IFC Entertainment has announced that it will be releasing the Che Guevara biopic, Che in theaters beginning early January, then on VOD (video on demand) a few days later, and then on DVD within a short period after that, exclusively at Blockbuster.
The indie supplier notes that Che will be its “highest-profile day-and-date release yet,” and they wanted to seek the widest possible audience.
The movie is four hours long and will play in theaters with an intermission break at 2 hours.
“This is definitely our biggest one, with the biggest cast and director. This is a $65 million production,” added Ryan Werner, VP of marketing at IFC. “And because of the fact that the movie is so long, we wanted to give people a variety of ways to see it.”
Result for: few days
Chinese Internet censorship is hardly something new, but lately it seems the country has targeted BitTorrent sites. Last week, users in China reported that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, Pirate Bay and isoHunt were redirecting to Chinese search site Baidu.com. China recently started to ban 10 video sharing sites for “regulations violations” and the eDonkey indexing site VeryCD received warnings shortly before being re-directed to Baidu.com.
The domain hijacks continued for a few days until they were seemingly lifted. Official explanation for the outage is a “DNS error”, yet that is very improbable as it seemed to affect the P2P sites exclusively which are hosted all across the world. DNS errors wouldn’t explain why they were all linked to another (the same) site either.
Of course, its far more likely that the block was intentional. The only question is whether it was because of piracy or because of some content that could be gotten from any of the sites was specifically targeted by the government.
Result for: few days
MySpace has announced that over 1 billion songs have been streamed so far through their newly launched MySpace Music service.
“We can confirm that we hit a milestone of one billion music streams only a few days after launching the new product,” the company said in a statement. “More importantly, we are still compiling our metrics on engagement and unique users which will tell a much richer story on how positively the community is responding to the new music experience. We’re excited to share more information and data as soon as it’s available.”
MySpace Music officially launched on September 25th, and includes the full catalogs of the Big 4 labels as well as many indie labels.
Although comparing the two is a far stretch (one is free, one is not), it is important to note that the iTunes store hit its five billionth song downloaded after five years in business whereas MySpace music hit 1 billion in a week.
