MPEG-4 Secrets Revealed... [The All Electric Media Weblog]

If aliens were to land on Earth tomorrow, and tap into the Internet to try to determine the political values of this planet's denizens, they'd get a pretty distorted picture. But then again, if they monitored our television and radio broadcasts, they'd get a different but equally distorted picture. Here's why. [Sean Gallagher: the dot.communist]

The Mouse goes for some Penguin lovin'. Disney's migrating its animation back-end to HP's GNU/Linux boxen. The great irony, of course, is that Disney is also using the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group to make it illegal to develop open source digital video applications. [Boing Boing Blog]

Sony: The conflicted conglomerate. Wharton professors and experts say the company is in a unique position to become a leader in digital entertainment--if it can stop fighting itself. [CNET News.com: Personal Technology] [The All Electric Media Weblog]

Amateur Auteur Likes It That Way. Evan Mather is one of the Net's most influential amateur filmmakers. His work is widely emulated, but he has yet to sign a big Hollywood contract. Why? Because he keeps it real. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News] via [The All Electric Media Weblog]

We've been working on some Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) documents on Hollywood's poor track-record on new technology.

We all know about the studios suing to keep the VCR off the market (and now pre-recorded media accounts for 40 percent of Hollywood's bottom line, versus 26 percent for the box-office, which has nonetheless grown every year since the VCR was introduced), but how about the TV itself? Hollywood boycotted TV because it was afraid that the small-screen would Napsterize the movie-houses. But when Walt Disney needed money to build Disneyland (and Roy wouldn't give it to him), he did a deal to open the Disney vaults to the broadcasters.

Once one of the studios broke ranks, the cartel fell apart, and TV became the Hollywood revenue juggernaut it is today.

I knew about this from reading my Disney library, which is 3000 miles distant in Toronto, and we needed citations now, so we gave Google Answers $40 to research the question. The answer is terrific, just chock-a-block with links and abstracts. [Boing Boing Blog]