While Netflix’s competitors still have room to grow — and Disney in particular has committed to growing a lot — agents and creators believe they are seeing the end of the spending spree that has lined many pockets in recent years. - The Hollywood Reporter
"Director General Tim Davie is preparing to announce deep cuts to BBC output in the coming week. ... The corporation estimates it needs to find another £285m ($356m) in annual savings as a result of government-imposed cuts to its budget." - The Guardian
They changed their minds, of course: "70% of the households who initially wanted to pay nothing or less than the £159 ($200.54) per year fee had u-turned by the end of the study." Turns out they used the Beeb more than they had realized. - Deadline
Netflix’s sign of softening brought a screeching halt to the prevailing industry logic that going all-in on streaming investment was the way to please shareholders. - Variety
“When analyzing title after title, it becomes very clear that spikes in piracy are most drastic when a movie is first available to watch in the home: It doesn’t matter if it’s available via premium video-on-demand or subscription video-on-demand.” - The Hollywood Reporter
Rather than prompting new subscribers to sign up, “the people who would have subscribed anyway are using the credit.” Subscribers weren’t swayed because they wouldn’t see the benefit until tax time and because the 15% credit was too low to change many minds on paying for news. - NiemanLab
Netflix has nearly 222 million subscribers around the world, more than any other streaming company, and just last month it was forecasting eventually growing to half a billion. Now the arrow is pointing in the opposite direction. - The Atlantic
They mostly (excepting Joe Rogan) fly beneath mainstream radar, but "rightwing satirists, podcasters and standups … feature on each other's podcasts, TV shows and social media feeds, sharing ideas and audiences. … Many are masters of Reddit-style trolling and meme-making, helping them reach vast internet audiences." - The Guardian
I don’t imagine that one will wake up and open Twitter and see it magically transformed into a total cesspool of hate, harassment, and false information. But I can imagine a “going bankrupt” quality to Twitter’s degradation—it might happen slowly, then all at once. - The Atlantic
The showrunner for The Chosen, Dallas Jenkins (son of a co-author of the Left Behind novels), put up billboards advertising the show that were faux-vandalized, ostensibly by The Devil. Some fans thought the graffiti was real and were very offended, but the billboards reeled in new viewers. - Slate
To help you get a sense of how vague and complex a term “the metaverse” can be, here's an exercise: Mentally replace the phrase “the metaverse” in a sentence with “cyberspace.” Ninety percent of the time, the meaning won't substantially change. - Wired
Gestures such as incorporating a Ukrainian flag into one’s username may be merely symbolic, but when users lobby politicians online, donate money, or even offer up their own homes to refugees, their engagement with the war begins to have real-world consequences. - The Guardian
Or, to put it more clearly, how the new streaming service — into which the previous bosses had poured hundreds of millions — was shut down ten days after CNN officially became part of the newly-merged Warner Bros. Discovery conglomerate (and why Discovery couldn't signal its concerns beforehand). - The New York Times
"Some of those experiments, like Headline News (now HLN), paid off in a big way; others were here and gone in about a year. But all of them started ... from the roots of a network that itself was a wild bet when it first started." - Tedium
Think Keanu Reeves in Always Be My Maybe, Anna Faris in Keanu (unrelated to Reeves, kind of), LeBron James in Trainwreck ... the list goes way back. - Time
