English Entertainment
Fashion TV to launch mobile network with SmartVideo
MUMBAI: Fashion TV will stream fashion, style and beauty programming vial cellular smartphones to SmartVideo subscribers worldwide. This marriage of high tech and high style was announced by FTV president and CEO Michel Adam Lisowski and SmartVideo president and CEO Richard E. Bennett, Jr.
Georgia-based SmartVideo Technologies provides of turnkey digital media solutions that allows for the management and distribution of live, on-demand, or the downloaded and play of high-quality video to mobile devices.
Some 50 million mobile phone subscribers, and millions more PDA subscribers, will now have access to the programming airing on cable systems, spanning designer shows and catwalk events around the fashion world, informs an official release.
SmartVideo delivers state-of-the-art, high-quality live television at an average of 15 frames per second, even to low-bandwidth devices operating on today’s existing 2.5g cellular networks. The deal with Fashion TV is the latest content agreement announced by SmartVideo, joining ABC News, ABC NewsNow, NBC Universal (CNBC, MSNBC and NBC Mobile), The Weather Channel, IFILM and DIC Kid’s Network, the release adds.
English Entertainment
Ellison takes his Paramount-Warner Bros case straight to theater owners
The Skydance chief goes to CinemaCon with promises and a skeptical crowd waiting
CALIFORNIA: David Ellison strode into a room packed with thousands of cinema owners and executives at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Thursday and did something rather bold: he looked them in the eye and asked them to trust him.
The chief executive of Paramount Skydance vowed that his company would release a minimum of 30 films a year if regulators greenlight its proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, a deal that has made theater owners deeply, and loudly, nervous.
“I wanted to look every single one of you in the eye and give you my word,” Ellison told the crowd. “Once we combine with Warner Bros, we are going to make a minimum of 30 films annually across both studios.”
It was a confident pitch. Whether it landed is another matter. Cinema operators have already called on regulators to block the deal, and scepticism in the room was hardly concealed.
Ellison pushed back by pointing to recent form. Paramount, born from the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media last August, plans to release 15 films this year, nearly double the eight it put out in 2025. Progress, he argued, was already underway.
He also threw theater owners a bone they have long been chasing: all films, he pledged, would run exclusively in cinemas for a minimum of 45 days, drawing applause from a crowd that has spent years fighting for exactly that commitment across the industry.
“People can speculate all they want,” Ellison said, “but I am standing here today telling you personally that you can count on our complete commitment. And we’ll show you we mean it.”
Fine words. The regulators, however, will have the last one.
