Items tagged with warner
Hello, competition! A decade ago, who could've thought that Apple, Amazon and Hulu (who?) would've been battling it out for the living room? Here we are, though, and it's happening. Amazon has taken a major step in the direction of domination by acquiring exclusive rights to bring Fringe and The West Wing to Prime Instant Video viewers. Yes, those are both big shows with rather large followings, but the real importance here is the "exclusive" nature. If companies like Amazon start landing these deals, we're going to see a kind of fragmentation that we haven't had to worry about before; soon, you may need to have Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and iTunes in order to truly see all shows from all studios....
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You may not think that a company like Warner Bros. doing business in China is a big deal, but consider the circumstances. China, along with other parts of Asia, are notorious for piracy. It's more of a way of life there, and less of a crime. For whatever reason, it's rampant. Due to this, many content companies have strayed from actually selling a lot of their content there, for fear of it simply being ripped off and sold for less elsewhere. But this marks a monumental change. Warner Bros. Entertainment has become the very first studio to offer films on-demand via television in China. YOU On Demand will operate under an exclusive 20-year joint venture with CCTV-6’s pay TV arm China Home...
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Federal regulators continue to come down on hard on corporate executives they believe are involved with misrepresenting investors and analysts. The latest group to get collared were 8 executives from AOL Time Warner who are being charged with inflating the company’s online advertising revenue by more than $1 billion between 2000 and 2002.“Four of the executives have agreed to settle the civil charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission by paying a total of roughly $8 million in fines and returning allegedly ill-gotten gains. They are David Colburn, Eric Keller, Jay Rappaport and James MacGuidwin, who was controller of the media company. The other three were in its business affairs...
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Yesterday Warner Bros. announced the decision to drop HD-DVD support, opting to go Blu-ray only after May. The HD-DVD Group issued a short, tersely worded press release in response, but that was just when the fun started.We just got an email which stated that the HD DVD group is canceling its CES press conference; tail severely between legs over today's explosive news that Warner -- the last "undecided" studio -- was going to the other side and doing Blu-ray discs exclusively. We're not sure if that's because the HD DVD group was in 11th hour negotiations with Warner or what, but the mood at that camp has to be beyond somber right now, so it's pretty hard to thump the tub when you've just...
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iTunes, Wal-Mart, and Amazon's "Amazon MP3" service sell DRM-free music downloads, but so far only from EMI (along with a "test" by Universal Music Group). Today Amazon.com announced it has beaten Apple (!) to the punch; it's signed a deal with Warner Music Group to sell MP3 downloads, giving customers the choice of more than 2.9 Million songs on Amazon MP3."Our customers are delighted with our DRM-free MP3 service. We have received thousands of emails from our customers since our September launch thanking us for offering the biggest selection of high-quality MP3 audio downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future," said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice...
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While the format wars rage on, many different solutions are being proposed. The latest is a disk that Time Warner will announce next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Total HD movies will carry movies that can be played on high-definition DVD players that use technology backed by Sony Corp.'s Blu-ray format, as well as players using Toshiba Corp.-backed HD-DVD format. The competing formats have been blamed for hindering sales of high-definition movies and players, with consumers recalling the bruising war between Sony Corp.'s Betamax videotape and JVC's VHS version. JVC is owned by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd....
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