Hard to believe that 10 years or so ago, Marvel was a mess. Spider-Man was caught in a web of lawsuits, and seemed destined for the scrap heap. Stan Lee, his inventor, was frustrated and isolated. Marvel’s few ventures onto the movie screen were less than successful.

Now Disney’s willing to pay $4 billion for the assets — “a full price but a fair price”, according to CEO Bob Iger.

Now, the question is whether Disney knows how to manage its acquisition. A big measure will be how much independence it gives Marvel. The charm of its characters has always been their idiosyncracies. When you think of Disney’s home-grown characters in recent years, the first word that comes to mind is “bland”.

Posted under Michael's Blog

A few days  ago, I met a  waitress at  a  Thai restaurant who exemplifies everything that’s right about China’s economy and wrong  about ours.

I’m visiting my  brother in Columbus, Ohio,  and she’s an ethnic Chinese from Indonesia who recently graduated from Ohio State University with a degree in industrial engineering. She’s been looking for a job since last  March with no success.  She’ll  go anywhere in the  country. Nada. Or, as they say in Mandarin, mei-you sheme.

Building a bridge in China

So guess where she’s going? Shanghai. She’ll go to a Chinese language institute to bone up on her language for a few months, then look for a job there. She’ll be snapped up instantly. Probably she’ll end up helping design and manufacture products sold to U.S. consumers. Commissioned by hollowed out giants like Target or Wal-Mart.

Ironically, she’s desperate to stay in the U.S., but can’t stand working at a restaurant any more to survive.

This comes as I read a sobering story about China in today’s New York Times. The lede says it all:

“In past global slowdowns, the United States invariably led the way out, followed by Europe and the rest of the world. But for the first time, the catalyst is coming from China and the rest of Asia, where resurgent economies are helping the still-shaky West recover from the deepest recession since World War II.”

Anyone know of any good jobs for a great industrial engineer? I’m serious.

Posted under Michael's Blog, iHollywood China

  Avatar could be a bellwether of 3D’s near-term prospects in the U.S. Imax is slated to show 16 minutes of James Cameron’s first feature film in years on Aug. 21 in more than 100 movie theaters, and Fox will be launching the trailer in 3D around the country. Expect a mass frenzy to get the Imax tickets, which will be on sale at the Avatar website starting noon Monday on a first-come, first-served basis.

Posted under Michael's Blog

For  an example of how  a national news operation  might  retool itself  in the digital age,  take a  look  at how NBC is running  its 10 owned-and-operated affiliates. Through a blend of professional  reporters  and repurposed national  material, its relaunched local web operations  have grown their audiences four-fold in ten months to  20 million unique visitors Yelp, according to Forbes.  That means it reaches almost as many people as Yelp,  which  has been around  for five  years.

News organizations have  a built-in  advantage  over places like Yelp or Craig’s List: people  will  come around even if they don’t want to buy  or  sell  something.  Imagine what happens when you combine  the power of both.

Posted under Michael's Blog

There are two ways to view the WTO’s ruling today that China is violating free trade rules by restricting imports of books, newspapers and movies. One is a slap at China for unfair trade practices. The other is an opportunity to do deals with China.

The Chinese government has a strong incentive to find ways to mollify international sentiment on its restrictive import policies and its laxity toward pirates . It would prefer to do so through joint ventures, rather than straight-out imports. Nationalistic, yes. But it’s the reality on the ground right now. If you’re willing to cede a degree of control, you’ll get a lot farther faster than if you insist on going it on your own, selling directly to the Chinese public.

This September, I’m traveling to Shenyang, a North-Eastern Chinese city, to speak at an international multimedia conference. The city wants to create a media park, and is prepared (along with Beijing) to fund it. We’ll be joined by Chinese venture capitalists seeking to invest in Western digital media startups.

I’m not saying the U.S. and Western countries shouldn’t be pushing to open up the Chinese media market as quickly as possible. But it seems to me there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit they can grab along the way, too.

Posted under Michael's Blog

Adult actress Savannah Stern eats crow, according to L.A. Times

The L.A. Times’ expose (sorry) of porn’s woes capsulizes the dilemma the Internet poses for all content: consumers are willing to settle for less-than-stellar products on the Internet rather than shell out money for higher production values in DVDs, CDs, etc.  The availability of free porn on sites like YouPorn, PornHub and RedTube is apparently eating deeply into the porn industry’s profits, providing a glimpse of the mainstream DVD market’s future. “Today, instead of leading the way up (in technology adoption), porn appears to be leading the way down,” the L.A. Times’ Ben Fritz writes.

The irony, of course, is that the L.A. Times is itself getting killed by free content on the Internet. Why subscribe when you can get everything you want from the paper for free on the Internet? And no one can pretend that all those banner ads on the Internet pay more than a fraction of what the paper’s display ads pay.

But porn may still have some upside lessons for media companies. Free porn video sites get huge traffic, and the marketing manager for PornoTube told the L.A. Times the site’s real value was in driving customers to paid video-on-demand. No reason why the L.A. Times can’t put up a story on porn, but charge for access to videos of their reporters interviewing porn stars, research reports on the DVD business or discounted movie tickets.  See, you can still learn something from porn.

Posted under Michael's Blog, Video

Thanks to the 300+ people who packed the seventh annual Digital Media Summit at UCLA on July 29th!

Posted under Michael's Blog

Jeffrey Katzenberg is prepared for 3D to utterly change the experience of      watching television and movies — and a lot sooner than you may think.

The DreamWorks’ chief told attendees at Fortune’s Brainstorm conference in Pasadena, Calif., today that companies like LG and Panasonic are ready to ship “millions of monitors” that show 3D video. Such TVs should show up in living rooms early next year. After that will come 3D screens that don’t require glasses.

“It’s like the move from black and white to color,” he said. “It will move to every device we have. Hollywood will be dramatically changed by this.”

Read my full story at NewTeeVee.com

Posted under Michael's Blog

Nothing irks me more than to see a Time Warner pitchman come on my TV to talk about all the money they’re “saving” me over satellite. Please. I’m currently spending more than $150 a month on my cable service, and that doesn’t count the $120 a month I pay for business class Internet service from Warner Cable.

The New York Times described my dilemma exactly when  it interviewed a 27-year-old actor who’s using a new service called Boxee that allows users to bypass the cable company and get the channels they want through a direct Internet connection to their TV. “Most people my age would like to just pay for the channels they want, but cable refuses to give us that option,” he told the reporter.

Not just his age. Us 49-year-olds balk just as much.

Once you unchain TV shows from the cable gatekeeper, you’re opening Pandora’s box — just as you are when you allow studios to sell directly to cell phone users and bypass the carriers. Don’t be surprised if cable companies try to sue Boxee and others like them out of existence to maintain their lucrative oligopoly.

But in the long run, hopefully those efforts will fall short. Content, as they say, wants to be free. And as somebody who pays through the nose for a product controlled by those cable and satellite oligopolies, it can’t come a moment too soon.

Posted under Michael's Blog

Usually, you meet Hollywood types on every flight to Las Vegas during CES — the executives shopping “content” for new devices, or the looky-loos from production. This year, many of those people didn’t go, if my admittedly unscientific conversations in the last few days are an indication. “Unless there is a very specific reason to go, travel has been chopped,” one talent agency exec told me.  Certainly that’s true for TV executives,  who have seen budgets slashed 5% to 10% across the board as advertising has plummeted. Overall, attendance is expected to drop at least 22% from last year’s 141,000.

Posted under Michael's Blog