“With NBCUniversal’s help, the struggling social media giant preps more than a dozen original series for its 188 million users as it muscles into a crowded market. … But its slate won’t be ripped from the Netflix playbook. All Snapchat scripted series will average about five minutes an episode and be released daily in the signature vertical video format.”
Category: media
YouTube’s Latest ‘Vlogging’ Stars Aren’t Even Real People
Kizuna Ai, an anime-style cartoon character with two million followers, “is part of an emerging trend where 3D avatars – rather than humans – are becoming celebrities on YouTube, with dedicated fan bases and corporate deals. It’s becoming so popular that one company is investing tens of millions in ‘virtual talent’ and talent agencies are being established to manage these avatars.”
This One Neat Trick Helps Russia Suppress Box Office For Foreign Films
“[A new study] suggests that the Russian government has been indirectly restricting Hollywood and foreign films for the last four years by assigning them tight age restrictions. … As families and teenagers constitute a large proportion of moviegoers in Russia, industry sources say tighter age restrictions could cost foreign releases a significant share of potential box office gross, which could reach 15 percent-20 percent.”
Netflix Plans Massive New Production Hub In New Mexico
The studio has acquired ABQ Studios in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as part of a plan to bring as much as $1 billion in production to the state over the next 10 years.
Inside The Capital Of Toddler YouTube (Oh Yes, It’s A Thing)
“Sesame Street has more than 5 billion views on YouTube … but ChuChu has more than 19 billion. Sesame Street‘s main feed has 4 million subscribers; the original ChuChu TV channel has 19 million — placing it among the top 25 most watched YouTube channels in the world.” Alexis Madrigal travels to ChuChu headquarters in Chennai to find out how they do it — and talks to a scholar of children’s media about the pluses and pitfalls of their style of video.
In Divided, Right-Leaning, Very Catholic Poland, Film About Child Abuse By Priests Is A Major Hit
There was controversy around the movie, titled Clergy, even before it hit cinemas: at a film festival last month, once it was clear that the film would likely win the audience award, organizers canceled that category. Even so, Clergy attracted 1.7 million viewers in its first week; that’s about 4½ percent of Poland’s entire population and the equivalent of 14.5 million in the U.S.
Few #MeToo Prosecutions In Hollywood, Though Plenty Of Exiles
The lack of prosecutions stems from a clash between the #MeToo ethos, which encourages victims to come forward years or even decades after abuse and harassment that they’ve kept private, and a legal system that demands fast reporting of crimes and hard evidence.
Data: That Colin Kaepernick Ad Boosted Nike Stores In Blue And Red States
Increasingly, this is looking like a marketing masterstroke. The latest is data Foursquare shared with Yahoo Finance, in which the location tech platform measured the difference in Nike store foot traffic between the week after Labor Day (September 4-10) and the week before Labor Day (August 21-27), then compared it to the same period in 2017, and found that overall foot traffic to 242 Nike stores in the U.S. went up by an average of 16.9%.
The Director Of ‘Moonlight’ Turns His Lens On James Baldwin
Barry Jenkins on his new adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk: “[With Moonlight,] the whole movie is created to almost force the audience to confront what this character is feeling. And so it’s really easy to sit outside the film and just want to hug the film, to hug the main character. But this is Baldwin. In Baldwin, everyone’s implicated, including himself. So I think there’s not a passive path through this film.”
For American TV, Has Australia Become A Shangri-La?
Damien Cave: “Our dry, sunny isle far from swampy Washington seems to be the latest pinup for the American desire to check out and start over. It reminds me a bit of Hawaii in the 1970s and ’80s (the era of Fantasy Island, Gilligan’s Island, and Magnum P.I.) and more recently with Lost. Or to go further back, it’s what Mexico was for Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac and the Beats in the 1950s and ’60s — a place of great beauty where familiar rules and conflicts could be sidestepped or ignored.”