3/20/2009

Obama's Movies, piracy, etc.

Our Pres gave the British PM a gift of 25 Hollywood movies on DVD. (/film has a list and it's pretty canonical stuff.) Unfortch, the discs are region-coded so Gordon Brown can't watch them. IP's a bitch.

Related: John August on the movie studios' strategies for preventing privacy: one is to delay release in territories where cam versions often originate.

Another is releasing more 3D movies, about which many details can be found in this USA Today article. (via)

if:book on e-books and e-readers: "Bookshops are crammed with full-length books whose contents could just as well be communicated in a short essay, or even in the title alone...And yet to make economic sense they have to be padded out for publication in 'proper' book size. But to conclude from this (as many unwittingly do) that long-form books are necessarily the best, rather than just the most familiar, way of communicating ideas is mistaken; and to assume that this practice will transplant to e-readers, imagined as a kind of iPod for these long-form essays, is just wrong."

Some compare the SciFi-->Syfy rebranding to Tropicana's FAIL. But after an initial negative gut reaction, I am liking "Syfy." The image of those four curvy letters protruding from their background works for me; it pleases me to look at it. And this is what cable channels do all the time: start with one identity, then move onto another when the original concept is seen as too constraining. Thus we have numerous channels named by letters that no longer stand for what they once did (entertainment and sports programming network, music television, American movie classics, the learning channel, etc.). "Imagine Greater" is a still a loser of a tagline, though. (Perhaps I should disclose that I'm not much of a Science Fiction fan.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I address the argument that 3-D is a way to reduce piracy in my book. I think there is some truth to that argument, but for the most part, entertainment wants to be shared (stolen).

The Syfy thing still seems sort of goofy to me, but I'm probably more bemused than anything. You're right that the slogan is just awful. It's like someone from Apple and someone from the Obama campaign tossed something together after lunch one day.

alisa perren said...

John Rogers initiates an amusing discussion of the Sci Fi/SyFy name change on his blog: http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/scifi-changes-its-name-to-syfy.html.

I tend to agree with Chuck that seems silly. I don't think name changes on cable channels are dumb per se, especially if the name change reflects a substantive shift in programming/target audience. But when it is this minor (as opposed to, say, Court TV's rebranding as TruTV), it seems to be dissing the "old" viewers (basically saying "you old sci fi viewers aren't good enough").