Disney is enlisting Maker Studios to help promote the next “Star Wars” movie. To do so, the video network -- which Disney bought for about $1 billion -- will produce “short-form shows about everything from ‘Star Wars’ fashion to games,” Bloomberg reports. “Maker … has secured sponsors to help fund the shows.” The next Star Wars movie, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” is scheduled to hit theaters near the end of 2015. 

According to an FBI bulletin obtained by The Intercept, the same hackers who broke into Sony Pictures and stole a devastating amount of data made threats against a domestic news organization, too and Gizmodo thinks it's CNN. The bulletin also says there's more to come. 

A lot of these movies are only leaving temporarily, but for the big online movie service, it's out with the old and in with the new (which are often old, too). But you have only until midnight on Jan. 1 (Thursday night) to watch a pretty big list of features  

Google's year-end presentation of what its users searched for online, which may take the record as "Most eagerly-opened document that proved our lack of focus with its own lack of focus."

The Diffusion Group's Joel Espelien concludes that given all the earned media from "The Interview," it's failed as an online event, and it leads him to the "fundamental problem" of transactional VOD: "All of the risk is on the viewer. In the theatrical case, by contrast, I would argue that the ‘cost’ of a bad movie is paradoxically less. After all, you still get a night out and the opportunity to skewer the movie with your viewing companions."  

Credit Re/Code's Lauren Goode for a wry loathing&loathing advance look the big CES show starting in a few days. "Put it this way: For us tech folks, it has become the equivalent of a high-school reunion. You’d rather have a more intimate outing with the people who actually matter to you..."

Virool, a video distribution platform for marketers, has launched a distribution product designed specifically for video marketing on the Facebook platform.

A group claiming affiliation with hackers, Anonymous, say they’ve released personal information including credit card numbers for customers of Amazon, Sony PlayStation, XBox Live and more companies.

The controversial film that was canceled and then rescheduled by Sony, debuted in about 300 theaters and is available to download from several sources, but iTunes was among the last.

Shortly after Sony Pictures Entertainment released “The Interview” on digital services Dec. 24, high-quality copies of the movie turned up on multiple piracy sites — and in less than 24 hours, it had already been downloaded by about 900,000 torrent users worldwide.