Pop Culture News and Notes

Elton John is celebrating his 60^th birthday (which is on March 25^th) by playing a record-extending 60^th show at New York's storied Madison Square Garden. Sir Elton is also joining the digital age by finally allowing his catalog of 30+ albums available for legal download for the first time. The downloads…ranging from his 1969 debut record Empty Sky to Rocket Man, a new 17-track hits compilation…will be exclusively available on iTunes for a month and then they will be available on the other major services.

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NBC Universal and News Corp. (the parent company of Fox TV) have joined forces to set up a network for sharing video clips, TV shows, and movies online as a direct assault on the growing prominence of Google’s YouTube. The network will utilize the already extant sites of partners Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft’s MSN as well as News Corp.’s MySpace to deliver their offerings (which will include TV shows such as Heroes, House, and 24 owned by the two principals.) The network is supposed to be up and running sometime this summer.

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Ever wanted to visit the sets of hit TV shows like Desperate Housewives, 24, House, or All My Children? Or maybe you’ve thought about having a meal with someone like Robin Williams, Hank Aaron, Richard Gere, or Alan Alda. Perhaps you’re interested in VIP seating at the Police reunion show in Madison Square Garden or attending a Chicago Bears game with 50-yard line seats and Hall of Famer Gayle Sayers as your host or being a VIP guest at Bette Midler’s annual “Hulaween” Gala. Maybe you’d like to play golf with Ethel Kennedy or go falconing (yes, falconing) with Robert Kennedy, Jr. Or maybe you’d like to have your iPod programmed by Quincy Jones.

All of these are among the 115 experiences (you can hang out with Martha Stewart!) and items (a Tina Turner dress or a shirt signed by Robert Redford) up for bid at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Auction running between now and April 6^th on the Charitybuzz site.

You will, of course, need deep pockets: as of this writing, the least expensive thing up for bid is a CD signed by the Indigo Girls ($75…plus $15 shipping and handling); breakfast or tea with former Federal Reserve honcho Alan Greenspan and his wife NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell, on the other hand, is going for a whopping $45,000 as this hits the blog.

Pop Culture News and Notes

The force is apparently with the Post Office as they are about to debut mailboxes (400 of them altogether) redesigned to look like feisty droid R2-D2 as part of a promotion for a new Star Wars stamp. The official announcement of the stamp is scheduled for March 28^th. (I will refrain from any jokes about mail put in these boxes ending up in a galaxy far, far away from where it was supposed to be delivered…)

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Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett is apparently signing on to join Harrison Ford in the fourth Indiana Jones movie. The film, which will be directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by George Lucas, is scheduled to be released on May 22, 2008.

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And this just in: Despite any Wikipedia articles to the contrary, actor/comedian Sinbad is still not dead.

Disney to Offer 4 ABC shows free on the Internet

Disney has announced that they will be offering episodes of four of their ABC shows free on the internet in an experimental 2-month trial program during May and June. The trial will include episodes of the shows Lost, Desperate Housewives, and Commander-in-Chief (all available starting the day after they are broadcast on the network) as well as the entire current season of Alias.

Viewers will be able to pause and rewind the shows and to skip between “chapters” but they won’t be able to skip ads (Universal Pictures, Proctor & Gamble, Ford and AT&T are among the advertisers signed up for the trial) due to technical embedding (watching commercials is the trade-off for free downloads it seems.)

Movie Downloads

Five Hollywood studios are joining the digital revolution as they start selling digital downloads of movies for the first time. Hits like King Kong and Brokeback Mountain are among the titles that are available to be bought and downloaded to computers.

Movielink…a site co-owned by Sony, Warner Brothers, MGM, Universal, and 20^th Century Fox…will make some releases available at the same time the movies go on sale on DVD and others will be available for download sale within 45 days of DVD release. (FYI: the Movielink site does not support the Firefox or Netscape browsers.)

Recent releases will be sold for $20-$30 and older movies will be available for download for $10-$20. (These prices seem a bit high given discounts available for DVDs at places like Amazon.com but perhaps a lot of people will be willing to pay those prices in order to have immediate access to movies. We shall see.)

Customers will not be able to burn the movies onto discs to be played on DVDs but they will be able to be stored on computers indefinitely. The movies will also be able to be transferred to two other computers. (Transfers of movies to handheld devices are not available yet but that capability is in the offing.)

Sony and Lionsgate will also be selling movie downloads through another site, CinemaNow (which appears to accessible to Firefox and Netscape as well as Internet Explorer.)

Of the major studios only Disney is shying away from digital downloads of their films for the time being. This is likely to change though.

Personally I’m not that excited about watching movies on my computer but I have to give the major studios credit for, however reluctantly, acknowledging that the ways movies are being viewed, rented, and purchased are indeed changing.