments and fed these free of charge to TV channels that were willing to carry it. Later as the footage built up we decided to put it all together as an anecdotal diary. So obviously the film is not about adivasis as such. It is the story of the Narmada dam and those who fought against it, many of whom were adivasis. As in all the films I’ve made there are hundreds of stories within stories each of which could legitimately have taken the film in a different direction.

As for representation and re-presentation, I do not get the point being made here and cannot comment until I do.

Avinash Sorab: A documentary maker can manipulate visuals to achieve a desired effect on audience and mobilize them towards his political opinions. Is it necessary for a documentary maker to take an explicit ideological stand to make his audience think in a particular way about the film? Or should he give an impression of being a neutral filmmaker not taking any sides?

AP: I think I just answered this question before it was asked! Of course I do not say that my approach to documentary cinema should be the blueprint for everybody. That would be boring. Let everyone come to the medium with their own preoccupations, their own likes and dislikes and methods of working. As for “manipulation” and subjectivity it is a given no matter what disguise is used to achieve the pretense of neutrality. Is Doordarshan neutral? The question is a non-starter. Are the CNN and the BBC neutral? Look at their coverage of the Iraq war or their bias towards Israel. Every observer and commentator brings his own bias and baggage to the table. I prefer not to hide mine but to offer it up for examination.

Avinash Sorab: You participated in the anti-Vietnam War movement in America. Is that where you realized the need for an alternative documentary film tradition in India?

AP: I wasn’t thinking that far. After my return from studies abroad I worked as a volunteer in a rural education and development project in rural Madhya Pradesh. Mostly we did farming and science teaching but I made a filmstrip (slide show with soundtrack) about post-Tuberculosis care to motivate village patients who came to our rural clinic. Later I joined an anti-corruption student movement in Bihar and ended up making a film called Waves of Revolution that began in Super 8 and ended up in 16mm. The film and myself went underground in 1975 when a State of Emergency was declared and people were jailed at the slightest sign of protest. But generally filming was far from a priority in those days and was more like a side activity that could be called upon if needed.

Avinash Sorab: I am aware that you made films much before the emergency period in India but in a way it’s a bit similar situation. Do you think that the anti-emergency movement strengthened alternative film making (Alternative in the sense of not state funded) in India?

AP: It is true that the Emergency and its aftermath saw a rise in democratic consciousness and the civil liberties movement gave impetus to several new documentaries. I made Prisoners of Conscience, Utpalendu Chakravarty made Mukti Chai, Tapan Bose and Suhasini Mulay made An Indian Story – all films about people and conditions in prison. Later as times changed and new issues were born documentaries about other issues began to be made as well. Video had not yet arrived and we still filmed in 16 mm, an expensive proposition for independents, so the over-all output remained tiny for a long time till the video Handycam and later the DV revolution put an affordable technology into the hands of the independent filmmaker.

Avinash Sorab: What is your opinion about the cinema vérité technique or use of hidden cameras which you never made use of in your documentaries? Are they unethical?

AP: Cinema vérité should not be confused with the use of hidden cameras. Cinema vérité is a practice of filmmaking, you can even call it an ideology, espoused by people like Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker that reached its zenith in the work of Frederick Wiseman. All were USA based practitioners whose best work was done in the 60’s and 70’s. I’m still not certain why the French word vérité was used. Perhaps there were people in France who also worked in this manner or perhaps as often is the case, the French were the first to spot it and name it. In essence the practice gave precedence to the camera’s power of observation and appeared to eschew or minimize all other forms of intervention like editing and the addition of effects or background music. In its purest form the vérité could become tedious, though its truth claim was obviously great. In reality even these films did have some form of editing though each cut was of much longer duration than was the norm, giving the impression that the film had not been edited. In Wiseman’s best work like Titticut Follies about an insane asylum or High School or Hospital (Wiseman specialized in studying institutions) this observational, non-interventionist cinema is seen at its best but even here the discerning eye can spot the hidden hand of the editor, seamless as the films may seem. One must remember that cameras in those days were celluloid shooting cameras which could only shoot 3 or 10 minutes per roll and needed separate machines to record sound. The whole act of continuous filming while keeping picture and sound in synch needed a degree of pre-planning. So however brilliantly the “Don’t mind me, I’m just a fly on the wall” effect is achieved, it is nevertheless, an effect. Today with video or digital cameras that have built in sound where a single shot can last for an hour or more , the dexterity and magic of vérité filmmaking has become commonplace and the only thing preventing long, unencumbered takes is the falling attention span of the world at large.

My own filmmaking as I said earlier is never shy of intervention and editing though in order to maintain the truth claim of what I document I do occasionally resort to the long, unedited sequence that at times gives the films a vérité feel. One thing I share with the vérité school is a reluctance to use background or mood enhancing music and effects, relying largely on sounds recorded in front of the camera and in the field.

Hidden camera filmmaking is a different matter. I won’t get into a debate on whether it is ethical because that depends on the situation. If I want to extract a confession from a mass murderer, I am not going to announce who I am and expect co-operation. Tehelka did just such a sting operation in Gujarat and hats off to them. Having said that I haven’t had occasion to use hidden cameras personally though in War and Peace I was more than happy to use portions shot by the Tehelka sting team when they exposed the fake arms scam of the NDA government.

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.

Yet despite its omnipresence, iTunes hasn’t aged well. Unlike most Apple products, it’s gotten slower and more unwieldy over the years. The Windows version is the most annoying program I use on a regular basis. (I don’t find the Mac version much more pleasant.) For one thing, it requires constant upgrades. These days the best desktop apps refresh themselves automatically; Chrome, Google’s fantastic Web browser, remakes itself without any user input—you start it up and suddenly there are new features delivered from afar. iTunes takes the opposite tack: It wants to be upgraded about twice a month, and it demands constant attention during the process. You’ve got to approve the 80-plus-megabyte download, you’ve got to click several times as it installs, you’ve got to agree to a new license, and you might be asked to reboot your computer. And for what? Most upgrades result in no discernible improvement.

The worst part is syncing my music and photos with my iPhone and iPad. I usually try to do this when I’m leaving the house—in other words, when I’m in a hurry. iTunes doesn’t care. It takes 30 seconds or so to identify my device, then several minutes to sync, and it’s not unusual for the program to run into some kind of problem along the way, requiring me to start over. All this hassle seemed tolerable back in the days before Wi-Fi, but now it’s anachronistic. It’s 2010—why do I have to plug anything into anything to get files from my computer onto my phone?

Or, as Google exec Vic Gundotra put it this week, “Guess what? We discovered something really cool. It’s called the Internet!” Gundotra was speaking at Google’s annual developer conference, where the company showed off a raft of improvements to Android, its mobile OS. (It also unveiled Google TV.) Android phones already do lots of stuff wirelessly; because the OS is tied to your Google account, most of your data flies over the Internet, and you don’t even need to plug the phone into your computer to upgrade its operating system (which you have to do with an iPhone).

Soon Android will be completely untethered. An upcoming version will let you buy apps and music from any computer—the files will then appear instantly on your phone. The best part, though, is that Android will let you play all the music on your computer without syncing your hard drive to your phone. As Gundotra explained, you’ll do this by installing a small app on your desktop that will send your music—whether it’s in iTunes, Windows Media Player, or anywhere else—to the Internet. (This only works with non-copy-protected music, which means pretty much everything except audiobooks.) Once the files are online, your phone will have access to your entire music library whenever you’ve got an Internet connection. In Gundotra’s demo, the system worked very well: Even though the music doesn’t live on your phone, it behaves exactly as if it does—it even includes album art. You press play and the song starts in seconds.

Gundotra didn’t say when this feature will become available, but for Google’s sake, I hope it’s very soon. That’s because Apple also seems bent on building what’s been called “iTunes for the cloud.” Last year it acquired the music-streaming service Lala, seemingly a prelude to Apple launching some manner of Web-based iTunes. I’m guessing that will happen this summer, when the company releases a new iPhone.

There are advantages and disadvantages to getting your music from the cloud rather than through syncing. The cloud gives you unlimited space: If you have 200 GB of music at home, you can get it all, even if your phone only holds 32 gigs. But streaming requires an Internet connection. The wireless Internet is getting better all the time—especially as carriers move to faster “4G networks”—but it’s still hit or miss, and you won’t be able to stream your songs in the subway or on out-of-the-way road trips (or—if you live in San Francisco and use an iPhone—outside your house).

Thankfully, Android will allow both—you can make all your music available from the cloud, while you can also sync some of it so you can play your tunes in a tunnel. Even better, there are apps for Android that allow you to sync music wirelessly, meaning that, yes, you can download music to your phone without ever having to connect it to a computer. Programmers have created similar systems for the iPhone and iPad, but Apple has rejected them from the App Store. That could be a sign that Apple plans to build that functionality into its devices. Or it could be a sign that Apple is just being Apple.

Either way, the syncing era is clearly on the wane. It seems likely that in a few years’ time, every phone, music player, and tablet PC will hold all your music and photos (and maybe even TV shows and movies) regardless of where you are. This will mark a profound shift in the gadget and entertainment businesses. For starters, it will erase Apple’s iTunes advantage; you might use Apple’s software to manage your music, but you’ll be able to use any company’s gadgets to play songs on the go. It might also herald many new kinds of devices. For instance, carmakers could build Android into their in-dash entertainment systems. You wouldn’t need to carry an iPod to get your music in the car. Or imagine having access to your songs through an alarm clock in a hotel, or the in-flight audio system on a plane.

The music industry could very well balk at these possibilities. Although it’s technically legal to put your music online for your own use, it has never been especially easy to do so. You can bet that both Apple and Google will add measures to restrict mass sharing of online music—one reasonable restriction would be to let you stream your music to only a single device at a time—but the technology will still change how we think about our songs. Cloud-based music will represent the ultimate psychological break with the idea that entertainment is somehow physical. In the future, not only will you not get a CD when you buy an album, you won’t even get a digital file. All you’ll have is an access flag tied to your account in a database in a server farm in some far-off land.

This sounds dreary and antiseptic, but it’s not: The music will sound just as great. It’ll just be anywhere, all the time.

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.

Using the main window of the service, called Channel One, subscribers can navigate by sector, date, markets or region, or apply filters to create their own personalized channels.

Thomson Reuters, which was formed in a merger in 2008, creating a $30 billion behemoth in financial news and information, is making a big bet on Insider, about $100 million. While its chief competitor, Bloomberg, is making inroads into consumer media with its purchase of Businessweek, Thomson Reuters is going in the opposite direction.

Why try to sell advertisers on a broad television network when you can get subscribers — investment banks, analysts, market players — to pay and pay dearly for the information ginned up by 2,800 reporters from 200 bureaus around the world, not to mention lots of other technical business intelligence from a curated group of partners?

The effort also tells us something about the place online video now occupies. “The trend that we are seeing in professional information is not all that different than consumer media,” said Devin Wenig, chief executive for the markets division of Thomson Reuters. “People are increasingly visual, and they expect to access information in that way. They want to be able to look at a chief executive and see the expression on the analyst’s face.”

Of course, just about anybody could go out on the Web and find gobs of people spouting off about financial matters. But Reuters Insider also produces almost real-time transcripts through voice recognition technology — the renderings are pretty rough, but useful — and then humans come behind and clean up some of those transcripts, while adding additional tags, links and other relevant information.

That metadata, along with highlighted search terms that allow the viewer to go to the exact moment in the video when the term is mentioned, could become part of a new informational system in which links are passed, video is shared and Web stars can be born.

You don’t have to have an M.B.A. from Wharton to know that making online video searchable has significant implications. With tools the new site provides, Thomson Reuters’s 500,000 users can use computers and P.D.A.’s to clip and share the parts of the video data stream most relevant to their corner of the world. In its social aspects and multiplatform delivery, the service reflects the lessons of the Web, brought to a gated community.

About 15 percent of the content on Reuters Insider will come from the service’s own studios and desktop nodes, while the rest will come from major media outlets like CNBC, Sky and Forbes, along with a lot of content from analysts at UBS, Roubini Global Economics and JPMorgan. Oh, and a long tail of hard-core niche providers most civilians have never heard of.

As part of the initiative, Reuters is sharing a suite of elegant and easy tools for desktop video production, even if some of the footage that comes back looks like a hostage video. “Not everybody is going to take to this immediately,” said Mike Stepanovich, the managing editor of Reuters Insider, diplomatically. “Some of our partners will be quicker adopters than others.”

It sounds wonderful, and probably will be one day, but the density and relevance of information still need work. And on-demand Web video, as anyone can tell you, won’t always do what you demand. Thomson Reuters says that it will iron out glitches as they occur and that it expects that, as some of its partners begin to see a marketing benefit from their video content, their contributions will grow in depth and quality.

“When I got started, research was mailed first class and you received it a few days later and that was it,” said Jeffrey S. Tabak, co-chief executive of Miller, Tabak and Company, an institutional trading firm. He said the firm was dropping significant time and resources into video programming for Reuters Insider because “we have to come up delivering information to a new generation of analyst.”

Mr. Wenig was frank in saying that Reuters might be ahead of the production and consumption curve by providing 3,000 weekly “shows.” (Actually, the programs are not much longer than commercials on regular television.) But he reasons that these are good muscles for the company to develop as video gains on text and clutter from all kinds of information increases.

On the media channel of Reuters Insider on Friday morning, I found a video from ITN, a British content company owned in part by Thomson Reuters, which featured David Hasselhoff’s plans for a reality show, a Reuters fixed-income analyst talking about Virgin Media, and a video from something called Market News Video about the earnings of Time Warner and the News Corporation.

It’s not exactly “Glee.” It’s not even “Mad Money.” But it beat downloading and reading the PDF of the latest media research report by a mile.

Making such a big bet on video, Reuters is acknowledging that professionally generated text — no matter how relevant, no matter how actionable — just isn’t going to get it done anymore.

By creating a site built on not only their nascent video efforts, but also user-generated video content from inside the walls of its own service, the company is redefining expertise, news and the language of information.

This evolving model suggests journalism is not a megaphone of one-to-many, but a maypole where many gather and the people formerly known as the audience see themselves reflected on the screens.

(The original article link is here)