by James T. Areddy and Ellen Zhu, Reporters, The Wall Street Journal
Walt Disney won’t make Shanghai the happiest place in the world.
That’s the early reaction from a surprising number of netizens, or Chinese Internet users, to confirmation early Wednesday that plans for Shanghai Disneyland have the green light to proceed. Of the posts streaming into tianya.cn, a major portal, early Wednesday, the negative views were solidly outweighing positive views.
Via Copycense, we learn that the students who formed the Disney Movie Appreciation Club at Washington University in St. Louis recently had to shut down the club due to threats of IP infringement, because the students were gathering together to watch the legally obtained movies, without getting a proper license for showing it to a larger group of people (rather than just a few people).
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
Last November, the Wall Street Journal ran a Heard on the Street column that proposed that Disney ought to buy Electronic Arts. The following month, they revisited the idea.
This morning, Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Tony Wible dusted off the concept in a report in which he launched coverage of Disney with a Buy rating. The logic isn’t that hard to figure out.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
Will Comcast use its rising cash pile to make a large acquisition in the content business?
Reuters raised that question in a lengthy news analysis yesterday which wondered if the company is plotting a giant deal along the lines of its failed $54 billion bid for Disney in 2004.
The U.S. Supreme Court today cleared the way for Cablevision to offer a network DVR service, allowing consumers to record copies of television programming “in the cloud,” rather than on set-top boxes. Without comment, the court refused to review a Court of Appeals ruling that rejected claims by film studios and television networks that the network DVR approach would infringe copyrights.
High-end filmmakers aren’t just making movies these days. They’re building virtual worlds before shooting a single frame of film, using digital tools that blur the lines between animation and live-action, virtual sets and physical soundstage, photorealistic cartoon characters and motion-captured human beings.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
One of the remarkable things about Pixar is that the Disney unit has never produced a flop.
It’s an amazing list: Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille and Wall-E.
Nine movies, nine success stories.
Can they make it 10 for 10?
by Ronald Grove, Los Angeles Bureau Manager, BusinessWeek
It’s shaping up to be the hottest race on the Web. Much as they do on TV, Disney and Viacom’s Nickelodeon are duking it out online. And if the most recent numbers from Web-traffic researcher comScore are any indication, Disney is pulling into the lead.
by Keith Rabois, Vice President of Strategy & Business Development, Slide
If you read this blog, you might think that Kara Swisher isn’t a big fan of fun. Or at least of silly, fun apps like SuperPoke! and what we call “social entertainment.” Call me silly, but I’d take entertainment over utility any time, and you know what? I bet you would too.
In Pixar Films’ upcoming animation epic, “Wall-E,” the title character is a cute but clunky robot whose centuries of solitude on an abandoned Earth is broken by the arrival of a svelte, futuristic robot named Eve–who is so white, gleaming and well, pod-like, that she looks like she was born in Apple’s design room. It [...]
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