A conference Tuesday on the future of television turned up differing opinions about whether new-media options were hurting or helping TV ratings.
Several members of TV-heavy traditional media companies, including CBS Corp. and NBC Universal, said full-length Web videos on sites like Hulu and the broadcast networks’ own sites were starting to see some real traction [...]

ON Networks(R) (ON) today announced the release of the first episode of Smart Girls at the Party - the original digital TV series that aims to help young girls find confidence in their own aspirations and talents. The series was created by and stars actor/writer Amy Poehler and friend Meredith Walker, former senior producer for [...]

Hollywood is challenging the hegemony of Apple in digital distribution.
A consortium of major studios — excluding key Apple ally Walt Disney Co. — is teaming up with leading retailers and consumer-electronics firms to essentially transform the paid download into an experience akin to buying a DVD. The goal is letting video purchased at any outlet be played on any device worldwide.
Known [...]

Comcast Corp. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. said Tuesday they are teaming up to introduce a video-on-demand channel featuring action movies and TV shows.
Comcast, the country’s largest cable operator, already has a hit with another genre-specific VOD channel and Web site, FEARnet, which features horror movies and thrillers, in collaboration with Lionsgate and Sony Pictures Television. FEARnet [...]

Just what the television industry needs, increased competition from those wacky YouTube videos that 68 million people watch every month.

Only now, it will be easier than ever to view them on television screens.
Beginning Thursday, TiVo will offer thousands of its subscribers the ability to stream YouTube videos onto their television sets through their broadband-enabled TiVo [...]

Amazon will launch a new streaming video service to select customers on Thursday called Amazon Video on Demand. The service is different from its year-and-a-half old Unbox download service, which offers downloads of movies and TV to rent and buy, but only works on Windows machines.

Amazon has clearly been rethinking the Unbox business lately, [...]

Google Inc. said Wednesday that it will partner with filmmaker Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. to share revenue from ads that Google places on YouTube clips from the studio’s movies.
The deal will put advertising on clips uploaded by users and by the studio itself from Lions Gate movies such as the “Saw” horror series and “Dirty [...]

If you’re anything like me and my friends—and I hope for your sake, that you are not—it can take hours to decide precisely which movie you want to go to. And that’s when you have a resource as handy as an iPhone, and all its attendant applications for checking out movie showtimes.

 
For one, there’s Jeff [...]

A man opens a “spiritual business” where people call to get issues off their chests.
A successful life coach who preaches selfishness and greed ruins the lives of those around him.
And a divorced woman gives questionable advice on her “chocolate powered relationship recovery” talk show.
These scripted shows are among the 40 short Web films, written and [...]

A major Hollywood studio and online search engine Google Inc on unveiled separate moves on Monday to put movie and TV-like content on the Web, highlighting the way in which both see the Internet as critical to reaching customers.
 
Sony Pictures Entertainment, a unit of Sony Corp, said it plans to make the Will Smith action [...]