It's not easy because older audiences just aren't coming back. Yet operators are starting to be a bit more optimistic. "The opportunity to see it in a theater is a better experience for just about any type of movie. We just need to reacquaint people with it." - Variety
"From automated audiobooks to digital avatars, AI systems are now replacing skilled professional performers" the union says. It warns of "dystopian" consequences unless copyright law adapts. Equity highlights a number of different ways actors' voices and likenesses may be used. - BBC
"CNN+ was reportedly drawing only 10,000 active users. Blog posts do better numbers than that. This one probably will. ... People were calling it 'CNN minus,' since it couldn't even stream the network's live coverage due to agreements with cable carriers." - New York Magazine
A nearly three-hour televised debate between French presidential candidates Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen on Wednesday night scored the lowest ever ratings for such a match-up. - Deadline
Is there such a thing as too many streaming options? How many people are really willing to pay for them? And could this business be less profitable and far less reliable than what the industry has been doing for years? - The New York Times
Since NBC took back The Office and HBO Max did the same with Friends, well, it can’t exactly be said that the emperor has no content. It’s just that Netflix’s whole approach favors quantity over quality. - The Guardian
The report from New Mexico's Occupational Health & Safety Bureau found that the crew "demonstrated plain indifference to employee safety" and "willfully violated" established safety protocols for handling firearms on a film set, thus Leading to the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. - CNN
"Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in Q1 and expects to lose another 2 million in the current second quarter, the streamer said in its first-quarter 2022 earnings release Tuesday." The causes, said the company, are password-sharing and the loss of the Russian market due to Ukraine-war sanctions. - Variety
Just 3% of UK households signed up to a new video streaming subscription in Q1 2022, compared to 4.2% during the same period in 2021 when the pandemic was keeping more people home. Fifty-eight percent of households (16.9 million) now have at least one paid subscription, down 215,000 quarter-on-quarter. - Deadline
Globally Netflix announced it expected to add only 2.5 million new subscribers in the first three months of the year, well down on the 4 million in the first quarter of 2021. The news has helped wipe almost $45bn (£33bn) from its value as investors worried Netflix’s glory days were over. - The Guardian
The writers of Everything Everywhere All at Once wrote that the movie "was a dream about reconciling all of the contradictions, making sense of the largest questions, and imbuing meaning onto the dumbest, most profane parts of humanity." - The New York Times
“We have more invention in front of us in the next 15 years than the last 15 — and our team is passionately committed to providing customers with the most expansive collection of compelling content anywhere in the world.” - Deadline
Saad Mohseni, founder and CEO of Afghanistan's first independent radio and TV networks: "On one side, we're dealing with a culture ministry that's constructive and realistic, and on the other, an intelligence agency and a ministry of vice and virtue that are not." - Bloomberg Quint
"(An) investigation was launched after the 84-year-old actor had been accused of sexual harassment, including making inappropriate comments to a female co-star on set during work." - Deadline
Mundanity and profundity—these were key to the 21st-century boom in what critics call “prestige TV,” during which the onetime “vast wasteland” (as Federal Communications Commission Chair Newton N. Minow called it in 1961) began earning regular comparisons to great cinema and literature. - The Atlantic
