Steve Wadsworth, president of Disney’s 
Interactive Media Group – the division overseeing video games, online virtual worlds and the company’s mobile efforts – has resigned after an 11-year tenure with the company.
The departure leaves a vacuum at one of the company’s most important – but often troubled – divisions.
The growing threat of Web video distribution 
is one the cable industry needs to pay closer attention to, according to the CEO of Verizon. Ivan Seidenberg, at a Goldman media conference in NY, told attendees he doesn’t expect future generations of customers to have any interest in buying cable bundles.
“Young people are pretty smart. They’re not going to pay for something they don’t need to,” he said. “Over the top is going to be a pretty big issue for cable.”
The advent of the app era has certainly 
changed how people view their phones, but its real impact has been less on telecommunications – and more on the electronics industry.
A new study by Deloitte, released today, finds that mobile apps actually aren’t a key driver on smartphone sales, but they do play a big role in people’s decision-making when they’re looking for something like a gaming console or GPS.
Don’t expect to see “The Big Bang Theory” or “Smallville”
among Apple TV’s rentals anytime soon.
Warner Bros., the studio behind those and several other hit shows, is among one of the highest profile holdouts for the service – and recent comments by CEO Barry Meyer would seem to indicate the company has no plans to change its mind soon.
Frequenters of infamous U.S.-based website 4chan.org have declared war on Hollywood.
Its users led the charge in a distributed denial of service attack on the MPAA and RIAA websites Monday — blocking their pages for hours.
The move, say the anonymous attackers, was in retaliation to action the orgs have taken to squash filesharing sites such as Pirate Bay.
If you had trouble accessing the Web sites 
for the MPAA and RIAA earlier today, you’ve got 4chan to blame.
The infamous Internet imageboard (and hangout of film piracy advocates) launched a coordinated DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack on the industry sites Monday – allegedly in a retaliatory move for the trades’ moves to squash filesharing Websites.
A slew of entertainment industry orgs have joined together to file a brief with the Supreme Court in support of the vidgame biz’s efforts to overturn California’s ban on the sale or rental of violent vidgames to minors.
The biz’s concern is that the law restricting the sale of vidgames because of their content could have far-reaching First Amendment implications. The issue at stake in the challenge to the law isn’t whether publishers can make violent games, but whether states can impose sales restrictions on those titles — effectively declaring them to be on the same level as pornography and therefore able to legally limit their sale to adults.
Windows Mobile 7 might be the most
radical (and promising) operating system from the company’s mobile division in years, but the road to retail isn’t going to be perfectly smooth.
Verizon, which was famously burned by Microsoft with the Kin earlier this year, has announced it will not carry phones using the service at launch – or at all this year. It will be some unnamed date in 2011 before the company begins supporting the OS.
You have to give it to Sony. When 
they made the decision to join the 3D battlefield, they jumped in with both feet.
Starting Tuesday, Sept. 21, every PlayStation 3 on the market will begin supporting 3D playback. (The move will come via a free software update.) That instantly puts 3D hardware into 38 million homes worldwide.
Chris Morris: Journalist 