Enjoy (really):

As Variety (registration required) notes, it’s the first time a big studio has done this with a widely released movie — normally Hollywood puts out digital copies at the same time as discs. The idea with this test is to see if an early window for Apple, etc., can goose sales.

It’s one of a series of experiments the studios are conducting with distribution windows (see: $60 Eddie Murphy movies), and I can sort of see the studio logic here: Digital “sell-through” is one of the only growing parts of a slumping home entertainment market.

But the bigger trend in home entertainment seems to be that people aren’t interested in buying movies, period. If they have a choice, they’ll rent them instead, via one-off video-on-demand or subscription services like Netflix.

Some studio guys are trying to figure out how to take that choice away from consumers, but I think that’s wishful thinking. More practical: Learning to live with a diminished home video revenue stream.

But the network doesn’t always want to play hard to get. Right now, you can go to iTunes and watch an episode of “New Girl,” a show so new it hasn’t appeared on Fox at all yet.

Fox started giving away free downloads of the Zooey Deschanel sitcom via Apple’s store this morning; next week, it will start promoting the show on Hulu, Fox.com and other sites. All of the free views will disappear before the show’s debut on Sept. 28.

After that, the show will be tucked back into Fox’s new eight-day “window,” which will make the show harder to watch on the Web, unless you’re a subscriber to either the Dish Network or Hulu Plus. (Here we’ll note that News Corp. owns Fox, and part of Hulu, and this Web site, too).

As Variety notes, TV networks have been handing out freebies on iTunes for years, but the trade journal thinks this is only the second time a U.S. broadcaster has done it. That’s worth noting, because the broadcasters have to worry about appeasing powerful local affiliates, who worry that free Web views equal small audiences for them and their local advertisers.

The other issue with the strategy: Last year, when Fox tried it for the first time, it didn’t work at all. Fox aired two episodes of “Lone Star” before it pulled the plug.

Here’s the first sneak peak Fox offered for “New Girl,” back in May, when it unveiled the show for advertisers.

Helping to achieve these records were nearly magical online and mobile presales that took place in the 45-days leading up to its debut.

Comcast-owned Fandango, which sells tickets online and through mobile applications to more than 16,000 screens, reports it sold more midnight and early morning show tickets for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”’ than it did for the late night openings of any other movie (including “The Dark Knight” and “Twilight”‘s “New Moon”).

It said many of the sales were for screenings starting at midnight, and that in total, more than 6,000 showtimes sold out on Fandango between midnight and the wee hours of the morning.

In all, the movie represented 93 percent of the day’s total ticket sales from its site.

Fandango charges a service fee of $1.25 for each ticket sold, but it’s difficult to say how much it would have grossed from the movie since a spokesperson declined to say how many individual tickets the 6,000 showtimes represented.

Fandango’s closest competitor MovieTickets.com also reported strong sales, reports MovieCityNews.com. As of Wednesday, it had sold more tickets for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2″ than any other movie released in 2011 — and that sales exceeded all ticket sales for “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.”

Variety is reporting that as of 1 pm Pacific time on Friday, the movie had already collected $24 million in domestic day-time sales, putting it on pace to break the record currently being held by “The Dark Knight.” That’s in addition to the $43.5 million in midnight sales.

If the pace continues, it may garner $80 million, which would far exceed Dark Knight’s $$67.2 million in opening day receipts.

What happened? Apparently, Microsoft (MSFT) realized that “Family Guy” is a ribald, off-color sitcom–but only after showing up to the taping of “Family Guy Presents: Seth and Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show.”

Variety says “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane and actor Alex Borstein did indeed promote Windows 7 during the Oct. 16 taping. Alas, “for most of the special, however, MacFarlane and Borstein made typical “Family Guy” style jokes, including riffs on deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest.”

Whoda thunk?

Give Microsoft credit, though: At least the company figured this one out before the show actually aired–unlike the vomit ads it used to push Internet Explorer 8 last year. And, in defense of MacFarlane and Borstein, Google (GOOG) hasn’t seemed to run into any problems with the pact it struck with MacFarlane last year.

Microsoft’s backpedal, via Variety:

“We initially chose to participate in the Seth and Alex variety show based on the audience composition and creative humor of ‘Family Guy,’ but after reviewing an early version of the variety show it became clear that the content was not a fit with the Windows brand,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. “We continue to have a good partnership with Fox, Seth MacFarlane and Alex Borstein and are working with them in other areas. We continue to believe in the value of brand integrations and partnerships between brands, media companies and talent.”

Here’s a representative sample of the show Microsoft was betting on: A clip that Hulu says is one of its users’ favorites. Warning! The following includes flatulence, some sex talk and some racial stereotyping. No mention of Microsoft products, though.

It doesn’t. Except when it does.

Contrary to News Corp. (NWS) CEO Rupert Murdoch’s comments earlier in the week, Dow Jones will not be charging customers who subscribe to both its Web and print versions a weekly fee to read the paper on its iPhone or BlackBerry apps.

But if you’re only subscribing to one version? That’ll be a buck a week, starting Oct. 24. The Journal will also start charging mobile-only users $2 a week, which is essentially the same price as a Web-only subscription.

That second charge makes some sense to me. The Journal has always said that it would start charging for the apps it makes for Apple’s (AAPL) and Research in Motion’s (RIMM) handsets. Right now these apps are gratis, which means you can either pay the Journal to read it in print or on the Web, or read it on your iPhone and pay zilch. That had to change at some point.

But while I have to be a tiny bit delicate here–Dow Jones owns this Web site, and I still have some aversion to insulting my employers in public–I don’t see how dunking paying customers a second time makes sense.

I do understand some of the impulse. Publishers of all stripes seem to think that while charging for content on the Web is tough, people are happy to pay for something delivered wirelessly. I think that many publishers are going to be very disappointed when they try this out in practice, but that’s another story.

And I also know that News Corp. has steadily been pushing Dow Jones to raise its subscription prices for the WSJ since it acquired the company, and this strategy sort of dovetails with that.

But seems to me that if I am paying for information, I will expect to consume it wherever I am, at the same price. And you’re starting to hear some publishers say the same thing–see Variety’s comments about subscription plans today in PaidContent.

I don’t actually pay for my WSJ subscription; my employers, who, I should stress, are truly excellent people, have hooked me up–so maybe I’ve got this wrong. Or maybe it’s merely a marketing issue: If you jack up my WSJ subscription and tell me you’re throwing in access to the mobile app for free, I might be okay with it.

But tell me you’re charging me an additional fee to read it on the go and it will stick in my craw. Let’s see if the paper’s paying subscribers feel the same way.

Estimates vary widely, but they’re all bad–as we thought they would be. Variety says ad agencies think the four broadcast networks–News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, Disney’s (DIS) ABC, GE’s (GE) NBC and CBS (CBS)–plus the pint-sized CW, may have seen sales drop by 10 percent to 12 percent compared to last year. Ad Age thinks the decline could by as much as 15 percent. Mediaweek says sales are down a staggering 22 percent.

The other bit of consistency is the explanation for the drop, which is two-pronged: Sales are down both because the economy is bad and because the networks are offering less inventory than they normally would. They’re holding back lots of their spots in hopes of selling them at higher prices later in the year, presumably when the economy comes roaring back.

I’ll let bigger brains than mine handicap the odds of that happening (but for the record, you can color me skeptical). In the meantime, let’s see what depressed TV ad prices do to prices for Web video ads.

The Nikki Finke auction is over, and the winner is…Mail.com. Jay Penske’s Mail.com Media Corporation, which owns the Mail.com email service and a small portfolio of Web sites, has acquired the blogger, whose Deadline Hollywood Daily is a must-read for Hollywood.

No details on pricing yet.* But, the fate of Finke’s site, which was managed by the LA Weekly, has been the subject of lots of speculation in recent months, including spirited back-and-forths between Finke and competitors like Variety and Sharon Waxman’s The Wrap.

Reading that stuff has been nearly as entertaining as Finke’s column. She provides blow-by-blow Tinseltown coverage–she seemed to post nearly hourly during the 2007-2008 writer’s strike–and relishes her scoops. One of her most recent: Allegations that GE’s (GE) NBC Universal was trying to “stifle” the Hollywood Reporter’s coverage of the entertainment conglomerate and its parent company.

Finke says she’ll keep full editorial and design control as she begins working for Penske, the son of auto magnate Roger Penske. He’s making an interesting move: Mail.com is a white-label email provider that raised $35 million last year, but he’s been expanding into the content business. Earlier this year, he relaunched Movieline with staff from Gawker Media’s Defamer site.

But Finke’s site will remain separate from the rest of Penske’s portfolio. She says she’ll expand her one-woman show by hiring a “senior” journalist based in New York City within the next three months.

That will be a tricky expansion to navigate: Recent history shows that blogs produced by dedicated/obsessive proprietors often stumble when they expand, in part because dedicated/obsessive proprietors may not be the best managers and in part because it’s tough to find people who want, or are able, to work for dedicated/obsessive proprietors.

And from my perch, this seems like a lousy time to sell an ad-supported news site. Not so, says Finke. Or at least, not her site.

“I was not anxious to sell. I was not looking to sell,” she says. “This was sort of a process where various people kind of wore me down….I’m very pleased with what happened. What wound up happening was nothing like the offers I was getting a year ago.”

UPDATE: You can now pick a number, depending on which news source you like, but they range from “low seven figures” to $15 million. It would be awesome if any of them are true–I need a bigger apartment, among other things, and it’d be great to know that you can get rich blogging–but the only one I think is remotely plausible is the lowest one, from Rafat Ali at PaidContent.

Gabe Snyder at Gawker does a nice job of running through the estimates and explaining why they don’t make sense.

The only thing I’d add is that all of the numbers being floated today are almost certain to include earnout clauses, meaning the deal is potentially worth up to X amount–if Finke’s site hits certain performance goals. Which is a lot different than saying she’s actually made X amount in the deal.

Another way of putting it, from a source who buys and sells media assets for a living: “Presumably it’s one of these billion dollar earnout deals. I’ll pay you a billion dollars–one dollar (more or less) upfront, and the rest as a percentage of revenues (or profits if I ever find someone else to sell this to). But in the meantime you can tell your friends that you were paid a billion.”

UPDATE2: Now the WSJ estimates the deal at $10 million — but says that number includes equity from Mail.com, along with a $1 million upfront payment.

Ah, one-click cinema. Seems that Amazon’s finally realized that there simply aren’t enough media junkies to support the download model it embraced with Unbox. “The people who pay to download video are extreme media-philes,” Forrester (FORR) analyst James McQuivey told Variety last year. “They are not the tip of an iceberg. They may grow their own spending, but there aren’t many people like that left. In the video space, iTunes (AAPL) is just a temporary flash while consumers wait for better ways to get video. They’re already coming.”