Daily Archives: September 18, 2006

Pirates 2 can’t save overall movie business

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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest may have been the biggest grossing movie of the year and briefly set off a wave of “the blockbuster still rules” articles, but as Chris Anderson says, it’s not enough to save Hollywood as a whole. When you take Pirates tickets – not grosses but pure, unadulterated tickets – out of the equation, sales would be down 15 percent this year. Even including those sales the numbers are down nine percent. As I said a while ago, blockbusters are more or less over as a “this will shore up weak sales elsewhere” safe harbor and Hollywood would do well to shift to smaller, niche-driven movies.

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LOTD 9/18/06

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  • Microsoft Zune will not only not play songs from other sources – even if those sources, such as Napster are approved by Microsoft – but it will also strip away Creative Commons licenses and apply its own DRM to all the files you try to put on the device.
  • The new site Go2Web20.net is way more fun than it really, objectively should be.
  • Speaking of Web2.0, Fast Company has a story and slideshow on the unique jobs that phrase has created.
  • With all the new and expanding entries into the area, it turns out video delivered over the Internet could actually turn out to be a viable foundation for a business. I know that’s surprising to a lot of people but it might be true.
  • Every wonder what the 25 worst websites actually were? PC World weighs in with its opinion.
  • David Pogue makes reading Digg fun again.
  • Keith O’Brien has a must-read list of 10 ways magazines can save themselves from, well, themselves.
  • Warner Bros. has signed a deal with YouTube that frees users to create videos using music from the label. The catch is that when YouTube detects a copyrighted song being used it forwards the video to WB for review.