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

1) Two weeks ago was E3 (Electronics Entertainment Expo), the largest trade fair for the video game industry, and, as usual, there were several major stories coming out of the event. The biggest seemed to be Sony’s massive ‘victory’ over Microsoft in the press conferences focusing on each’s next-generation entertainment consoles available this holiday, the PlayStation 4 and XBox One, respectively. Besides undercutting Microsoft’s console by $100, Sony scored major consumer points by directly attacking Microsoft’s announced DRM policies including a required internet connection and restrictions on sharing/loaning games. Sony was clearly feeling confident, releasing this humorous video of PlayStation execs showing people the ‘complicated’ process of sharing games on their new system:

2) Yet the even bigger news took place the week following E3, as Microsoft, following an outpouring of negative consumer and media feedback and loss of pre-sales on Amazon against the PlayStation, pulled a complete 180 on the XBox One’s restrictive DRM policies. Gone are the regular on-line checks and restrictions on borrowing. While it is too early to tell if such a bold reversal will affect Microsoft’s PR woes in the long-run, they have already overtaken the PS4 on UK Amazon pre-orders.

3) Fox Searchlight Pictures has lost a lawsuit brought against them by two interns on the film Black Swan after a Federal District Court found them in violation of minimum-wage laws for not paying the production interns who were treated essentially as regular employees. The judge found the environment too similar to a regular waged position and not enough of a training/educational program to be considered unpaid. While this is a massive victory for unpaid labor in the film and media industry, many have already noted this could become a landmark decision for future cases of internship exploitation in a variety of fields.

4) Attention bachelorettes: Rupert Murdoch will soon be back on the market. Murdoch and wife Wendi Deng have filed for divorce. While Deng and the couple’s children will retain financial interest in News Corp, they do not get voting rights. In slightly less tabloid-y news, News Corp’s publishing and entertainment arms have started trading separately as a preliminary stage before the official split later this month.

5) And just to keep things going on the TMZ-front, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are now parents of a baby girl. More interestingly, this news came just one day after West’s hotly anticipated new album, Yeezus, leaked to the internet, and three days before the album’s official release. As expected, the child of Kanye and Kim has already learned the power of synergistic corporate marketing strategies.

6) More Netflix original programming is on the way, this time from the folks over at DreamWorks Animation. The deal involves over 300 hours of new content, making it the largest in Netflix’s short history. This is part of a larger initiative from DreamWorks to branch out into the television marketplace. They are confident their TV deals (including Netflix) will generate $100m in revenue for the company.

7) Senior Senator John McCain has asked the FCC to research and consider the benefits of a la carte cable pricing. This is in line with proposals and urgings from McCain for years to offer more options to television consumers, including proposed legislation. McCain calls the current system restrictive saying in a letter to acting FCC Chair Mignon Clybrun, “This is wrong, and action should be taken.”

8) The economic and financial upheaval in Greece hit the media sector these past weeks after the government shut down public broadcaster Hellenic Broadcasting Corp. (ERT). The canceling of all state-run broadcasts and massive layoffs led to protests around the country, which eventually spread to other European broadcasters (including Britain, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy) signing a petition and speaking out. The movements proved successful, as the Greek PM Antonis Samaras offered to bring ERT back on air with a limited staff after a court reversed an early decision siding with Samaras.

9) This past week saw the annual Licensing Expo in Las Vegas, with the entire industry reporting growth of 2.5% in 2012 by bringing in approx. $110 billion. Disney has been the unchallenged king (or princess!) for years, ranking as the world’s #1 licensor generating $39.4 billion. And they are only growing, with recent purchases of Marvel and Star Wars giving them six of the top 10 franchises worldwide.

10) Our tenth story is a bit of old fashioned rivalry between… talent agencies. An extended prank by William Morris Endeavor (WME) against rival Creative Artists Agency (CAA) saw the company put up posters around Hollywood featuring “CAAN’T” that parodied CAA’s iconic white-on-red logo. The stunt even extended to t-shirts spotted in the background of the Today show and a website, caant.com. Unfortunately for us watching, Phase 2 of the ad blitz was shut-down, with the WME claiming it is “not worth it” and “The fun we had is done.”

11) To end on a somber note, celebrated actor and terrific human being James Gandolfini passed away June 19, 2013 while vacationing in Italy. Best known for his work as Tony Soprano, Gandolfini’s work extended beyond television to film, the stage, and even voice-work (see below). The outpour of tributes, honors, and reflections speaks more for how loved he was than I ever could alone. That said, I’ll leave you this week with one of my favorite memories of his work:

Earlier this year, Sony and Microsoft announced their additions to the newest console generation, the PlayStation 4 and XBox One, respectively. Coming this holiday season, E3 will certainly be a showcase for both consoles, providing another stage for both companies to win over consumers, as well as stockholders, game developers, and industry publishers. And it is those last two that seem most at odds in Sony and Microsoft’s plans. Based on their previous announcements, let’s take a look at what we can expect from this year’s E3.

Let’s start with Sony. The biggest takeaway from the PlayStation 4 announcement, and its subsequent marketing and press materials leading up to E3, is a focus on game developers. While in-house or 1st party development teams are still a large market force (just ask Nintendo, hurting for 3rd party developers), a recent industry survey shows 53% of game developers recognize themselves as independent. This shift in the way games are being made has Sony positioning themselves to take advantage. As Andrew Groen notes in an article in Wired, “There’s a war brewing for the hearts and minds of the videogame industry’s independent developers. The weird thing is, Xbox doesn’t seem interested in fighting it.” Groen quotes independent developers like Braid‘s Jonathan Blow and Retro City Rampage‘s Brian Provinciano who found working with Microsoft to be excruciating and unnecessarily difficult, with restrictive demands and guidelines, as well as errors while publishing that have cost these developers money. Sony will be taking this message of developer-friendliness with them to E3, where they will be giving out shirts with the tagline “No hurdles, just games,” followed by the PlayStation symbol, a pixelated heart, and the word “Devs.”

Turning to Microsoft, if I had to sum up the reaction to Microsoft’s May 21 reveal of the XBox One in just one word, it would be confusion. Industry reporters used words like disaster, desperate, and uncertain. Most of this stemmed from Microsoft’s lack of clarification on crucial issues like persistent online connection, used-game functionality, and privacy concerns over the ‘always-listening’ nature of the Kinect motion-sensing camera/microphone. Perhaps Microsoft realized the situation when this past Friday it made a post on its XBox Wire titled “How Game Licensing Works on XBox One.” In the document Microsoft attempts to clarify some of these points of confusion, emphasizing how games are always installed and registered directly to your unique XBox ID (whether purchased digitally or a physical disc), how game trade-ins and reselling will be up to the publisher to decide whether to enable this functionality, and that the XBox One must be connected to the internet once every 24 hours to allow games to be played. This time the reaction was a bit worse with one reporter claiming the XBox One “just had a very bad day.”

What Microsoft is trying to do with the XBox One is apply similar digital rights management (DRM) we see used on digital-commercial platforms like Steam and the App Store to a console that still supports physical, disc-based media. By tying game purchases to individual users and accounts, they are taking the physical out of the equation, much in the same way software is already registered to individual devices (Remember, this is still Microsoft). However, this ignores the several thousands of console users who do not have dedicated internet access or simply choose to use physical copies. Consider the entire video game rental business, which is completely unsupportable by the XBox One at launch. According to the post, “Loaning or renting games won’t be available at launch, but we are exploring the possibilities with our partners.”

To be clear, Sony has not been forthright with their system’s DRM and may well take on a policy similar to Microsoft’s. Hopefully Sony will reveal that at E3. But the question remains why Microsoft would risk alienating a large portion of their users? Just as Sony is looking to appeal to game developers, Microsoft is wooing game publishers. Used games have been a scapegoat for hurting sales and profit margins, and Microsoft may appeal to publishers by giving them that control, while avoiding being the ‘bad guys’ themselves by outright banning the second-hand market.

Both Sony and Microsoft have a lot of questions to address at E3. Their answers will change the course the video game industry follows, having nothing to do with the actual games and everything to do with the economics of the market.