Early on, "when Almodóvar started making films, he promised himself one thing: his movies would give the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco the ultimate two-fingered salute. ... They would simply act as if he had never existed." Now, he's changed his mind. - The Guardian (UK)
A company called Space Entertainment Enterprise intends to open a space station containing both a film and TV studio and a sports/performance arena for clients who want to produce work in a micro-gravity environment. The scheduled completion date is December 2024. - Variety
The licence fee announcement needs to be seen as part of a wider legacy in which the government has questioned the relevance of the whole idea of Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) and its role in the 21st century. - The Conversation
It's no secret that Hollywood has faced accusations of ageism, seeking younger audiences at the expense of older players both in front of and behind the camera. Yet the priorities and business model of streaming, and the abundance of content that it has created, appears to be tinkering with that math. - CNN
"Ads that ran for 30 seconds outperformed others on most key performance indicators such as engagement, brand effect, and recall, and were also heard as more trustworthy, likable and relevant," said Audacy's chief research officer about the study. - Inside Radio
An executive announced that the platform will only go forward with programs that have already been contracted through the Black Voices and YouTube Kids Funds — a big change from earlier plans to present a lot of original content on the YouTube Premium paid subscription service. - The Hollywood Reporter
Streaming was supposed to be the great equalizer, for either access to content or its segmentation into competitive platforms warring for their niche and slice of IP. Yellowstone presents a fascinating rebuke to these trends. - The Guardian
"There has been a range of films" — Zero Day (2002), Elephant (2003), Polytechnique (2009), Beautiful Boy (2010), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Mass (2021), the documentary Bowling for Columbine (2002) — that have tried to make some kind of sense of these senseless, most horrifying atrocities." - BBC
The news giant has already poached Audie Cornish from NPR and Chris Wallace from Fox for CNN+ (rumor has it they dangled $20 million at Rachel Maddow), and it's bringing on its own stars (Anderson Cooper, Sara Sidner) as well. The suits insist, "This is not CNN 2." - Vanity Fair
It's the way the BBC is funded — a flat fee, currently £159 ($217) a year, charged to every household in the UK that has a television. Here's an explanation of how that money is spent, why the fee was just frozen, and why the Tories want to kill it. - BBC
YouTube’s controversial move to remove public dislike counts in November was aimed at shielding smaller creators from harassment campaigns but has already started to discourage certain viewers from engaging with videos on the platform, new data suggests. -Variety
Shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell said the Government is signalling “the end of the BBC as we know it” in a “pathetic” attempt to distract from Boris Johnson’s difficulties over Downing Street parties. - The Press-Gazette
