hollywood

Facebook is planning to improve its relationships with the film and music industries, a new report claims.

According to Reuters, citing anonymous sources, Facebook is currently looking to hire an executive who would handle the company's relationship with Hollywood in the hopes of eventually inking lucrative deals with both film companies and music labels.

Although Facebook has yet to make a decision on whom it might hire, the company has held talks with former MySpace co-President Jason Hirschhorn. Those talks, Reuters says, apparently went nowhere, and Facebook is back to looking for a suitable person for the job.

Facebook'… Read more

Even if you believe that splitting Netflix into two services and raising prices is the right plan for the company in the long term, the moves in the near term have many subscribers asking whether managers value them.

Many Netflix users are outraged for the second time in the past three months. CEO Reed Hastings offered an apology last night in a letter to customers as well as in a video message for the way the company announced a price increase in July. He didn't say he was sorry for the actual price hike, and more importantly, he also said Netflix was splitting itself into two separate services. The new Netflix will be involved in streaming video over the Web exclusively, while the other service, called Qwikster, will oversee DVD by mail.

Some analysts and customers argue that Netflix has made plenty of other missteps in the past several months. The company couldn't close a licensing agreement with Starz, the pay-TV service that owns Web distribution rights to content from Sony Pictures and Disney. That means Netflix's streaming library will offer even fewer films from the top Hollywood studios. Much of Hollywood is lukewarm about Netflix's business model and the company has struggled to acquire streaming rights for popular films. … Read more

Investors are fleeing Netflix's stock and many subscribers have turned their backs on the Web's No. 1 video-rental service.

A combination of skimpy selection in Netflix's Internet-streaming library, problems acquiring content, and an unpopular price increase have led the company's leadership to what appears to be a crucial moment. Observers are beginning to wonder if Netflix's stunning growth of the past two years is coming to an end.

Netflix said today that it expects to report 1 million fewer U.S. subscribers in the third quarter than previously anticipated, a 4 percent shortfall. That number includes almost 800,000 fewer DVD-only subscribers than expected.

If you're one of those who cancelled a subscription hoping it would send a message to company managers, well, they got it and so did Wall Street. Netflix's stock closed trading today at $169.25 a share, down $39.46 or 18.9 percent.

Today's revised expectations raise important questions about the company. Netflix is supposed to have near perfect customer data and is supposed to be better than competitors at gauging customer tastes and trends. So, how could it set up Wall Street for disappointment by being overly optimistic about reaction to the price increase?

And with fewer subscribers and less subscription revenue coming in, will that hurt Netflix's ability to acquire content, which already appears to be flagging? … Read more

A splinter group of hacker collective Anonymous is turning attention away from corporations and governments and toward the beautiful people.

According to multiple reports, the Hollywood Leaks team has announced its intent to target celebrities in film, TV, and music--evidently, folks like Miley Cyrus, Tom Cruise, and rapper Kreayshawn have already been hit. The hackers are looking for dirt, such as nude photos, embarrassing e-mails or memos, scripts under wraps, etc. In general, Hollywood Leaks wants to leave a trail of showbiz carnage in its wake.

So far, the fruits of their dastardly labor include publishing online a list of celebrity cell phone numbers (Cyrus and Ashley Green, Helio Castronoves and Corky Ballas, who both previously appeared on "Dancing with the Stars") and the pre-release script of the movie musical "Rock of Ages" starring Tom Cruise. This morning, they served up Gerald Butler's e-mail address. Admittedly, that's not the most devastating list of achievements so far, but these are the early days yet.

"Nothing like a #LEAK for breakfast," the group tweeted this morning. … Read more

Authorities in China and Hong Kong have cracked the case of the flying iPads. In a "Mission: Impossible"-style smuggling operation, iPads, iPhones, and other coveted gadgets were being ferried across the river that separates Hong Kong and Shenzhen via a long zip line, according to translated reports from Chinese media.

The idea was apparently to capitalize on the different taxation laws in the two locales and make a mint selling the devices cheaper on the mainland side.

As if written for a scene with Daniel Craig or Jet Li, the goodies were loaded into a black nylon bag under cover of nightfall and sent over a cable line roughly a third of a mile long using an elaborate pulley system. The whole process reportedly took about two minutes.

The video below features a tour of one side of the crime scene.

Customs officials undertook a significant surveillance campaign, which led to a handful of arrests and seizing of dozens of the previously airborne Apple devices estimated to be worth more than $45,000. … Read more

Meet the Mega man.

MegaPorn, MegaVideo, MegaLive, MegaPix, and Megaupload are all Kim Schmitz: entrepreneur, father, former hacker, former street racer, and former outlaw.

Depending on who you ask, all of these sites and brands created by Schmitz--a well-known hacker in Germany who is said to have officially changed his name to Kim Dotcom--are either part of the simple and successful Internet file-storage business he founded in 2005, or they're an extension of a vast online piracy empire that includes some of the most visited video sites on the Web--right there along with YouTube and Hulu. According to legal … Read more

Zediva, the video service that attempted to build a business by exploiting loopholes in copyright law, suffered a serious setback today when a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction against the service.

U.S. District Judge John Walter has ruled that Zediva violates copyright law and granted a preliminary injunction motion made by the Motion Picture Association of America for Zediva to be shut down. The judge is waiting a week for a legal technicality before officially issuing the injunction, but Zediva's fate is sealed.

Zediva billed itself as a DVD rental service that enabled users to rent physical … Read more

Apparently we were just kidding ourselves and the Internet really isn't going to send us to some digital TV Shangri-La, where all the content is free of charge, available at our fingertips, and stripped of commercial breaks.

All the signs coming out of Web TV over the past year or more tell us that the TV networks are done with their experiment with ad-supported online distribution and super low-cost content. The returns that these companies were collecting from Hulu just weren't attractive enough for them to brush off cable companies and other distribution partners.

Fox announced yesterday that … Read more

They said Hulu was going to save the film studios and television networks from repeating the mistakes of the music industry.

They said the video portal would help turn the Internet into a new means of distributing the most popular TV shows and movies for less money than cable and offer viewers much more control over where and when they watch.

But the latest news out of Hollywood seems to indicate that enthusiasm was misplaced, premature, or both. The most recent and most dramatic sign of this came yesterday, when the Fox Network, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., … Read more