At the end of 2008, it was announced that Consumers Union, publishers of Consumer Reports was acquiring Consumerist.com from Nick Denton’s Gawker Media. Gawker has now dropped its Defamer.com site as its own entity and rolled it into Gawker.com as the site’s "column from Hollywood."

Negotiations between the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the major studios stalled last week after the two parties could not reach an agreement on how actors should be compensated for online clips.

Studios want to distribute clips of old TV shows and movies without actors’ permission and pay them a flat fee instead of paying each actor individually. The actors union is against the measure.

The remaining vestiges of ex-CEO Terry Semel’s Hollywoodization of Yahoo continue to be swept out of the portal, as senior VP Vince Broady leaves Yahoo’s entertainment division.

The ongoing fight between the Writers Guild of America and Hollywood studios will lead to some of them exploring the possibilities of the Internet for their work.

Imagine a return to moviemaking where storytelling as a craft mattered most, and a writer with a dream and some financial backing could do what once required a studio to accomplish.

Even though Hollywood executives claim this Internet thing is too new for them to figure out how much they can cut out of it for writers, the scribes pointed out Viacom seems to have an idea.

Film and TV writers are striking for the first time in almost twenty years after the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers were unable to reach an agreement.

Google isn’t the only company that has to determine the best way to protect copyrighted video; the movie and TV studios have to come to grips with a way to let people share content, or forever kill the ability to monetize it online.

With its own site for its copyrighted video content due out this month, NBC is already getting a little touchy. Peter Chernin, president and COO of News Corp, chides that Google “could do a better job” of policing for copyrighted content on YouTube, saying:

Google will become a distributor of original content through its AdSense network, with contributions from ‘Family Guy’ creator Seth MacFarlane and Disney Channel star Raven-Symon

My best friend is an extremely gifted film talent. But he hated Hollywood, hated the hoops young aspirants had to go through, hated having to play ball, so he left Hollywood and came home to be an English professor. It’s really too bad online video hadn’t taken off just yet.

In an almost comical turn about, the company that provided Sony with one of the two horrific DRM systems in October of 2005 is now facing a lawsuit. MediaMax worked on controlling the number of copies that a person could make with a CD, and has cost Sony some 5.75 million dollars to settle the lawsuits that arose from the use of MediaMax.

Just as Rupert Murdoch and the News Corp apparatus pore over a potential deal for Dow Jones, MySpace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson have submitted their pay requests for consideration.

Just one day after CNET reported on Hollywood’s frustration at YouTube’s copyright feet dragging, Google announces that they are ready to begin testing their video fingerprinting tool.

TimeWarner and Disney have signed on for the test, which they hope will help to identify copyrighted content and prevent illegal uploads of the content.

Longtime Hollywood insider and Variety editor in chief Peter Bart took on the blogosphere and the rights of bloggers with a decidedly negative take; a pair of movie bloggers took him to the editing room and trimmed him down to size.

The technology YouTube has in mind to detect and filter content will be a bad deal for the studios, and Microsoft has quietly asked powerful Hollywood honchos to skip it in favor of another option.

Hollywood has plans to branch out into online movies in a major way. They have been slow to embrace the Internet but it seems they are realizing the great potential for generating revenue online.

Instead of spending tons of cash on providing substantial assistance to federal investigations of torrent trackers, maybe the MPAA should use those funds to educate its member studios about the mad, mad, mad, mad world of Internet advertising.

As the Internet transforms into a high-speed content medium, video distributors, eyeing a world without middlemen and hardware costs, debate about the methods by which to serve up content. At a loss, they turn to the experts – they ask the porn guys.

Replete with Tivo and other time-shifting technologies, consumers want control of what matters most-their time. Perhaps Hollywood is waking up to their needs?

Financial Times men of the year, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, will be billed as executive producers of an indie film by an old college friend.