Lost Remote points us to this utterly disturbing study, which concludes that people with Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) are actually more likely to watch commercials than those just watching, as Defamer likes to refer to it, "acoustic TV".

Since there hasn't been (and probably won't be until June) any action on a possible Writers Guild strike, it's time to look forward to the coming Fall negotiations between the Screen Actors Guild and the studios. SAG is trying to ratify a dues increase which would help them build a strike fund and pay down some of their debt. But a little old-fashioned infighting (which is far too boring to get into here) may stop them from getting their fund together.

Months before the recent NBC-Universal merger, the two parties put a synergistic series called Transylvania into development for NBC, set in the world of Universal's Van Helsing. Both sides now claim that Transylvania was shelved well before Van Helsing opened to horrible reviews and disappointing box office, but you can bet that if Van Helsing justified its enormous budget with a strong opening, Transylvania would have been rushed into production.

Even the NY Daily News is getting in on our "shareholders as angry mob" analogy, writing that Viacom head Sumner Redstone took a "big drubbing" as "investors pounded the octogenarian media mogul." And here we thought that CBS was the only part of Viacom brutalizing the elderly.

The LAT found out exactly what former Disney president/erstwhile superagent Michael Ovitz was paid in severance: $109.3 million. This is considerably lower than the original rumored $140 million figure, but apparently Ovitz could have raked in even more had he cashed in even more of his stock options. Does this mean that he's going to have to return his diamond-encrusted robot that craps gold ingot and protects his mansion from possible Gay Mafia incursions to Hammacher Schlemmer? We hope not, he'd get killed on that 10% percent restocking fee.