Media

ILM team wins Oscar for best visual effects

After 13 years, ILM's Oscar wait is over.

With its victory in the best visual effects category for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic broke its Academy Awards dry spell, which had lasted since it won for Forrest Gump in 1994.

On Sunday evening, ILM's John Knoll, Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson and Alan Hall were rewarded for their work on Pirates II, work--particularly on the film's "Davy Jones" character--which had left many in the visual effects industry shaking their heads.

"Davy Jones was 100 percent CGI,&… Read more

BitTorrent goes legit: Paid P2P movie-sharing coming

BitTorrent is launching a legal, paid media distribution system, the BitTorrent Entertainment Network (BEN). [See News.com story.]

Essentially an online store that will compete other stories like iTunes, the new BitTorrent Network will have more than 5,000 titles. TV shows will be $1.99 an episode, and users will be able to watch them as much as they want. Movies will cost $2.99 or $3.99 and will time out 30 days after download, or 24 hours after the user begins playing them.

In other words, there will be heavy digital rights management (DRM) on BitTorrent files. … Read more

YouTube does sound with AudioSwap

It's a common problem: your point-and-shoot camera's microphone picked up nothing but wind while you were at the park shooting a video of people flying kites. The solution? Wipe over the track with music. But putting licensed music over the videos not only requires video editing software, but also the digital rights to publish. YouTube has rolled out a new service called AudioSwap which hopes to quell both of those problems.

To use AudioSwap, just pick a video you've uploaded and browse the provided audio list. You'll get a preview right away, and with the click … Read more

Man nabbed for uploading Oscar 'screener'

Felony charges are becoming an Oscar tradition right up there with Botox injections and borrowed Harry Winston jewels.

The Department of Justice said Thursday that it has charged Salvador Nunez Jr., a 27-year-old from Los Angeles, with allegedly uploading an Oscar-nominated film to the Web and making it widely available online. Nunez, who is charged with copyright infringement and faces a maximum of three years in prison if convicted, got ahold of the Paramount Pictures' animated film Flushed Away through his sister, who had received a review copy, known as a "screener," according to the DOJ.

(Nunez's … Read more

Which is more righteous--Digg or The Dig?

George Lucas' company is taking on popular news aggregator Web site Digg. A few weeks ago, Lucasfilm Entertainment filed a challenge to Digg's trademark application, claiming that Digg is "confusingly similar in sound, meaning and appearance" to The Dig, a video game Lucas Entertainment released. Digg filed its application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in January 2005, according to the documents. Neither a Digg spokesman nor an attorney for Lucasfilm returned calls seeking comment.

Really simple file sharing with YouBackItUp

YouBackItUp is a great way to share large files with friends. YouBackItUp has employed a really neat drag-and-drop interface that makes it dead simple for anyone (read nontech-savvy people) to use. Instead of hitting a browse button and fishing through your hard drive to find the file, you can just drag the original right onto the interface, and it takes care of the rest. When you're done uploading things, you're given a simple URL to send to friends or family where they can download the files.

What makes the service a real winner in my book is its … Read more

Yackpack: Skype meets walkie-talkies [Update x3]

There have been several communication tools on Webware in the last few days. Joining the party is Yackpack, a messaging tool that lets you chat live as a group or swap recorded messages to group members, all within your Web browser.

Yackpack creates a visual chat room for you, with floating faces representing users. Playing and recording messages is handled through a slick and simple player that sits in the top right of the interface. Handling who you are and aren't talking to is as simple as clicking icons. Toggling all group members is managed with a single select … Read more

News Roundup: Digg gets OpenID, Flickr downtime, 37signals Highrise teaser, Blinkx + Sproose partnership

Digg to adopt OpenID. Later this year, Digg will be adding OpenID to its site. OpenID, which we looked at back in September, creates a master password similar to what you get with Microsoft's Live ID, but it's not proprietary. ( TechCrunch)

Flickr outage reveals site's scale. Flickr wasn't working yesterday, but fear not--it's back up. The problem mixed up a large number of photos across the site, which quickly led to Yahoo shutting down the service for several hours. Interestingly enough, the outage revealed that at times, the site serves over a billion photos a day. ( … Read more

Joost fires up its engines with Viacom deal, Mac beta

Hey TiVo, Slingbox, AppleTV, and everyone else who's trying to "bridge the content gap" between TV and broadband video--Joost might really pack a powerful punch. The start-up from the founders of Skype and Kazaa has been all over the news recently with new content deals, a Mac beta version, and an agreement in the works with Viacom to distribute programming from such cable mainstays as MTV and Comedy Central.

Last week, it was announced that the previously Windows-only private beta version of Joost would be available for Intel-based Macs. At the same time, Joost released new … Read more