Entertainment

"Avatar" may be the box office champ in this or any other galaxy, and the first weekend of ticket sales for "Alice in Wonderland" has certainly put a Cheshire Cat smile on the faces of Walt Disney studio executives. However, all that monetary activity stems from watching those two movies in the plus...

Google and Dish Network reportedly are testing a service that allows television users to search for television programming and Web content from set-top boxes. Google software installed in the boxes allows users to create a personalized programming lineup, anonymous sources told The Wall Street Journ...

TiVo stock skyrocketed Thursday following news that it had won its long-running court case against sister companies Dish Network and EchoStar. Specifically, a federal appeals court affirmed a previous contempt finding against Dish and EchoStar for violating a court-ordered permanent injunction to st...

RealNetworks has ended its legal battle with Hollywood over its RealDVD software. The Motion Picture Association of America and Viacom filed suit against RealNetworks in 2008, alleging that RealDVD infringed on content producers' copyrights. RealDVD allowed users to save copies of DVDs to their comp...

Lines are being drawn in the fight over control of wireless spectrum space. On one side is the wireless industry, which is "facing a looming spectrum crunch," said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. "Without sufficient spectrum, we will starve mobile broadband of the nourishment it needs to thrive as ...

With its purchase of Vudu, an online service that delivers video to Internet-ready TVs and Blu-ray disc players, Walmart is hoping its sequel turns out better than its previous attempts to enter the online movie distribution business. The deal will put Walmart back in competion with the likes of Net...

Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota woman who was twice found liable for copyright infringement for sharing two dozen songs using an online file-sharing application, has turned down an offer to settle her $54,000 penalty for less than half that amount. The Recording Industry Association of America g...

The Department of Justice has cleared the path for Live Nation and Ticketmaster to merge -- but with several conditions attached, including significant support to companies that will be formed to provide competition. The two firms, which announced the possibility of a merger a year ago, have agreed ...

The movie industry loves a gala premiere, with red carpets, paparazzi and Klieg lights sweeping a glittering marquee. YouTube's announcement this week of its new movie rental strategy is about as far away from that scenario as you can get. Instead of the commercial first-run features that are popula...

In The Rise of the Creative Class, author Richard Florida describes his theories on how creative communities grow around two groups of people: 1) artists, media workers, and other classically bohemian sorts; and 2) university professors, service providers, and other highly educated professionals. O...

Sometime within the next two years, you'll feel like ducking for cover the next time the Discovery Channel's "Mythbusters" team blows something to smithereens. Yet you'll be in the comfort of your living room, wearing oversize glasses while watching a new 3-D television channel whose very existence ...

2009 may have been a year of recession, but don't tell that to the blue-skinned aliens of "Avatar," the hormonal teen wizards in the new "Harry Potter" film or the needy talking dogs of "Up." Their adventures in special 3-D theater screenings helped push U.S. box office receipts past home DVD sales ...

The proposed $30 billion Comcast-NBC Universal deal has entered the labyrinthine process of winning Congressional approval from the antitrust gurus and the Federal Communications Commission. Small cable operators, which apparently still exist, fear that they will be driven out of business by the ...

Vevo, an online music video site seeded with close to 15,000 videos from 5,000 artists, has launched. Unlike other online video sites -- Joost, for example -- Vevo is launching with impressive backers: Google and Universal Music Group, its original founders; Sony Music Entertainment, which joined la...

It's official: Comcast has engineered what appears to be the biggest media joint venture of the year -- a multibillion-dollar merger that will combine General Electric's NBC Universal with Comcast's own cable networks. Once complete, Comcast will take majority ownership of NBC, ending GE's 20 year c...