hollywood

The federal government's inquiry into Apple's business practices isn't restricted to digital music, according to a published report.

Investigators with the Department of Justice have begun asking questions of executives in the film industry and other media sectors, according to a story that appeared Friday in The New York Post.

"The [Justice Dept.] is doing outreach," an anonymous Hollywood source told the Post. "You can't dictate terms to the industry. The Adobe thing is just inviting the wrath of everybody."

CNET could not reach its film industry sources this weekend and could … Read more

The Pirate Bay, the highly controversial BitTorrent search engine, re-emerged Tuesday in typically defiant fashion after Hollywood film studios helped trigger a day-long blackout of the site.

The Web site, which is targeted for elimination by content owners nearly the world over, presumably has found a new bandwidth provider. The service, which has helped millions of people locate and eventually download scores of pirated films, had been temporarily subdued Monday after German authorities ordered its then-Internet host to cease providing Web access to the site.

On Tuesday morning, the Pirate Bay posted a photo of a cat and a note--in … Read more

The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent search engine that Hollywood has tried in vain to shut down for years, was offline Monday morning.

The blackout was presumably the result of an injunction won recently by the film studios that ordered The Pirate Bay's bandwidth provider to stop servicing the site. This is only the latest chapter in the cat-and-mouse game between Hollywood's big studios and the site's operators.

The Pirate Bay has lost at least two other bandwidth providers in the past few years and the site typically just acquires a new host. That is likely to happen … Read more

Want to change the world but only have 99 cents? Armchair Revolutionary is here to help.

Set to launch into beta on Tuesday, Armchair Revolutionary is a Web-based social activism platform designed to harness large-scale crowdsourcing and the boom in social gaming in a bid to support a wide variety of science and technology ventures that could benefit the world at large.

Started by the founders of The Hollywood Hill, said to be the largest social change membership organization in the entertainment-industry, Armchair Revolutionary is meant to bring people's interest in helping support worthwhile causes and the iTunes-era simplicity … Read more

The detective story is one of literature's most popular and versatile genres, with sleuths ranging from the mild-mannered Miss Marple to hard-boiled private eyes like Sam Spade. Jim Novak, the reluctant hero of the "Hollywood Murders" by Michael Zerbo, is the latter type, a 1950s style gumshoe straight out of Central Casting. The case involves a scandalous murder and the usual array of slinky dames, shady characters, and assorted thugs and snitches typical of film noir mysteries. It features photo-realistic graphics, sound effects, and an Infocom-style parser.

The software aspect of The Hollywood Murders is easy to … Read more

In Hollywood, everyone knows that movies are king. Television makes money, and video games are a fantastic way to extend a franchise, but movies get the prestige. Vanity Fair doesn't have an annual Emmys party.

That's been the way it is for years, but the fault lines under the entertainment industry are shifting rapidly in favor of a more cohesive and multimedia approach to storytelling, and those who refuse to adapt may well be victims of a major shake-up in the way things work.

The protagonist in this story? A relatively new and increasingly popular concept called transmedia … Read more

One of the most attractive benefits that Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, and other Internet movie services have to offer is that they're a cheaper alternative to paying monthly cable fees.

That may be one of the reasons why the cable companies are going on the offensive. The Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing Co-op, a group that includes Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Sony Pictures, and Universal Pictures announced on Wednesday it plans to spend $30 million on an advertising campaign designed to "expand consumer awareness...of (rental) movies on demand."

The theme of the campaign will be "… Read more

He wasn't lining up for an interview with Ryan Seacrest about what designer made his suit, but a few eagle-eyed bloggers on location at the 82nd Academy Awards on Sunday evening say that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was in attendance. In a tux, not a black turtleneck.

Blogger and Web video personality Wayne Sutton snapped a far-away shot of someone whom he believed to be Jobs, accompanied with "OMG it's Steve Jobs! I'm the only one yelling at him." Indeed, Sutton's photo shows Jobs' unmistakable profile filing into the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. CNET … Read more

Wall Street is once again fretting over Netflix.

Some analysts didn't know what to do with themselves on Tuesday when the share price of the Web's top movie rental service shot past their performance expectations. Sure, Netflix continues to return boffo earnings, but after the company's share price hit $70, some brokers took a hard look at Netflix's prospects for the future, according to a MarketWatch story by reporter Therese Poletti.

What the analysts found was a Web video-on-demand segment filling up fast with competitors. That apparently spooked analysts at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Susquehanna … Read more