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Hardest hit was feature-film production, which had been steadily falling over much of the last decade as L.A. lost jobs to Canada and, increasingly, other states such as New Mexico, Louisiana and Michigan that offer lucrative tax credits and rebates to filmmakers. California's newly adopted film tax credit program helped to blunt the downturn, with production activity increasing by double digits in the second half of the year. About 50 productions have qualified to receive about $100 million in tax credits since the state program debuted this summer

TV, Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, Disney, Super Bowl, Advertising, Sports, Media, Movies

Executives at Microsoft are fond of saying that its subscription gaming service, Xbox Live, should be thought of as a cable channel.

The company is even producing shows for users: it is in the middle of the second season of “1 vs. 100,” an interactive version of a game show that was on NBC.The content ambitions do not end there. Microsoft has held in-depth talks with the Walt Disney Company about a programming deal with ESPN, according to people close to the talks, who requested anonymity because the talks were intended to be private.

For a per-subscriber fee, ESPN could provide live streams of sporting events, similar to the ones available through ESPN 360,

Google said on Tuesday that it was considering shutting down Google.cn and closing its offices in China after a cyber attack on its corporate infrastructure resulted in intellectual property loss. Google also said it would stop censoring search results on Google.cn. For the first time, reports and images of the Tiananmen Square massacre and other events could be seen through Google searches in China.

Chinese American media rushing to provide their analysis in the context of U.S.-China relations. “Google, Don’t become a tool in the political fight between the U.S. and China” read the headline of an editorial published Friday in China Press. “Though Obama tried to adapt to China’s increasingly powerful role in the world with a new attitude and said the United States would not repress China’s development, the differences in ideology between the countries continue to prohibit the U.S.-China relationship from moving forward,” the editorial argued.

“If the Chinese government just let it go, Google could stop its financial losses in China, which would be beneficial to its share price. If the Chinese government is willing to compromise, Google will become the ‘hero’ that breaks China’s strict control over Internet information.” Chinese investors, Leung noted, believe the absence of Google will actually benefit the local Internet market; the stock prices of Chinese Internet companies rose right after the announcement was made.

The ruling would allow Comcast and other Internet service providers to restrict consumers’ ability to access certain kinds of Internet content, such as video sites like Hulu.com or Google’s YouTube service, or charge certain heavy users of their networks more money for access.

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site without extra charge.

But executives of The New York Times Company said they could not yet answer fundamental questions about the plan, like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading. They stressed that the amount of free access could change with time, in response to economic conditions and reader demand.

Still, publishers fear that income from digital subscriptions would not compensate for the resulting loss of audience and advertising revenue.

To fix the prime-time woes, NBC, under Mr. Gaspin, plans to spend more on development. It has deals with producers like J. J. Abrams, Jerry Bruckheimer and Brian Grazer. It made 11 pilots last year and plans to increase that number to 20 this year.

“I’m not trying to reinvent right now,” Mr. Gaspin said. “I’m really going back to basics.”

A sour economy and civil litigation — including one suit filed by Titan Media Group’s parent company — have prompted video website Veoh.com to file for bankruptcy. Veoh co-founder Dmitry Shapiro wrote in a blog post that despite “great vision, a passionate team, tens of millions of users, millions in revenues and victory in court were not enough."

Walt Disney Co. is asking theater operators to agree to a shorter time between movie debuts and DVD releases, specifically starting with Alice in Wonderland, in an effort to boost home video sales. The move comes as studios try to find ideas to speed the release times of DVDs to fight slumping DVD revenues.

But it could be a face-saving way to exit a market where Google has made surprisingly little progress. Most research companies agree Google controls at most one-quarter of China's search market. That's hard to swallow, given Google's dominant position in the U.S. and many other major markets.

Google has never been a big believer in traditional marketing anywhere, including China, while Baidu is an active advertiser in TV, out-of-home and digital media.

"Their chief problem was the idea they could come into the market without doing marketing and expect to replicate the miraculous success they had enjoyed in the U.S. They did no marketing," said Kaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based consultant for Youku.com and the former of head of digital strategy at Ogilvy & Mather in China.

PARIS — Google said on Monday that it faced antitrust complaints in Germany from newspaper and magazine publishers who want the company to pay for using article snippets in its Web news service and search results.