Oo-la-la! Endemol's beach-front party last night was really rather saucy with pole dancers and a French stripper, complete with baguettes.
17:22 MGM and BitTorrent
Endemol has something of a reputation when it comes to Mip parties, but more than one person said they would not have got away with this in England.
A girl with walnut-cracking thighs spent half the night wrapped round a pole with the (mostly male) audience jaws-a-dropping in awe. A stripper did something alluring with baguettes, but I don't think Dita von Teese has anything to worry about. And we had Austin Powers, a dwarf Marilyn Monroe and some rather scary Poodle things with buck teeth. I did take some pictures but I don't think Organ Grinder could take the heat...
Someone's making far too much money, muttered a journalist who brushed past me towards the glowing white dancefloor.
Fremantle's new reality show
It could be the next Big Brother: TV production company Fremantle has acquired the rights to a Dutch reality show format called The Phone. The premise is that two contestants compete "unknowingly but willingly" via mobile phone in a race to answer clues and find a €50,000, complete with helicopter footage. Like Challenge Anneka, but without the social conscience. The rights cover the US and most of Europe - including the UK. Brace yourself, a bit.
MGM and BitTorrent
MGM's about-turn on BitTorrent is being gossiped about: when I was last at Mip in October, the company's chief operating officer Rick Sands was on a panel with BitTorrent chief executive Ashwin Navin. It was about the most entertaining session of the entire conference, given that a million movies a day are downloaded using BitTorrent's P2P software.
Sands had said he spends a huge amount of money on ghosting files and DRM to protect his copyright and just wanted to be paid for the content that users were getting illegally. I suggested that MGM buy BitTorrent and distribute its movies that way - it is clearly a great endorsement both of the content and the delivery platform - but Sands didn't seem too impressed.
I should point out that this is a new commercial company that uses the BitTorrent technology and the name, but faces a battle in getting content producers on side because it is a name just as loaded as Napster or Kazaa.
And then lo - four months later MGM agreed to partner with BitTorrent.com. And seven months later, Sands is back at Mip extolling the virtues of P2P distribution.
So why the sudden turnaround by MGM? The more business-minded among us might think that MGM played the hard ball legal threat approach... and then came to a very satisfactory licensing deal on BitTorrent.com. All very cosy.
