In the post "Complicated entertainment laws" I wrote about how Warner Brother's TheWB.com wouldn't allow users outside of the U.S to enter the site and how they instead displayed a message telling users to write their governments to "fight this injustice". It seems as the complaint got to Warner since the message now only says: The WB can only be viewed in the United States. Great! Thanks Warner for listening and acting on this little thing, shall we now proceed with the bigger issues? Read More

TheWB.com update

Newteevee and the Korean Times are reporting that Sony Pictures has left South Korea because of "sluggish sales and rampant piracy". Sony wasn't first to abandon the Korean market though – appearantly Paramount, Universal, Buena Vista and 20th Century Fox have all left which means no big Hollywood studio is operating in the country. This is important news and means the DVD Industry is actually dead in South Korea - and the death is spreading! South Korea's DVD sales has rapidly been falling in the recent years ($673 million in 2002 vs. ...Read More

The death of the DVD?

My first entry on Digital Renaissance will unfortunately be a post that resembles a rant – but comes with a FREE suggestion of how to make the digital world a better place. Warner Brothers just relaunched it's television website TheWB.com with ad-supported streaming of popular tv shows. While the service has some new interesting features and a nice rollout of shows (Friends, The OC, Veronica Mars, Smallville etc.) it shows a digital territorial gap between the US and the rest of the world. See below. This is what it looks like if ...Read More

Complicated entertainment laws?

Financial Times, The Guardian and Sydsvenskan are reporting that a study by MCPS-PRS Alliance, a British collecting society, and Big Champagne, an online media measurement company, shows that more people downloaded the Radiohead In Rainbows album in illegal ways than on the bands own website. This despite that the album originally was free to download on the latter. Illegal exceeded legal – in spite of free. There is two main reasons for this. An awful lot more people are hanging around at The Pirate Bay than on artist sites. Not strange ...Read More

Free isn’t enough

We've urged for collected statistics on what is being listened to on the web. BBC has also seen this need and recently launched their Sound Index. "Every six hours the Sound Index crawls some of the biggest music sites on the internet - Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube - to find out what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It then counts and analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web. The ...Read More

Sound Index - an important step to an internet chart