[JackSpratts]

TV Stardom on $20 a Day
Robert Mackey

AMANDA CONGDON is a big star on really small screens - like the 4½- inch window she appears in on computer monitors every weekday morning or the 2½ inches she has to work with on the new video iPod. Ms. Congdon, you see, is the anchor of a daily, three-minute, mock TV news report shot on a camcorder, edited on a laptop and posted on a blog called Rocketboom, which now reaches more than 100,000 fans a day.

In terms of subject matter, Rocketboom is actually quite a standard - one might even say traditional - Web log: Ms. Congdon comments on intriguing items she, and the site's producer, Andrew Baron, have found on the Web, and includes links to them which appear just below clear, smooth-playing video. The items tend to be developments in Internet culture (robots and flash mobs, say, or flash mobs of robots) with a sprinkling of left-leaning political commentary (Ms. Congdon announced the posting of Representative Tom DeLay's mug shot while wearing a party hat and blowing a noisemaker) and samples of Web video from around the world.

What makes Rocketboom so different from most of the other video blogs, or vlogs, that have popped up in the last year or so is that the daily episodes are consistently entertaining. With Mr. Baron, 35, the designer who created the site and films the episodes, Ms. Congdon, 24, has fashioned a quirky, charming persona, with an inventive take on the news that is closer in spirit to Letterman than CNN.

The fact that she is an attractive young woman probably doesn't hurt either. Regular visitors to the site tend to check in at the start of each workday, soon after new episodes are posted from the Rocketboom production studio - also known as Mr. Baron's one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. "They won't always like it. It won't always be their cup of tea," Ms. Congdon said, "but they know a lot of times they will and, regardless, I'm not like screaming at them or telling them what to do. I'm kind of just like 'Hey, I'm here - this is what I think is cool.' "

It's not just cool, though, it's prescient. The vlog has been up and running for 14 months, but it's only in the last two that Web video has become new media's favorite new medium - since Apple Computer's iTunes online store began stocking vlogs, calling them video podcasts and making it easy to download them for free viewing on the new iPods. In fact, the day Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, introduced the video iPod to developers, he showed a playlist of video podcasts on his computer. Rocketboom was at the top.

In case you're wondering, it has occurred to Mr. Baron and Ms. Congdon that they just might be sitting on a gold mine. At a cost of about $20 an episode, they reach an audience that some days is roughly comparable in size to that of, say, CNN's late, unlamented "Crossfire" political debate show. They have no background in business, but Jeff Jarvis, who tracks developments in technology and culture on his blog, BuzzMachine.com (and who has served as a consultant to The New York Times on Web matters), pointed out to them that they might be able to charge $8,000 for an interactive ad at the end of the show, which would bring in about $2 million annually.

The financial opportunity here has occurred to others, too. TiVo, which can now be used to watch Web video on home television sets, just signed a deal to list Rocketboom in the TiVo directory - making it as easy to record as conventional television programs like "60 Minutes" and "Monday Night Football." Giving up no creative control, Ms. Congdon and Mr. Baron will get 50 percent of the revenue from ads sold by TiVo to appear before and after their newscast, and their show will gain access to more than 300,000 TV sets connected to those new TiVo boxes. (That won't include Mr. Baron, though, since he gave up watching television years ago, and doesn't even own a set. He briefly considered buying one this year, but the thought passed. "I guess I'm going to hold out," he said.)

THE rapid expansion in the number of vlogs and Web sites offering video podcasts strongly suggests how bored viewers are getting with standard commercial TV: a growing number of them are willing to seek out alternatives online, or just create one themselves. As recently as a year ago there were fewer than two dozen active vlogs. In mid- October, just after Mr. Jobs name-checked Rocketboom, and Apple added the category of "Video Podcast" to the default menu of the new iPod, the site Vlogmap.org showed 415 vlogs worldwide. A month later Mefeedia.com, a site that allows users to watch and subscribe to vlogs, had 1,100 sites in its directory. Two weeks after that Mefeedia boasted of "2,017 vlogs and counting." Rocketboom includes reports from vloggers both near (Boston) and far (Prague), with regular contributors based in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and "the German-speaking part of Europe."

Many of the world's other vlogs are closer in form to diaries or home movies - with all the tedium that can imply. Still, some have their fans, such as the filmmaker Ross McElwee, whose personal documentaries, including "Sherman's March," have elevated the home movie into a serious art form. "Most of the vlogs are quite boring," he said recently by e-mail, "but now and then there is one that for some reason seems to have something special." Mr. McElwee cited one called Mom's Brag Vlog that documents events like trick-or-treating at the mall and a spider spinning a web outside a family's house. "It's so mundane and down-to-earth that it's charming," he said, "in small doses."

On most vlogs, that's the only dose available. The average video runs no longer than a pop song and, as with blogs, it's easy to dip in to and back out of any site that fails to hold your interest. In the right hands, vlogs can become microdocumentaries of surprising beauty, wit and intelligence. The diarist Michael Verdi, for instance, uses his camcorder to deliver improvised monologues that Mr. McElwee said "celebrate the frustrating banality" of those in-between moments, waiting for lights to turn green or planes to take off, that would be edited out of most biographies. One reviewer on Mefeedia wrote, "Verdi is a household name amongst vloggers."

Rocketboom's Minneapolis correspondent, Chuck Olsen, profiles other people on his main site, Minnesota Stories, but also maintains a video diary called Secret Vlog Injection. One post there uses video that Mr. Olsen shot without permission during an indie-rock concert at a local club. The result records not only a great performance by the band but also Mr. Olsen's argument with the club's manager, who tried to confiscate his camera. The story evolves into a smart, funny discussion of copyright issues and the philosophical difference between the world-views of the vloggers and traditional media companies. "There's no economic motive," Mr. Olsen says in titles that appear on the screen like a news crawl, noting that the viewer is not being charged for the video. "The point is to capture, and share, fantastic, fleeting moments."

The twist is that Mr. Olsen used his stolen images to make what might be one of the best music videos of the year, which could easily have been shown on MTV as an advertisement for the band. But not all vloggers are interested in making video that could be televised.

Charlene Rule, who makes artful short pieces that appear on her vlog, Scratch Video (and have been shown at the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village), uses fragments of her own life - like parts of a surprisingly long phone conversation with a wrong number, or a few seconds with a dress-maker helping her to "make breasts" for the bridesmaid's outfit she wore to a friend's wedding.

She takes a different approach from those vloggers who, she said, "mimic TV." Instead, she points to an ideal of personal filmmaking advocated by the director François Truffaut nearly 50 years before vlogs were invented (which she quotes on her site): "The film of tomorrow" he wrote in 1957, "will be even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary. The young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will relate what has happened to them: it may be the story of their first love or their most recent; of their political awakening. ... The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has."

The amount of spare time they have may also be a factor. "One of the vlogs I stumbled upon recently," said Mr. McElwee, who also teaches documentary film at Harvard, "said 'If you have a few hours to kill, check out my photo blog that accompanies this vlog' - but it seems like years since I've 'had a few hours to kill.' "

But the new technology of podcasting solves that problem. Just as videocassette recorders first made it possible to watch television shows when you wanted rather than when they were broadcast, podcasting allows you to have shows (audio or video) sent directly to your computer, portable players or TiVo box for viewing at your leisure.

A site like Ms. Rule's Scratch Video, which has about 8,000 subscribers, suggests that it may soon be possible for video producers to distribute their programs directly through the Internet - and possibly even make a living doing it, in much the same way novelists with small but loyal followings can build a career without ever cracking the best-seller list. Until now, both the television and film industries have been built on a model that requires producers to appeal to millions of people or be considered failures. If Amanda Congdon at one end of the spectrum and Charlene Rule at the other continue to add viewers at the rate they're going, they and the best of the other vloggers might just provide a viable alternative to that lowest-common-denominator business model.

In other words, the revolution may just be vloggerized.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/ar...on/11mack.html





Cable Relents on Channels for the Family
Ken Belson and Geraldine Fabrikant

Yielding to pressure from regulators, lawmakers and interest groups, the country's biggest cable companies say they expect to introduce packages of family-friendly channels as early as the first quarter of 2006.

Kyle McSlarrow, the head of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, which represents cable companies and programmers, told lawmakers yesterday that at least six cable companies, including the two largest, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, were developing packages of channels that would appeal to parents who want to shield their children from potentially offensive shows.

Mr. McSlarrow said each cable company would come up with its own family-oriented packages and that they would be purchased like other bundles. He did not say how much the bundles would cost and added that cable operators still must solve some technical problems and revisit their contracts with programmers.

The move is the latest effort by cable companies to head off pending legislation that might obligate them to block certain programming or sell channels to consumers on an à la carte basis. The cable industry has long opposed efforts to regulate its offerings and has argued that technology already in place lets parents filter out unwanted shows.

The industry has also fought calls from advocacy groups that want to pay only for the channels they want to watch. Cable operators say that the amount of programming would shrink if consumers bought only a few channels, because the most popular networks effectively subsidize the less popular ones.

But in recent weeks, Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and several congressmen have pressured the cable industry to remedy the concerns of advocacy groups that oppose sex, violence and profanity on the airwaves.

In acceding to that pressure, the cable industry may have addressed the decency debate that has percolated at least since Janet Jackson's breast was bared on national television during the halftime show at the 2004 Super Bowl. But the cable industry may have unwittingly taken a step toward offering more à la carte programming, not less.

The problem, industry analysts say, is that one home's definition of family-friendly programming can be very different from another's. One family, for instance, may want to buy a bundle of cartoons, while another may want religious programs and yet another may not want violent movies.

For now, cable companies are expected to devise a few types of family packages to appease them. But inevitably, advocacy groups and lawmakers are expected to push cable companies to give consumers even more options to pick their channels.

Yesterday's announcement was a move by the cable industry "to fend off à la carte for as long as possible and wrap itself in the flag of family friendliness," said Ford Cavallari, an analyst at Adventis, a telecommunications consultant. "But the fraying of the family-friendly package could lead to an à la carte world."

The Parents Television Council, one of the loudest voices calling for à la carte programming, yesterday called the industry's offer to introduce family-friendly tiers a "red herring." The industry would determine what is family friendly and their control would be the equivalent of "the fox guarding the henhouse," said L. Brent Bozell, council president.

Mr. Cavallari said the splintering of family packages was just one reason cable companies were likely to sell more programs on an à la carte basis in the future.

Already, major studios like Disney are selling individual programs for the Apple iPod. Yesterday, Sprint Nextel said it would start streaming full-length movies to its customers' mobile phones for $6.95 a month.

Cable operators overseas have introduced an à la carte model and found that they have not lost money and that viewers prefer it, Mr. Cavallari said.

Still, the cable industry and television channels, which have been trying for months to head off calls for à la carte programming, are unlikely to give in easily. Cable network executives say à la carte offerings would make it harder to develop niche programming because there would not be enough subscribers to pay the cost. "C-Span could not survive," said Paul Colichman, the chief executive of "Here," a subscription video-on-demand service for gays and lesbians. "It is one thing to have a gay and lesbian à la carte channel with a community that is wealthy enough to support it. But other minority groups may not be so fortunate."

Still, skeptics argue that à la carte service will not save consumers money because they will end up paying almost as much for a handful of individual channels as they would for a standard plan of 60 or 70 channels.

Other executives, including Ken Solomon, the chief executive of the Tennis Channel, say that consumers will not want to choose a few channels from a list of hundreds and will end up choosing an existing package, just as they do now.

"If consumers had to sit down and choose the channels themselves, they would end up overwhelmed and be confused about the choices," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/bu...a/13cable.html





MPAA gives film about itself an NC-17

Film will air on IFC - uncut, uncensored, and commercial-free - in Fall 2006
Press Release

IFC, the first and largest network dedicated to independent film, announced today that the IFC Original Documentary, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," from Academy Award-nominated director Kirby Dick and producer Eddie Schmidt, will premiere at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and air on IFC in Fall 2006. The documentary, a breakthrough investigation into the MPAA film ratings system and its profound effect on American culture, is executive produced by IFC's Alison Palmer Bourke and Evan Shapiro.

On November 30, the ratings board, an anonymous group whose mandate is to classify films for the MPAA from the perspective of "the average American parent," screened this documentary and gave it an NC-17 rating for "some graphic sexual content." An NC-17 rating generally limits a film's avenues of exhibition: many theater chains will not show it, media outlets will not run its advertisements and video store chains will not stock it.

IFC, however, will present the film uncensored and uninterrupted. Alison Palmer Bourke, IFC's VP of Documentaries and Features states: "Kirby's film is a natural for IFC. Our 'tv, uncut.' mandate is to give filmmakers a platform for free expression, and we let our viewers decide for themselves what is appropriate and of interest to them."

Kirby Dick agrees, "It is important that this film be seen by as many people as possible, as it deals with an insidious form of censorship resulting from a ratings process that has been kept secret for more than 30 years."

The documentary asks whether Hollywood movies and independent films are rated equally for comparable content; whether sexual content in gay-themed movies is given harsher ratings penalties than their heterosexual counterparts; whether it makes sense that extreme violence is given an R rating while sexuality is banished to the cutting room floor; whether Hollywood studios receive detailed directions as to how to change an NC-17 film into an R, while independent film producers are left guessing; and finally, whether keeping the raters and the rating process secret leaves the MPAA entirely unaccountable for its decisions.

The MPAA has established itself as the lobbying arm of the American motion picture, home video and television industries in the US since its inception in 1922. On its board of directors are the Chairmen and Presidents of the seven major producers and distributors of motion picture and television programs in the United States -- Sony, WB, Paramount, MGM, Fox, Disney and Universal. When Jack Valenti became president of the MPAA in 1966, he created a rating system to replace the old Hays code, first adopted in 1930. Valenti's voluntary rating system, modified only slightly over the years, has become an icon in American culture, with its letter ratings of G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17 (formerly X) used to classify films according to age-based appropriateness.

Until today's announcement, the subject matter of "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" was kept under wraps by the filmmakers during more than a year of research into the MPAA's rating practices. Director Kirby Dick ("Twist of Faith," "Derrida") interviews filmmakers, critics, attorneys, authors and educators. Ultimately, Dick tries to uncover Hollywood's best kept secret -- the identities of the ratings board members themselves.

Filmmakers who speak candidly in "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" include John Waters ("A Dirty Shame"), Kevin Smith ("Clerks"), Matt Stone ("South Park"), Kimberly Peirce ("Boys Don't Cry"), Atom Egoyan ("Where the Truth Lies"), Darren Aronofsky ("Requiem for a Dream"), Mary Harron ("American Psycho"), actress Maria Bello ("The Cooler") and distributor Bingham Ray (co-founder, October Films and former President, United Artists).

When Jack Valenti stepped down in September 2004, Dan Glickman succeeded him as president and CEO. However, Valenti continued to supervise the ratings process until September 2005, when the MPAA announced that it would be splitting its leadership duties between Los Angeles-based president and COO, Bob Pisano, and Glickman, who has been appointed the Washington DC-based CEO and chairman and now oversees the ratings system.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/051207/nyw108.html





'Brokeback Mountain' Leads Globe Nods
David Germain

The gay cowboy romance "Brokeback Mountain" positioned itself as a key Oscar competitor Tuesday, roping in seven Golden Globe nominations, including best dramatic picture and honors for actor Heath Ledger and director Ang Lee.

Other best drama picture contenders were the murder thriller "The Constant Gardener," the Edward R. Murrow tale "Good Night, and Good Luck," the mobster story "A History of Violence" and "Match Point," a drama about infidelity.

The Globes were a triumph for smaller budgeted films over big studio productions.

"This is the first time in the history of the Golden Globes that all of the best (dramatic) film nominees are independent movies made for under $30 million," said Philip Berk, president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which presents the awards.

The Globes have a separate category for musical or comedy films. Nominated were the theater tale "Mrs. Henderson Presents," the Jane Austen costume pageant "Pride & Prejudice," the Broadway musical "The Producers," the divorce story "The Squid and the Whale," and the Johnny Cash film biography "Walk the Line."

The Globes were the latest recognition for "Brokeback Mountain," a critical darling that has received top honors from critics groups in New York City, Los Angeles and Boston.

Still, the film has an uphill trail to the Oscars, whose voters may hesitate to anoint a gay-themed movie as its champion.

"It's going to be a front-runner, but it really has a mountain to climb, because never have we seen a gay romance in the best-picture race before," said Tom O'Neil, who runs theenvelope.com, an awards Web site.

Movies with gay angles have earned acting honors, Tom Hanks winning for "Philadelphia" and Hilary Swank for "Boys Don't Cry," but those movies did not break into the best-picture pack.

Yet "Brokeback Mountain" has proved a favorite at film festivals and debuted with huge box- office grosses last weekend, taking in almost $550,000 in just five theaters. The movie goes into wider release over the next few weeks, its backers hoping it will find a broad audience despite the subject matter.

"Clearly, we felt that because the film speaks a very universal emotional language; it's going to surprise people, when it comes out, how accessible it is," said James Schamus, a producer on "Brokeback Mountain" and co- president of Focus Features, the NBC Universal banner that released the film.

Best dramatic actor nominee Ledger plays a husband concealing a homosexual affair with an old sheepherding buddy from his family. Other nominees included three actors playing real-life figures: Russell Crowe as Depression- era boxer Jim Braddock in "Cinderella Man," Philip Seymour Hoffman as author Truman Capote in "Capote," and David Strathairn as newsman Murrow in "Good Night, and Good Luck." The fifth nominee was Terrence Howard as a small-time pimp-turned-rap singer in "Hustle & Flow."

"Good Night, and Good Luck" was tied for second-most film nominations with four, along with "Match Point" and "The Producers." The Murrow tale earned a best-director nomination for George Clooney, who also had a supporting actor movie nomination for the oil industry thriller "Syriana."

Felicity Huffman received two nominations - best dramatic actress in a film for her role as a man preparing for sex-change surgery in "Transamerica" and best actress in a TV musical or comedy for "Desperate Housewives." Her "Desperate Housewives" co-stars Marcia Cross, Teri Hatcher and Eva Longoria also were nominated, and the ABC show earned a best TV comedy bid.

ABC also scored three nominations for best dramatic TV series: "Commander in Chief," "Grey's Anatomy" and "Lost." Bids also went to Fox's "Prison Break" and HBO's "Rome." Other nominees for best comedy or musical TV series were HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "Entourage," UPN's "Everybody Hates Chris," NBC's "My Name is Earl" and Showtime's "Weeds."

Other best dramatic film actress nominees were Maria Bello as a wife learning painful secrets about her husband in "A History of Violence," Gwyneth Paltrow as an unstable math genius' daughter in "Proof," Charlize Theron as a woman leading a sexual harassment lawsuit in "North Country" and Ziyi Zhang as a poor girl who becomes the belle of Japan's geisha houses in "Memoirs of a Geisha."

Based on a short story by Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain" grabbed a supporting actress nomination for Michelle Williams as Ledger's wife, who chooses to ignore his affair with a man (Jake Gyllenhaal) to hold her family together. The movie also scored a directing nomination for Lee and received nominations for best screenplay, score and song.

For best actor in a movie, musical or comedy, Globe voters nominated Pierce Brosnan as a burned-out hit man in "The Matador," Jeff Daniels as a husband unglued by divorce in "The Squid and the Whale," Johnny Depp as candyman Willy Wonka in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," Nathan Lane as a Broadway con man in "The Producers," Cillian Murphy as a cross-dressing Irishman in "Breakfast on Pluto," and Joaquin Phoenix as country legend Cash in "Walk the Line."

Best musical or comedy film actress nominees: Judi Dench as a 1930s British dame who opens a nude theatrical review in "Mrs. Henderson Presents," Keira Knightley as the romantic heroine in "Pride & Prejudice," Laura Linney as a divorcing wife in "The Squid and the Whale," Sarah Jessica Parker as a woman hated by her fiance's relatives in "The Family Stone," and Reese Witherspoon as country singer June Carter in "Walk the Line."

Besides Lee and Clooney, the directing contenders were Woody Allen for "Match Point," Peter Jackson for "King Kong," Fernando Meirelles for "The Constant Gardener," and Steven Spielberg for "Munich."

In addition to Clooney, supporting movie actor nominees were Matt Dillon for "Crash," Will Ferrell for "The Producers," Paul Giamatti for "Cinderella Man," and Bob Hoskins for "Mrs. Henderson Presents."

Playing a bigoted cop who dotes on his sickly dad, Dillon was the lone acting nominee from an ensemble of great performances in "Crash," which interweaves multiple story lines on a single tension-filled day in Los Angeles.

"It was honest and truthful to what I believed was an L.A. cop, not typical of what every cop is," Dillon said. "It went and explored these two extremes ... bitter racist cop and really loving son who cares about his sick father. These are the complicated things we see in life."

Supporting actress nominees: Scarlett Johansson for "Match Point," Shirley MacLaine for "In Her Shoes," Frances McDormand for "North Country," Rachel Weisz for "The Constant Gardener," and Williams for "Brokeback Mountain."

Two years ago, the Golden Globes correctly predicted Oscar winners in all key categories, including best-picture champ "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King."

But a year ago, the Globes missed the mark, picking "The Aviator" as best picture, an honor that went to "Million Dollar Baby" at the Oscars.

Winners of the Golden Globes will be announced Jan. 16, five days before polls close for Oscar voters. Oscar nominations come out Jan. 31, and the awards will be presented March 5.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





The Bear Who Was There at the Start of It All
Dave Itzkoff

IN a courtroom scene from "The Simpsons" that has since entered into the television canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. "Animation is built on plagiarism!" declares the show's hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a- cartoon, Roger Myers Jr. "You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?"

It's hard to imagine here that the flesh-and-blood producers of "The Simpsons" weren't pointing their fingers, squarely but affectionately, at the legendary animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, and their enduring ursine mascot, Yogi Bear. From his debut in 1958 on "The Huckleberry Hound Show," Yogi never missed an opportunity to announce that he was smarter than the average bear. He seems to have outwitted a few copyright lawyers along the way: he took his moniker from the celebrated Yankees catcher, of course, and his tilted porkpie hat, his tie, his sonorous voice and his hipster mannerisms from Art Carney's portrayal of Ed Norton on "The Honeymooners." And didn't his anthropomorphic, picnic basket-robbing, park-ranger-outwitting antics suggest the work of another popular cartoon studio, doc?

Despite - or perhaps because of - his many obvious appropriations, Yogi became Hanna-Barbera's first breakout star, earning his own TV series in 1961 ("The Yogi Bear Show," newly released on DVD from Warner Home Video). In the process, he provided his creators with a modus operandi that would yield many more hit characters and shows: by 1962, Hanna-Barbera had turned Sergeant Bilko into a wily alley cat named Top Cat; they had transformed Bert Lahr into a mangy pink lion named Snagglepuss; they had slapped loincloths on "The Honeymooners" and called them "The Flintstones"; they had sent "The Flintstones" into the future and called them "The Jetsons."

In an uncharitable worldview, it's possible to see Hanna-Barbera as black marketers of animation, repackaging properties they didn't create for viewers who wouldn't recognize knockoffs when they saw them. But it's far more reasonable to think of them as innovators, who, at the birth of what we now know as American popular culture, while working in a medium that was meant to appeal simultaneously to children and adults, were just discovering the power of the pop-cultural reference. To his youthful audience, Yogi Bear was a funny-talking woodland creature, but to grown-ups, he was a signifier - a wink and a nod that told them they were allowed to be in on the joke, too.

If we're really going to give credit where it's due, then let's acknowledge Hanna-Barbera for establishing a tradition of cultural homage that has shaped animation for the better. If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from "Fritz the Cat," there would be no "Ren & Stimpy Show"; without the Rankin-Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no "South Park"; and without "The Flintstones," "The Jetsons" and the countless other cartoons that it unapologetically cribs from, "The Simpsons" would cease to exist. And then there would be no reason for a lovingly crafted fantasy sequence in which that obvious Fred Flintstone stand-in, Homer Simpson, imagines that he is Yogi Bear. "I was having the most wonderful dream," Homer says, waking up from his reverie. "I had a hat, a tie and no pants on."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/ar...on/11itzk.html





Doing the Hollywood Math: What Slump?
Lorne Manly

SCANNING the weekly box-office reports has been a mighty sobering experience in 2005, the litany of gloom seemingly blurring into one recurring headline: Moviegoing Plummets Again. But a closer look at the movie business, in all its global reach and various outlets, tells a different story. "It's still a healthy business," said Stacey Snider, chairwoman of Universal Pictures.

Yes, in an age of hundreds of cable channels, video games and other distractions, the domestic box office so far this year is down about 6 percent from the same time period in 2004, and off from 2003 and 2002 levels. But the money flowing into the coffers of movie studios is greater than ever.

Special-effects-laden blockbusters, from "War of the Worlds" to the "Harry Potter" franchise, show no sign of weakening. The home-video market - namely the sale of movie DVD's - remains strong here and is more robust overseas. The overall global marketplace, in fact, for the first time accounts for more than half of the studios' annual revenue, and growth from emerging markets like Russia are expected to widen that divide.

Executives in Hollywood, however, are not Pollyannaish about the future. "The audience has become much more discriminating about what they go to," said Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment, adding that "it's the middle that has gotten hurt."

American moviegoers are increasingly passing up the chance to hoot and holler in the dark with hundreds of strangers if the films are not big events or smaller genre ones. The number of movies in the $100 million to $200 million box-office range has fallen dramatically the last two years. As a result, executives at the major studios are more closely scrutinizing midrange films - those with budgets from $50 million to $75 million.

In addition, domestic DVD sales have slowed from their gangbusters growth rate of a few years ago. But the slack has been taken up by the surprisingly strong performance of television DVD's like "Seinfeld" and straight-to-DVD movies like "Lion King 1½." And most of the money made off of these DVD's goes to the same entertainment conglomerates that own the movie studios.

To Ms. Snider and others in the film industry, the possibilities of the on-demand world - one perfectly customized to a viewer's life - offer Hollywood the next big leap forward. Videocassette recorders did not, as feared, become the Boston Strangler of the movie studios. And while VHS may be near death's door, the rise of the DVD has more than made up for that disappearing revenue. "There's always been something to replace it that's groovier," Ms. Snider said. "Portable, wireless devices are pretty irresistible."

But two significant obstacles confront the studios before they will see substantial incomes from making movies available to watch anytime on a big-screen television or tiny iPod: piracy and pricing. In other words, show business won't be good business if you pick their pocket, or they pick yours.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/movies/11manl.html





Computer Spots A Blockbuster From Box Office Flop

Hollywood producers fretting over this year's box office downturn should take heart.

A scientist in the United States says he has come up with a computer programme that helps predict whether a film will be a hit or a miss at the box office long before it is even made.

"Our goal is to try to find oil in a way," said Professor Ramesh Sharda of the Oklahoma State University on Wednesday.

"We are trying to forecast the success of a movie based on things that are decided before a movie has been made," he told Reuters by telephone.

Sharda, an expert in information systems, has been working on the model for seven years and analysed more than 800 films before publishing a paper which appears in "Expert

Systems With Applications" early next year.

Sharda applied seven criteria to each movie; its rating by censors, competition from other films at the time of release, star value, genre, special effects, whether it is a sequel and the number of theatres it opens in.

Using a neural network to process the results, the films are placed in one of nine categories, ranging from "flop", meaning less than $1 million at the box office, to "blockbuster", meaning more than $200 million.

The results of the study showed that 37 percent of the time the network accurately predicted which category the film fell into, and 75 percent of the time was within one category of the correct answer.

Sharda said he was in discussions with a "major" Hollywood studio about further developing the system to make it more accurate.

He did not name the studio, but added that the network could be used commercially in the notoriously risky world of cinema.

"I think it has real world applications, and that's why we've been trying to get to work with this one studio," he said.

The system correctly predicted, for example, that the Harry Potter series would be a smash hit. The four films released so far have ammassed well over $3 billion worldwide.

Sharda may have picked the ideal moment to publish his findings.

As of mid-November, North American ticket receipts stood at $7.6 billion, around seven percent down on the same stage in 2004, although that was before the release of three big films; "Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire", "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", and "King Kong".
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...REDICTIONS.xml





What Men Want: Neanderthal TV
Warren St. John

THERE was a heart-wrenching moment at the end of last season's final episode of the ABC series "Lost" when a character named Michael tries to find his kidnapped son. Michael lives for his child; like the rest of the characters in "Lost," the two of them are trapped on a tropical island after surviving a plane crash. When word of Michael's desperate mission reaches Sawyer - a booze-hoarding, hard-shelled narcissist who in his past killed an innocent man - his reaction is not what you would call sympathetic. "It's every man for hisself," Sawyer snarls.

Not so long ago Sawyer's callousness would have made him a villain, but on "Lost," he is sympathetic, a man whose penchant for dispensing Darwinian truths over kindnesses drives not only the action but the show's underlying theme, that in the social chaos of the modern world, the only sensible reflex is self-interest.

Perhaps not coincidentally Sawyer is also the character on the show with whom young men most identify, according to research conducted by the upstart male-oriented network Spike TV, which interviewed thousands of young men to determine what that coveted and elusive demographic likes most in its television shows.

Spike found that men responded not only to brave and extremely competent leads but to a menagerie of characters with strikingly antisocial tendencies: Dr. Gregory House, a Vicodin-popping physician on Fox's "House"; Michael Scofield on "Prison Break," who is out to help his brother escape from jail; and Vic Mackey, played by Michael Chiklis on "The Shield," a tough-guy cop who won't hesitate to beat a suspect senseless. Tony Soprano is their patron saint, and like Tony, within the confines of their shows, they are all "good guys."

The code of such characters, said Brent Hoff, 36, a fan of "Lost," is: "Life is hard. Men gotta do what men gotta do, and if some people have to die in the process, so be it."

"We can relate to them," said Mr. Hoff, a writer from San Francisco. "If you watch Sawyer on 'Lost,' who is fundamentally good even if he does bad things, there's less to feel guilty about in yourself."

Gary A. Randall, a producer who helped create "Melrose Place," is developing a show called "Paradise Salvage," about two friends who discover a treasure map, for Spike TV. He said the proliferation of antisocial protagonists came from a concerted effort by networks to channel the frustrations of modern men.

"It's about comprehending from an entertainment point of view that men are living a very complex conundrum today," he said. "We're supposed to be sensitive and evolved and yet still in touch with our Neanderthal, animalistic, macho side." Watching a deeply flawed male character who nevertheless prevails, Mr. Randall argued, makes men feel better about their own flaws and internal conflicts.

"You think, 'It's O.K. to go to a strip club and have a couple of beers with your buddies and still go home to your wife and baby and live with yourself,' " he said.

The most popular male leads of today stand in stark contrast to the unambiguously moral protagonists of the past, good guys like Magnum, Matlock or Barnaby Jones. They are also not simply flawed in the classic sense: men who have the occasional affair or who tip the bottle a little too much. Instead they are unapologetic about killing, stealing, hoarding and beating their way to achieve personal goals that often conflict with the greed, apathy and of course the bureaucracies of the modern world.

"These kinds of characters are so satisfying to male viewers because culture has told them to be powerful and effective and to get things done, and at the same time they're living, operating and working in places that are constantly defying that," said Robert Thompson, the director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.

Consequently, whereas the Lone Ranger battled stagecoach robbers and bankers foreclosing on a widow's farm, the enemy of the contemporary male TV hero, Dr. Thompson said, is "the legal, cultural and social infrastructure of the nation itself."

Because of competition from the Web, video games and seemingly countless new cable channels, television producers are obsessed with developing shows that can capture the attention of young male viewers.

To that end Spike TV, which is owned by Viacom and aims at men from 18 to 49, has ordered up a slate of new dramas based on characters whose minds are cauldrons of moral ambiguity. They will join antiheroes on other networks like Vic Mackey, Gregory House, Jack Bauer of "24," and Tommy Gavin, the firefighter played by Denis Leary on "Rescue Me" who sanctions a revenge murder of the driver who ran over and killed his son.

Paul Scheer, a 29-year-old actor from Los Angeles and an avid viewer of "Lost," said that not even committing murder alienates an audience. "You don't have to be defined by one act," he said.

"Three people on that island have killed people in cold blood, and they're quote-unquote good people who you're rooting for every week," Mr. Scheer said. The implication for the viewer, he added, is, "You can say 'I'm messed up and I left my wife, but I'm still a good guy.' "

Peter Liguori, the creator of the FX shows "The Shield" and "Over There" and now the president of Fox Entertainment, said that most strong male protagonists on television appeal to male viewers on an aspirational level. Those aspirations, though, he said, have changed over time.

In the age of "Dragnet," "everything was about aspiring to perfection," Mr. Liguori said. "Today I think we thoroughly recognize our flaws and are honest about them. True heroism is in overcoming those flaws."

Part of the shift to such complex and deeply flawed characters surely has to do with the economics of television itself. Cable channels, with their targeted niche audiences, are no longer obliged to aim for Middle America, and can instead create dramas for edgier audiences.

The financial success of networks like FX and HBO has also opened the door for auteurism that has embroidered scripts with dramatic complexities once reserved for film and literature, where odious protagonists - think of Tom Ripley, the murderous narcissist protagonist in Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley" - have long been common.

Still the morally struggling protagonist has been evolving over time, Mr. Ligouri said, pointing to Detective Andy Sipowicz on "NYPD Blue." Sipowicz was an alcoholic who occasionally fell off the wagon, and he often flouted police procedure in the name of tracking down criminals. Like all good protagonists, Sipowicz was also exceedingly good at his job.

Mr. Liguori took the notion of the flawed protagonist to new levels in the creation of Vic Mackey on "The Shield." At the end of the pilot for that show, Mr. Liguori said, Mackey turned to a fellow cop he knew to be crooked and shot him in the face.

"There was a great debate at FX about how the audience would react," he said. "I thought 50 percent would say that's the most horrible thing, and 50 percent would say he was a rat." Mr. Chiklis, who plays Vic Mackey, won an Emmy for his performance in that episode, which was the highest rated at the time in the history of the network.

"The ability to let the audience make that judgment was my 'aha' moment," Mr. Liguori said. "I think that moral ambiguity is highly involving for an audience. Audiences I believe relate to characters they share the same flaws with."

Mr. Liguori added that in a world where people are increasingly transparent about their own flaws - detailing them on blogs, reality TV, on talk shows and in the news media - scripted TV drama had to emphasize characters' weaknesses.

"The I.M.-ing and social Web sites, they're all being built on being as open and honest as possible," he said. "You cannot go from that environment to a TV show where everyone is perfect."

With the success of shows featuring deeply flawed leads, the challenge for networks is to rein in the impulse to create ever more pathological characters. Pancho Mansfield, the head of original programming for Spike TV, said he could see network television going the route of "Scarface."

"With all the competition that's out there and all the channels, people are pushing the extremes to distinguish themselves," Mr. Mansfield said. But for now, he argued, the complexity of characters on serialized TV shows is a kind of antidote to the increasingly superficial characters in Hollywood films, which he said, have come more to resemble the simplistic television dramas of yore.

Dr. Thompson agreed. "On one level you could see the proliferation of these types of characters as an indication of the decline of American civilization," he said. "A more likely interpretation may be that they represent an improvement in the sophistication and complexity of television." If you accept that view, he added, "Then the young male demographic has pretty good taste."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/fa...les/11MEN.html





Would You Like Some Fries With That Download?
Julie Bosman

If the Walt Disney Company has its way, McDonald's Happy Meal toys could be replaced with portable media players that hold Disney movies, music, games or photos, according to a pending patent application. Users could add files to the devices by earning points with food purchases.

The plan could work something like this: A customer enters a restaurant and buys a meal, receiving the portable media player and an electronic code that authorizes a partial download of a movie, video or other media file, which can be downloaded while in the restaurant, according to a United States Patent and Trademark Office application filed by Disney. Then, with each subsequent return, the customer earns more downloadable data, eventually getting an entire movie or game.

Earning a large file, like a movie, might require five trips - a compelling incentive for a customer to return to the restaurant.

"The reward for eating at a restaurant, for example, could be the automatic downloading of a segment of a movie or the like, or a short animated clip or cartoon," according to the patent application. While the application mentions McDonald's as a potential restaurant partner, such a device could apparently be licensed to other restaurants or businesses as well.

The British journal New Scientist, which recently reported on the patent application, said that the portable media players could be used as part of a McDonald's promotion and create marketing opportunities for electronics companies. They could also carry advertisements aimed at children and teenagers, the most likely targets of the promotion, and customers could transfer downloaded files to other media devices, potentially sharing their files with other users. (A Disney spokeswoman declined comment; McDonald's executives could not be reached.)

The patent application follows efforts by McDonald's to enhance wireless capabilities at its restaurants. The company began outfitting its restaurants with wireless Internet connections in 2003, and since then has installed Wi-Fi services in more than 6,200 restaurants worldwide. For now, Wi-Fi is primarily intended for McDonald's customers to surf the Internet and check e-mail messages on laptops. The restaurant charges customers for Wi-Fi usage and trades promotional coupons and prepaid cards for Wi-Fi time.

The portable media players would require "networking systems, such as Wi-Fi or any other suitable wireless Internet access systems," the application said. By continuing to install Wi-Fi capability, McDonald's may be gearing up for the portable media player to be a staple of its promotional lineup.

But McDonald's customers should not plan on the devices appearing anytime soon. Patent applications currently take an average of 30 months for final approval.

"It hasn't even begun to be reviewed," a spokeswoman for the Patent and Trademark Office said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/te...mcdonalds.html





Toshiba to Delay HD DVD Player Launch
Hiroko Tabuchi

Japanese electronics maker Toshiba Corp. said Tuesday copy protection issues would delay the Japan launch of the first players supporting its HD DVD format, the latest development in the high-stakes battle for the next generation of video discs.

Players will not hit the Japanese market until details of a copy protection system for the players are worked out, Toshiba said in a statement, reversing its earlier intention to roll out the first players in Japan by the end of the year. Toshiba did not give a specific release date.

But the company said it would continue to push for a U.S. launch early next year.

The delay brings the launch of the HD DVD, jointly developed by Toshiba and NEC Corp., closer to the expected debut of its main competitor, the Blu-ray disc, which is backed by Sony Corp.

PlayStation 3, Sony's popular next-generation video game console, is expected in Japan early next year and will read Blu-ray discs.

The two formats are incompatible, raising fears of a repeat of the VHS- versus-Beta battle over the format for videotape recorders in the early 1980s.

The HD DVD is backed by Universal Studios, Warner Bros. and Intel Corp., as well as Microsoft Corp., which hopes its new Xbox 360 video game console will challenge the longtime dominance of Sony's PlayStation.

Blu-ray is backed by Apple Computer Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc., along with a variety of other tech companies and studios.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS





Media, Tech Companies Team Up On High-Definition TV

Several of the world's biggest media and electronics companies on Wednesday said they would work together on high-definition television and audio standards for sophisticated home-entertainment networks.

The alliance was founded by cable operator Charter Communications, electronics manufacturer Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America Inc., General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal television networks, Korea's Samsung and server computer-maker Sun Microsystems.

They said in a joint press release that they'll consult with industry organizations, such as the Consumer Electronics Association, CableLabs and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The group's initial goals include looking at ways to make it possible to simultaneously watch, pause and record up to five high-definition video channels; developing sophisticated universal remote controls for home audio-video networks; and securely sharing high-definition content between personal computers and portable devices.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr..._0_US-HDTV.xml





Hollywood Urges China Reforms Before Olympics
Brooks Boliek

Hollywood's top lobbyist has urged the Chinese to crack down on movie piracy and open its markets to additional American-made films by the 2008 Olympics.

Speaking on Tuesday at an industry convention in Beijing, Motion Picture Assn. of America chairman and CEO Dan Glickman said the Olympics is a perfect time to prove the nation's commitment to ending copyright piracy and opening its markets, according to an advance copy of the speech provided by the trade body.

"In 2008, China will be at the center of the world stage, hosting the 29th Olympic Games. It will be a terrific moment of pride for the country," he said according to the speech. "And so I would like to plant this challenge: by 2008, to have more legal than illegal DVDs sold in China, to have more American movies in Chinese theaters and to have more Chinese movies in American theaters."

Motion picture piracy in China costs U.S. studios nearly $300 million a year, according to industry estimates. While the Chinese allow as many as 20 U.S. theatrical releases into the country each year, the average number of U.S. films admitted is 14.

Glickman said where the Chinese have a will, they find a way to crack down on copyright piracy. He pointed to news reports that found a scarcity of counterfeit Olympics-logo goods there.

"It is virtually impossible to find counterfeit Olympics goods in China. Why? As one of the Chinese officials said, it is because fakes dilute the value of the logo, the intellectual property upon which the Chinese have invested to finance the games," he said. "The value of that intellectual property is worth protecting for all film producers, everywhere. It's the same value that exists for that independent Chinese filmmaker who was in my office and for all the other filmmakers from around Asia and the world whose collective creative spirit is such a commodity."
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...archived=False





Macedonia's Special Movie Effects
David Reid

These days major film producers use so many effects in their movies that they have to outsource much of the work from places like Eastern Europe and the Balkans. David Reid found out the part Macedonia is playing.

Macedonia is a nice place to shoot a movie, and there is no shortage of companies there whose sights are set on coaxing business out of Hollywood.

They are not, however, so interested in touting the former Yugoslav republic as a filming location.

Instead, the scenery they are looking to sell comes directly out of a computer.

So seamless are digitally generated effects these days that they are difficult for film producers to resist.

The pixel is replacing the panorama, as faking it becomes cheaper and easier than the real thing.

The increased demand means that media companies in developing countries like Macedonia are getting the chance to have a hand in Hollywood blockbusters.

Film producers in the US are looking to outsource the more labour-intensive animation projects.

This is highly skilled and intricate work, and involves painting in the backgrounds of scenes that have already been shot.

One scene from The Aviator was filmed in a giant studio, and Macedonia's FX3X was given the job of converting the green backdrop into the harbour where Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose performed its maiden, and only, flight.

Miso Ristov, visual FX supervisor at FX3X, told Click Online: "Basically everything was shot handheld or stuck on some cranes. First we had to track the footage and then blend with the background and make a seamless blend.

"You have to do it manually, frame by frame, so we spent two and a half months for probably a couple of minutes of footage.

"We worked 15 hours a day, maybe. No sleep, no seeing your girlfriend, no stuff like that."

Strength in numbers

Buoyed by some initial successes, a number of companies are hoping to club together to tout Macedonia as a new media hub.

In bringing all the workshops under one roof they are aiming for strength in numbers and economies of scale.

"The point is to out-grow the capability of any individual company", said FX3X's Kristijan Danilovski.

"Jointly they will be able to share the costs and invest in joint infrastructure that would help all of them create one virtual large company, a big player in the market."

The more hands you have on deck the better, and in a place like Macedonia, if you want a large pool of digital media workers you have to go straight back to the source.

FX3X used a US government-funded schools computer network to teach some 400 students how to use animation software.

But not all the country's talent is training at home. One rising star, Ana Nikolovska, is flying to the US on an animation scholarship.

Her success abroad will no doubt fuel the enthusiasm at home for animation and special effects.

She says: "There is a growing interest in 3D animation in Macedonia and it is becoming very popular, especially these last two years.

"I think lately everyone wants to be in the entertainment industry. In the past people wanted to be actors, now they want to be animators."

Hollywood is fond of rags to riches stories, and this former Yugoslav republic may well fit the script.

Many here hope that the country's enthusiasm for new media could make it a future player in the digital dream factory.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...ne/4513744.stm





The Baltic Life: Hot Technology for Chilly Streets
Mark Landler

Visiting the offices of Skype feels like stumbling on to a secret laboratory in a James Bond movie, where mad scientists are hatching plots for world domination.

The two-year-old company, which offers free calls over the Internet, is hidden at the end of an unmarked corridor in a grim Soviet-era academic building on the outskirts of this Baltic port city. By 5 p.m. at this time of year, it is long past sunset, and a raw wind has emptied the streets.

Inside Skype, however, things are crackling - as they are everywhere in Estonia's technology industry. The company has become a hot calling card for Estonia, a northern outpost that joined the European Union only last year but has turned itself into a sort of Silicon Valley on the Baltic Sea.

"We are recognized as the most dynamic country in Europe" in information technology, said Linnar Viik, a computer science professor who has nurtured start-ups and is regarded as something of a guru by Estonia's entrepreneurs. "The question is, How do we sustain that dynamism?"

Foreign investors are swooping into Tallinn's tiny airport in search of the next Skype (rhymes with pipe). The company most often mentioned, Playtech, designs software for online gambling services. It is contemplating an initial public offering that bankers say could raise up to $1 billion.

Indeed, there is an outlaw mystique to some of Estonia's ventures, drawn here to Europe's eastern frontier. Whether it is online gambling, Internet voice calls or music file-sharing - Skype's founders are also behind the most popular music service, Kazaa - Estonian entrepreneurs are testing the limits of business and law.

And by tapping its scientific legacy from Soviet times and making the best of its vest-pocket size, Estonia is developing an efficient technology industry that generates ingenious products - often dreamed up by a few friends - able to mutate via the Internet into major businesses.

These entrepreneurs grow out of an energetic, youthful society, which has embraced technology as the fastest way to catch up with the West. Eight of 10 Estonians carry cellphones, and even gas stations in Tallinn are equipped with Wi-Fi connections, allowing motorists to visit the Internet after they fill up.

Such ubiquitous connectivity makes Tallinn's location midway between Stockholm and St. Petersburg seem less remote.

Even the short icebound days play a part, people here say, because they shackle software developers to the warm glow of their computer screens. For the 150 people who work at Skype, Estonia is clearly where the action is.

"What Skype has shown the world is that you can take a great idea, with few resources, and conquer the world," said Sten Tamkivi, the 27-year-old head of software development.

Whether Skype poses a mortal threat to telephone companies, as some enthusiasts suggest, is an open question. But it has become an undisputed technology star - a status cemented in September when eBay, the Internet auction giant, bought the company in a deal worth $2.5 billion.

More than 70 million people have downloaded Skype's free software from the Internet, Mr. Tamkivi said, and it is adding registered users at a rate of 190,000 a day. On a recent evening, 3.7 million people were logged on to the service, nearly three times the population of this country.

Professor Viik and others relish the attention that Skype has brought Estonia. But he says his country cannot build a long-lasting technology industry on a single hit or even a few hits: Kazaa was hugely popular before it ran into a blizzard of copyright-infringement lawsuits.

Silicon Valley, Mr. Viik noted, is composed of clusters of companies that feed off one another. Skype is a closed company, with proprietary software and owners who are so secretive about their plans that for a time local journalists did not know where its offices were.

The company's two founders are not even Estonian. Niklas Zennstrom is a Swede, and Janus Friis is a Dane. Skype's legal headquarters are in Luxembourg; its sales and marketing office is in London. Although Estonian developers wrote Skype's basic code, only a fraction of the eBay bonanza went into Estonian pockets.

Part of the problem for Estonia's entrepreneurs is the nation's inexperience in capital markets. It regained its independence only in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Estonia's entrepreneurs do not yet have the Rolodexes of their Scandinavian counterparts. Recently, Tallinn got its first high-tech venture capital firm.

Then, too, there is its small size. Estonia's entire software development industry employs roughly 2,500 people, less than the research and development staff at a major American technology company.

"Let's be frank," said Priit Alamae, the 27-year-old founder of Webmedia, another leading software design firm. "Estonia has 1.3 million people; we have 200 I.T. graduates a year; we do not have the resources to develop our own Microsoft."

The competition for talented recruits is driving up salaries more than 20 percent a year, he said. While Estonia remains cheaper than neighbors like Finland or Sweden, the gap is narrowing rapidly.

In some ways, however, Estonia's labor shortage has contributed to its success. Companies here are extraordinarily efficient. And they tend to focus on niche products or on business models - like Skype's or Kazaa's - that can expand from a small base by word of mouth.

Skype and Kazaa are powered by so-called peer-to-peer technology, which allows computers to share files or other information on a network without the need for a centralized server to route the data. In Kazaa's case, the files being swapped are songs. In Skype's case, they are voices.

"There is no new technology in Skype," Mr. Viik said. "It is an example of how you put together bits and pieces of technology in a clever way. Estonians are very good at putting together bits and pieces."

Necessity is the mother of invention, but what is it about Estonians that makes them the Baltic's answer to Bill Gates?

"People here are kind of introverted and into technology," said Jaan Tallinn, a tousled-haired man who looks younger than his 33 years and wrote the software code that is the basis of Kazaa and Skype. "We have long, cold winters when there isn't much to do, so it makes sense."

Other people cite history: Estonia's long subjugation by the Soviet Union, and the euphoria that came with freedom.

"It's as if a young country suddenly came into independence with great hopes but few material resources," said Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Mr. Jurvetson, whose family has Estonian roots, has invested in a few start-ups here, most notably Skype.

Estonia owes one thing to its former oppressor. In the 1950's, the Soviets chose the Baltic states as the site for several scientific institutes. Estonia wound up with the Institute of Cybernetics - basically a computer sciences center - that now houses Skype and many other firms.

That scientific legacy remains embedded in society, people say. It is most visible in Estonia's receptiveness to new technology. Internet penetration is estimated by the telecommunications industry to be 49 percent of the population.

Estonians use mobile phones to pay for parking, among other things. Most conduct their banking online, and more than 70 percent file their taxes on the Internet. The state issues a digital identification card, which allows citizens to vote from their laptops.

In a rare disappointment, less than 2 percent of the electorate, or 10,000 people, voted electronically during recent local elections. One hurdle was that voters had to buy a card reader to authenticate their ID's. The government hopes for better numbers for the next election, in March 2007.

Some people contend that Estonia's success is a function of hard work and happy circumstance rather than raw talent.

"I can't say that Estonians are the greatest software programmers," said Allan Martinson, who last June started the first high-tech venture capital fund to be based here. "You can find more talent in Russia."

While entrepreneurs complain about the shortage of skilled workers, more and more young foreigners are ready to trek to this northernmost Baltic nation for a job. Skype employs people from 30 countries; in the halls, one hears plenty of English, and even some Spanish.

Oliver Wihler, 38, a Swiss software developer, moved to Tallinn from London in 1999, drawn by the heady professional atmosphere and by Estonia's parks and forests. Now he and a business partner, Sander Magi, 28, run a company called Aqris, which reformats Java software.

"The commute in London was a drag, and I missed not having any green space," Mr. Wihler said.

Estonia offers plenty of that. But Skype is relying on more than a pleasant lifestyle; it is taking a more traditional approach in its recruitment by offering stock options in eBay. But Mr. Tallinn says that is only part of the company's appeal.

"The other draw," he said, "is that if you want to work for a company that influences the lives of tens of millions of people, and you want to do it in Tallinn, there really isn't any other choice."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/te...rtner=homepage





Energy-Free Communications

According to the laws of physics, you have to expend energy to communicate. It turns out, though, that you don't have to send that energy to the other party. This is useful because communications that happen without sending energy to another party are theoretically impervious to eavesdroppers.

A study by a Texas A&M University researcher shows that two parties can communicate without putting energy into the communications channel by modulating and monitoring the channel's natural noise.

In ordinary communications, signals are transmitted using light or electricity. In contrast, the researchers' scheme uses ever present temperature fluctuations or zero-point energy. Zero-point energy consists of virtual particles like photons that pop in and out of existence in a vacuum. Because eavesdropping on such a signal either alters the characteristics of the noise in the channel or throws off the timing of signals, it is always possible to detect any eavesdroppers.

The method could eventually be used to provide potentially perfectly secure communications.
http://www.trnmag.com/Roundup/2005/T...communications





Quantum Cryptography

Quantum cryptography, which taps properties of photons to represent information, can, in theory, provide perfectly secure communications.

Alice, for instance, can send Bob perfectly secure messages using quantum key distribution because the method allows them to tell for sure whether the encryption keys they are using to lock and unlock messages have been copied.

Quantum key distribution systems use single photons to represent the binary numbers, or bits, that make up encryption keys. The use of single photons is what guarantees security. If there were two or more photons per bit, eavesdropper Eve could siphon off extra photons to make a copy of a key without being detected.

The systems use polarized photons to represent bits. Photons have both electric and magnetic fields. The electric field of ordinary photons vibrates in all directions perpendicular to the photon’s course. Polarized photons have electric fields that vibrate in only one of four directions: vertical, horizontal and the two diagonals.

Two pairs of polarizations, vertical and horizontal, and the two diagonals, can each be used to represent the 1s and 0s of digital information. For example, vertical could represent 1 and horizontal could represent 0.

To send an encryption key to Bob, Alice transmits a string of randomly polarized photons and records how each photon was polarized. Bob measures the photons, but because of a quirk of quantum physics-the Heisenberg uncertainty principle-he can only look for one of the two pairs of states in each photon. Bob has to choose which type of polarization to look for, and he only gets one look because the act of measuring the photon destroys it.

Bob randomly chooses whether to look for vertical and horizontal or the diagonal orientations. He tells Alice, over a regular unsecure communications channel, how he measured the photons and she tells him which ones he chose correctly.

Alice and Bob use this common string of photon polarizations as a binary encryption key. Alice uses the key to encrypt a message, then sends the encrypted message to Bob over an open channel. Bob then uses the bit string to decrypt the message. Because the bit string was generated at random, there is no mathematical basis for decoding the message without knowing the key. And by using a new encryption key for every message, Alice and Bob can thwart code breakers who deduce keys by looking for common patterns across messages.

The quirky nature of photons makes it impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept single photons and successfully replace them. This is because, like Bob, Eve has to guess which way to measure the photons. If she chooses to measure a photon to see if it is a 1 or 0 based on the vertical and horizontal orientations but Alice encoded the bit in the diagonal orientations, Eve will get a false reading.

This means Eve could correctly measure about half of the photons she intercepts, and so half of the substitutes she sends to Bob would be polarized randomly. By chance, half of the randomly polarized photons would be correct, making about 25 percent of the substitute bits wrong.

Alice and Bob check the error rate by comparing a few of the bits Bob chose correctly. If the error rate is higher than even one percent, they can decide that the chance that Eve has intercepted their key is too high, and throw it out and transmit another.
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/1...hy_111405.html





Among Makers of Memory Chips for Gadgets, Fierce Scrum Takes Shape
Martin Fackler

Nestled in a valley in central Japan, surrounded by forested hills and terraced rice paddies, is one of the world's most sophisticated - and secretive - semiconductor plants.

Inside the windowless plant, built by the Japanese electronics maker Toshiba, tiny cranelike robots shuffle along automated production lines, moving stacks of silicon wafers the size of dinner plates. Masked technicians watch as rows of tall machines grind the wafers, etch circuits on their surfaces and cut them into tiny rectangular computer chips.

Inside, visitors are allowed to peek through windows at only a small part of the factory floor. Toshiba is anxious to guard the secrets beyond because it needs them to wage one of the most ferocious battles in today's electronics industry, for control of the fast-growing market for the advanced memory chips at the heart of portable music devices like the Apple iPod Nano.

The fight pits Toshiba and its partner, SanDisk of Sunnyvale, Calif., a maker of memory cards, against Samsung Electronics of South Korea. Both camps are spending billions to build new factory lines, hire engineers and develop more powerful chips in a bid to gain supremacy.

The chips, called NAND flash memory chips, differ from earlier computer memory chips in that data on them can be easily erased and replaced and they can store data even after the power is turned off. That makes them like miniature hard-disk drives, only much more durable because they lack moving parts. The newest flash memory chips are the size of a fingernail and can store two gigabytes, the equivalent of every word and image printed in nine years of a newspaper.

While Toshiba invented the chips more than a decade ago, Samsung has seized the lead with bigger production volumes and lower prices. In the three months that ended in September, Samsung had a market share of 50.2 percent of the $2.97 billion in total global NAND sales, according to iSuppli, a market research firm based in El Segundo, Calif. Toshiba's share was 22.8 percent. SanDisk is not included in iSuppli's figures because it does not sell its chips, but instead uses them all in its own memory products.

But Toshiba is fighting back. It plans, with SanDisk, to spend some $2.5 billion to expand the Yokkaichi plant, which is owned by Toshiba but is used by both companies to make the NAND chips. The new production lines will allow the plant to produce 48,750 wafers a month by March 2007, five times the current output. Each wafer yields hundreds of chips, though Toshiba will not say exactly how many.

And competition is only getting more intense, as more than a half-dozen other chip makers try to muscle in. Hynix Semiconductor of South Korea has rapidly gained a 13.2 percent market share since starting production of NAND chips last year, according to iSuppli. Intel, the world's largest chip maker, said last month that it would team up with another American chip manufacturer, Micron Technology, and that each would spend $2.6 billion over the next three years to make NAND chips. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation of Shanghai, China's largest chip maker, also says it plans to produce the chips next year.

"This is one of the hottest markets in the industry," said Joseph Unsworth, an analyst for Gartner, a market research company based in Stamford, Conn.

The fight has also moved into the courts, where Toshiba and SanDisk are trying to repel newcomers by defending their patents on many of NAND's basic technologies. On Wednesday, SanDisk filed the latest in a series of lawsuits against Swiss-based STMicroelectronics, which started making NAND chips last year. In September, Toshiba filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission alleging that Hynix had infringed on three NAND patents.

At stake is one of the fastest-selling electronics devices in recent years, though one that consumers may not have heard of because it sits inside other products.

The chips allow people to store hundreds of songs on pocket-size portable music players, like the Nano or the U10 from iRiver. Flash memory chips also make possible everything from digital cameras to flash drives and memory cards.

Meanwhile, the chips keep getting more powerful, even as manufacturers compete to shrink circuits etched on the silicon's surface, allowing chips to hold even more data. Chang-Gyu Hwang, chief executive of Samsung's chip business, caused some eyebrows to rise in skepticism in September when he predicted that the chips would soon hold enough data to make hard-disk drives obsolete, paving the way for lighter, thinner and tougher laptop computers.

NAND chips are "the backbone of the mobile electronics era," Mr. Hwang said.

Demand for NAND chips has exploded in recent years. Global sales rose to $10.7 billion this year, from $1.5 billion in 2000, according to Gartner, which forecasts that sales will almost double again in three years, to $18 billion.

Demand is so hot, in fact, that manufacturers say they cannot keep up. Toshiba says it has had to turn down new customers and estimates that manufacturers can meet only about 70 to 80 percent of global demand. Big buyers like Apple and its rival Sony, maker of the Walkman, are signing multiyear deals with chip makers to ensure supply. Shrinking supplies of chips have forced some smaller music-device makers in China to stop production, analysts say.

But scarcity has not driven up prices, as might be expected when demand surpasses supply. That is because companies have continued to slash prices in a cutthroat race for market share, say analysts. This year alone, critical prices will probably drop 56 percent, according to Gartner.

One of the most aggressive price-cutters has been Samsung, which this year beat Toshiba to become the main supplier of memory chips for the Apple Nano. While details of the deal are not public, Samsung's price was so low that the Fair Trade Commission in South Korea said last month it was investigating to see if Samsung, the second-largest chip maker after Intel, had used its size to unfairly squelch competition. Samsung says it has not broken any laws.

Samsung enjoys a commanding lead despite the fact that it still pays royalty fees to Toshiba for licensing NAND technology 10 years ago. Asked if it regretted selling the technology to Samsung, Toshiba said a second supplier was necessary at the time to kick-start the market for an unknown and untested product.

"The one that bought the technology is now the leader," admits Shozo Saito, a vice president at Toshiba who runs the memory chip division. "No matter how much we invest, it'll be hard to catch up."

To cement its advantage, Samsung said in September that it planned to spend $33 billion over the next seven years to expand production at its sprawling Hwaseong computer chip plant, though it will not say how much of that will be devoted to NAND chips. Samsung also said it would hire 5,000 more engineers to increase research and development of new chips. Not to be outdone, Toshiba said it planned to begin making a similar chip by the same time.

At Toshiba's Yokkaichi plant, there is a palpable determination to catch up with the larger Korean rival. Engineers work in shifts around the clock to speed up development and production of new chips.

Noriyoshi Tozawa, the plant's manager, said he kept workers on their toes with little reminders of darker times. One is an elevator that has been kept out of use since 2001; a sign on the doors says that it was turned off after a crash in computer chip prices almost forced the closure of the plant, which used to produce DRAM, another type of memory chip.

"You have to always be at the leading edge to stay alive in this industry," Mr. Tozawa. "We know what it's like to lose."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/te...y/12flash.html





Microsoft, MCI Plan PC-To-Phone Service[
Elizabeth M. Gillespie

Microsoft Corp. and MCI Inc. said Monday they'll soon offer a service that lets customers place calls from their personal computers to regular phones.

But the service will permit only outbound calls at first, even as rivals Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc. allow instant messaging users to receive calls from conventional phones as well as to call out.

Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, and MCI, the telecommunications provider being acquired by Verizon Communications Inc., said they will begin a test run of the service in the United States this week. Broader availability is set for the first half of next year.

The service will use technology from Teleo Inc., a small startup Microsoft acquired in August. Teleo's Internet telephony software lets people make voice calls by clicking on phone numbers appearing on a Web pages.

It's the latest offering to use Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, technology. Calls are broken into data packets that get routed over the Internet, an approach that is cheaper and more efficient than the traditional circuit-switched phone system.

Last week, Yahoo announced it would add computer-to-phone calling capabilities to its instant- messaging service, after a similar retooling of the rival AOL Instant Messenger service from Time Warner Inc. earlier this fall.

Microsoft and MCI's new service, which the companies have dubbed "MCI Web Calling for Windows Live Call," will allow users of MSN Messenger, Microsoft's instant messaging service, to call land lines or cell phones. Microsoft said it was working to add additional capabilities, including inbound calls.

Rates will start at 2.3 cents a minute during the test period. Pricing for the final version will be set when the service launches next year.

Customers will sign up for the computer-to-phone calling service through its new Windows Live Messenger software, which will eventually replace MSN Messenger, and buy prepaid calling time from MCI in $5, $10 and $25 blocks. MCI will handle account management, customer service and billing.

The companies did not disclose the value of what they called a "multi-year agreement," or specify how many years the deal will last.

The latest versions of MSN Messenger and other instant messaging programs already let people talk to each other from computer to computer.

There are also low-cost Internet phone providers like Skype Technologies SA, acquired by Internet auction house eBay Inc. in October, which give away software that lets people talk for free over the Internet using computers and microphones.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS





Study: Online Music Sharing Can Spur Sales
Joan Anderman

The record industry has long considered online file sharing a serious threat to its livelihood. But a new study scheduled to be released today suggests that consumer-to-consumer music recommendations -- a growing feature of online music stores and websites -- will benefit the industry, artists, and fans alike.

The report, released by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and research firm Gartner Inc., surveyed 475 so- called early adopters, or computer users who are among the first wave of frequent music downloaders. The findings suggest that the opportunity to give and receive recommendations could become an important force in the online music business.

Nearly one quarter of frequent online music users say that the ability to share music with others is a key factor when selecting an online music service. And a third were interested in technology that helps them discover and recommend music, such as tools that allow Internet users to publish and rank lists of their favorite songs. Perhaps most important for the recording industry, a tenth of those surveyed said they frequently make music purchases based on others' recommendations.

''The industry has fought all forms of sharing for eight years," says Berkman Center fellow and study coauthor Derek Slater, ''and the fight has largely been a miserable failure. We argue that [they need to] embrace . . . what's already happening. Word of mouth has always been the most powerful marketing tool."

For example, Slater notes that more than 500,000 playlists have been published at MusicStrands (www.musicstrands.com) since the site opened early this year. Visitors can hear 30-second clips of each track on a playlist and then click ''Get It" to find locations where the song can be purchased. The iTunes music store's iMix feature allows people to publish playlists of songs available in the store's catalog (www.apple.com/ itunes/playlists/). Since September, more than 1.3 million users have ranked the site's 320,000 posted playlists.

It's no surprise peer-to-peer programming is taking off. While traditional music spaces, such as neighborhood record stores, offer a logically laid out shopping experience, Internet music sites can be more difficult to navigate. With thousands of artists, millions of songs, and more than 300 legal online music sites, the need for tools to refine searches is growing.

Slater and his collaborator, Gartner research director Michael McGuire, predict that by 2010, 25 percent of online music store purchases will be driven by such consumer-to-consumer recommendations. But to encourage and sustain legal downloading, the authors say, the industry must relax its licensing and use rules to allow consumers to easily publish playlists and include music in podcasts or on blogs.

Considering the bad rap online sharing has among record companies and artists, this will require industry insiders to tweak their perspective.

''Rights holders and policy makers have been distracted by illegal downloading, but sharing isn't equivalent to stealing," says McGuire. ''As labels look at this, some of the people who should be at the forefront of discussions are the A & R [artists and repertoire] and marketing and promotions people. This is an easy way to get attention for a new act or a back catalog, too."

That's not news to Courtney Holt, head of new media and strategic marketing at major label Interscope Records, part of the Universal Music Group.

''I have a Rolodex of hundreds and hundreds of narrow-casting, blogging, and niche-community websites that target the audience I'm trying to reach," says Holt. ''I make sure the core people get information early. It's in its infancy, but peer-to-peer music discovery is going to be invaluable. People used to find out about music from friends at school or in their neighborhood. In an online space, that friend potential increases exponentially. Some of those people are going to turn into the influential music programmers of tomorrow."

The Gartner/Berman study also emphasizes the importance of online music services enhancing their playlist-publishing capabilities and strengthening links to fan sites.

''There will always be people trying to get [music] for free," says McGuire. ''But if you continue to enhance the legitimate services so that they're more compelling and less complicated, if it's frictionless, you make it much more attractive."
http://www.boston.com/ae/music/artic...an_spur_sales/





Wilco's Jeff Tweedy Says Shutting Down File-Sharing Like Closing A Library
AP

Shutting down file-sharing is like closing a library.

That's according to Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, who's on a solo acoustic tour after the band's recent release of the live double CD Kicking Television. After a recent performance, Tweedy answered the following questions about songwriting, performing live and when it's good to steal music.

AP: At what point did you realize that music was something you could create?

Tweedy: I don't really remember when music became the most important thing in my life. My mother claims that I would stand and point at the stereo when I first learned how to walk, before I learned how to talk.

AP: What was your first instrument?

Tweedy: Guitar.

AP: The first song you ever wrote?

Tweedy: I wrote a song with a guy that lived in my home town for his band when I was 15, 16 called Your Little World, and they made a single out of it, but it was a local release.

AP: Do you remember what you were thinking when you wrote it?

Tweedy: It was just a pop song about a girl.

AP: Do you listen to the radio or contemporary music? Specifically, what do you like or hate about it?

Tweedy: Honestly, I don't listen to the radio very much.

AP: What's the first thing you do after you've written a song?

Tweedy: I tend to have a lot of things working at once. Like works in progress. But if I get the main idea of a song together I usually play it for my wife, or my kids, and see how they react to it. Eventually, I play it for my bandmates to see how they react to it. And if things keep going with some sense of encouragement, we record it and finish it.

AP: During last night's show, the crowd was calling out songs they wanted you to play. How much have those requests influenced your set list over the years?

Tweedy: I don't really have a set when I do a solo performance. I put a list on stage that (contains) way more songs than I will ever be able to play in one night. I just use it if I can't think of a song. Mostly I just go with what feels right to play next.

AP: After being dropped by Reprise Records in 2001, Wilco released Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on the web for free. Was that simply to get your music out there, or because you were disenchanted by the corporate process?

Tweedy: We had a tour booked, and we wanted to go out and play our songs that we had been rehearsing and were most excited about, which was our new record. And so we could have done (the tour) without people knowing those songs, but we thought that it would be more fun if people had a heads-up to what we might be playing. And also I think the real sense that we had in the band at that point was we never made any money from selling a record. We had never recouped on any of our records. We had never gotten a royalty check. We had always been able to support ourselves by working hard and playing a lot of shows on the road, and that was a lot more important to us than having people pay us for our record. At that point in time, it was a very real decision.

AP: You've said that you don't see music file sharing as a threat, mainly because of quality issues?

Tweedy: That's just part of it. I don't think that the quality is the same. But I don't see it as a threat because I don't feel that it's a threat to have people more interested in music. I think what's happening with file sharing is that you have a lot more people hearing a lot more music, and I think more than anything else it has engendered an enthusiasm for music. It's a no-brainer that it should be embraced, that's kind the whole point of making music, to be heard.

The only thing that stands in the way of (that) making sense to most people is greed. . . . File sharing sites don't just have new material, they have archival material, they have spoken word, they have tons of material that I never had access to growing up. At their fingertips, people have all this amazing stuff, and I'd like to see what's going to come out of that in the future. If you shut that down, it's like closing a library.

AP: So the record industry's approach is driven by fear?

Tweedy: Do you remember home taping as killing music? It's the same thing. The sky is falling. Ultimately, I think it's an excuse for incompetence.

AP: Maybe the best argument is the Grateful Dead, who let fans tape their shows?

Tweedy: That's the difference. If people aren't willing to go out and play music live, and use that as a part of how they define themselves as a band, then it's definitely going to hurt you. You can't just sit in your home studio and crank out records and get rich. Because people are going to be sharing (the music). But you foster a relationship with an audience, and nurture some good will by allowing taping. Most importantly, like the Grateful Dead, whatever you think of their music, they had it right, in my opinion philosophically, that this music that you're making requires a listener.

AP: One last question. When will Wilco tour?

Tweedy: Not until next year. That's kinda it for a while.

http://www3.cjad.com/content/cp_arti...s/e120919A.htm
















Until next week,

- js.

















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

December 10th, December 3rd, November 26th, November 19th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black