Current (https://current.org/tag/pbs/page/22/)
Kind-Hearted Woman, David Sutherland’s latest documentary series for Frontline is a five-hour story of abuse and triumph for a Native American woman. His meticulous techniques for gathering and mixing sound added six months to the post-production process, yet the filmmaker says they’re a key part of his process of creating intimate documentary portraits.
The Nielsen Co., the stalwart television-ratings tracker, announced Feb. 20 that it plans to track viewing on additional devices beginning in September. The news was reported by the Hollywood Reporter. Among the media Nielsen will include are Xboxes and over-the-top devices that stream programming from services such as Amazon, according to the Reporter. In January, PBS signed a deal to bring some of its local and national programming to Xbox and over-the-top device Roku.
Palestinian documentary filmmaker Emad Burnat, whose Oscar-nominated film 5 Broken Cameras received funding from PBS’s POV, was detained Feb. 20 at Los Angeles International Airport after arriving in the country for Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony. The news that Burnat had been held for one and a half hours was first tweeted by friend and fellow documentary filmmaker Michael Moore. Burnat later released a statement confirming that he and his family had been detained and threatened with deportation and that they had been forced to provide proof that he had been nominated for an Oscar. “Although this was an unpleasant experience, this is a daily occurrence for Palestinians, every single day, throughout the West Bank,” Burnat said.
More than five months after subpoenaing notes and outtakes from The Central Park Five, a crime documentary about the 1989 arrest and conviction of five innocent young men over the rape and assault of a jogger in Central Park, lawyers for New York City were rebuffed in their attempts to gain hold of the film’s unused footage for evidence in an ongoing federal lawsuit. The decision came on the evening of Feb. 19, as reported by the New York Times. Co-directed by Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah and longtime Burns producer David McMahon, based on extensive research from Sarah, the film was released in theaters in fall 2012 to critical acclaim and will air on PBS in April. The city had accused the filmmakers of biased reporting when it filed the Sept.
The third-season finale of Downton Abbey drew 8.2 million viewers for its Feb. 17 PBS broadcast, the network and WGBH announced Feb. 19. The numbers come from Nielsen and gave the episode a 5.2 household rating. The episode came in with 50 percent more viewers than the season two finale in 2012 and also drew 300,000 more fans than this year’s season premiere.
Wendy Levy, the director of arts consultancy group New Arts AXIS, called for documentary filmmakers to embrace big data tools as a permanent part of their storytelling process during the keynote address at the Media That Matters Conference, held Feb. 15 in Washington, D.C.
Amazon announced today it has struck a deal with PBS to make its online video streaming service, Prime Instant Video, the exclusive subscription streaming outlet for Downton Abbey. Beginning June 18, Prime Instant Video will be the only subscription streaming service where viewers will be able to watch Season 3 of the smash Masterpiece Classic program. The first and second seasons of the show are currently available on Amazon as well as on rival subscription streaming services like Netflix and Hulu Plus, but will migrate exclusively to Prime on an unspecified date “later this year,” according to a press release from Amazon. Prime will also be the only paid streaming service to offer Season 4 and, if produced, Season 5 of the series. Downton Abbey is already the most popular TV series among Amazon Prime customers, according to Brad Beale, Amazon director of digital video content acquisition.
PBS is jumping into the “over-the-top” video-streaming space with a pair of deals to distribute public TV programs through apps on Roku boxes and Xbox Live.
PBS is weighing whether to schedule the debut of the next season of Downton Abbey for the fall, when it is set to air in the United Kingdom, or continue its practice of delaying the premiere until January.
PBS unveiled upcoming feature programming today at the annual Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour in Pasadena, Calif. Highlights include a week of special programming examining the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Ct. PBS NewsHour, Frontline, Nova, Need to Know and Washington Week with Gwen Ifill each will focus on different aspects of the tragedy; new offerings from P.O.V. and Independent Lens such as director Michael Apted’s 56 Up; the first autobiographical documentary on famed physicist Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Mine; a six-part series, Latino Americans, narrated by actor Benjamin Bratt; and, for fans of British dramas, The Bletchley Circle, a three-part murder mystery, and How Sherlock Changed the World, a two-hour examination of the popular detective character. PBS’s sessions at the TCA Press Tour conclude tomorrow.
PBS was nominated in four categories at the 70th Golden Globe Awards Jan. 13, but only Dame Maggie Smith of Downton Abbey earned a win from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Smith won for Best Supporting Actress in a TV Series for the show’s second season. The awards, which celebrate both film and television, had also nominated Downton Abbey for Best Drama, while star Michelle Dockery had been nominated for Best Actress in a Drama. The Showtime series Homeland won in both categories. Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch had been nominated for Best Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie, but lost to Kevin Costner for his work in History’s Hatfields & McCoys.
Three nights after 7.9 million people tuned into the third-season premiere of PBS’s Downton Abbey, WGBY in Springfield, Mass., will broadcast an interview tonight with Lady Carnarvon of Highclere Castle, the filming location of the BBC-produced series. The interview is being shown as an episode of the program Connecting Point and is not available for national carriage, so only those New Englanders lucky enough to receive the WGBY signal will be able to watch this evening. “I got in touch with Lady Carnarvon’s personal assistant last fall for a different reason,” WGBY spokesperson Myrna Flynn told Current regarding how the station landed the exclusive. “Circumstances naturally led to this. The Countess was very gracious and accommodating.” In 2011, the Countess authored a book, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle.
PBS unveiled deals to distribute public TV programs on two additional on-demand video streaming platforms — Roku and Xbox Live. The contracts, unveiled last week by PBS Digital chief Jason Seiken, lay the groundwork for apps that will feature local station programming and a limited selection of national content. To gain access, Xbox and Roku users will provide email addresses and choose their local station. The graphic interface on both services will be cobranded with PBS and local station logos. “Xbox and Roku are leaders in the fast-growing ‘over-the-top’ television phenomenon, in which viewers access television programs on-demand on their TV sets using an Internet connection,” Seiken wrote in Jan.
Crowdfunding website Kickstarter announced Thursday that independent film projects on its site had passed the $100 million mark in pledges since its 2009 launch, with $42.6 million of that total pledged to documentaries — the largest share of any film genre. Many Kickstarter-funded documentaries find their way to larger success, whether through film festivals, theatrical distribution or airings on networks like PBS. This year, three Kickstarter-assisted documentary features shortlisted for a Best Documentary Oscar nomination will also air on PBS in 2013: The Waiting Room, Detropia and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.
Producers of the PBS program Charlie Rose have agreed to pay up to $250,000 to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by a former unpaid intern, the New York Times reports.
With short turnaround, PBS and New York’s WNET will offer two programs in the next two days focusing on the aftermath of the Dec. 14 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn.
The Central Park Five, written and directed by Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon, is not one of his production company’s typical stately paced works.
After two-plus years of planning and prototyping a shared hub providing easy access to digital content from across public media, partners in the Public Media Platform will begin building the new technical system next month.
PBS has restructured its senior management, effective immediately, elevating programmer/producer Beth Hoppe to chief programming executive and general manager, according to a memo circulated to PBS stations today. Chief programmer John Wilson, who has worn many hats since joining PBS in 1994, will focus on fundraising programs as senior v.p., pledge strategy and special projects. Wilson will “build on the experiments undertaken this year to reshape our pledge programming and will continue to work closely with PBS colleagues, producers and stations to develop these plans,” said PBS Chief Operating Officer Michael Jones, in his memo announcing the management changes. Hoppe signed on at PBS last year as one of Wilson’s deputies. She has specialized in nonfiction programming during a TV career that includes a run as one of PBS’s hottest producers and a stint producing and developing science programming for Discovery Studios.
Ken Burns’ The Dust Bowl has a clear message: What happened before can happen again.