MEDIA

Would Halloween Ends have opened bigger if it weren't also streaming on Peacock? Maybe. - Seattle Times (AP)

Mallory Rubin watches each House of Dragons episode three times before her two podcasts. "It would be hard to engineer a commentator better equipped for this moment, when growth-obsessed streaming services and movie studios have coaxed audiences toward the outer limits of franchise entertainment." - The New York Times

"Coltrane, across a decade of movies, imbued in him a depth and warmth that made him feel not just instantly memorable, but real. In doing so, he subtly pushed against the scripts’ inclinations to turn the character into mere comic relief or an adorable buffoon." - The Atlantic

Here's where to stream not Murder, She Wrote, but some of her (other) greatest work. - Vulture

"The question shouldn’t be whether a movie should capture Black pain. The problem in film arises when the camera only asks for an audience to witness." - Time

The love and togetherness wasn’t “Barney” ’s problem. The character himself was uniquely unnerving—more Grimace than T. Rex, somehow dopey and condescending at once—and some of the outrage, I suspect, came from viewers’ impassioned feelings about what good educational TV should be. - The New Yorker

"The ad-supported service is scheduled to debut Nov. 3 as Netflix tries to reverse a drop in subscribers. It will cost $7 per month in the U.S., a 55% markdown from Netflix's most popular $15.50-per-month plan, which is ad-free." - AP

TikTok’s website was visited last year more often than Google. No app has grown faster past a billion users, and more than 100 million of them are in the United States. The average American viewer watches TikTok for 80 minutes a day — more than the time spent on Facebook and Instagram, combined. - Washington Post

"Displaced families in Syrian camps are begging for donations on TikTok while the company takes up to 70% of the proceeds, a BBC investigation found. Children are livestreaming on the social media app for hours, pleading for digital gifts with a cash value." - BBC

"For an American, it can be easy to forget how much ideology is packed into the genre — until you watch a film from elsewhere, and are confronted with the cartoonish heroes and villains of other cultures." - The New York Times Magazine

Experiencing a game is weirdly different from experiencing a TV show, a movie, a play or a book. They are, to use a drab but accurate phrase, “lean back” culture. You’re the audience, experiencing the art — the artists and creators talking to you. Games, on the other hand, require you to do things. - Medium

The podcast industry built itself on an open ecosystem: any podcast player could make any particular podcast available.  Then Spotify, after it bought Gimlet Media, started insisting on allowing its podcasts only on its own player.  It's a standard big-business move — and it's backfiring. - Simon Owens's Media Newsletter

The studio is cutting 26% of personnel, a total of 125 positions, across scripted, unscripted and animation. - Deadline

Actors and directors are threatened by crowds and harassed by authorities; occasionally, a film set is vandalized; some stories become off-limits. "Out of fear, you draw back and you draw back and you draw back, until you step on the very people you ought to be defending." - The New Yorker

"You may have already forgotten about it, but Vault by CNN launched in the summer of 2021 as a marketplace for its own NFTs (non-fungible tokens) that would 'offer collectors the opportunity to own a piece of history.'"  Well, it did last 15 times longer than CNN+ did ... - The Verge