1) Granted, you probably didn’t miss our top story, as the news of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos purchasing the Washington Post for $250 million was all over the media. It is important to note this is a personal buy, as the Washington Post will be a part of Bezos’s personal portfolio unaffiliated with Amazon.com. The large reaction to the story stems both from the possible creation of a new media tycoon as well as the history of the Washington Post, a family-controlled newspaper with a storied history of investigative journalism, most notably the Watergate scandal. While Bezos has said he will take a hands-off approach in the day-to-day operations, tax incentives and write-offs could force him to take more direct control. With Rex Sox owner John Henry buying the Boston Globe, you might be thinking of buying your own paper; however, The New York Times wants you to know they are not for sale. And from the tales of “Be Careful What You Read,” Chinese government-run news agency Xinhua claimed Bezos purchased the Washington Post by accident while browsing the web, a ‘story’ appearing in The New Yorker’s satirical Borowitz Report.

2) Next, our report from the front lines in the never-ending war between Time Warner and CBS over retransmission fees leading to Time Warner’s decision to blackout CBS in New York, L.A. and Dallas which could extend into September. TWC threw a PR strike, claiming they offered a new a la carte option for customers wishing to get CBS, an offer CBS CEO Leslie Moonves called a “public relations gesture,” a “well-wrought distraction,” and finally, a “sham.”  Another TWC letter raises issues with what it calls CBS’s policy of “coercive bundling” with premium channel Showtime, as well as blacking out access to CBS.com from TWC internet users. The casualties of the blackout for CBS, according to analysts, could range around a loss of $400,000 per day, not bad enough for investors to run away. TWC, on the other hand, is feeling the hurt in the PR war, as their perception score on BrandIndex fell after initiating the blackout. But what about us, the people and our beloved CBS shows, the collateral damage? Well, a class action suit has been filed by TWC customers in Southern California who are seeking recovery of fees paid for missing Big Brother, Dexter, Ray Donovan, and the PGA Championship. But other would-be victims rise above in times of media strife, as piracy of Under the Dome has seen an increase since the blackout. KEEP CALM AND PIRATE SHOWS. (NOTE: The writer of this post and the folks at Antenna do not condone piracy. This is a joke in the vein of the above wartime metaphor.)

3) Turning to CBS predecessor Viacom, showing that cooperation can be done as they have struck a new tentative deal with Sony for an Internet-TV service. The deal would allow content on an in-development Sony service that streams live television, which could launch as soon as the end of the year. The deal would be a boon for Sony, who is launching their new gaming system, the PlayStation 4, this holiday season in direct competition with Microsoft’s XBox One, with its own slew of television-related content. Analysts are seeing this as a possible start to a new era in competition for cable and satellite providers, as consumers are given another option for content, but this time with access to it live.

4) In international news China will resume payments to U.S. film studios from Chinese box office revenues after a dispute over a WTO-violating tax hike. MPAA chairman/CEO Christopher Dodd made the announcement, signaling the end to the dispute as well as the beginning of payments owed by the Chinese government for over a year. So while China is paying U.S. movie studios, there is no word on when the U.S. will start paying China back for that $1 trillion or so from our debt…

5) Speaking of U.S. politics, GOP chair Reince Priebus threatened to deny 2016 debates to both NBC and CNN after it was announced both networks were planning to air programs (a miniseries and documentary, respectively) about Hillary Clinton, he stated in letters sent to both Robert Greenblatt and Jeff Zucker (and reposted to the GOP website). After neither channel budged, the GOP officially voted to ban 2016 primary debates from NBC and CNN, later releasing the text of the resolution. In a related story, it is currently the year 2013.

A shameless reference to my South Carolina Gamecocks

6) After the NCAA dropped its licensing deal with EA Sports over inclusion in its yearly college football video game, three of the biggest conferences in college sports (SEC, Big Ten, and Pac-12) have announced plans to do the same. Each school, conference, and of course the NCAA itself make personal deals for licensing of team logos, names, and other trademarked material, so although each can make their own decision, many are following the NCAA’s and conferences’ lead. The moves not to license come as the NCAA and individual schools face mounting litigation from former and current student-athletes over the use of likenesses without compensation, a cost that seems to outweigh the income from licensing.

7) Another quick story from the world of video games, as American Express and popular online game League of Legends  have announced a partnership that will see the release of prepaid credit cards that not only feature imagery and characters from the game, but allow a user to gain in-game currency (called Riot Points) by activating and loading money onto their card, essentially encouraging use of the cards to better one’s abilities within the game.

8) A new research report has found an increase in the rate of cord-cutting, noting the “numbers aren’t huge, but they are statistically significant.” Cable operators Comcast and Time Warner have been hit hardest by deserters as pay-TV subscribers have been shrinking overall. Recent financial results from Canada show the trend happening ‘up North,’ as well.

9) Following in the footsteps of After Earth and White House Down, Jerry Bruckheimer’s The Lone Ranger will join the list of bombs of 2013’s summer as Disney is expected to lose up to $190 million on the blockbuster, despite coming out ahead of predictions in overall earnings for the quarter. What makes this news particularly interesting is that stars Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer, as well as Bruckheimer have blamed critics for the film’s failure, implicitly making the bold claim that people actually listen to critics, despite Grown Ups 2′s financial success/critical panning.

10) StePhest Colbchella, the annual music celebration on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report hit a snag when scheduled performers Daft Punk cancelled only a day before their scheduled appearance due to a contractual exclusivity agreement with fellow-Viacom channel MTV to (secretly!) appear on the Video Music Awards next week. While some questioned whether this was planned all along, Colbert addressed the controversy with notable aplomb.

11) Finally, a silly story with a headline so perfectly descriptive, I will let it speak for itself: U.S. Battling Dictator’s Son for Michael Jackson’s Glove.

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.

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?