My Date With Drew 30 days, $1100, For an Ordinary Guy to Get a Date with Drew Barrymore. I can't remember how I found out about this movie, but the important thing is that I did :) There's nothing more inspiring than to see a complete and total LOSER make his dreams come true.  I...

Two announcements today about downloadable movies illustrate Hollywood's one-step-forward, one-step back approach to this market. Jaman, an online video-on-demand service that specializes in indie fare, announced a licensing deal with Paramount that gives the site its first major-studio content. It'...

Apologies for stealing the headline from an editorial we ran Monday about the FCC and product placement, but it applies just as well to this post. In the aforementioned opinion piece, the Times' editorial board inveighed against the nanny-state notion that adults can't ward off the siren song of emb...

In March I noted that digital cinema rollouts were fast approaching a critical mass. In recent weeks, digital 3D deployments have gained a similar momentum, albeit on a smaller scale. In particular, Beverly Hills-based Real D had two big announcements in quick succession. On May 20 it announced that...

Knowledge Ecology International, a group that seeks to reduce the control wielded by patent and copyright holders, recently posted a list of suggestions that the RIAA purportedly sent to the U.S. Trade Representative for what to include in the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Ars Techni...

It's a needle-in-a-haystack world for new TV shows, particularly when they're on cable. That's why so many networks put pilot episodes online well in advance of the series premiere. Still, the Viacom-owned cable network Spike seems to be going one important step beyond its peers in its efforts to bu...

Glenn Britt, head of Time Warner Cable (soon to be a pure-play cable operator), recently engaged in a revealing Q&A with the Wall Street Journal's Vishesh Kumar that highlights yet another impediment to TV networks putting their shows online. Britt warns that cable operators such as Time Warner ...

After a couple of years playing hard to get, Sony got into bed with the cable industry Tuesday and embraced CableLabs' tru2way standard for interactive-cable-ready devices. That makes at least six four major consumer electronics manufacturers who have signed onto the CableLabs standard for two-way p...

Two things struck me about Roku's newly announced $100 Netflix Player, a book-sized set-top box that lets people watch streamed video files from Netflix on their TVs. First, it was priced lower than anything I'd previously seen in the "digital media adapter" category (i.e., devices that br...

The entertainment industry has been pressuring colleges directly and indirectly to teach students the do's and don'ts of copyrights, hoping such lessons will help abate online piracy. But at USC's Entertainment Technology Center, students often are the ones giving lessons to Hollywood and the high-t...