Media Money

AP Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in a scene from the movie "Titanic"

Titanic 3-D has a lot working in its favor when it opens in 2600 theaters in the U.S. and in 100 countries around the world—awareness is huge.

Fifteen years ago the film broke records and became the biggest film ever, beaten only by another epic by director and producer James Cameron, Avatar.

Paramount

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[VIA  Loading...      ()   ] and 20th Century Fox

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[NWS  Loading...      ()   ], which are splitting distribution of the film, spent $18 million to convert the film into 3-D.

There’s no question it will pay off in droves.  » Read More

Getty Images A sign with the 'like' symbol stands in front of the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

Ahead of its IPO, investors pour over every new SEC filing from Facebook, trying to figure out what the social networking giant is really worth.

Today two private company analysts – Lou Kerner, who runs the Social Internet Fund, and Arcstone Research’s Bo Brustkern—hosted a conference call to discuss that very issue.

Facebook’s market cap is about $100 billion based on private market transactions. But Kerner and Brustkern say that based on their analysis, that number is actually low.  » Read More

CNBC.com

It isn’t so uncommon for disputes between content and distribution giants to leave consumers without channels. But DirecTV’s battle with Tribune isn’t just another conflict over retransmission fees. It’s turned into an indictment of the Tribune company’s management in bankruptcy, and what DirecTV

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[DTV  Loading...      ()   ] calls “another case of runaway Wall Street Greed,” in a press release issued when DirecTV filed a complaint with the FCC Monday afternoon.

 » Read More

Getty Images

With the Super Bowl and the Awards shows, the first quarter is the most important quarter in advertising.

AceMetrix, which analyses every TV ad released in the U.S. every year, just released its rankings, and even more interesting than the winners, were the losers: financial services companies.

And Goldman Sachs

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[GS  Loading...      ()   ] in particular—ranked at the bottom of all ads.  » Read More

Source: Pinterest.com Pinterest

Pinterest hit ten million monthly unique visitors faster than any other website, drawing comparisons to Facebook. But now growth of the service for sharing images from across the web in "virtual scrapbooks" is coming back to earth.

Data through March 18th which Comscore shared exclusively with CNBC reveal that the company's growth has started to slow this month.

The technical details: a four week moving average of Pinterest's unique users showed that growth slowed from an 85% rate between mid-January and mid-February, to an 18% rate between mid February and mid-March. Based on the latest data Comscore projects that Pinterest will grow its total unique users in March to just over 20 million, just a roughly 12 percent month-over month increase, after posting a 50 percent increase in February.  » Read More

It's a landmark day for Microsoft as it pushes to control the entertainment pipeline into your living room.

For the first time, people are using its Xbox gaming console more for entertainment—watching movies and TV shows and listening to music—than for playing video games.

Source: Microsoft

The tech giant announced that not only has entertainment usage surpassed gaming, but that use of entertainment apps on the XBox platform have more that doubled over last year.

Microsoft

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[MSFT  Loading...      ()   ] announced its progress in the entertainment space as it launches three new entertainment apps for its Xbox Live subscription service: HBO Go, Comcast's TV, and MLB.TV. All three work with voice control through the Kinect controller.

 » Read More

The Hunger Games is already breaking records—the numbers are in and the film scored the biggest midnight opening ever for a non-sequel: $19.7 million. This puts the Lionsgate

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[LGF  Loading...      ()   ] film, based on a hit young adult book series, well on its way to a gross north of $120 million opening weekend. That would be the biggest March opening weekend ever. And it would make the film a massive financial success for Lionsgate—it cost just $80 million to produce.

Lionsgate shares have climbed on growing buzz for the film – the stock is up nearly 75 percent so far this year. Wall Street sees billion dollar potential in The Hunger Games franchise—the studio has three more movies in the works.

Source: Thehungergamesmovie.com Scene from "The Hunger Games"

But now Wall Street is playing an expectations game—investors doing some profit taking, and the stock dropping after Evercore Partners downgraded the stock to “market perform” Thursday morning.  » Read More

Rovio has turned its one hit wonder into a money making machine. Its newest game - Angry Birds Space went on sale at midnight and almost immediately became the top selling and top grossing app on the iPhone and iPad

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[AAPL  Loading...      ()   ], not just in the US, but also in China and Japan. People are shelling out 99 cents for the iPhone app, three bucks for the HD iPad game, or five bucks for the game for mac computers.

Bloomberg via Getty Images Angry Bird toys are seen on display at the headquarters of the game's developer Rovio Mobile Oy in Espoo, Finland.

Game-maker Rovio has everything riding on the Angry Birds brand. Thanks to this one game—and the sequels ‘Seasons’ and then ‘Rio’ pegged to a movie release last year, Rovio grew its revenue from $10 million in 2010 to $100 million last year. And the company has been upfront about its goal of going public on the Hong Kong stock market this year.

The risk: Angry Birds Fatigue.  » Read More

Source: omgpop.com

Zynga stock

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[Z  Loading...      ()   ] popped on the company’s announcement that it snapped up game maker ‘OMGPOP,’ snagging its hit new game ‘Draw Something.’

This is part of the social game maker’s strategy to diversify away from its reliance on Facebook.

The company did not disclose any financial terms of the deal and wouldn’t comment on whether the acquisition will be accretive. Zynga has a secondary offering on file with the SEC, so it’s in a quiet period. But CNBC’s Kayla Tausche reports that Zynga is paying about $200 million.

OMGPOP emerged as a hot takeover target as its Draw Something game took off in the past six weeks since it launched.  » Read More

AP

As expected, "John Carter" is weighing heavily on Disney’s balance sheet.

The studio officially acknowledged that the $250 million budget film is a bomb, issuing a statement saying that the film will generate “an operating loss of approximately $200 million during our second fiscal quarter ending March 31.”

As a result of this loss, the studio division will have a loss of between $80 million and $120 million for the second quarter.

 » Read More