hollywood

Amazon.com has gone Hollywood.

Debuting yesterday, the new Amazon Studios is looking to make commercial motion pictures based on scripts and movies submitted by budding screenwriters and filmmakers.

Anyone with dreams to make it big in the big-screen business is invited to submit a full-length movie or script. Through both monthly and annual awards starting in 2011, Amazon plans to offer cash to the best submissions and develop the top projects as commercial movies through Warner Bros. or another Hollywood studio.

Filmmakers can upload their movies at the Amazon Studios Web site. Movies must be full-length--at least 70 minutes--and … Read more

The studios were preparing to cut and run from digital distribution in fall 2009, the last time I spoke at length with Eric Garland, CEO and co-founder of Big Champagne.

Big Champagne tracks the legal and illegal consumption of digital media online and sells the data mostly to music labels and film studios. Few people possess such a clear view of how the digital strategies employed by entertainment companies are faring.

On a visit to Los Angeles last fall, I discovered a film industry with growing skepticism about the Web as a distribution tool. The legal services weren't generating … Read more

As Netflix revenues soar and as Hulu ponders a $300 million public offering, a group of people who played an enormous part in the brightening prospects of Web TV is very much overlooked.

Managers at the major Hollywood studios: Disney, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Paramount, NBC Universal, and Sony Pictures are pretty much despised in tech land allegedly for their anti-innovation and protectionist ways, but the record shows that, over the past year, they have helped build the foundation for Netflix's success and are embracing digital distribution like never before.

Last summer, the studios signed unprecedented licensing deals … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--When George Lucas talks about the raison d'etre of his award-winning visual effects studio, Industrial Light & Magic, his logic might strike some in the bottom line-obsessed world of Hollywood as heretical.

"I started ILM to help make great movies," Lucas told CNET recently. "That's what we're here for. We're not here as a big moneymaking organization. We're not here as a business. We're here to make great movies."

Of course, any filmmaker would probably want to say something like that, but Lucas may well be the one person … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--It's hard to imagine anything in a museum featuring hundreds of original Disney concept sketches and art pieces, including dozens of Mickey Mouse, being as impressive as the art itself.

But try visiting the Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio here and not coming away with the strong impression that the way the facility was designed, with its wide variety of beautiful digital displays, imaginative use of video screens, innovative touch-screens, audio clips of Walt himself nearly everywhere you go, and much more, is nearly as compelling an experience as the opportunity to see first-hand the origins … Read more

Today: The movie and TV industries vs. the Internet! Who will win--Studios, Internet companies, consumers, manufacturers, or some combination?

The entire entertainment industry is, of course, in the middle of shedding its skin. The old ways of distributing and charging for entertainment content are being changed by the Web. Theoretically, entertainment can now follow us anywhere, from screen to screen, without costing us a dime. And some content is. But most Hollywood content is not, at least not yet. With "over the top" content boxes from the likes of Apple, Google, Roku, Boxee, and Tivo all giving us easy access to this content--and with content aggregation plays like Hulu and Netflix doing the back-end work to bring it to those boxes--the old TV and movie economics are increasingly challenged.

That's what we're talking about today, with two great guests. First, representing CNET's tech-first view of content indsutries, our own Greg Sandoval, author of the Media Maverick blog.

And joining us from the heart of the entertainment industry, Hollywood, we have Steven Gaydos, the executive editor of Variety and one of the foremost experts at understanding the changes in the entertainment industries.

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Show notes and talking points… Read more

Netflix finally knocked off Blockbuster yesterday. Leaders of pay TV services might be wise to start doing the business equivalent of digging foxholes and manning the battlements, or the same thing could happen to them.

There's a growing body of evidence that pay TV services--that is, cable, broadband, and telephone companies that offer films and TV shows--are ripe for a smackdown. Talk of cord-cutters is all over business news and the momentum in home-video distribution appears to be with companies that do it over the Web, such as Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, and the upcoming Google TV.

Skeptics say … Read more

New releases were supposed to be dead at Netflix.

Don't tell that to CEO Reed Hastings. He just signed a long-term agreement that will hand the Web's No. 1 video-rental service the ability to stream "first-run films" from independent studio, Nu Image/Millennium Films as soon as the movies are made available for pay TV services, the companies announced Wednesday.

Remember when Netflix was blasted for initiating a 28-day delay on the rentals of new releases from Warner Bros. and some of the other big studios? Oh, how the critics howled. They said Netflix had surrendered. … Read more

Movie Gallery, the once powerhouse video-rental chain, went bankrupt last spring and is now trying to sell off such assets as trademarks, URLs, and proprietary technology.

While the company's demise and liquidation means more bad news for traditional video rentals, it could be a boon for Web video start-ups. At its height five years ago, Movie Gallery operated 4,700 Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery stores and generated $2.5 billion in annual revenue. A Web video service looking to work under a well-known brand or glean insights from the company's sales and marketing data might find something … Read more