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
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
In one game, the player is a Ukrainian tractor driver stealing Russian tanks; in another, she slaps Putin with a sunflower; in another, he shoots the free-floating heads of prominent Russians (plus Elon Musk). One game just has the player walk around Kharkiv talking with other survivors. - The Guardian
Cleese's as-yet-untitled show on GB News, shared with satirist Andrew Doyle, will presumably be part of his notorious ongoing campaign against "wokeness" and "cancel culture" and in favor of "free speech." ("The Ministry of Silly Wokes?" quips The Hollywood Reporter.) - BBC
Characters, sports figures, local TV news anchors: They all have a Q, and that Q Score was used by advertising agencies, TV studios, Hollywood execs, marketing companies and consultants to put the most-liked people/things/characters in front of eager American audiences and consumers. - Washington Post
Some companies are coming to the conclusion they will need a dance partner to pursue growth instead of going it alone. Other Hollywood giants realize they probably should have one major offering in the marketplace, rather than two or three separate ones. - The Wall Street Journal
Writer-director Frances O'Connor says, "Sometimes it takes us a while to get the courage to step into something that we really feel passionate about, ... but if you’re going to tell a story now, I think it’s good for it to speak to women in a way that’s alive." - The Observer (UK)
A Netflix exec: "We loved going to see great original family films. ... Sadly, now when you look at what a lot of the offerings are, they aren’t live-action family. It’s usually animated for family, and then it’s reboots, remakes, sequels, low-budget horror." - The New York Times
Or rather not ending, but continuation, as a U.S. company buys and intends to expand the company that hired actors and built elaborate sets for "immersive screenings" of everything from Star Wars to Stranger Things. - The Guardian (UK)
