In 2017, Bell Canada, TVA, Videotron, and Rogers teamed up in a lawsuit against the operator of TVAddons, the largest repository of Kodi add-ons. The legal action proved extremely controversial but now, after many twists and turns, the matter is now over. As part of a consent judgment (PDF), TVAddons' founder [Adam Lackman] has admitted liability and agreed to pay a cool US$19.5 million in damages. TorrentFreak reports: In a letter dated February 18, 2022, the media companies and Lackman told the Federal Court that they had resolved their differences by agreeing to a consent judgment. That was reviewed and issued by Justice Rochester, who laid out the agreed terms in her judgment handed down February 22, 2022. Lackman admits to communicating TV shows owned by the plaintiffs to the public, including by directly or indirectly participating in the "development, hosting, distribution or promotion of Kodi add-ons that provide users with unauthorized access" to the plaintiffs' TV shows, contrary to sections 3(1)(f) and 27(1) of the Copyright Act. The TVAddons founder further admits that he made the TV shows available to the public in a manner that provided access "from a place and at a time individually chosen by them" and induced and authorized users of the infringing add-ons to "initiate acts of infringement of the Plaintiffs' right to communicate the Plaintiffs Programs to the public by telecommunication," again by developing, hosting, distributing or promoting Kodi add-ons.

The Federal Court issued a permanent injunction to restrain Lackman (and anyone acting with him, under his authority, or in association) from communicating the plaintiffs' content to the public in any way, including via the development or distribution of infringing add-ons such as the 'FreeTelly' and 'Indigo' tools. The terms of the injunction are lengthy and comprehensive, leaving no doubt that TVAddons and all related tools and services are now dead, with Lackman unable to do anything remotely similar in the future.

"THIS COURT ORDERS the Defendant Mr. Lackman to pay the Plaintiffs the amount of twenty-five million dollars ($25,000,000) in the form of a lump sum for damages, profits, punitive and exemplary damages, and costs," Justice Rochester writes. The judgment is in Canadian dollars but for reference, that's currently around US$19.5 million. The judgment also authorizes the bailiffs and independent supervising solicitor (with the assistance of computer forensics experts) to transfer the evidence obtained during the search of June 2017 to the media companies. Exactly what data was seized is currently unclear but it is likely to be sensitive, particularly if the trove includes user data and/or information about Kodi add-on developers. Finally, it appears the media companies will also be taking control of "login credentials, accounts, domains, subdomains and servers" in order to bring this years-long battle to a conclusion. Adam Lackman announced his relief on Twitter, noting that "It wasn't the outcome I had hoped for, but an outcome nonetheless."

A fourth movie in the rebooted Star Trek franchise will be produced by J. J. Abrams and star Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, according to an announcement this week by Paramount.

But Variety remembers how Quentin Tarantino once approached Paramount with his own Star Trek idea with a "Pulp Fiction vibe" in 2017 — and both Paramont and J.J. Abrams loved it. Tarantino ultimately partnered with "The Revenant" screenwriter Mark L. Smith, who was tasked with writing a "Star Trek" film script based on Tarantino's idea while Tarantino was busy finishing post-production and touring the world for "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." Smith revealed on the "Bulletproof Screenwriting" podcast in April 2021 that J.J. Abrams' production company Bad Robot gave him a call on Tarantino's behalf. "They just called me and said, 'Hey, are you up for it? Do you want to go? Quentin wants to hook up.' And I said, 'Yeah,'" the screenwriter said. "And that was the first day I met Quentin, in the room and he's reading a scene that he wrote and it was this awesome, cool gangster scene, and he's acting it out and back and forth. I told him, I was so mad I didn't record it on my phone. It would be so valuable. It was amazing."

Tarantino intended to bring a "Pulp Fiction" vibe to "Star Trek" with an idea that was a largely earthbound story set in a 1930s gangster setting. Tarantino's pitch appeared to take inspiration from "A Piece of the Action," the 17th episode of the second season of "Star Trek: The Original Series." The installment, which aired in 1968, followed the Enterprise crew as they visit a planet with an Earth-like 1920s gangster culture.... According to Smith, Tarantino's "Star Trek" idea was "really wild" and like "its own very cool episode." The plot included "a little time travel stuff going on" and "had a lot of fun" with Chris Pine's Captain Kirk.

Roku, the leading supplier of smart TV OS in North America, is looking at possibly building its own TV sets. Nexttv reports: According to Business Insider, Roku convened a focus group earlier this month in which participants were shown "different models, feature sets and names, sizes, price points," of smart TVs, according to an individual "familiar" with the event. This unnamed person told the news site that the moderator made it clear that Roku is exploring the possibility of "going it alone" with its own "manufacturing operation," and not merely attaching its brand to an existing smart TV manufacturer's product line.

The replicants are heading to the small-screen as Amazon Studios has put a live-action series set in the Blade Runner universe into development. Deadline reports: Ridley Scott, who directed the original 1982 Blade Runner movie, is executive producing the series, Blade Runner 2099, a follow-up to the feature film sequel Blade Runner 2049, which was released in 2017 and directed by Denis Villeneuve. Silka Luisa, showrunner of Apple TV+'s upcoming Elisabeth Moss-fronted drama series Shining Girls, is writing and exec producing Blade Runner 2099, which comes from Alcon Entertainment in association with Scott Free Productions and Amazon Studios. The project, which would mark the first Blade Runner live-action series, is in priority development at Amazon Studios, which is fast tracking scripts and eyeing potential production dates. Staffing is currently underway for writers to join a room. Scott may direct if the series moves forward, sources said.

As indicated by Blade Runner 2099's title, the latest installment of the neo-noir sci-fi franchise will be set 50 years after the film sequel. [...] Blade Runner 2099 is the latest extension in the Blade Runner franchise since Alcon Entertainment in 2011 acquired the film, television and ancillary franchise rights to produce prequels and sequels to the 1982 sci-fi classic. Kosove and his Alcon co-founder Broderick Johnson are exec producing the series along with Michael Green, who wrote Blade Runner 2049, Ben Roberts and Cynthia Yorkin as well as Scott Free Productions' David W. Zucker and Clayton Krueger. z

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese fans of U.S. sitcom "Friends" have expressed dismay online after noticing censorship in recently released episodes of the beloved show, including of LGBT issues. Several major Chinese streaming sites, including Tencent, Baidu's IQiyi, Alibaba's Youku, and Bilibili, started showing a version of the first season of the show on Friday, its first re-release in China for several years. But fans soon noticed parts of the long-running show were different to what they had seen before and complained of censorship which included the removal of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-related content, as well as mistranslations. In one example, a conversation where a main character, Ross, explained his wife was a lesbian, was deleted. Another scene where another character, Joey, suggested going to a "strip joint" was translated as "go out to play" on the version shown on Tencent Video. As users started to notice the changes, they began discussing and "boycotting" the move. The discussion was a "hot search topic" on Weibo on Sunday. Reuters adds: But in a sign the discussion itself may have caught the attention of censors, searches on Weibo on Sunday for several variations on the hashtag or search term #Friendshasbeencensored produced either zero or limited recent results. The development follows a similar treatment of David Fincher's 1999 cult classic "Fight Club." Fans were shocked to find that a version of the movie that was made available on Tencent Video had a new ending where the authorities win. After much uproar, the original ending for the movie was restored.

During today's telecast of the Super Bowl, 100 million Americans will see at least three commercials promoting cryptocurrency, reports the Washington Post, "and though Tom Brady may be gone from the game, he hovers over it, hawking crypto exchange FTX."

"Yet the hype belies a more complicated relationship. Unlike the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, the country's most popular sports league, has essentially prohibited its teams from using crypto." It's a microcosm of the broader cultural battle between those touting the currency as the shiny future and others warning of its dangers.... [T]he headlines often come with a negative tint. New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman warned last month about crypto's parallels to the subprime mortgage crisis. This week, the FBI arrested a New York couple for allegedly conspiring to launder billions in crypto. That can scare the large corporate entities of professional sports, particularly the NFL, whose love of fresh revenue sources is matched only by its fear of public relations disasters.... In September, a memo revealed by the Athletic showed the league's restrictive attitude toward crypto... "Clubs are prohibited from selling, or otherwise allowing within club controlled media, advertisements for specific cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings, other cryptocurrency sales or any other media category as it relates to blockchain, digital asset or as blockchain company, except as outlined in this policy," it said.

The NFL has made some forays into NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, the digitally watermarked tools that are crypto's less controversial cousin, signing up for a partnership with Ticketmaster for NFTs of Super Bowl tickets and an NFT video highlight program with Dapper Labs, one of the leaders in the space. And of course the Super Bowl is taking place at SoFi Stadium, named for the digitally minded financial firm. But sponsorships from crypto exchanges remain off-limits, and the idea of the NFL creating a cryptocurrency, which some enthusiasts have advocated, is the stuff of fantasy. Even the Super Bowl commercials going for as much as $7 million for 30 seconds — which the league authorizes — include only exchanges such as FTX and not currencies themselves....

The NFL has formed an internal working group to study the regulatory, brand and other consequences of partnering with crypto companies but has set no timetable for when its rules could be revised. Renie Anderson, the NFL's chief revenue officer, said the league is moving slowly by design. "We don't want to put everything and the kitchen sink into this," she said by phone from the site of Super Bowl events in Los Angeles. "We don't know where a lot of this is going, so what we're trying to do is testing and learning so we can understand." She cited regulatory and market forces that are still coming into focus. (The Treasury Department and other federal agencies have been ramping up their efforts to create a regulatory framework for crypto, but there remains a degree of murkiness around what the future limits might be.) The NFL, Anderson said, would rather act after there's clarity. "It's hard to unwind something like a naming rights deal," she said, "and I'd rather not have to undo opportunities two years later because there are rules against advertising or marketing certain things."

National Basketball Association executives, however, say they see a major opportunity right now.
The article also points out that one football star even says he converted his $750,000 salary to Bitcoin. Though one sports analyst calculates that if the purchase was made on November 12th, after federal and state taxes it's now worth about $35,000.

Isolation rooms, fears of positive Covid-19 tests and the absence of cheering crowds are squeezing all the joy from the Beijing Games. From a report: On the day Team USA flag bearer Elana Meyers Taylor was supposed to march her country into the Olympic Stadium, she was in a Chinese isolation hotel. She had tested positive for Covid-19 and watched the Opening Ceremony on TV in a room she wasn't allowed to leave. Ms. Meyers Taylor was one of the lucky ones. She has since recovered and is scheduled to compete as one of the medal favorites in two bobsled events. In the gloom of the Beijing Winter Olympics, luck is a relative term. The Games are supposed to be an ebullient, global sporting bonanza, but they have never felt so downbeat. Rather than "Faster, Higher, Stronger -- Together," the Olympic motto, the Beijing Games so far have been sadder and quieter.

Olympians compete in nearly empty arenas without friends or family. Some wear N95 masks, in practice and even in competition, to limit the risk of infection. The rest live with the daily fear of testing positive, being sent to isolation and watching years of training slip away. Natalia Maliszewska, a short-track speedskater from Poland, was awoken at 3 a.m. one night this week, before she was set to compete, and transported to isolation before learning that authorities had made a mistake. It later turned out that she had tested positive and was returned to isolation. "To me, this is a big joke," Ms. Maliszewska said. "I hope whoever is managing this has a lot of fun. My heart and my mind can't take this anymore." The usual stresses, strains and tolls of competing at the Games have been amplified by a pandemic that has shrunk the event to fit into a suffocating bubble. American figure skater Vincent Zhou felt a sense of desperation from inside his isolation hotel room this week after he tested positive for Covid-19. With his chance to compete now over -- he skated in the team event but missed his individual event -- he was awaiting the two negative PCR tests that would return his freedom.

It's not just the office pool anymore. More than half of U.S. states now allow legalized sports betting, and in many cases it's as easy as opening an app on your smartphone and making a wager. From a report: A whopping 17.6 million people are expected to place a bet on Sunday's Super Bowl online or in person at a sportsbook, according to the American Gaming Association. It's not all profits for the operators, though. Sportsbooks are putting up their own money in the form of a massive advertising campaign targeting the millions of sports fans who will be glued to their TVs for the matchup between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals. "TV sportsbook advertising has grown exponentially this year and in the last couple of years overall," Adam Candee, managing editor of the trade publication Legal Sports Report, told NPR.

Candee said the sudden growth of legalized gambling in states across the country has sportsbook operators jockeying for a piece of the huge new customer base -- and the Super Bowl is their latest opportunity to sell themselves to potential bettors. "It is happening in the here and now, moment to moment, as they compete for customers. That is because this is essentially a new industry that is rising up from the ground," he said. Sports gambling could become a $37 billion industry by 2025, according to the investment management company ARK.

"Hulu has ordered a(nother) revival of Futurama," writes Slashdot reader aitikin, sharing a report from Variety. From the report: Variety has learned that the streaming service has ordered 20 new episodes of the adult animated sci-fi comedy series. The revival hails from David X. Cohen and Matt Groening. Cohen developed the original series with Groening, the series creator.

Original series cast members Billy West, Katey Sagal, Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche, Lauren Tom, Phil LaMarr and David Herman will all return. John DiMaggio, who voiced Bender and several minor characters, is not currently attached. According to an individual with knowledge of the project, the producers are hopeful DiMaggio will return. Should that not happen, Bender will be recast. Production will begin this month with an eye towards a 2023 premiere. "I'm thrilled to have another chance to think about the future... or really anything other than the present," said Cohen. "It's a true honor to announce the triumphant return of 'Futurama' one more time before we get canceled abruptly again," added Groening.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Setting up a Raspberry Pi board has always required a second computer, which is used to flash your operating system of choice to an SD card so your Pi can boot. But the Pi Foundation is working on a new version of its bootloader that could connect an OS-less Pi board directly to the Internet, allowing it to download and install the official Raspberry Pi OS to a blank SD card without requiring another computer. To test the networked booting feature, you'll need to use the Pi Imager on a separate computer to copy an updater for the bootloader over to an SD card -- Pi firmware updates are normally installed along with new OS updates rather than separately, but since this is still in testing, it requires extra steps.

Once it's installed, there are a number of conditions that have to be met for network booting to work. It only works on Pi 4 boards (and Pi 4-derived devices, like the Pi 400 computer) that have both a keyboard and an Ethernet cable connected. If you already have an SD card or USB drive with a bootable OS connected, the Pi will boot from those as it normally does so it doesn't slow down the regular boot process. And you'll be limited to the OS image selection in the official Pi imager, though this covers a wide range of popular distributions, including Ubuntu, LibreELEC, a couple of retro-gaming emulation OSes, and Homebridge. For other OSes, downloading the image on a separate PC and installing it to an SD card manually is still the best way to go. To learn more about installing the bootloader or download the Pi OS over a network, you can view the Raspberry Pi Foundation's documentation here.

Major rightsholders and internet companies in Russia have signed a new memorandum of cooperation designed to make pirated movies, TV shows and other content harder to find. In addition to automatically removing reported infringing links within hours, search engines have agreed to completely deindex all domains that carry 100 or more links to infringing content. TorrentFreak reports: Signed in 2018, a memorandum of cooperation signed by major rightsholders and internet companies including Yandex changed the way infringing content is handled. Following the creation of a centralized database of pirated content, the Internet companies agreed to query it every few minutes in order to remove corresponding content from their platforms within six hours. Over a period of three years, more than 40 million infringing links have now been removed from search results. Since its introduction, the memorandum has been renewed several times alongside calls for the system to be opened up to a wider range of rightsholders, such as those operating in the publishing sector. While that is yet to happen, a new memorandum has just been signed by the original signatories containing an even more powerful anti-piracy tool.

Under the current agreement (which is set to expire early September 2022), rightsholders must submit specific URLs to infringing content to the centralized database controlled by the Media Communications Union (ISS). These specific URLs are then delisted by search engines but rightsholders complain that the same content can reappear under a new URL, meaning that the process must be repeated. To deal with this type of 'pirate' countermeasure, the new memorandum requires search companies to take more stringent action. Any domain that has 100 or more 'pirate' links reported to the database will be deindexed entirely by search engines, meaning that they essentially become invisible to anyone using a search engine. This must be carried out quickly too, within 24 hours according to ISS. Given the number of links to infringing content posted to non-pirate sites, safeguards will also be introduced to protect legitimate resources from deindexing. These include media sites, government projects, search engines themselves, social networks, and official content providers. "Alongside the development of the memorandum a new law is being drafted, with the aim of enshrining its voluntary terms into local law," adds TorrentFreak. "That should allow other rightsholders that aren't current signatories to obtain similar benefits. At the time of writing, however, progress on the legal front is taking its time and might still take a few more months."

Last month streamers in China discovered that Fight Club had arrived on streaming platform Tencent — but with an entirely new ending where local authorities "rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals....."

But now there's been another round of changes, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "After widespread online backlash to clumsy censorship of the film's ending, Chinese streaming service Tencent Video backtracked in recent days and restored most of the cuts it had made." Crucially, Fight Club's complete ending is now viewable in full in China...

News of the cuts went viral around the world and sparked much debate and embarrassment on Chinese social media about local censorship practices.... [I]t would appear that the backlash has been deemed more troublesome than the fictional film's ending, as Tencent has now restored 11 of the 12 minutes it originally cut from the 137-minute movie. The minute still missing is mostly comprised of brief nude sex scenes between Brad Pitt's and Helena Bonham Carter's characters.
Insider reports that changing the original ending provoked comments like these on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo:

- "This has become a Chinese-only joke. Even dogs won't want to watch this."

- "This is exactly why, even if you have streaming platform subscriptions, you still have to watch pirated versions."


And it brought massive attention to China's history of changing movies, notes the Wrap since "word quickly spread across the globe, bringing embarrassment to the country," reports the Wrap: Censorship of American films and TV shows at the behest of Chinese officials has become common as Hollywood has made in-roads in the country over the past decade. Last year, an episode of "The Simpsons" in which the titular family visits China was removed from Disney+ in Hong Kong over a joke made in the film about the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and the Chinese government's censorship of the event.
Even the South China Morning Post reported that Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel that inspired the film, "appeared to mock the move on Twitter. 'Everyone gets a happy ending in China!' he wrote..." Similar changes have been made to other films in China in the past. Nicolas Cage's 2005 crime film Lord of War had its final half-hour cut and replaced with text reading, "Yuri Orlov confessed all the crimes officially charged against him in court and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the end."
And another example from the Hollywood Reporter: After 20th Century Fox's Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody won multiple Oscars in the 2018, it was granted a theatrical release in China — but only after all mentions of Freddie Mercury's homosexuality were cut from the film.
But in this case a global popular outcry appears to have been too embarrasing to endure. According to the Hollywood Reporter now we even have an expected ending to the story of how China tried to censor Fight Club.

"Reversals of censorship actions are extremely rare within China's entertainment industry — but cuts to Hollywood movies are not."

Amazon is raising the price of its annual Prime membership to $139 from $119, the company announced on Thursday as part of its fourth-quarter earnings results. From a report: Amazon last hiked the price of Prime in 2018, when it increased to $119 from $99. Four years before that, it raised the subscription fee to $99 from $79. Amazon's annual increase amounts to about a 17% rise in price. Amazon also raised the monthly price of a Prime membership from $12.99 to $14.99, the company said. New members will see the increased prices on Feb. 18, and current members will be billed at the higher rate after March 25. Launched in 2005, Amazon Prime gives members access to free two-day shipping, as well as access to exclusive movies and TV shows, among other perks. As of last April, the service had more than 200 million subscribers worldwide.

If you've been watching any TV over the past few months, chances are you've seen Crypto.com's ad featuring Matt Damon. It's an expensive advertisement, complete with top-notch CGI and heady phrases like "History is filled with almosts" and "Fortune favors the brave." Jody Rosen dissects Damon's crypto push in a New York Times piece titled, "Why Is Matt Damon Shilling for Crypto? An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The burden of spreading that gospel has been placed on the beefy shoulders of Matt Damon, whom Crypto.com hired as its "brand ambassador" in advance of a $100 million global marketing push. Damon is just the latest A-list star who has taken to hawking crypto. Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen have appeared in commercials for the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, a Crypto.com competitor in which they have an equity stake. On Twitter, Reese Witherspoon is a vocal booster ("Crypto is here to stay"), and Snoop Dogg, an NFT aficionado, offers investing advice ("Buy low stay high!"). There is something unseemly, to put it mildly, about the famous and fabulously wealthy urging crypto on their fans. Cryptocurrencies, after all, are in many cases not so much currencies as speculative thingamabobs -- digital tokens whose value is predicated largely on the idea that someone will take them off your hands at a higher price than it cost you to acquire them. Entertainers and athletes have ample money to risk in speculative bubbles; their millions of admirers don't have that luxury and may be left holding the bag when a bubble bursts. [...]

The cryptocurrency industry's marketing efforts are focused on young people, especially young men. Surveys have shown that some 40 percent of all American men ages 18 to 29 have invested in, traded or used a form of cryptocurrency. [...] Damon offers a particular kind of appeal to that demographic. His star power is based on brains and brawn; he can recite magniloquent phrases while also giving the impression that he could fillet an enemy, Jason Bourne style, armed with only a Bic pen. In the ad, his words are high-flown -- all that stuff about history and bravery -- but they amount to a macho taunt: If you're a real man, you'll buy crypto.

The bleakness of that pitch is startling. In recent weeks, while watching televised sports -- where the Crypto.com spot airs repeatedly, alongside commercials for other crypto platforms and an onslaught of ads for sports-gambling apps -- I could not shake the feeling that culture has taken a sinister turn: that we've sanctioned an economy in which tech start-ups compete, in broad daylight, to lure the vulnerable with get-rich-quick schemes. Yet what's most unsettling about the commercial is the pitch it doesn't make. Traditionally, an advertisement offers an affirmative case for its product, a vision of the fulfillment that will come if you wear those jeans or drive that truck. This ad doesn't bother. It shows a brief glimpse of a young couple locking eyes in a nightclub -- an insinuation, I guess, that crypto has sex appeal. But the ad builds inexorably toward that final shot of Mars, where Matt Damon's astronaut was marooned in a hit film and where Elon Musk, the world's second-richest man and a crypto enthusiast, says he plans to build a colony to survive the end of civilization on Earth. "We live in troubled times," writes Rosen in closing. "The young, in particular, may feel that they are peering over the edge, economically and existentially. This ad's message for them seems to be that the social compact is ruptured, that the old ideals of security and the good life no longer pertain."

"What's left are moonshots, big swings, high-stakes gambles. You might bet a long-shot parlay or take a flier on Dogecoin. Maybe someday you'll hitch a ride on Elon Musk's shuttle bus to the Red Planet. The ad holds out the promise of 'fortune,' but what it's really selling is danger, the dark and desperate thrills of precarity itself -- because, after all, what else have we got? You could call it truth in advertising."

YouTube topped Netflix in terms of quarterly revenue, with the Google-owned video platform delivering $8.6 billion in advertising revenue in Q4, the company said Tuesday. The Hollywood Reporter reports: For fiscal 2021, YouTube delivered $28.8 billion in advertising revenue. In the same quarter a year earlier, YouTube delivered $6.9 billion in advertising revenue, underscoring the continued explosive growth of the platform. For comparison, Netflix delivered $7.7 billion in revenue in Q4 in 2021, compared to $6.6 billion a year earlier. Overall, Alphabet, Google's parent company, reported $75.3 billion in revenue for the quarter, and $257.6 billion for the year, with Google search advertising still making up the lions share of revenue.

With regard to YouTube, the executives cited commerce as a potential growth area for YouTube, with CEO Sundar Pichai calling it "a whole other layer of opportunity." "Podcasts, gaming, learning, sports, across all of these areas we will take a vertical specific look and find out how we can support creators better," he said. "While pretty early, there is a lot of pilots under way," he added, noting that they were "super early" into testing how shopping could be baked into YouTube Shorts, its TikTok-esque shorts platform, which Pichai said now has more than 5 trillion views. The executives also called out YouTube's connected TV opportunity.

LG has announced a new offering to advertisers that promises to be able to reach the company's millions of connected devices in households across the country, pummeling TV viewers with -- you guessed it -- targeted ads. From a report: While ads playing on your connected TV might not be anything new, some of the metrics the company plans to hand over to advertisers include targeting viewers by specific demographics, for example, or being able to tie a TV ad view to someone's in-store purchase down the line. If you swap out a TV screen for a computer screen, the kind of microtargeting that LG's offering doesn't sound any different than what a company like Facebook or Google would offer. That's kind of the point.

Online ad spending reached more than $490 billion by the end of last year, and those numbers are only going to keep going up as more advertisers look for more ways to track and target more people online. Traditional TV ad spend, meanwhile, has tanked since its peak around 2016. In order to lure ad dollars back, folks in the television space, like LG, are using every tool at their disposal to claw back the ad dollars the internet's taken away. And it's clearly working. While traditional TV ad spend has plummeted, there's never been more money spent on advertising across the digitally connected TVs offered by companies like LG. Roku, for example, recently announced an upcoming Shopify integration that would let retailers target TV viewers with more ads for more of their products. Amazon rolled out a new beta platform that lets networks promote apps, movies, or TV shows to people right from the device's home screen. And I don't need to remind Samsung TV owners how their devices are getting absolutely plastered with ads from every conceivable angle.

Andorra Telecom, the only ISP in the principality of Andorra, suffered repeated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks during a multi-day Twitch gaming tournament. From a report: The DDoS attacks occurred during the scheduled SquidCraft Games tournament in Minecraft, one of the most successful Twitch Rivals tournaments ever broadcast. Eight or more Andorran streamers were eliminated from the Twitch tournament after the second day of attacks due to their repeated disconnects. There is some suspicion that perpetrators planned the DDoS attacks on Andorra Telecom to cheat the Andorran's of their chance to win the $100,000 pot. The SquidCraft Games was a highly anticipated Twitch streaming event designed to emulate the hit Netflix series called The Squid Game in Minecraft. As noted, it has been a viral game streaming event with a peak viewership of over a million on day two of the event. As per the TV series, this is an elimination game, and in this Twitch event, there is a healthy prize pot of $100,000 to ensure participants would be highly competitive. The event will end on Tuesday. A significant portion of the 150 SquidCraft games participants lives in Andorra. Spanish language reports of the event confirm that day one went without a hitch for all players, in terms of fairness. The games "green light, red light," and "hide and seek" ran smoothly to their conclusions.

The knives are out for Peloton and CEO John Foley. From a report: Blackwells Capital, an activist investor that owns less than 5% of Peloton, says it has "grave concerns" about its performance and is calling on its board of directors to fire Foley immediately and explore a sale. In an open letter Monday, the investment firm sharply criticized Peloton for not capitalizing the success it achieved in 2020, saying it squandered the opportunity to grow sales of its internet-connected bikes and treadmills. Peloton shares have tumbled 80% from their peak, bruised from sagging sales, a massive recall and PR nightmares in popular TV shows. Blackwells' Chief Investment Officer Jason Aintabi said the company is currently on "worse footing today than it was prior to the pandemic, with high fixed costs, excessive inventory, a listless strategy, dispirited employees and thousands of disgruntled shareholders." To turn around Peloton's fortunes, Blackwells suggests firing Foley for his "repeated failures," listing 10 examples. They include his pricing strategy (Peloton cut the price on its Bike and Tread in August 2021, only to raise them again months later), his handling of the treadmill recall and a purported temporary shutdown of production. Blackwells also slammed Foley for hiring his wife as a key executive.

The Washington Post reports that three of the world's most prominent live-streaming stars "received notifications of copyright infringement after broadcasting TV shows to their millions-strong fanbases on Twitch."

"The days that followed produced copious amounts of Twitch's most common byproduct, online drama, but also focused attention on the murky and legally complicated question of what constitutes fair use of copyright materials such as TV shows and movies...." In 2007 Viacom sued YouTube for copyright infringement. Though the court ultimately ruled in favor of YouTube, the suit paved the way for the "Content ID" system, which automatically identifies copyright content and aggressively polices the platform. While software that can scan Twitch already exists, Twitch has yet to create its own automated system, and it does not appear to be in the process of doing so, according to industry figures with knowledge of Twitch's operations who weren't authorized to speak publicly.

Such an outcome becomes more likely, however, if advertisers start withdrawing from the platform for fear of being associated with risky content, something that's already beginning to happen on Twitch according to Devin Nash, chief marketing officer of content creator-focused talent agency Novo...

The "react content" trend often hinges on broadcasting copyright material, like popular movies or TV shows, a practice which skirts the outer edges of platform rules. Earlier this month, Viacom and the History Channel/A&E (which is owned by Hearst and Disney) issued copyright claims — also known as Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests — to specific streamers.... The DMCA-centric discourse left streamers and viewers on Twitch with ample drama but no clear answer as to whether one of the platform's go-to trends merely faces a few bumps in the road or an asteroid-sized extinction event. "Nothing could happen, or everything could happen," Cassell added. "And it rests on the decisions of a handful of media rights holders...."

Some streamers, such as Piker and Felix "xQc" Lengyel, both of whom started reacting to clips from sites like YouTube long before the current react meta began, argue reaction content should be permitted since Twitch is essentially built on copyright infringement. Streaming a video game is technically a DMCA-able offense. The video game industry, however, has decided to allow the practice because the free publicity and resulting sales tend to outweigh any potential downsides. But television is a different beast, with its economics rooted in broadcast rights rather than individual unit sales....

This awkward and unceasing dance around the topic has been fueled in part by the fact that Twitch is incentivized to maintain its ignorance of copyright infractions taking place on their platform.... But the silence has added stress to streamers whose livelihoods could be impacted by decisions around the current DMCA practices....
The Post also spoke to game/esports/entertainment lawyer David Philip Graham, who believes copyright law itself is due for an overhaul. "Much of our current copyright regime isn't really about authors' rights or promoting the progress of science and useful arts, but about big businesses looking for easier routes to profitability," Graham said.

He proposes shortening copyright term lengths — and also expanding permissions for derivative works.

"Netflix's stock has tumbled 41% from the all-time high it hit just two months ago," reports CNN Business.

"It's gaining subscribers at a painfully slow pace. Competition is heating up. The company's answer to all that: It just raised prices on North American customers." Netflix ended 2021 with 221.8 million subscribers. That's significantly more than others in the streaming marketplace, including Disney, one of its closest competitors. Disney had 118.1 million subscribers as of October, and it grew subscriptions 60% between October 2020 and October 2021. During that same period, Netflix grew just 9%. Disney hasn't yet reported its financial results for the last three months of 2021. But Netflix's growth slowed even further in the fourth quarter to just 8%. (And Disney's growth last quarter spooked Wall Street too....)

The problem with relying exclusively on subscriptions for revenue is: after a while, you run out of people who haven't subscribed. That's bad news for Wall Street investors who are mostly concerned with companies' abilities to grow. Zak Shaikh, vice president of programming at research-based media firm Magid, believes that Netflix's fall is more of "a Wall Street thing" rather than "something that reflects the business is in trouble.... They still added subs, and they still have the same high usage and viewing metrics," he added. However, even Shaikh pointed out that in the long term, "Netflix will have to deal with the fact that you can't keep adding subscribers."

One way the company has tried to offset its slowing growth is by investing in other verticals, such as gaming. Another way is to raise prices, but that could prove difficult as fierce competition ramps up. Although price increases will probably help to offset its sluggish sign ups, they could also lead to more stagnation for Netflix. For some consumers, price increases — even small ones — are a lot to ask considering that so many competitors are at Netflix's gates.
Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at MoffettNathanson, specifically predicted to CNN Business that 2022 will be a year "of concern about growth and competition for Netflix."