I know we all thought it was long gone already, but it’s only now that Netflix is winding down its DVD rental service. Those once-ubiquitous red envelopes are no more and it’s been a good run. But after this week, Netflix has informed customers still getting those round piece of plastic to simply keep ’em. Jay Peters at The Verge has more. Netflix won’t charge DVD.com customers for any discs they still have after September 29th, the company announced. That generous offer, combined with Netflix’s recent announcement that it may send customers as many as 10 extra discs from their queues, means that…
Tag: streaming
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Yell Poop, Make Money
Leave it to kids and a weird set of circumstances to become an income stream for musicians out there. A fascinating story from Katie Notopoulos at Buzz Feed wherein people who make silly songs are earning streaming income by kids yelling “Poop” at Alexa. With the proliferation of Echo devices putting Alexa in many homes, kids will yell silly things at it. Of course, kids think this stuff is funny, but when they issue this command, Alexa translates it into a request to play a song. With Amazon Music set as the default music service, it serves up songs like…
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What’s Your Vecna Song?
Stranger Things is all the hype once more. Season 4 has dropped, bringing the next chapter to completion. Two episodes clocking in at 4-hours is certainly a lot of Hawkins kids to watch. However, one thing that makes a great season even better is the incorporation of music this time around. The Duffer Brothers have not shied away from bringing iconic 80’s music into the Stranger Things universe. It’s always been prominent. But, Season 4 took it to a new level. Without giving anything away, music is a means of survival. To help celebrate this deep interweaving of music into…
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Apple TV+ Comes Into Its Own
I’ve been saying it for many months: Apple TV+ is a bonafide hit of a streaming service. But what are the best shows on Apple TV+? Of course, we all know about Ted Lasso. Apple promotes it at every opportunity. However, Severance is the latest show to really knock it out of the park. I cannot state enough how great this show is. It combines great storytelling and visuals that drive the ideas home. There’s a lot more than this pair to watch. Keith Nelson, Evan Romaro, and Milan Polk at Men’s Health breakdown of the top 20 shows on…
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Netflix Reaps What it Sows
Last week was a rough week for Netflix. The company that basically invented modern-day streaming, binge-watching, and kicked off the endless rebooting of shows, is in a world of hurt. Last week Netflix officially let go 150 employees. On the surface, this may seem like no big deal. Netflix is a giant company with many thousands of employees. The company is losing hundreds of thousands of subscribers. They’re seeing their stock slide on all this news. However, there’s more to it than that. This is the culmination of a company whose MO led them to catch lightning in a bottle…
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Long Runtime
Brian Stauffer reported for Variety on something I’ve surely noticed a lot lately: movies are really freaking long now. So many movies clock in at two and a half or even nearly three hours, lately. For me, it seems to be a detrimental factor each and every time I think about watching a film. Even when watching at home, the long runtime means you can’t just pop a movie on after dinner, especially when you need to be up for work the next day. Stauffer talks to a number of industry people about this and how all that extra footage…
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The Final Upside-Down
We’ve been teased about the fourth season of Stranger Things for so long. Then COVID had other plans for the show and things were on hold. But finally, finally, finally we get not only new information about season 4 but a release date! Netflix announced last week that this upcoming season will be split into two volumes. Season 5 will also be our final foray into Hawkins. That, to me, is fantastic news. Season 4 has been split into two parts with Volume 1 coming on May 27th. The second volume will stream on July 1st. David Tyler over at…
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The Return of MoviePass
Back in 2018, MoviePass was a big deal with people who wanted to go to the movies. The small startup was flowing with VC money and posing an impossible deal: subscribe for $10 per month and see unlimited movies in theaters. Of course, this was unrealistic. The cost for a monthly subscription didn’t even cover the cost of a single ticket and MoviePass was losing money like crazy. It didn’t take long for MoviePass to crater and die in a spectacular blaze. This past week Stacy Spikes, the original founder of MoviePass pre-VC money, held a presentation announcing he purchased…
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What Is Work
My list of “Wow, that looks interesting” tv shows is growing. The newest one to add is Apple TV+’s Severence starring Adam Scott. Wyatte Grantham-Philips and Sasha Urban over at Variety reveal what the show is about. From writer and creator Dan Erickson, “Severance” follows Mark Scout (Adam Scott), who leads a team at Lumon Industries — where employees have undergone a “severance procedure,” which surgically divides their memories between work and personal lives. Throughout the course of the series, the mysterious and chilling “work-life balance” experiment is called into question as Mark is forced to confront reality. Variety The…
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One Final Frontier
On Friday Paramount dropped the trailer for the second season of Star Trek: Picard. After streaming the first season last year, I have been looking forward to the next season for a while. Season 2 brings back many characters introduced the first time and we get some fun surprises for this second installment. Between who is returning and the storyline looking to be a time travel adventure, I’m ready to go! Season 2 begins on March 3rd on Paramount+. You can watch the full trailer below.
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YouTube TV Loses The Mouse
For many cord-cutters out there, YouTube TV has been a good option as a replacement service. The Alphabet-owned streaming service carries a bunch of live channels for $65 a month. Unlike cable, there’s no contracts or hoops or bundling or any other nonsense. One thing however that has carried over from cable-land are disputes with networks. As of today, YouTube TV lost access to all Disney channels it was carrying. Jon Brodkin as more at Ars Technica. YouTube TV was seeking a most-favored-nation (MFN) clause from Disney. “Our ask to Disney, as with all our partners, is to treat YouTube…
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Closing the Window
A common theme lately is the fight between streaming services and movie theaters. COVID changed a lot with films coming out on Day 1 as a movie in the theatre. Over on VOX’s YouTube channel, they have an interesting explainer as to why theaters are still a viable business. Vox does a good job of explaining the release window. This is an exclusive time a movie is in theaters before it goes onto be available elsewhere. This exclusive time period is essential for the theater to make money. Studios make money still from theaters and also gain some ground by…
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PlutoGoogs
Streaming TV service Pluto is coming to the Google TV platform. Pluto does something pretty revolutionary: they have liner TV channels that run commercials and doesn’t let you rewind, skip, or pause. It’s literally the style of live TV but on a streaming app. And I love it. Catie Keck at The Verge has more: Beginning today, Google TV will now support Pluto TV within the live TV tab, meaning users can easily access more than 300 free channels from the platform’s primary live TV hub. Pluto TV is the fourth streaming service to grab a spot on Google TV’s tab. …
Benn Jordan, known for writing music under the name The Flashbulb, has uploaded a 20-minute video to YouTube in which he goes over how he’s been scammed. And not by some ordinary person, but by a reputable NYT reporter. At first, this video seems quite long for viewing. But Jordan goes into many details on how New York Times reporter Ian Urbina has allegedly scammed him. Jordan says he was solicited to write original music in exchange for potential exposure. We know exactly what exposure is worth: zero. The video is a full takedown of Urbina’s position wherein he allegedly…
Christmas movies are always tough to nail right. Sometimes they’re too cheesy or too serious. The timeless ones are timeless for unknown reasons because they can still be too serious or too cheesy. A Christmas Story was basically unknown until TBS decided to run it endlessly on Christmas, turning it into a modern classic. A new challenger has entered the arena this year: 8-Bit Christmas. I checked it out this past weekend and this will be my spoiler-free thoughts. This movie stars Neil-Patrick Harris narrating a story to his daughter about his adventures in 1987 to get a Nintendo (which…
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The Beatles Are Coming
Disney+, best known for endless Star Wars and Marvel stuff these days, is dropping an amazing docuseries on November 25th with exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of The Beatles. It’s produced by Peter Jackson (the Lord of the Rings guy) and will release on the service for three consecutive days. The Beatles official channel has released a small clip of the show to YouTube. It’s only 85-seconds long but you can see the magic of the Fab Four in action. I’ve been waiting for this for nearly a year since it was originally introduced and cannot wait to view it. The footage…
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Back in the Day, Video Games Were Hard
Video games should always be fun (it’s my only rule when playing) but oh man, old NES games could be brutal. Weird ways to make them more difficult or lack of a good instruction manual always took a game from ‘fun’ to ‘frustrating’ quite fast. Streamer camillestreamss posted this video to Reddit last week wherein a ‘door’ is not what it seems to be. It’s a fun, short clip and one where we can all chuckle about the outcome. Camille laughs about it as well and let’s face it: we all did something like this when we played video games…
Forget about COVID. This is the real reason I never go to the movies It’s the summer of 2008. I’m sitting in a packed theater waiting for The Dark Knight to begin. Knowing how awesome Batman Begins told the Batman origin story, I was elated to see the next installment from Christopher Nolan. 152-minutes later I walked into the parking lot deflated. Not at the movie (although it suffers from the notorious “unnecessary extra 20-minutes” at the end) but at the people watching the movie with me. Various people talked throughout the showing. More people than I could count were…