Media

“The group allegedly circumvented copyright protections on nearly every movie released by major production studios, as well as television shows, and distributed them by way of a worldwide network of servers.” – The New York Times

TV needs the movies. But as the pandemic has forced the closure of countless movie theaters, new questions have surfaced about how much the movies will need TV. – Variety

Current licensing rules for free-to-air commercial TV broadcasters in Australia require a set number of hours of original, locally produced drama, nonfiction/news and children’s programming each year. Those broadcasters are lobbying the conservative national government to eliminate those rules entirely, but even their “fallback” position, accepting a “simplified” quota system, would see spending on Australian programming fall by half and the loss of up to 4,600 jobs, says Screen Producers Australia. – The Guardian

“The men, who have been charged with copyright infringement conspiracy, were accused of being members of the Sparks Group, a sophisticated piracy outfit spanning several continents … [that] ‘allegedly circumvented copyright protections on nearly every movie released by major production studios, as well as television shows.'” – The New York Times

Of the removed videos, 3.8 million were taken down for child safety reasons, 3.2 million for spam or scams, 1.7 million for nudity or sexual content, 1.2 million for violence and 900,000 for the promotion of violence. – CNET

Virtual conventions are long. People are watching at home, in their rooms, instead of in giant ballrooms packed with other excited fans. Trying to bring some of that convention energy to people digitally is immensely difficult, but what FanDome proved is that figuring out pacing and giving audiences something to actually look at in place of Zoom call screens they’re already exhausted by goes a long way. – The Verge

Some of the people who make visual effects for Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters believe they have found a way to help: By embracing open source, they want to open up doors for traditionally underrepresented communities. – Protocol

Some of the most influential modern comedy in any medium was created for radio: “Who’s on First?“, Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life, The Jack Benny Program, BBC’s The Goon Show and I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, The Firesign Theatre. And it has always been a fertile format for experimentation (because it’s cheap). Sam Corbin explores why audio sketch comedy lands like nothing else — and wonders why, in the podcast boom, we aren’t getting more of it. – Vulture

With cinemas in many of the big U.S. metros still closed and many potential customers still unconvinced that multiplexes are safe from the coronavirus (despite the efforts of the National Association of Theatre Owners), Hollywood sees the box-office results for the new Russell Crowe road-rage thriller, the first major U.S. release since March, as good news. Says the CEO of the movie’s distributor, “We’re breathing a sigh of enormous relief.” – Los Angeles Times

From the experience in the theatre to when and where movies will be shown, to… – HuffPost

It wasn’t easy to film Love in the Time of Corona. But it was doable, with a lot of care – and a lot of house-cleaning for the actors whose homes hosted the shoots. Some of the details: “Filming over two-plus weeks in July, Johnson worked with a crew of seven who were tested before spending three days at each location. The showrunner monitored scenes from a van parked outside the actors’ homes, and gave direction via walkie-talkie.” – Vulture

Reassuring: “The theaters are pushing hard the argument that moviegoing is safe more broadly, or at least as safe as going to a restaurant, flying on an airplane or worshiping in a church.” – Los Angeles Times

His team sprang into action and got censor-free footage that seems impossible. “The hardest footage to shoot was inside the I.C.U., Ai said, but he could not divulge how it was filmed. He said much of it was done with hand-held video cameras about the size of a smartphone that are able to stabilize images. It helped, he said, that many people were wearing masks: That made them feel less nervous about getting in trouble for speaking on camera.” – The New York Times

The drivetime listeners are gone, sending NPR’s radio ratings into the sub-sub-basement. Yet NPR is reaching 10 percent more people than at the same time last year. What gives? “Bringing a younger, more diverse audience into the NPR fold means reaching listeners on the platforms they’re already on — whether that’s putting podcasts on Spotify, music on YouTube, or newsy explainers on TikTok. … Executives are putting two and two together from the demographic reports and, bubbling up from the bottom, junior producers and interns want to produce content that their digital-native friends will actually see.” – Nieman Lab

Horror movies sure seem to think so. A lot of them seem to exhibit “this idea that if you have enough free time, you’re going to just start rounding people up and killing them.” – Wired

“It’s easy to pin the current squabbles on the coronavirus. Look more closely, and you’ll see evidence of deeper frustrations at play that marketers and media outlets have known about for years but haven’t done enough to fix. … Since the industry agreed to changes in the way Nielsen measures TV ratings in 2007, viewership patterns have grown exponentially more complex — and everyone, it seems, has a different vision of how to calculate the number of people who watch a favorite comedy or drama; a sports event; and a newscast.” – Variety

As one of the authors of UCLA’s annual Hollywood Diversity Report put it, “There are almost no people of color in the film industry who have the power to say, ‘This movie is getting made and by this person.” Now MGM is taking a concrete step to address that: it’s turning its Orion Pictures division over to 36-year-old Alana Mayo (“a person who is a woman and Black and queer,” as she puts it) to produce films by, and about, underrepresented people and groups. – The New York Times

Directors UK (the Brit equivalent of the Directors Guild) has published Intimacy in the Time of COVID-19, a new set of guidelines for the planning, staging and recording of sex scenes, starts with suggesting that “the director, writer and producer review the scenes together and decide if the intimate act needs to be shown.” And yes, the guide explicitly suggests looking to the Hays Code as a model. – Variety

Now that work is underway for the second season of “All Rise,” which stars Simone Missick as an idealistic Los Angeles judge, five writers from the original staff of seven are gone. Among those who quit were the program’s three highest-ranking writers of color. – The New York Times

One partial solution to the decline of media that often gets ignored—yet has the potential to both alleviate the deepening crisis and also help restore public trust in the media as a whole—is for the government to create and finance a truly public media system. The idea of public media is often conflated with state-run media in the eyes of skittish libertarians, but public media systems in other democracies have proven entirely capable of retaining editorial independence despite being government-funded. – The New Republic

“Female film critics contributed 35% of the film reviews across print, broadcast and online outlets, up 1% from 2019, according to the report, titled Thumbs Down 2020: Film Critics and Gender, and Why It Matters. Though the increase in numbers of female film critics seems marginal, the numbers show a marked improvement from the 73% male to 27% female breakdown in 2016.” – Variety

“In such an expansive catalog, encompassing films from more than 40 countries, the relative absence of African-American filmmakers stands out. There are, for example, more directors in the Criterion Collection with the last name Anderson than there are African-Americans.” Criterion president Peter Becker acknowledges the problem: “There’s nothing I can say about it that will make it OK. The fact that things are missing, and specifically that Black voices are missing, is harmful, and that’s clear. We have to fix that.” – The New York Times

This early promise of a more equit­able industry didn’t last. Once the studio system kicked into gear, women were largely muscled out of positions of authority. There are exploding opportunities for women in TV and streaming today, but film writing and directing are still overwhelmingly dominated by men, and white men at that. – Variety

“Technology and trivia may not be obvious bedfellows. But trivia enthusiasts in the postwar-trivia boom of the 1950s would surely look in envy at technologies we take for granted today: word processors, search engines, wikis, videoconferencing services. In today’s Tedium, I take you through the technological evolution of a trivia format called quizbowl.” – Tedium

The lawsuit was filed against Netflix, Disney, Hulu, DirecTV, and Dish Network on August 4 in Indiana Commercial Court in Marion County. The cities of Indianapolis, Evansville, Valparaiso, and Fishers want the companies to pay the cable-franchise fees established in Indiana’s Video Service Franchises (VSF) Act, which requires payments of 5 percent of gross revenue in each city. – ArsTechnica