Fascinating analysis. Four key points have been cherry-picked by me, but you’ll want to read the whole thing.

THR:

1. “We believe 2012 will be a watershed year for the media industry and serve as a historic inflection point for traditional TV consumption,” Greenfield wrote. “While TV viewing has consistently risen as choice (channels) and access (VCR/DVR) expanded, we believe consumers have reached a breaking point. There are simply not enough hours in the day for online activities to be purely incremental.” …

2. Movie-going is also “less and less compelling,” meaning that attendance will remain in secular decline, he argued. “3D, IMAX, XD – are they really worth the extra money? Maybe for a one or two movies a year, but Hollywood is increasingly looking to premium exhibition formats as the solution to falling top-line revenues (as home entertainment profits drop),” he wrote. “Unfortunately, bad movies at premium prices are still bad movies and end up alienating your best customers.” …

3. Digital video platforms could benefit though as Greenfield predicts that Google’s YouTube will increases its video spending 10-fold and enable some subscription offerings, while Amazon.com will launch a stand-alone subscription video streaming service, and Facebook will become a video platform. …

4. Netflix will redefine its image with original programming successes. “We expect Netflix’s push into original programming to be a positive surprise for investors in 2012 and expect it to create a new form of “buzz” around the Netflix brand that has been missing since the serious missteps of the third quarter 2011,” Greenfield predicted.

Numbers 3 and 4 are, I think, going to change everything. Not just the way we watch television and program our own viewing experiences, but with digital delivery removing the distribution bottleneck currently controlled by a very few, this will also be good for the culture as a whole.

Because those very few currently in control of distribution are hostile to the beliefs held by over 60% of the country, that has been the number one discouragement for those eager to to produce a different type of content.

No more.

This won’t happen tomorrow, but it will eventually.

With “Lilyhammer,” Netflix completely went around every known distribution method that’s been in place for almost a century. It is the camel nose in the tent.

We’re entering the second act of a slow-motion revolution that only started with the Internet. And the winners will be We The Customers.

The guardians of our culture matter less today than they did yesterday and will matter less tomorrow than they do today.

Good article from the “L.A. Times,” touching on how the Internet has forever altered television viewing habits and what this means for the business end of it:

Television production studio executives long have been wary of Hulu and other forms of Internet distribution, fearing they would lead to increased piracy and destroy lucrative secondary markets, including syndication and DVD sales. But video streaming services offered by Netflix, Hulu and Amazon.com are becoming an unexpected boon to the TV syndication market. By writing checks to license library content from networks, the Internet services are injecting new revenue into the TV business and breathing new life into middling shows.

“The introduction of the subscription video-on-demand platform has broadened the opportunities for exploitation of product in a very positive way for consumers and studios,” said Ken Werner, president of Warner Bros. domestic television distribution. “You do not need to accumulate 100 episodes of a series because 40 hours of programming is a lot, so many of these shows work perfectly well on these new services.”

Something the article does miss, though, is how television marathons and DVD have also altered our viewing habits. We like to gorge now, watch more than just a single episode at a time and lose ourselves in that world for hours. This is one reason serialized dramas such as “Mad Men,” “24,” “Breaking Bad,” and the like are such favorites. These shows are addictive — in the best way.

Yesterday, the wife and I watched 5 episodes in a row of “Sons of Anarchy,” and when a new DVD arrives via Blockbuster of “The Closer,” we usually knock out all four episodes in just a sitting or two.

The Internet is also going to be a new boon for older shows; I’m talking “Wagon Train” and “Father Knows Best”  — the kinds of shows studios probably don’t think are worth the investment of printing up on DVD. But today these older shows can be monetized via a streaming provider with almost no cost involved in making them accessible that way.

The real winner, of course, is the customer. The very narrow distribution filter controlled by a very few (most of them out-of-touch Hollywoodists) is going the way of the buggy whip. The choices we enjoy now will only multiply over time and the ability we now have to program and schedule our own “Must-See TV” is a splendid opportunity to wrestle away control of the culture from the left.

Now that parents enjoy almost unlimited choices, hopefully they will take advantage of that and introduce their children to the kind of television that fits their values instead of some network programmer desperate to brainwash through a personal agenda. Hopefully people will start to discover and rediscover just how good so many of these older shows were.

One of the greatest lies told both about old movies and television shows is that they’re “simple” and “antiquated” in their presentation of good and evil, when the truth is usually just the opposite.

Contrary to what the the left-wing guardians of the entertainment tell you, “black and white” doesn’t mean “dumb” or “simple.”

This isn’t even a partisan thing. If you want your children to grow up advocating for same-sex marriage, program “Friends” into your viewing habits. If you want your children to learn about chivalry, masculinity, and nobility, program “Gunsmoke.”

Right now, very few control the television culture our kids grow up on because very few own all the broadcast and cable networks, and for decades now, that’s all there has been to watch. A casualty of this is what it does to the attention span. After the pop-pop-pop of MTV and “The Simpsons,” it’s awfully difficult to sit the kid down to teach them the real pleasures of a “Rifleman” or the treasure chest of Turner Classic Movies.

In other words, the left not only controls our popular culture but their programming also rewires the brain in a way that ensures the kind of television that does fit our values feels slow and boring to our kids.

The Internet has changed all that. Now you can control the vertical and the horizontal, you can cancel your cable, you can wrest control away from today’s cultural guardians.

It’s a beautiful thing.

I first began reading Mark Steyn when he seemed to be writing mostly for Canadians. That, of course, was my mistake. He’d already captured the interest and admiration of the entire English-speaking “Lost”, which is most of us.

Despite his unmistakably British diction, Mark was born in Toronto. Despite his Anglican affiliations, his family is rife with Catholicism. As a Moriarty, I attribute most of his genius to his disinherited Catholicism.

His most formative education was in the United Kingdom at the King Edward’s School, Birmingham, England and according to his Wikipedia biography his professions seem to have gone from disc-jockey to musical theater critic for The Independent of London. That accounts for his impressive knowledge of the entire American Songbook, not to mention the theatrical panache he can summon up in an entertaining instant.

Despite the indelibly British cadences, he has a Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls bite to his television appearances.

Broadway off of Piccadilly Square!

After entertaining the folks at The Independent, he then moved to the UK’s magazine, The Spectator.

Now, of course, Mark Steyn is all over the English-speaking world and I assume his eternally provocative books have been translated into every European language there is. If not, it is their loss, despite the inevitably great losses in translation.

Mark Steyn is locked into my memory because of the laughter he inspired in me at some very unhappy times of mine as an American exile in Canada.

It was the gallows humor of a realist whose POV still carries the panache of a lone but fearless, Fourth Musketeer.

He’s an Anglo-Canadian-American combination of Mark Twain, James Boswell and, well, Mark Steyn, recording the seemingly inevitable disintegration of English-speaking individual freedom into an imperialistic, Obama Nation of Marxist cookie cutters.

He travels the world as if it were not only his backyard but his own private bookshelf. He can pull out any corner of the globe and bulls-eye its major problem in one sentence, i.e., “In Britain, everything is policed except crime.”

This, of course, in the wake of recent riots in the U.K.

Erasing the entire Atlantic ocean, he sums up an English-speaking humanity, “For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population”.  

For a law of life to take home with you: “Big Government means small citizens”.

“Thrusting home”, our Cyrano adds, “Nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.”

He can also be excruciatingly merciless with his puns: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.”

In short, “Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances but its human capital, too.”

Here is the article in its entirety.

We American exiles of the despairing class need a Mark Steyn the way America needs another Ronald Reagan. The styles of Steyn and Reagan would both appear to be entirely different but then one of Reagan’s greatest admirers was William Buckley. Three entirely different deliveries arriving at most of the same conclusions.

And the Progressives call Conservatism “provincial”.

I tend to believe, with increasingly Catholic faith, that the Progressive, bipartisan triumphs in the last twenty, New World Order years of Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama were God’s cunning plan to lead the Ivy League Know-It-Alls into the very bubble that is now being popped by Reality.

God wisely gave Mark Steyn the sharpest pin with the longest reach to help Reality do the job we’ve all been waiting for.

“And as I end the refrain, thrust home!”

To influence change we decided to not only play their game, but to play it better.

So we started our own site MovieCriticAssassins.com. We created our own pseudonymous Sensei White Lotus and Master Iron Fist. Through our anonymity we deprived anyone of using personal attacks, while also holding the ability to “tell like it is” in the industry we love so much.

Since that time we’ve developed a following through Sensei’s unique essays and box office predictions, as well as Master Iron Fist’s unfiltered commentary on the aforementioned biases (more often referred to as “verbal executions”). We aspire to be muckrakers and to offer sound, firm analysis while also joining in on Big Hollywood’s mission to provide accountability within the entertainment industry.

We are honored and thrilled to join this community at long last.

In helping us reach out to new friends and opportunity, we are indebted and forever thankful to Andrew Breitbart and John Nolte. It is our hope you enjoy Sensei’s essays and weekly predictions along with Iron Fist’s unwavering, well, let’s just call it “honesty.”

We also invite everyone to check out our site. We do not expect, however, for everyone to make it out alive.

Quit laughing.

In a recent Washington Post column, Kennicott takes issue with “a litany of shameful events and grievances” committed against homosexuals in the arts, from “the ‘super-macho’ ethos of the American abstract expressionists” to the recent removal of an explicit exhibit from the Smithsonian Museum. Basically, he believes that despite the disproportionate contributions of homosexuals to the arts world, the arts world has failed to honor them appropriately. And he believes that the only way to do this is to make sure that museums are upfront about (1) the sexual proclivities of artists and their subjects, and (2) the subjects’ role, if any, “the iconography of same-sex eroticism.”

For instance, since Saint Sebastian has been appropriated as a homosexual icon, museums are supposed to mention this wherever they display paintings of him. Never mind that he was not himself homosexual.

And if all this openness makes museums seem a little less “family friendly” to some, well, they just need to get with the times. “‘Family’ is now understood to include gay parents, married gay couples and people with gay children, and the absence of basic information about the role of same-sex desire in art history has become an overt sin of omission,” Kennicott explains. Because society is now more accepting of various forms of sexuality, clearly, kids need more sexual information shoved in their faces! (Since, you know, they’re not getting enough of it already from the culture around them.)

Whether or not this is actually good for the arts themselves, Kennicott doesn’t spend much time considering. He should. As Mark Steyn notes in his brilliant book Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, the modern theater’s relentless focus on homosexual issues has made the theater world more insular—and shrunk audiences.

Using the musical Rent as an example of this trend, Steyn writes:

Well, I was moved, but not because of the transvestite sculptor or the lesbian performance artist. In Puccini’s bohemia, the artiness is merely the specific characteristic of universal characters. . . . But there’s nothing mythic or emblematic or enlarging about the characters of Rent: La Boheme is about everyone, Rent is about its participants. I was moved by its inability to move us, by its inability to speak to the world beyond. . . .

A theatre that loses interest in all but a few select minorities is doomed.

And so is a museum.

***

Have you heard about “Poetry Night” at the White House?  I find it appalling and very inappropriate (yet not at all that surprising) that the Obamas have invited “Common”, a rapper who grew up in the pews of America-hating “Reverend” Wright’s church, who he describes as an “intelligent, strong individual…a great man…a conduit of love.”   He denigrates women with his misogynistic lyrics, promotes killing cops, and burning (President) Bush. Isn’t that special?  His lyrics have been praised by a Fox News reporter as being “very positive.”  Are you kidding me?

Hi Caliber

This is just another tactic this administration is using to convince young Americans that Barrack Obama is just that “cool” and that these are the kinds of artists your kids should be listening to.

Please.

In the New York Times Bestseller Obama Zombies:  How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation, author Jason Mattera describes how liberals successfully launched their highly successful technology-based campaign to take advantage of and brain-wash his generation into becoming “zombies” for Team Obama.  They used every facet of new media to reach our youth through their computers, iPods, and cell phones via new media venues and services like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and text messaging and “rocked the vote” in favor of “That One.”

Thankfully, we conservative keyboard warriors are fighting back with those very same tactics to reach our young voters using every weapon in our arsenal (e.g., conservative websites, blogs, video rants, music, books, artwork, and the list goes on).   In less than two years (since the 2008 elections), through the effective use of  new media, the TEA Party movement managed to rise up and put a major hurtin’ on the Democrats in the House and Senate in the mid-term elections.  It was interesting to note that younger voters seemed less than enthusiastic about voting in 2010.  Perhaps voter’s remorse is setting in?

Good.

Make no mistake, we have our work cut out for us and it is up to us to reverse the damage done by the left to our kids.  We need to keep hammering away at them with the truth, we need to speak their language, and present the conservative message in ways they are more apt to take notice.  One way is through the music they listen to.

Allow me to introduce Hi Caliber.

Hi-Caliber, one of our fine culture warriors at BigDawg Music Mafia, is a conservative hip-hop artist, a proud TEA Party member, and political talk radio guru.  His mission is to battle the left-wing media with a tool rarely used by his fellow right-wingers.  That tool is hip-hop.  Hi Cal states:

The goal is to show our youth that being patriotic is “cool” and that not all conservatives are rich, racist, hatemongers as some would have them believe.

After a political and spiritual awakening in 2001, Hi Cal discovered conservative talk radio and accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.  It was shortly after that he decided to combine his life-long passion for hip hop with his new-found passion for politics.  His first “buzz” came during the 2008 election when he recorded a song called Use Your Brain which gained multiple spins on the Imus in the Morning show.

Hi-Cal  had heard a lot about the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2009 and decided he needed to be there. With absolutely zero contacts or connections, a backpack loaded with copies of his first CD Mr. Conservative, and $30 to his name, he showed up in an old beat-up Buick carrying a sign that said “Support Conservative Music”.   He was approached by liberal blogger, Max Blumenthal, who was looking to depict him as a nut job.  Hi Cal “spit” a couple rhymes on camera which later showed up on the Daily Beast and Breitbart.tv.

Why have so many mothers become so active?

Because motherhood is political.

I have two sons. One day they may hear the call of duty and enlist to fight for our liberty. One day they may be called upon to defend America’s shores. They may decide to enter business or take up a trade. They may decide to have families of their own someday. I want them to have every opportunity available to them and I will stand against that which impedes on their rights. It’s instinctual: my job as a mother is to raise up, nurture, and protect my children, to protect their interests, to protect the interests of my family. In a society where my first line of defense, my husband, has been compromised by the self-victimization of the female sex, I’ve volunteered to go to the front lines of this ideological battle and I do it for my children. I’m not the only one.

It’s unconscionable to me that I would protect my children from running out into a busy street but not protect their right to be free. A month after my oldest was born my husband and I spent an entire morning baby-proofing our house: placing plastic covers on all empty wall sockets, installing cabinet latches, covering all the sharp edges of the tables with adhesive cushions. Why wouldn’t I also rise to install barriers against that which harms my children’s future? We armed our children with the knowledge against “stranger danger,” we taught them how to dial 911 in emergencies, we’ve taught them how to properly handle and not handle firearms. Why wouldn’t I teach my children about their fundamental rights as an American? Their right to free speech, to assemble, the freedom of the press, the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, the freedom of religion? Their right to pursue happiness but not the expectation that they are owed happiness from their fellow man?

We take them to the pediatrician to have them immunized, to inoculate them against disease. Why wouldn’t I also build up their knowledge of the Constitution, their confidence, and their courage so as to inoculate them against the ongoing campaign to break them down and render them dependent upon a swelling government?

Every Sunday morning we’re in the church pew and our children learn about the grace and love of their Creator. They’ve also been taught that their rights are inalienable, that these rights come from God, and though man tries he cannot co-opt those rights.They are taught that while our country was built on the Christian principles of freedom, one isn’t forced to subscribe to the faith to enjoy the rights born of it.

The nurture and protection of your children isn’t limited to monitoring their dietary needs, their educational needs, their emotional and spiritual well-being. I speak out because I don’t want my children saddled with debt. I don’t want my children’s generation to be the first generation that comes out of the gate with a lower standard of living because of our recklessness. I don’t want my children’s future squandered on entitlement and things non-essential to the operation of our basic Article 1 Section 8 government. I don’t want my children robbed of their ability to have effect in their communities because the power was sucked up and centralized at the federal level. I don’t want them to be demonized because they reject the socialist and humanist ideology which preaches against self-sufficiency and criminalizes faith and ambition in popular culture.

This is why mothers have been politically active these past few years and why more and more they are strapping the baby in the carrier before grabbing a diaper bag and a bullhorn on their way out the door. If you saw danger coming headfirst at your children you would intervene. Danger assumes many forms.

We’ve taken position against the reckless spending of our children’s future, against the many attempts by the establishment government to assume more parental rights and position our children as wards of the state in education, medicine, faith, diet, and wage. We reject the ideal that the government can be all and provide all because no government can be all, provide all and still reflect a free people. We reject the cultural vehicles through which this ideology is distributed: through the attack on men via feminism, through the cultural criminalization of our boys, and through the false empowerment via promiscuity and self-victimization of our daughters.

This is why motherhood is political. This is why mothers are turning out in force to protest, to petition, to run for office. Our instincts detected a threat to the well-being of their children and we are working to right it.

Old sayings never fail. The most dangerous place in the world is between a mother and her children. It remains true today.

And Happy Mother’s Day to my mother, who didn’t raise a victim.

—–

Tonight!

Andy Levy guest hosts.

SE Cupp does the ombuds-woman-ing.

Also: Ann Coulter, Marc Lamont Hill, and Rick Leventhal!

Though liberals only make up 20% of the population, they’re still able to pull off this sinister bluff because conservatives took their eye off the ball and allowed the Left to infest the institutions in charge of documenting and portraying who we are as a society. Unfortunately, these socialist engineers aren’t stupid and figured out almost immediately that with a near-monopoly on sound and image they could make a majority of the population feel like the minority; with the goal in mind of using peer pressure to shape our culture into a godless orgy of anything goes hyper-sexuality.

The result is that those of us made nauseous by the idea of loveless sex are intentionally made to feel like the oppressive party-poopers – the weirdos, the prudes, the uncool outsiders lacking in compassion, enlightenment and sophistication. This devil has so perfectly executed this ruse that even those of us on to him can forget what’s happening until a genuine phenomenon like “Twilight” comes along to remind us.

The three “Twilight” films just aren’t very good movies and yet they are huge hits. Why? Certainly, the concept of benevolent vampires who walk among us is interesting, as is the idea of pitting them against werewolves due to some age-old feud. The execution, however, is lethargic, stuffy, melodramatic and lacking in any kind of action or excitement.

The latest chapter, “Eclipse,” is probably the best of the three. Though still a one-hour story stretched to two, the slow pace at least feels deliberate, a conscious decision to cast a kind of hypnotic spell. But none of that helps to explain why what are essentially TV-level stories gross hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars. Except this:

Bella: You said you wanted me to have every human experience. I want you [sexually] while I’m still me.
Edward: It’s too dangerous.
Bella: Try. Just try. I’ll marry you. Just try.
Edward: Stop trying to take your clothes off.
Bella: Do you want to do that part?
Edward: Not tonight.
Bella: You don’t?
Edward: Believe me I want to. I just want to be married to you first.
Bella: You make me feel like a villain. Like I’m trying to steal your virtue.
Edward: It’s not my virtue I’m concerned about. I just want to leave one rule unbroken. My soul is gone but I want to protect yours. I know… it’s an old-fashioned notion.
Bella: It’s ancient.

Though not a perfect transcript that comes from a scene in “Eclipse” after Bella assures her father [and the audience] she’s still a virgin.

At the end of that exchange, Edward, who’s forever 17 but was born in 1901, then talks about how wonderful it would be if the world were still old-fashioned. Then he could do things properly and ask permission of Bella’s father to court her. Before the scene is over, he gets down on one knee, produces a ring, and asks her to marry him.

Usually, when I walk into a theatre and find it packed with tweens, it’s time to brace myself for a nightmare of chatter and texting. This audience was packed with young girls but for the full 124 minutes, other than laughter (the film has a nice sense of humor) and sighs, you could’ve heard a pin drop.

From Disney Channel tarts to YouTube to MTV to their public school health education classes, young girls in this country are bombarded and constantly out-flanked with the toxic message that if they want to be ”in” and ”liberated” and “strong” they must become the useful and willing objects of sexual gratification manipulative men have always wanted them to be. Trust me, no one’s benefited more from left-wing feminism than than shallow, sexist men who use, abuse, objectify and discard women like empty beer cans.

In our world of popular culture, the romance between Bella and Edward is unlike anything these young girls have ever been subjected to outside of Turner Classic Movies. Edward cherishes Bella, and he protects her, not only from physical harm but from his own appetites and desires that would strip away her dignity. His love for her is what love is supposed to be: completely selfless and understanding. 

As weak as these films have been in the storytelling department, they’ve become money machines because a majority of young girls don’t want to be Lady Gaga, they don’t want to monologue about their vagina with Jane Fonda, and they simply don’t understand why the very same adults charged with protecting them use classroom time to roll Trojans on cucumbers.

Young girls confused and frustrated by the pop culture and media institutions constantly pressuring them into the counter-intuitive idea that the road to virtue is through the loss of their dignity — young girls who long to find their own Edward, a selfless, strong and tender man who will protect and cherish and love them, are told by “Twilight” that they’re not weird or alone. “Twilight” is a billion dollar film and publishing franchise because it serves a role more important than entertainment. The romance between Edward and Bella validates the better nature of millions of young souls yearning not to be lost. 

Don’t be fooled into thinking Hollywood will try to repeat this recipe to print money that mixes yearning and restraint and human desire back into the idea of romance. Winning the culture war will always take precedent. The good news, however, is that the war isn’t over. If it was, when Hollywood let a “Twilight” slip through, there’d be a lot of chatter and texting.