TV/movie piracy & Hollywood. Who’s to blame? And is it all bad?

A post in honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Are improper movie downloads Hollywood’s own fault? Kinda looks like it.  When you give people easy, reasonably priced ways to download movies, they prefer them over “pirated” downloads.

And as a sidenote, Netflix has found that pirate download stats are a  great way to decide what movies and shows they should bid on for their streaming service. Apparently, if people want pirate downloads, they also want legal downloads of it.

(BTW, given that today is TLAPD, if you talk like a pirate at Long John Silver’s today, they will give you a free piece of fried fish if you ask for it.)

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A Motorcycle Ride to the United 93 Memorial on a Rainy Summer Day

This has nothing to do with the media. It’s a brief story about a ride I took on my motorcycle to the United 93 Memorial on a rainy June day back in 2004. It was written shortly after I had recovered from a fairly serious illness, and I was happy just to be back on the road. I’ve taken to posting on 9/11.


Took a short ride last Saturday. The distance wasn’t much, under 200 miles, but I went through two centuries of time, ideas, and food. Which felt really good after having been ill for the last month-and-a-half.

Headed out of Morgantown about 7:30 a.m. on I68. Stopped at Penn Alps for breakfast. Nice thing about being on insulin is that I can include a few more carbs in my diet these days. Pancakes, yum! (Penn Alps, if you don’t know, runs a great Pennsylvania Dutch breakfast buffet on weekends that is well worth riding to. Just outside of Grantsville, MD.)

Then off on the real purpose of the trip. Up US 219 toward the Flight 93 Sept. 11 memorial. The ride up north on 219 is beautiful; I’ve ridden it before. I always like when you come around the bend and see the turbines for the wind farm. Some people see them as an eye sore; for me they’re a potential energy solution and a dramatic sight. Chalk one up for industrial can be beautiful.

Continue on up to Berlin, PA, where I take off on PA 160 into Pennsylvania Dutch country. I start seeing hex signs painted on bright red barns, or even hung as a wooden sign. Not quite cool enough to put on my electric vest, but certainly not warm. Then it’s heading back west on a county/state road of indeterminate designation.

Now I’m into even more “old country” country. There’s a horse-and-buggy caution sign. Off to the left there’s a big farmstead with long dark-colored dresses hanging from the line, drying in the air. They may not stay dry, based on what the clouds look like.

The irony of this ride hits pretty hard. I’m on my way to a memorial of the violence and hatred of the first shot of the 21st century world war, and I’m traveling through country that is taking me further and further back into the pacifist world of the 19th century Amish and Mennonites.

A turn or two more, following the map from the National Parks web site, and I’m on a badly scared, narrow road that is no wider and not in as good of shape as the local rail trail. (Reminds me why I like my KLR!)

It’s only here that I see the first sign for the memorial. No one can accuse the locals of playing up the nearby memorial. Perhaps more flags and patriotic lawn ornaments than usual, but no strident statements. And then the memorial is off a half-mile ahead.

The crash site is to the south, surrounded by chain-link fencing. No one but families of the victims are allowed in that area. Off a small parking area is the temporary memorial, in place until the National Park Service can build the permanent site. There’s a 40-foot long chain-link wall where people have posted remembrences, plaques on the ground ranging from hand-painted signs on sandstone, to an elaborately etched sign on granite from a motorcycle group. The granite memorial is surrounded by motorcycle images.

The messages are mostly lonely or affirming. Statements of loss, statements of praise for the heroism of the passengers and crew. But not statements of hatred. It reminds me in many ways of the Storm King Mountain firefighter memorial. Not the formal one in Glenwood Springs, but the individual ones out on the mountain where more than a dozen wildland firefighters died several years ago.

It’s time to head home. When I go to join up with US 30, it’s starting to spit rain, so I pull out the rain gloves, button down the jacket, and prepare for heading home. It rains almost the whole way back PA 281, but I stay mostly dry in my Darien. The only problem is the collar of my too-big jacket won’t close far enough, and water dribbles down inside. It reminds me that riding in the rain, if it isn’t coming down too hard, can be almost pleasant, isolated away inside a nylon and fiberglass cocoon.

I’m home before 1 p.m.. I’ve ridden less than 200 miles. But I’ve ridden through a couple of centuries of people’s thoughts, actions, and food. And I’m finally back on the bike.

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Media News Roundup

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Is this a better approach for advertising beer?

Beer advertisers have been taking a fair amount of heat lately for producing messages that are sophomoric at best and brand damaging at worst.  These ads are criticized for promoting over consumption of lousy beer to under age or barely of age drinkers.

So it was refreshing (beer ads, refreshing, ok, sorry) to see this latest ad for Guinness from the BBDO agency’s New York office. This is creative, gets across a brand-enhancing image, and still brings in traditional elements of beer advertising.

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Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

 

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Time Warner Cable / CBS Resolve Month-Long Retransmission Dispute

Time Warner Cable and CBS Inc. have finally resolved their month-long retransmission battle that will bring back CBS broadcast and Showtime back to cable subscribers in New York City, Los Angeles and the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.

This means that subscribers in these markets will not be cut-off from regular season NFL football or the rest of the final season of the Showtime hit “Breaking Bad.”

The dispute was over whether/how much TWC (which is no-longer  owned by media giant Time-Warner) would pay to CBS to carry the broadcast network on its cable systems.  While we don’t know the terms of the final contract, CBS had been asking TWC to pay $2 per month per subscriber.  According to Media Post, TWC had been paying somewhere in the range of 50 cents per subscriber previously.  For comparison, ESPN gets $5 per month per subscriber.

During the dispute, TWC subscribers who wanted to watch CBS had to get HD antennas to bring in the broadcast network, and Radio Shack stores in affected cities were reportedly up sharply.

If you’d like an in-depth look at the issues surrounding broadcast retransmission, turn to this blog post by the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta (who else?).

 

 

 

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MLK, Mahalia Jackson and the “I have a dream” speech

One thing I learned this week during the 5oth anniversary of the March on Washington was that a substantial part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech was improvised.  Specifically, the part about having a dream…

While King had used the dream theme in previous speeches, he hadn’t included it in the prepared text for his speech for the March.

But as Drew Hansen wrote in the New York Times earlier this week, King became dissatisfied with how he was concluding his speech. So when singer and activist Mahalia Jackson shouted out behind him, “Tell them about the dream, Martin,” he did just that, and launched into the language that would define his brilliant address to the world.

Mahalia Jackson singing “How I Got Over” at the March on Washington

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“I have a dream…” Washington Post virtually ignored the speech 50 years ago

Today was the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered what is considered to be one of the great speeches of the 20th century, if not one of the best American speeches ever:

And it is easy in retrospect to assume that it was recognized immediately as a classic piece of American rhetoric.  But if you went back to look at the Washington Post from Aug. 29, 1963, you would see lots of stories about the March on Washington, but almost nothing about Dr. King’s speech.  Roberg G. Kaiser, an associate editor at the Post and a former managing editor of the paper, was a summer intern at the paper that year.  In an op/ed piece earlier this week, Kaiser writes:

We were poised and ready for a riot, for trouble, for unexpected events — but not for history to be made. Baker’s 1,300-word lead story, which began under a banner headline on the front page and summarized the events of the day, did not mention King’s name or his speech. It did note that the crowd easily exceeded 200,000, the biggest assemblage in Washington “within memory” — and they all remained “orderly.”

In that paper of Aug. 29, 1963, The Post published two dozen stories about the march. Every one missed the importance of King’s address. The words “I have a dream” appeared in only one, a wrap-up of the day’s rhetoric on Page A15 — in the fifth paragraph. We also printed brief excerpts from the speeches, but the three paragraphs chosen from King’s speech did not include “I have a dream.”

Kaiser writes that no one has called the paper “on this bit of journalistic malpractice.  Perhaps this anniversary provides a good moment to cop a plea.  We blew it.”

You can see C-SPAN’s coverage of today’s 50th anniversary of the March here.

 

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First Media Memories – Part III

The final set of my media literacy students’ first media memories:

  •  Dragon Tales – “Max and Emmy are the main characters who are able to touch a magical dragon scale and travel to a place called Dragon Land. In Dragon Land, the two children help their dragon friends fulfill certain tasks, while learning important morals.”
  • The Snow Queen (Russian cartoon) – “I grew up in Russia, so my first media memory is Russian cartoons.  Those cartoons were pretty old, made back when it was Soviet Union. I remember they were very kind and innocent; they never showed even a sign of violence. Each cartoon either had a deep meaning or taught a life lesson. My favorite cartoon was The Snow Queen, which is based on a fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen. 
    Editor’s Note: I’m not certain this is the right cartoon, but it’s what I could find.
  • Rugrats, The Wild Thornberries, Hey Arnold– I remember my brother and I would get up early on Saturday mornings just to watch those shows while we waited for my mom to make breakfast for us.“My parents let us watch them because it opened your mind to think outside of the box and use your imagination.”
  • Flintstones & Jetsons –  My mother always had them when I would come home from school and I enjoyed them because they were in the Jetsons case, so futuristic and in the Flintstones case, so amusing!
  • Chalk Zone – I remember getting up early on the week days and sitting in the living room eating my Fruit Loops watching Rudy Tabootie and his friends Snap and Penny going on their adventures in the chalk zone. I loved the idea that there was an alternate universe, I did a lot of daydreaming as a child so Chalk Zone was my kind of show.
  • Disney’s The Little Mermaid – One of my first media memories is watching my favorite movie, The Little Mermaid.

 

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First Media Memories – Part II

More first media memories from my Global Media Literacy class (updated 8/28/13):

  • Social media website Bebo. “When asked, the social media website Bebo and instant messaging program MSN were the first medias that popped into my head.”“My media memory is Bebo which is a social networking site where you can have photos, friends, and items you like on your profile.”
  • Blues Clues – “It was the first thing that was on every morning when I woke up as a child, especially during the summers!”
  • 9/11 – “I don’t remember much of 9/11 because I was in second grade.  What I do remember was that someone had came into the room and talked to our teacher. After that we watched it in school and at home.”

    “The way I remember it is my second grade class and I were having a normal class day when someone rushed in and whispered something into the teacher’s ear. She had a shocked look on her face and the rest of the day just seamed off and when I got back to my house after school I just remember seeing the two huge buildings in a massive fireball and really being confused I suppose.”
  • Michael Jackson’s The Man in the Mirror – Growing up my parents always listened to music especially MJ and Whitney Huston!! Ever since then I’ve always had a liking to MTV.
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