Web Eats Hollywood's Hedge Against Recession

Retailers and cable providers going after its online streaming business

(NEWSER) - Netflix is taking over Hollywood. What started as a DVD-by-mail rental service 10 years ago has become an all-you-can-watch, instant-stream entertainment cornucopia, providing more than 20 million subscribers with more than 20,000 movie and TV titles, all at the push of a button. DVD sales are slackening. Less TV is being watched. Studios are losing money. But retailers like Amazon and Wal-Mart are hoping to break up a Netflix nation, reports the Los Angeles Times . More»

Netflix takes leading role in company's imminent bankruptcy

(NEWSER) - With Blockbuster, once the dominant US video-rental chain, on the verge of bankruptcy, Daniel Indiviglio takes a look at three crucial factors in the demise of an outfit whose “fate was mostly sealed by its failure to embrace technology quickly enough.”

• Netflix: “Its business model merged technology, convenience and good customer service,” Indiviglio writes for the Atlantic—and it doesn’t have the overhead costs of ubiquitous stores, like Blockbuster.

New studio heads place bets on 'branded entertainment'

(NEWSER) - In previous downturns, the corporate owners of America's movie studios would cut Hollywood some slack. Not anymore: these days, the corporate suites of LA look like the aftermath of a slasher flick, with old hands kicked out at Disney, Universal, MGM, and Paramount. With DVD sales down 25% and easy financing a thing of the past, "there's been more change in the last 18 months than in the preceding 18 years," one exec tells the Los Angeles Times. More»

Credit crunch forces director into personal bailout for studio

(NEWSER) - Perhaps for the first time, Steven Spielberg is using personal funds to pay half of a $26.5 million bill his company, DreamWorks, owes ex-partner Paramount so it can keep 17 film projects under its wing. Due to cash shortages, the studio has already lost the rights to as many projects that the divorced companies had initially agreed to share, Variety reports. More»

Both Battleground and Lilyhammer get mixed reviews, as streaming services branch out

(NEWSER) - Online streaming sites Hulu and Netflix both launched original series this week, as both services take baby steps toward competing with regular television, reports Gigaom . A look at each:

• Hulu's Battleground is the more conventional of the two, a 13-episode comedy about a Senate campaign in Wisconsin that started today, with a new 22-minute episode airing each Tuesday. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has solid praise for Battleground, saying it is "a smart, well-written comedy series you might find on a premium cable network." The AP is less kind, however, calling it "a light, watered-down knockoff of The Office," while the New York Daily News comes down somewhere in-between.