One of the first tags I created here on the blog was “Future TV” which seemed to best sum up the various articles and such I was absorbing about what was sometimes called “Peak TV” and sometimes a new “Golden Age” of television. In hindsight, “the streaming wars” should have been coined as a nod to the far more fun “cola wars.” That’s because it became clear that Peak TV and the “wars” were over…
In case you forgot, today’s the day you can binge all 20 episodes of Star Trek: Prodigy, season 2. I, for one, am ready for the cockamamie plans.
I still should work on a wrap-up post regarding last year’s Hollywood Strikes, but one of the outcomes the unions were able to negotiate was visibility about the success of shows on streaming services. In what definitely feels like an effort to guide that narrative, Netflix released a heretofore unprecedented amount of data publicly in December regarding how many people watched what on their service. You can get a summary, watch a half hour press…
The final month is upon us. DVD Netflix is going away. This departure will blow a hole in the movie-watching habits of many of us… and leave us ever more at the mercy of ephemeral licensing deals and capricious streamers, both of which may conspire to leave us without certain perfectly good films that deserve to be seen. As Beth Greenfield notes on Aol.com (yes, the irony of that article’s location is not lost on…
Not quite three months ago, I, along with a couple million other people, got the sad news that Netflix was finally shuttering its films-by-mail service aka, the DVD rental business with “no late fees” that started it all. Now, there’s also over 200 million other Netflix subscribers who likely didn’t realize you could still get DVDs and Blu-Rays by mail. That doesn’t change the fact that this Postal method was and is a great way…
I was all ready with another post for today when this popped into my inbox yesterday afternoon: You can learn more about the decision in these articles in The Hollywood Reporter, Gizmodo, and Reuters among others. Even though this decision makes perfect sense –I guess there have to be less than 2 million of us red envelope cinemaniacs left– it’s quite the bummer. For almost all of those 25 years, I have been the recipient…
So, the news that Netflix lost subscribers last week has generated more online articles this week than… well, new shows dropping on Netflix any given week (spoiler: it’s a lot). It seems many people are delighting in the fact that the streaming disruptor is now finding its plans disrupted. Now, I’ve been a Netflix subscriber going back to when they were only DVDs by mail. In fact, I still get DVDs by mail in addition…
Evidently, this month had gotten away from me –at least in term of blog updates– so this is most definitely old news, but remember how I noted that Netflix was getting into podcasts? Well, apparently they’re getting into video games as well. Per the Vox/Recode article, they’re looking to start with games based on their existing properties (e.g. Stranger Things) and their hire of a former Oculus executive may bode a move towards virtual reality…
The podcast hills may soon be alive with the sound of Netflix. That’s what I’m gleaning from this Bloomberg article about the new Netflix executive in charge of podcasts. N’Jeri Eaton comes to Netflix by way of Apple and NPR. An award-winning storyteller, she has roots in documentary filmmaking, something near and dear to many a DC filmmaker. While that’s all cool, the big surprise from the article for me was that not only that…
Last week, I mentioned the big news that was AT&T’s retreat from WarnerMedia (still to be approved). And, as many people have noticed, media consolidation continues apace. This week’s revelation? Amazon is looking to buy MGM. Now, since MGM has been trying to sell itself for a while, this may not come as a surprise, but what this means for consolidation… well, who knows?