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Netflix Lost Almost A Million Subscribers Last Quarter.  This Is Actually Good News.

Even though the tally, 970,000, is the largest such loss in the company's history, executives and analysts had expected the number to be more than twice as high. - Variety

The Emmy Nominations Prove No One Knows How To Watch TV Anymore

"Folks just watch things in weird chunks now, sneaking in bits and pieces of viewing where they can." - Wired

Award-Winning Documentary About Yazidi Women Enslaved By ISIS Is In Big Trouble

Among the issues surrounding the film, titled Sebaya: a key scene doesn't show the rescue it purports to show, whether the women onscreen legitimately consented to appear, and an issue the film avoids entirely: rescued women being separated from the children sired by their ISIS enslavers. - The New York Times

Movie And TV Studios Have Extended COVID Protocols Through The End Of September

They're not messing around with omicron variants. - Variety

Inside The Inventive, Intense Animation For Marcel The Shell’s Big-Screen Debut

"The danger, when you’re dealing with a bigger budget, is that in polishing it up, you might sand down all the things that made it wonderful." - Los Angeles Times

Netflix Rests Its Hopes On Ryan Gosling And The Former Captain America

No, this isn't a return of an early meme. This is an action film, by the brothers who made Marvel zillions of dollars with the Avengers, that is Netflix's attempt to start an action franchise. - The New York Times

The Metaverse Is Coming To Hollywood, Probably Starting With Disney

"When we think about the virtual plane of existence where the impossible is possible, it's likely that many of us are going to want to use that to enrich our connection to the stories and characters we love most." - MSN (Los Angeles Times)

When Lofi Girl Disappeared, YouTube’s Issues With False Copyright Claims Reared Up Again

YouTube isn't protecting its smaller artists (or any artists) from false claims. Says one producer, "A lot of the legal practices are going towards stifling artists, which is interesting when the main idea of is to be protecting them." - NPR

Why Can’t Filmmakers Learn How To Cast Dakota Johnson?

Only Maggie Gyllenhaal has worked well with her in the past few years, in Lost Daughter. Dare we even address the travesty of the new Persuasion? - Washington Post

Cheaper Netflix, With Ads, Is Coming

Those ads will come from a partnership with Microsoft. "It’s very early days and we have much to work through, ... but our long-term goal is clear." - The Guardian (UK)

The BBC Made A Lot Of Money Last Year

Rather jaw-dropping, really. "The BBC has declared a record income of £5.33 billion ($6.4 billion) for the 2021/2022 period, up from £5.06 billion last year, and a surplus of £206 billion." - Variety

“Princess Mononoke” Is A Brilliant, Complicated, Gorgeous Film, And Was A Huge Hit In Japan. Why Didn’t It Catch Fire In The States?

Perhaps, as some in Japan say, because America has such a black-and-white, good-versus-evil mindset. Perhaps because Hollywood thinks animation is for kids and therefore must be simple. It could be an epic snafu with the English script. Or it could be, as Neil Gaiman says, "Harvey Weinstein being petty." - BBC

YouTube Live Has Been Rather Quietly Growing Until It’s Bigger Than Hulu

"Google nearly decided to call the internet TV service 'YouTube Air,' because an early version used an over-the-air TV antenna," and then internally it was YouTube "Unplugged." The service has a million more subscribers than its fellow "Live" at Hulu. - Variety

The Death Of The “Voice Of God”: Traditional Voiceover Narrators Are Disappearing From Documentaries

Starting in the 1990s, traditional documentaries started to be replaced by personality-driven nonfiction films whose directors (e.g., Michael Moore, Werner Herzog) were more than clear about points of view. Now more and more documentaries have given up narration entirely, using only the voices of subjects. - The Guardian

Emmy Nominees Tell Us We’re Truly Not OK

Perhaps that's not such a surprise, well into our third year of a global pandemic, but the drama nominees show "it is easy to feel trapped by forces beyond our control. Easy to feel like pawns in a game or part of an experiment." - Los Angeles Times

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