Is the growth of online video cannibalizing TV time? A TV viewing report from eMarketer last week reveals that 42 percent of U.S. adults believe they watch less TV now than they did two years ago, but it may not be attributable to online video because there hasn’t been a huge increase in video viewing. The latest statistics from Leichtman Research Group say four percent of U.S. adults viewed online video daily and 14 percent viewed it once a week in December 2006 compared with four percent and 11 percent in March 2006.
The report also found hesitation about watching long-form video programming on computers, with 68 percent of adults saying they would watch downloaded TV shows and movies on their TVs, but only 45 percent willing to watch them on their computers.
“TV will still likely be the dominant media device for the next several years,” eMarketer concluded, although it projects the number of online video viewers will grow from 107.7 million in 2006 to 157 million in 2010.
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist and Writer, Dies At 95
Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children's books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer's wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple's two cats and his recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been ill for a couple of years, "but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny."
Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched among numerous forms of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, urban angst and other societal currents. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political relations that defined his readers' lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with "communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority."
Feiffer won the United States' most prominent awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking home a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and "Munro," an animated short film he wrote, won a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
"My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh," Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. "Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down."
Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx. From... Read More