Ten (or more) media industry news items you might have missed recently:

1) Surprisingly, the biggest news items of the past two weeks come from the ‘dying’ world of publishing. The ‘Time’ in Time Warner is officially breaking off as Time Warner has announced a split with its magazine division, Time Inc. The spin-off will make Time Inc. an independent, publicly traded company, currently the number-one magazine publisher in the U.S, featuring People, Sports Illustrated, Forbes and of course, Time. But Time Warner isn’t the only conglomerate making bold publishing moves, as News Corp. is creating a new publishing-focused company, still named News Corporation, granting it a healthy starting-allowance of $2.6 billion. This has led to multiple reactions from the industry with fears of possible layoffs at Time.

2) Staying in the world of magazines, Next Issue Media has expanded beyond Apple to launch on Windows 8 and Microsoft products like the Surface. Following a subscription model for unlimited access to over 80 magazines, Next Issue has been called both ‘Hulu’ and ‘Netflix’ for magazines. (The jury is still out on which one we are all going to call it. Post your suggestions in the comments below!) CEO Morgan Guenther is aiming for 1 million subscribers in the next 18 months.

3) Back to battling conglomerates, new information in the legal battle between Cablevision and Viacom has come to light. To catch you up, at the end of February, Cablevision filed an antitrust suit against Viacom, arguing against the mass media giant’s method of bundling its less performing cable networks with must-watch ones claiming, “The manner in which Viacom sells its programming is illegal, anti-consumer, and wrong,” in what may very well be the least self-aware statement ever made by a corporation. Now, Cablevision is claiming Viacom was threatening a $1 billion penalty if Cablevision refused the lower-tier networks. More on this irony as it develops.

4) The release of EA’s highly anticipated reboot of the SimCity video game franchise may go down as one of the biggest disasters in the industry’s history (though nothing touches the unforgettable landfills of Atari E.T. cartridges). Utilizing EA’s already highly controversial always-online DRM protection, SimCity became unplayable for thousands of players due to server issues and shut-downs. An alleged EA employee blasted the company on Reddit, expressing frustration and disappointment over the launch. EA responded by increasing server capacity and offering a free game, but many have not been assuaged, especially after computer modders/hackers revealed the game can function offline, but EA refused to allow that capability despite the massive amount of server failure.

5) In more video game news, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) and the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) have announced a new campaign to educate parents on the industry’s ratings system and parental controls. This comes as a response to increased media scrutiny, particularly in the possible connection between video games and violence in teens and young adults. In a related move, the ESRB has changed its policy on game marketing, following a model similar to Hollywood in that publishers may show trailers for Mature (M) rated games to a wide audience, as long as a green slate (a la movie trailers) precedes the footage.

6) Hulu’s future is in question, as Disney and News Corp. are discussing strategy for the online streaming service, with the implication begin one may buy out the other’s stake (which would be another third. The final third is primarily owned by Comcast, who is barred from management decisions to a federal regulatory agreement). The talks appear to be centered around the companies’ divergent views on Hulu’s primary operation, with News Corp. favoring the paid subscription model of Hulu Plus while Disney wants to focus on advertising-based revenue from free streaming.

7) News from the ‘upfront-line’: upfront season has begun! Cable and smaller broadcasting divisions have already begun the annual process of selling airtime to advertisers. Two of the more newsworthy reports come from NBC News Group, where Matt Lauer joked about recent negative reports on his image and Today’s slipping ratings, and Disney Kids, pushing the use of multi-screen viewing patterns and, much more importantly, the upcoming summer spin-off “Girl Meets World.” We demand Mr. Feeny!

8) At the box office, the past two weekends played Jekyll and Hyde for Hollywood, providing them their first flop and first mega-success of 2013. Two weeks ago, Jack the Giant Slayer brought in an estimated $28 million domestically, just 14% of its nearly $200 million budget, though it shows promise in Asia. Last weekend, however, Oz: The Great and Powerful proved to be just that, bringing in over $80 million domestically and $150 million globally. While this is good news for a Disney, who started planning for a sequel before Oz‘s release, it is better news for the entire domestic box office, as current year totals are 17% behind 2012.

9) Unionized healthcare workers at the Motion Picture Television Fund hospital stated their intention to strike for three days starting this Monday, March 18. MPTF responded with intentions to hire replacement workers for the strike. Talks fell through this past Wednesday, and the union plans on following through with their strike.

10) A new study from Carnegie Mellon‘s Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics, published on March 6, draws the conclusion that since the shutdown of piracy-giant Megaupload, legal digital movie sales and rentals have increased, drawing a distinct correlation. Their findings show, “a positive and statistically significant relationship between a country’s sales growth and its pre-shutdown Megaupload penetration.”

And finally, The Silly Side, the news stories too inane not to share:

• A countersuit has been filed over the Fifty Shades of Grey porn parody (Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptation). Smash Pictures (really) is claiming Universal’s lawsuit is unjustified on the grounds that due to its being originally published online as part of a fan fiction series, it is technically in the public domain.
• Please don’t turn off your smartphones. App, a new horror film from the Dutch studio 2CFilm, involves utilizing a free interactive app movie-goers can use during the screening, that adds complimentary information and scenes that are activated by audio cues in the film.
• Russell Crowe saw a UFO and posted a video of it. That’s really all I have to say about that.

1) Over 6 years after their last console release, Sony announced their latest gaming console, the PlayStation 4. While they did not reveal what it would look like, they did detail its functioning, new controller, hardware specs, and user interface. The system will include iOS and android apps to enhance the gaming experience.

2) The Academy Awards, or rather the Oscars, took place on February 24th. Six of the films nominated for Best Picture had earned over $100 million at the box office, making it the most commercially successful group of nominees to date. In the documentary short category, Inocente became the first Kickstarter-funded film to win an Oscar. The big news of the night became Seth MacFarlane’s hosting, which elicited a lot of criticism and sparked discussions about Hollywood’s potential sexism and racism. The Academy stood behind MacFarlane’s performance, and in fact this year’s Oscar ceremony showed increased viewership, especially in key younger audiences (which had been a concern for the producers). MacFarlane was not the only one in trouble on Oscar night, as The Onion faced an intense reaction towards a tweet, for which they offered a rare apology (And for anyone who is wondering how Ted came to life at the Oscars, here’s how!). The Independent Spirit Awards, which honor independent films, also took place last weekend.  Silver Linings Playbook came away the big winner, irking some people because the film’s $21-million budget technically put it outside of the classification for “indie film.”

3) Although they won an Oscar for visual effects for their work on Life of Pi, Rhythm & Hues filed for bankruptcy last week. They were cut off from discussing the plight of the industry in their acceptance speech, which upset many visual effects workers. Visual effects artists are protesting the layoffs and bankruptcies their industry is facing using any outlet they can, including social media and open letters (including a second one to Ang Lee).

4) New copyright alert system is launched by the film, TV, and music industries. The warning system gives people six strikes before they begin enforcing consequences. Sony has also developed a patent that would be able to distinguish between piracy activities and legal downloads. Internationally, France is also looking at increasing their (already very strict) anti-piracy laws. Thinking of piracy, how much does “free” music actually cost to artists involved?

5) For the first time in 12 years, music sales grow a small but symbolically important amount. In other music news, Billboard is beginning to include YouTube plays of a song in their formulation of their “Hot 100 List.” This change will allow YouTube hits like “Harlem Shake” to boost their stats. Most of YouTube’s top channels are music-based, suggesting the importance of this connection. Google is considering getting into the streaming music business. Pandora has put a limit on free listening, citing increased royalty fees as the reason, and Spotify is meeting with the record industry to ask for price breaks on royalties.

6) The 2013 box office totals are off to a slow start, 13% behind last year, and Jack the Giant Slayer opened to a disappointing $20-30 million. After taking a big loss on Rise of the Guardians, DreamWorks is forced to lay off 350 employees. The news is not all bad though, as Oz the Great and Powerful debuted with $75 million and The Hobbit closes in on $1 billion worldwide. In other movie news, Hollywood plans to cut back on sex and violence? And Regal Entertainment gets even bigger by buying Hollywood theaters.

7) In the publishing world, New York Times plans to sell Boston Globe. Variety announced they are making big changes–dropping their daily print editions, eliminating their paywall, and adding three new editors in chief.  Tim O’Brien, The Huffington Post‘s executive editor, has decided to leave.  Reader’s Digest files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And are digital book signings the way of the future?

8) Numerous companies are reporting hackers entering their systems, including Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, NBC.com, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook (no user data was taken; but if it is compromised in the future, how would Facebook recover?).

9) In TV news, it’s pilot season! ABC is developing a miniseries How to Survive a Plague, based on the Academy Award-nominated documentary about the continuing AIDS crisis. A&E hit a record number of viewers for their reality series Duck Dynasty. Nielsen ratings are changing to reflect the new ways that people access television. Kaley Cuoco of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory tweets positively about Dish Network’s Hopper, though CBS is in the process of suing them. AMC fought with Dish about licensing fees, and AMC’s fourth quarter profits took a hit as a result. The FCC is being pushed to modify the current standards of TV product disclosure to create more transparency with regard to show sponsorship. Cablevision, with the support of Time Warner Cable and DirecTV, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Viacom, claiming that they practice illegal block booking of stations (an accusation that Viacom leveled at John Malone 20 years ago).  The lawsuit could lead to people being able to more selectively sign up for channels, only paying for the ones they want.

10) In other miscellaneous news: Clive Davis comes out as bisexual. Girls Gone Wild files for bankruptcy. And future technologies–the iWatch? Transparent Smartphones? A computer that never crashes? Or what about touchscreen T-shirts?

A poster from an earlier retransmission consent battle

Last Sunday was a double nail biter for Oscar enthusiasts who subscribed to Cablevision in the NYC metro area. Not only were they nervously awaiting the envelope (please) but were anxiously wondering whether they would receive the telecast at all. The 3.3 million Cablevision subscribers were the most recent victims of a retransmission consent dispute between a cable operator and the owner of a local broadcast TV station. A 1992 statute dictates that every three years a broadcast TV station must either decide whether to demand that their local cable system carry their signal without receiving compensation (called must-carry), or elect to negotiate some sort of compensation for carriage (called retransmission consent). In this case, WABC, the ABC network’s NYC affiliate, owned by the Disney Corporation, wanted Cablevision to pay Disney $1 per subscriber to carry WABC. Cablevision ran ads lambasting the greedy Disney Empire while Disney encouraged viewers to switch TV service to a satellite or telecom carrier. Early Sunday morning Disney pulled the plug on its WABC signal to Cablevision, prompting the parties to reach a tentative agreement, but not until 14 minutes into the Academy Awards broadcast when WABC’s Cablevision signal was restored.

One impetus for the must-carry and retransmission consent rules was the recognition that local broadcasting was in some way a public good — that the form of television that was locally produced and freely available for all who owned a television receiver was something worth preserving. Must-carry and retransmission consent were policies to ensure that local broadcasting would remain economically viable as cable and satellite forms of nationally distributed programming expanded – they were meant to provide local broadcasters with some measure of leverage in contract negotiations with cable operators. But when media conglomerates grew to own TV stations, broadcast networks, cable networks and other media properties, the must-carry/retransmission rules became tools for leveraging corporate power in carriage negotiations. In the 1990s, FOX used retransmission consent to get cable operators to carry its FX cable network, ABC did so to leverage ESPN2, and NBC leveraged CNBC. More recently, in addition to leveraging carriage of conglomerates’ non-broadcast networks, retransmission consent disputes have negotiated direct per subscriber fees for broadcast TV carriage. For example, FOX negotiated per subscriber fees for its owned and operated broadcast TV stations while other large multi-station groups, such as Sinclair, have obtained per subscriber payments for their broadcast stations as well. With more precedents for per subscriber fees for broadcast TV station carriage, cable and satellite operators have formed a group to lobby the FCC to arbitrate these disputes and prevent broadcasters from pulling their signals during contract negotiations.

But rather than push these public disputes behind closed doors, perhaps now that we, the subscribers, are in effect paying directly for local broadcast TV, perhaps we should have more say about programming decisions and corporate practices. If corporate conglomerates used the privilege of retransmission consent (a policy derived from the foundational principle that the airwaves are a public resource) to leverage their corporate interests in negotiations, why can’t we, the subscribers, use this policy to leverage our demands for more corporate transparency and voice in programming decisions.

Well, for inside-the-beltway folks this would be just silly. But we can imagine, and even begin to organize, a way to make these retransmission consent disputes more publicly relevant beyond missing Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin’s 14 minutes of opening shtick. As the next retransmission consent dispute inevitably looms (quite possibly to a neighborhood near you), perhaps what we need is a Retransmission Consent Awards Show that allows viewers to express their viewing desires and hold the conglomerates accountable for their corporate practices. Let the subscribers have a voice in terms of how their money is allocated, to decide which corporate entity is more worthy of compensation.

An Awards Show for this latest dispute would have subscribers vote for least egregious practices in compensating executives, or for records on labor relations, another for merchandising practices and perhaps one for campaign contributions. The Show might include dramatic reenactments of corporate activities, such as when Disney pressured the Harvard-affiliated Judge Baker Children’s Center to evict the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood after the advocacy group proved Disney’s Baby Einstein videos had no educational value and persuaded Disney to refund customers who purchased these videos. There might be a sports award that allowed viewers to comment on how Disney’s ESPN and the Dolan’s MSG franchises cover sports. I for one miss ESPN’s Playmakers, the scripted show that was critical of NFL culture and, likely, why it was short lived. I’ve also become a fan of women’s softball, but get tired of waiting until the Olympics to watch it on TV (which is no longer the case since softball was dropped from the 2012 games). Indeed, perhaps others would want more coverage of women’s sports in general from these conglomerates, especially given ESPN charges cable systems close to $4 per subscriber for carriage. Cable subscribers might also have something to say about how much their per subscriber fee for a local broadcast channel actually gets allocated to the local station, rather than to the station’s affiliated network or conglomerate. I watch local TV news in the morning (and indeed, studies show that local TV news is still the leading media source for news) and enjoy the weather reports and puff pieces on community events from dog shows to what not. But I would appreciate it if the station had more investigative personnel to cover city hall and local commerce — as I’m sure local news producers would like more resources to do so as well.

It’s our airwaves and increasingly our direct payments. What would other subscribers like to see exposed, talked about and shared in the coming retransmission disputes?