The BBC Trust, an independent oversight body, they are now allowed to release their iPlayer
, enabling the download and viewing of BBC owned content such as Doctor Who. Unfortunately the Trust also mandated the use of DRM to enforce a 30 day playable period, and exempted classical music performances from being made available. There will now be a 2 month consultation period. According to one of the trustees, the Trust could still change its mind if there was a public outcry and it was backed up by evidence
Break out your spandex pants, start practicing your karate kicks; David Lee Roth is officially returning as the front man for Van Halen. Founding band member Eddie Van Halen made the first official announcement, saying It feels like a whole new beginning to be back with Dave and to be playing with my brother and my son. We look forward to going on tour.
Roth, an original member of Van Halen, quit the group in 1985. He rejoined the band briefly in 1996, only to quit again a few months later. Roth hasn’t performed live with the group since 1984
Police in the United States are investigating a media company for causing a massive security scare after police overreacted in Boston. A marketing campaign for Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force turned into a day-long terrorism scare for the city and a public relations nightmare for Turner Broadcasting System Inc over a bunch of blinking boxes that were mistaken for bombs. Major disruptions occurred throughout metropolitan Boston, beginning at 8am local time and then in the afternoon, as calls came in about suspicious-looking devices attached to bridges, roadways and an MBTA bus station
Fox has given Matt Groening the rights to do four straight to DVD movies for Futurama, even after they cancelled the show a few years ago. The series, has been picked up for more episodes, but not by Fox. Comedy Central will be airing new episodes after the straight to DVD movies have been released
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department restyles their recruitment page in the mode of Frank Miller’s Sin City — via Warren Ellis
The British Broadcasting Corporation said Monday that it was in discussions with the search engine company Google about putting some of the BBC’s programming on the online video site YouTube
Record companies are considering ditching DRM for their MP3 albums. For the first time, flagging sales of online music tracks are beginning to make the big recording companies consider the wisdom of selling music without rights management
technologies attached. Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, mobiles, portable music players and compact discs without limit. Partially, the independents see providing songs in MP3 as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales. Should one of the big four take that route, however, it would be a capitulation to the power of the Internet, which has destroyed their monopoly over the worldwide distribution of music in the past decade and allowed file-sharing to take its place —l via Slashdot
MGM has announced the extension of the hit Stargate SG-1 franchise with two movies based on the popular series. Stargate: The Ark of Truth
will bring a conclusion to the primary storyline of the past two seasons of SG-1 and Stargate: Continuum
is the usual time paradox tale
The husband of Second Life land baroness Anshe Chung said he should not have filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint against YouTube in his attempts to have the site delete a video of her avatar being attacked by a barrage of digital flying penises. And as a result, he said, he has revoked the DMCA claim. I didn’t realise that some people would misunderstand this as a censorship attempt, which it definitely was not,
Guntram Graef said. So, what was it if not an attempt to scupper the story?
Sony has been convicted of misleading the French public and told to pay damages to a consumer watchdog for selling downloadable songs that only run on its own music players
A blogger named Spocko had his blog shut down by ABC/Disney lawyers because he had posted clips from an ABC Radio-affiliated program and commented on their content, as well as informed show advertisers of what exactly they were paying for. Spocko merely pointed out the content that station KSFO was broadcasting, and as a result Visa pulled their advertising from the station. More companies were reportedly considering pulling their ads
25 years ago, TV series Blake’s 7
— and most of its characters — were killed off. But now the cult programme is coming back from the dead in a series of newly penned hour-long audio episodes, which will initially be podcast in five-minute segments. It is hoped that they will be followed by a mini-series, Blake’s 7: Legacy, to be set 30 years after the bloodbath on the planet of Gauda Prime, which ended the original 52-episode run
In the grand tradition of if you value your sanity, don’t look
, I bring you Celine Dion butchering AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long
.
This is wrong on so many levels.
I think I need to go beat my head on the keyboard until the soothing sound of broken bone and plastic makes her horrible screeching go away.
There are some things you just cannot unhear. You have been warned.
Singer James Brown, known as the Godfather of Soul
, has died at the age of 73. He was admitted to hospital in Atlanta after being diagnosed with severe pneumonia but died at 0145 local time (0645 GMT). The star was famous for hits including I Got You (I Feel Good), Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag and Living in America
A third Stargate series is in the concept phase and is being actively worked on by the Vancouver creatives behind Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. No concept for the show has yet been revealed. Despite the cancellation of SG-1, the series is likely for a 2007 debut
Australia’s $3.5 billion free-to-air commercial television industry is being threatened by the internet more quickly than expected, with a new online study showing 53 per cent of respondents regularly download TV shows from the internet, most of them illegally
Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Mark Sheppard, Jonathan Woodward, Christina Hendricks and Adam Baldwin all turned up and partied with fans at the hotel bar into the night at the cancelled convention Flanvention
After years of selling online music digitally wrapped with copy and playback restrictions designed to hinder piracy, major music labels are beginning to make some songs available in the unrestricted MP3 file format
RSS – Posts