David Bergstein, the troubled Hollywood financier whose credits include -- oddly enough -- helping orchestrate the recent sale of Miramax, was arrested in Florida last November over bad checks and unpaid gambling debts involving multiple Las Vegas casinos, TheWrap has learned.

Though one set of fraud charges was dismissed after Bergstein moved to make good, the arrest -- Bergstein’s secret until now -- is the first public indication of criminality in the unfolding Hollywood saga of his calamitous personal and professional lives.

All totaled, he allegedly stiffed casinos for almost $3 million in recent years.

Bergstein reacted angrily Tuesday to a message left by TheWrap,...

There’s yet another piece of compelling evidence of the media industry’s emerging consumer-centric economics: a burgeoning controversy with Apple at its core.

With pricing power and customer control at stake, the simmering dispute pits the Silicon Valley game-changer against magazine giants Time Inc. and Hearst in a struggle over the fledgling market for so-called digi-mags on the  four-month-old iPad, which already looks like another potentially paradigm-shifting...

After almost 20 years of haplessly blazing a golden trail for its rivals, CBS, under onetime-TV-actor–turn-CEO Leslie Moonves, is finally cashing in to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on the future of broadcast television -- “retransmission consent” fees.

And yet, even with a windfall of $250 million a year in new revenues from cable operators CBS won't likely ever match the scale its rivals have achieved.

Ironically, by exploiting CBS’ nearly two-decades-old vision of “retrans,” rivals ABC, Fox and NBC built multi-billion-dollar cable empires that dwarf the entire worth of CBS, which also owns Showtime, sprawling radio and outdoor advertising businesses and publisher Simon & Schuster.

Indeed, at about $10 billion, CBS’ value is less than that of some individual networks that are part...