The tactic, by “Weeds” producer Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., is the part of a more aggressive effort Hollywood is taking to boost online sales of digital movies.

Studios have become bolder in how they push their shows and movies over digital channels. Earlier this month, Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Sony Pictures started making online rentals of its hit movie “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” available for owners of some Sony TVs and other devices, well before the film’s Jan. 5 release on DVD.

A Sony spokesman declined to say how many consumers were taking the offer.

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The numbers illustrate Pandora’s challenge to regular broadcast radio’s online programming. Some 22 million people listen to regular radio stations’ streams each week, compared with 15 million for Internet-only stations such as Pandora, according to Edison Research Inc. and Arbitron Inc.

CC Media Holdings Inc.’s Clear Channel Radio (CCO) says it has about 8 million listeners who stream its programming each month.

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The studios resolved their next-generation DVD format war almost two years ago. So far, though, the take from Blu-ray has been underwhelming. The high-definition home-video format, now four years old, will produce just $1.3 billion in revenue to studios this year, says Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research. That’s about 14 percent of anticipated sales of regular DVDs this year, and half what the older format produced in its fourth year, in 2000.

But in this last month of the year, the studios have a chance to make signficant inroads with Blu-ray.

If they can nudge Blu-ray up a few percentage points over the 11.5 percent of studios’ home-video sales revenue that the format represented over the first nine months of 2009, it could take some of the sting out of slowing sales of regular DVDs, their traditional cash cow, Mr. Adams says.

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“I don’t think I’m going to be re-signing,” said morning-show host Howard Stern on the air last month. “I know exactly what I want to do here,” he said, in terms of a less time-consuming schedule, “and I don’t know if it would interest them,” meaning his bosses. That leaves open the question of what Mr. Stern will do once his contract with Sirius expires at the end of next year. Pre-negotiating posturing is already well under way.

On the same show where he questioned his prospects, Mr. Stern pronounced his current gig on satellite “the best job in radio I’ve ever had.” But it could also be true that he is angling for a change.

Mr. Stern signed up with Sirius in late 2004, but he didn’t join the company until 15 months later.

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More than 42 million people each week listen to radio streamed over the Internet, more than double the rate from five years ago, according to market-research firms Edison Research Inc. and Arbitron Inc. Many of those are either new listeners or people tuning in at times when they never listened to regular broadcast radio.

But radio has been slowest among the media industry to turn its Internet audience into cash. Gordon Borrell, who runs consultancy Borrell Associates Inc., calls radio the “C” student of the Internet. Radio gets only an estimated 2.4 percent of its revenue from online, while TV gets 3.4 percent and newspapers 7 percent.

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The artist, who calls his revved-up rockabilly sound “psychobilly,” earlier this year cooked up a scheme to put almost his entire catalog up on Amazon.com, for free. “I’m losing a little bit of money in the short run,” Mr. Nixon says. But “in the long run, there is going to be much bigger Mojo awareness.” He and his online distributor, The Orchard, hope the move will lead to bigger sales and other opportunities, such as licensing more of his songs to Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

Mr. Nixon, who was hoping to get just 10,000 or so downloads out of the scheme, says he is very happy with the outcome so far.

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The “American Idol” TV show host has a popular morning radio show based in Los Angeles that frequently takes the top spot in its target audience of listeners age 18-34. But that isn’t good enough. He has been complaining about being told to cut short the chatter and play more Lady Gaga and other hit artists, all because of the rollout of an audience-measurement system used for selling advertising.

Arbitron Inc.’s (ARB) Portable People Meter two years ago began replacing radio’s antiquated diary-based audience-measurement system, in which people kept written records of what they listened to.

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The prototype, developed by digital content security company Nagravision SA, based in Cheseaux, Switzerland, and 3D company 3ality Digital LLC, Burbank, Calif., will be shown at the 3D Entertainment Summit this week in Los Angeles. It’s called the Nagra Media Guide for 3D.

Although no cable company has yet committed to the set-top technology, the prototype offers a window into the evolution of 3D home technology, which is getting much closer to what is available in movie theaters. Consumers will be able to access 3D programming using today’s set-top boxes, but the Nagra Media version will show the information using 3D graphics.

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While some studios already make full-length movies available on YouTube, they tend to be older, lesser-known titles. Now YouTube is talking to Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., Sony Corp. (SNE) and Warner Bros. about integrating newer titles into the existing YouTube site, most of which it would carry a rental charge. In some cases, these titles might be available on the site on the same day that they come out on DVD. It is unclear to what extent older movies or television shows will be part of the new agreements.

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Now a federal judge will weigh in on whether the studios are the only ones who can legally make those copies, or if other companies can jump on the bandwagon.

Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Friday will open a hearing to evaluate whether RealNetworks (RNWK) can sell a computer program called RealDVD that allows consumers to copy DVDs onto computers.

Last fall, the studios won a temporary ban on the sale of RealDVD. If Judge Patel rules the program can go back on the market, it could hamper Hollywood’s efforts to cash in on consumer demand for digital copies of the DVDs they buy.

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At a digital music panel in Nashville this week, executives from AT&T (T) and Comcast (CMCSA) created a furor by saying they were passing along warnings to customers that the RIAA says are illegally uploading music files onto the Internet.

Later, the companies tried to calm the outrage erupting in the blogosphere by harrumphing they weren’t cutting off Internet access to those people–or in the case of Cox (CXR), hardly ever cutting it off. AT&T said it wouldn’t cut off access without a court order.

So what is going on? For more than a year, the RIAA has been engaged in a major diplomatic effort to win over ISPs. “What we are trying to encourage ISPs to do is adopt some form of graduated response,” says Jonathan Lamy, an RIAA spokesman. “It is our position that people who are repeat offenders merit an account suspension or something like that.” He adds that any customer has a right to due process and should have the option to challenge the action if they think it is unjustified.

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