Media

The studio judges that its “Bandersnatch” project was a success and it’s exploring extending its experiments in letting viewers have more control of the stories they’re watching. But what kinds of stories should these be? – The Guardian

“The new streamer, [called PBS Living and] costing $2.99 per month after a seven-day free trial, will offer classic PBS series like The French Chef, This Old House and Antiques Roadshow, along with more recent series like No Passport Required and Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. The new channel will offer subscribers hundreds of episodes of PBS series across the food and cooking, home, culture and travel genres, with new content to be added each month.” – The Hollywood Reporter

“The 83-person staff of Gimlet Media, a podcasting startup acquired by music streaming service Spotify for $230 million in February, is unionizing with the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE). Gimlet was founded in 2014 and produces popular podcasts including Reply All, StartUp, and Crimetown.” – BuzzFeed

People in a Quebec town and across the province were shocked after learning in January that footage from a derailment and explosion that killed 47 people was used in the drama starring Sandra Bullock. – Toronto Star

The nightly two-hour show, which is carried on nearly 200 radio stations nationwide and boasts an estimated audience of 1.3 million, might not identify as ideological or political, at least not overtly. But Lee Habeeb has clearly positioned it as a right-of-center alternative to NPR, whose programs such as Morning Edition and All Things Considered also emphasize skillful story-telling, but which many conservatives perceive, rightly or not, as inhospitable to anything that isn’t progressive or politically correct. – The Daily Beast

The service’s parent company revealed in its third-quarter financial report “that the money-losing subscription service has fewer subscribers than previously disclosed, causing the firm to restate its revenue downward by 8.2 percent [$6.6 million] and its losses upward by 7.7 percent [$6.7 million].” – The Hollywood Reporter

The embargo was instated by Pakistan’s Association of Film Exhibitors following last month’s flare-up of armed conflict in and around Kashmir. It may seem a patriotic gesture, but there’s a real question whether Pakistan’s roughly 120 remaining cinemas can survive without Indian films to show. – BBC

Lindsay Ellis has recently emerged as one of the medium’s breakout stars. She earns more than $10,000 a month on Patreon, the crowdfunding site that’s her primary source of revenue. It helps pay for a small staff of mostly part-time employees and allows her to turn out video series like last year’s three-part deep-dive into the Hobbit trilogy, which cost nearly $20,000. Ellis and some of her team went to New Zealand as part of the production, which she feared her supporters would find excessive; instead, the videos gave her the biggest Patreon boost ever. And in the last year, the number of her YouTube subscribers and Twitter followers has doubled. – Wired

There are a few reasons. A presidential budget is essentially a messaging tool these days, a way to show your supporters that you’re addressing their priorities; Congress has to actually decide where real money will go. Just about every member of Congress has a public radio or TV station in his or her district; any transition from rhetoric to reality would be felt back home. But it’s also because public broadcasting is actually pretty popular and pretty trusted by Americans. – NiemenLab

As Fox’s film and television operations (not including Fox News and Sports, or the lot itself) prepare to go to Disney, “The Los Angeles Times spoke to dozens of actors, executives and other Fox veterans to reminisce about the studio’s 106-year legacy, its family atmosphere, its moguls, its filmmakers and the magic they made.” – Los Angeles Times

In what seems a twist worthy of season 65 of the Netflix show The Crown, the BBC has started mocking the numbers, or rather lack of numbers, Netflix shares about one of its most expensive shows. The Beeb’s director general acknowledged that Netflix had a huge budget compared to the BBC, and also urged the BBC to get ready for people never to watch live TV. – The Guardian (UK)

Duh, right? Captain Marvel had the seventh-highest opening for a Marvel movie and by far the highest debut for a film fronted by a woman. (Also, Marvel, perhaps because of its internal and external experience, was ready for the trolls.) – Quartz

It’s TikTok (you might know that already) – but what is TikTok? Whew: “A free-for-all. It’s easy to make a video on TikTok, not just because of the tools it gives users, but because of extensive reasons and prompts it provides for you. You can select from an enormous range of sounds, from popular song clips to short moments from TV shows, YouTube videos or other TikToks. You can join a dare-like challenge, or participate in a dance meme, or make a joke. Or you can make fun of all of these things.”  The New York Times

No, not with director’s cuts, but with literal remakes of their own earlier movies. “For the studio heads tasked with squeezing as much money out of the project as possible, it’s a can’t-fail proposition even safer than sanding off all of a foreign hit’s edges to prep it for Stateside viewers.” – The Guardian (UK)

Soderbergh has made a feature for Netflix and released his work in all sorts of ways; he says “I really don’t care how people see my movies, as long as they see them.” Spielberg is trying to ban Netflix from the Oscars and says that “movie theaters need to be around forever.” Critic Ann Hornaday writes that the root of Spielberg’s anxieties is something that Soderbergh understands. – The Washington Post

It’s still obvious to even the most casual viewer that Netflix hates movies, because they won’t offer their viewers something that theaters, LaserDiscs, videotapes, DVDs, Blu-rays, and even Mutoscopes offered as a matter of course: the ability to watch a film from the first frame to the last.  – Slate

It is usually believed that the anti-sex, anti-violence Code was harmful to art, intellectually unsophisticated, imposed from above and un-American in its disregard for First Amendment Rights. This is far from the full picture. Often the Code encouraged greatness, was intellectually nuanced, self-regulated and conformed to American values of Judeo-Christian ethics and free enterprise. For good and bad, it was as American as apple pie. – History Today

Jackson’s family and his estate have denounced the Leaving Neverland documentary in recent weeks through written statements, a lawsuit, and letters to HBO and Britain’s Channel 4, which also plans to air the film. Their central criticism has been the documentary’s failure to talk to family members or other defenders of Jackson, whom they insist never molested a child. – CBC

Strange as it may seem today, there was a point at which the network was very skeptical of Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency. Now Fox News personalities appear with Trump at political events and give him policy advice, both on and off the air. Jane Mayer does a deep dive into how the change happened, who tried to keep it at bay (Roger Ailes!), and who chose not to stop it. – The New Yorker

“The anti-vax documentaries had been available in the U.S. as part of Prime Video but as of Friday afternoon were not available to stream. … The move came just hours after U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) publicly announced that he’d sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos expressing concern that Amazon is ‘surfacing and recommending products and content that discourage parents from vaccinating their children.'” – Variety

This story is complicated, but basically, Fox executives, including two who are in line to be top executives at Disney, just got hit with a $179 million ruling that they committed fraud against the stars and executive producer of the massive hit Bones, which ran from 2005-2017. But it has larger implications. “What we have exposed in this case is going to profoundly change the way Hollywood does business,” the lawyer said. Will this news also break Hulu? – The Hollywood Reporter