Hollywood

Imagine a return to moviemaking where storytelling as a craft mattered most, and a writer with a dream and some financial backing could do what once required a studio to accomplish.

Film and TV writers are striking for the first time in almost twenty years after the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers were unable to reach an agreement.

Google isn't the only company that has to determine the best way to protect copyrighted video; the movie and TV studios have to come to grips with a way to let people share content, or forever kill the ability to monetize it online.

My best friend is an extremely gifted film talent. But he hated Hollywood, hated the hoops young aspirants had to go through, hated having to play ball, so he left Hollywood and came home to be an English professor. It's really too bad online video hadn't taken off just yet.

The technology YouTube has in mind to detect and filter content will be a bad deal for the studios, and Microsoft has quietly asked powerful Hollywood honchos to skip it in favor of another option.

Hollywood has plans to branch out into online movies in a major way. They have been slow to embrace the Internet but it seems they are realizing the great potential for generating revenue online.

Instead of spending tons of cash on providing substantial assistance to federal investigations of torrent trackers, maybe the MPAA should use those funds to educate its member studios about the mad, mad, mad, mad world of Internet advertising.

As the Internet transforms into a high-speed content medium, video distributors, eyeing a world without middlemen and hardware costs, debate about the methods by which to serve up content. At a loss, they turn to the experts - they ask the porn guys.