An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The ordeal of three people, who edited major movies down to 10 minutes and then uploaded those summaries to YouTube, is not over yet. After being arrested and found guilty in a criminal court last year, they now face action in the civil courts. A total of 13 companies including Toei, Kadokawa, Nikkatsu, and Fuji, say they are entitled to at least $3.9 million in copyright damages. [...] Clear indications of how seriously the anti-piracy groups and media companies are taking this action were on display after the lawsuit was filed last week. A press conference was held in Tokyo with a representative of CODA and three attorneys present to answer questions on the case.

Those present, including CODA director Takero Goto, highlighted that the three defendants committed criminal acts when they uploaded the movie edits and then profited from advertising revenue. The civil action aims to underline those convictions with a strong message that rightsholders will not allow people to free-ride on creators' content without facing significant financial consequences. The overall message is one of deterrence coupled with the reaffirmation of copyright law, Goto said.

"62-year-old Val Kilmer was just 26 when he played Iceman in the 1986 movie Top Gun," remembers long-time Slashdot reader destinyland.

But in 2015 Kilmer lost his voice to throat cancer, remembers Parade: In his 2020 memoir I'm Your Huckleberry, Kilmer joked that he has less of a frog in his throat and more of a "buffalo." He said, "Speaking, once my joy and lifeblood, has become an hourly struggle."

Kilmer has teamed up with Sonantic, a U.K.-based software firm that uses artificial intelligence to copy voices for actors and production studios, to replicate his speech, using old recordings of his voice and existing footage. Kilmer elaborates on the process of finding his voice again through AI in a video posted to YouTube in August 2021. In his new AI-enhanced voice, which does indeed emulate the speech audiences are familiar with, Kilmer says: "People around me struggle to understand me when I'm talking, but despite all that, I still feel I'm the exact same person, still the same creative soul. A soul that dreams ideas and stories constantly.

"But now I can express myself again, I can bring these dreams to you, and show you this part of myself once more. A part that was never truly gone, just hiding away."

Kilmer's health struggles, his childhood tragedies and his ambitious career were recently documented in the acclaimed 2021 feature-length doc Val, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Top Gun: Maverick screened at the Cannes Film Festival to rapturous reviews, with thunderous fanfare including an air show. Though reports say audiences gave the action picture (currently sitting at a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes) a five-minute standing ovation, with audible responses throughout the picture, mainly at the groundbreaking stunt work, it's also been reported an audience-favorite scene is the "overwhelming" emotional response to the reunion of Tom Cruise and Kilmer.

Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers last quarter and potentially two million this current period, according to a note to shareholders from last month. Now, new research highlights that the number of long-standing subscribers canceling Netflix rose precipitously in the past few years. 9to5Mac reports: The data provided by the research firm Antenna to The Information shows that people who had been subscribers for more than three years accounted for just 5% of total cancelations at the start of 2022, while it hit 13% in the first quarter of 2022: "Newbie subscribers, meantime, accounted for only 60% of cancellations in the quarter, down from 64% in the fourth quarter. Also in the first quarter, overall cancellations rose to 3.6 million people, compared with around 2.5 million in each of the preceding five quarters. Antenna says it draws its data from a panel of 5 million Americans who anonymously contribute their streaming subscriptions."

While Netflix is losing ground, the streaming market as a whole is gaining more subscribers, and Antenna's data suggest a connection between the price increase and Netflix's subscriber losses: "'Consumers vote with their wallets on a monthly basis, and now there are just more viable candidates on the ballot,' said Brendan Brady, media and entertainment lead at Antenna. Also, since many entertainment companies, like NBCUniversal and Disney, have pulled their shows off Netflix and put them on their own services, Netflix has had to rely more on its originals, which have been hit or miss, he said."

Japanese conglomerate Sony said it is well-positioned to play a leading role in the metaverse, or immersive virtual worlds, which commentators speculate will massively disrupt industries and establish new powerhouses. From a report: "The metaverse is at the same time a social space and live network space where games, music, movies and anime intersect," Chief Executive Kenichiro Yoshida said at a strategy briefing on Wednesday, pointing to the use of free-to-play battle royale title Fortnite from Epic Games as an online social space. Sony's game, music and movie units contributed two-thirds of operating income in the year ended March, underscoring the group's transformation from consumer electronics maker into a metaverse-ready entertainment juggernaut under Yoshida and predecessor Kazuo Hirai. The firm is a gaming gatekeeper with its PlayStation 5 console, however observers point to the risk presented by the growth of cross-platform, cloud-based titles and their potential to reduce the influence of proprietary platforms. Sony has been adjusting its approach, enabling cross-play in Fortnite in 2018.

Disney added 7.9 million new subscribers to its Disney Plus streaming service during the first three months of 2022, the company announced (PDF) in its Q2 earnings report on Wednesday. The Verge reports: That brings the total to around 87.6 million worldwide, excluding the 50.1 million people subscribed to Disney Plus Hotstar internationally. In the US and Canada alone, Disney Plus now has 7.1 million more subscribers than it did a year ago, with 44.4 million. The company also said that the number of subscribers for all of its streaming offerings -- including Hulu and ESPN Plus -- had grown to over 205 million, an increase from the 196.4 million it reported in January.

Disney also reports that it's earning more per Disney Plus subscriber than it had been previously, at least in the US. Where its average monthly revenue per paid subscriber used to be $6.01, it's now sitting at $6.32. Disney says this is thanks to "an increase in retail pricing and a lower mix of wholesale subscribers." Despite this, Disney Plus is actually losing the company money at a greater clip than it was before. Disney says this is thanks to higher costs for production, advertising, and technology. Those costs seem unlikely to go down, and raising prices, like Netflix did, could cut off its subscriber growth. All that put together makes it obvious why Disney is looking at creating an ad-supported tier sooner rather than later.

echo123 writes: Twenty Internet providers, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, have agreed to provide high-speed service at a steep discount to low-income consumers, the White House announced Monday, significantly expanding broadband access for millions of Americans. The plan, a feature of the $1 trillion infrastructure package passed by Congress last year, would cost qualifying households no more than $30 per month. The discounts plus existing federal Internet subsidies mean the government will cover the full cost of connectivity if consumers sign on with one of the 20 participating companies. The White House estimates the program will cover 48 million households, or 40 percent of the country.

The 100-megabit-per-second service is fast enough for a family to work from home, complete schoolwork, browse the Internet and stream high-definition movies and TV shows, the White House said. Households can qualify for the subsidies, called the Affordable Connectivity Program, if their income is at or below 200 percent of federal poverty guidelines, a member of the household participates in certain federal anti-poverty initiatives -- including Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, federal housing assistance, Pell Grant tuition assistance, or free or reduced-price school meals -- or if the household already qualifies for an Internet provider's low-income service program. Consumers can check whether they qualify for discounted service at getinternet.gov.

Chinese researchers show off a swarm of drones collectively navigating a dense forest they've never encountered. TechCrunch reports: Researchers at Zheijang University in Hangzhou have succeeded, however, with a 10-strong drone swarm smart enough to fly autonomously through a dense, unfamiliar forest, but small and light enough that each one can easily fit in the palm of your hand. It's a big step toward using swarms like this for things like aerial surveying and disaster response.

Based on an off-the-shelf ultra-compact drone design, the team built a trajectory planner for the group that relies entirely on data from the onboard sensors of the swarm, which they process locally and share with each other. The drones can balance or be directed to pursue various goals, such as maintaining a certain distance from obstacles or each other, or minimizing the total flight time between two points, and so on.

The drones can also, worryingly, be given a task like "follow this human." We've all seen enough movies to know this is how it starts ... but of course it could be useful in rescue or combat circumstances as well. A part of their navigation involves mapping the world around them, of course, and the paper includes some very cool-looking 3D representations of the environments the swarm was sent through. Zhou et alThe study is published in the most recent issue of the journal Science Robotics, which you can read here, along with several videos showing off the drones in action.

An anonymous reader writes: Sony struck a major blow against censorship after defying a Chinese government demand to delete the Statue Of Liberty from "Spiderman: No Way Home" ahead of its release. The bombshell rejection was revealed by "multiple sources," per a recent article by Puck. According to the piece, Chinese regulators had asked if the Japanese entertainment giant could "delete the Statue of Liberty from the ending of the film." Sony unsurprisingly declined the demand given the prominence of Lady Liberty in the climax in which the three spidermen swing around the iconic symbol of freedom while battling supervillains, Puck reported. Undaunted, China then inquired if the monument could be "minimized," according to the report. Specifically, they'd wondered "if Sony could cut a few of the more patriotic shots of [Tom] Holland standing atop the crown, or dull the lighting so that Lady Liberty's visage wasn't so front-and-center," per Puck.

Andy Maxwell, reporting for TorrentFreak: In response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, several Hollywood studios announced the immediate suspension of new releases in Russia. Unexpectedly, some Russian theaters are still able to show movies such as The Batman on the big screen but this isn't down to the studios. The movies are sourced from illegal torrent sites and few seem afraid to admit it.

In 1972, photo prints that developed before your eyes were "downright magical," argues Fast Company — "and still meaningful today."

A new article at Fast Company points out that while Polaroid went bankrupt twice, and stopped making cameras in 2007, "Then an unexpected thing happened: It turned out that even Polaroid couldn't kill Polaroid." Even as instant photography's eulogies were being written, a band of enthusiasts known as The Impossible Project bought the last Polaroid factory that hadn't been hastily dismantled and started producing film packs again. The task required reformulating its own chemistry from scratch, and it was years until the results reached the vicinity of original Polaroid quality. Fans were very patient.

Eventually, the Impossible Project and Polaroid came under the same ownership, adopted Polaroid as the unified brand, and started making instant cameras again. The new models start at $100 and look a lot like that 1977 OneStep, even when they're adorably miniaturized. It's almost as if Polaroid's years in limbo were a bad dream.... Polaroid and several smaller companies refurbish old models, replacing worn parts and otherwise returning them to optimum performance. Repairing an SX-70 generally involves permanently removing its leather, but replacement skins are available in an array of styles, from the traditional to the psychedelic.

Increasingly, yesteryear's Polaroid cameras are springing back to life in surprising ways. Wisconsin-based Retrospekt not only revives old models, but also encases antique innards in new plastic shells, allowing it to sell branding crossovers such as Malibu Barbie and Pepsi-themed Polaroid cameras. Hong Kong's Mint offers a camera called the SLR670 that's really a restored SX-70 accompanied by a gizmo that plugs into the flash port to allow for manual settings. And Open SX-70 is a project to smarten up the SX-70 by replacing its 1970s circuit board with a tiny Arduino computer.
Other things I learned from the article:

• "Each film pack contained its own battery, so the camera would never run out of juice at an inopportune moment."
• Kodak was forced out of the instant photography market in 1986 by a Polaroid patent infringement suit in which Polaroid won $925 million in damages.
• Edwin Land's "final gambit to revolutionize photography" was 1977's wildly unpopular Polavision instant home movies.
• There's a 1974 ad for the cameras narrated by Laurence Olivier.

Bill Gates shares a statistic about the COVID-19 pandemic. "If we'd been able to stop it within 100 days, we would've saved over 98% of the lives." "Viruses spread exponentially, and so if you get in there when the infection rate is fairly small, you can actually stop the spread."
In a new TED talk, Gates argues that we did learn a lot from this pandemic — enough to build a prevention system for next time. "Covid 19 can be the last pandemic if we take the right steps." But the answer isn't vaccines. "We also need vaccines, but we want to stop the outbreak before we have to do a global vaccination campaign." And then Gates points out that currently it could take months to get resources to a low-income country experiencing an outbreak.

Read on for Slashdot's report on Gates' proposed solution — and how he feels about his own prominence in anti-vaccine misinformation.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 "shattered early box office projections," reports the Los Angeles Times, bringing in $71 million in its opening weekend. That makes it the biggest first-weekend for a Paramount movie in at least four years — more than Terminator: Dark Fate ($29 million) and Mission: Impossible — Fallout ($61.2 million).

You can watch its trailer here — but here's how the Times summarizes its plot. "The titular furry blue protagonist (voiced by Ben Schwartz) faces an equally fluffy new threat, Knuckles the Echidna (Idris Elba), who has joined Dr. Robotnik's (Jim Carrey) ongoing quest conquer Earth."

Engadget calls this the best opening weekend ever for a videogame movie. The previous record-holder was Sonic the Hedgehog 1, a movie which Paramount+ now "plans to expand into a cinematic universe" — or at least, expand into a spin-off TV series. Before the pandemic shut down theaters throughout the U.S, and other parts of the world, the first Sonic film went on to gross $319 million globally. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is currently on track to beat those earnings having grossed approximately $141 million globally.

As with the first movie, timing appears to have been a significant factor in Sonic 2's early success. Its main competitor at the box office was Sony's much-maligned Morbius, which saw a drastic 74 percent drop in ticket sales from its opening weekend last Friday. It only earned $10.2 million in additional domestic revenue after a $39 million debut.

Plex has an audacious plan to become the daily go-to app for everyone's streaming needs: The media center app rolled out new universal search, watchlist and discovery features Tuesday that are designed to help people find and keep track of all of the shows and movies available across a growing universe of streaming services. From a report: "The app dance, going from app to app to find something to watch, just doesn't make any sense," said Plex's senior product and design director, Jason Williams. Instead, Williams hopes that people will just open Plex to browse everything that's new on various streaming services, and then follow deep links to directly launch playback on Netflix, Hulu or anywhere else. "You're going to open up Plex every day," Williams said. "It's going to be your trusted source." Universal search and discovery have long been a holy grail for the streaming industry, but efforts by platform operators to integrate these types of features directly into the smart TV home screen have been held back by industry power struggles. Plex hopes it can avert some of those issues, and is betting on the ingenuity of its power users to help out along the way. In addition to universal search and a universal watchlist across multiple streaming services as well as personal media, Plex is also launching a dedicated discovery section in its app that highlights new titles on Netflix and other services.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mashable: YouTube recently added a bunch more movies and TV shows for its U.S. users to stream for free, provided you're willing to sit through some ads. Unfortunately, actually finding them all isn't easy. While YouTube has offered free, ad-supported movies before, this is the first time it has branched out to TV shows. Announced last week, YouTube's updated catalogue of free content now includes over 1,500 movies and 100 television shows, such as 10 Things I Hate About You, The Sandlot, Robin Hood: Men In Tights, Legally Blonde, two seasons of Kitchen Nightmares, and a decent number of more obscure titles such as 1970's Western The Return of a Man Called Horse.

However, YouTube has also made browsing its free titles much more annoying than it needed to be. The platform won't just show you all its free titles and let you scroll through them to find your next binge watch. It certainly won't let you filter them, so you can't narrow your search to all of YouTube's free action movies, or free romantic comedies. Rather, YouTube's algorithm selects a few hundred ad-supported titles to show you in its "free to watch movies" section, hiding the rest. Mashable only counted 360 ad-supported films available in this category, despite YouTube stating it offers over four times that number. Mashable also counted 100 free TV shows.

YouTube noted that viewers can use its search bar to look for titles, as well as browse through content in genre-themed sections which contain a mix of free, hire, and purchasable content. However there's no section only listing all of YouTube's free films or television shows, giving users no option but to trust that YouTube knows best what they should watch. [...] It seems like a strange lack of functionality, but then again, YouTube's bread and butter is in user-uploaded content rather than blockbuster films. "YouTube is personalized to users, so instead of seeing the entire library at once in the links, users see personalized selections for them," a YouTube spokesperson told Mashable. "Once users begin watching or when new titles cycle in or out, the makeup of the selection in the shelves will change."

Dune won six Academy Awards tonight — the most of any movie — at this year's Oscar's ceremony, taking home Oscars for its cinematography, visual effects, film editing, original score, production design, and "achievement in sound."

But the movie's Oscar-winning crew were surprised there was no Oscar nomination for the film's director, Denis Villeneuve, reports IndieWire: "I was very confused when Denis was not nominated for directing. It's as if the film directed itself and all of these craft categories magically did great work," sound designer/supervising sound editor Theo Green said. "Seeing the sweep that Dune is having tonight makes me very proud for Denis."

Green and other below-the-line winners painted a production picture where Villeneuve orchestrated a kind of cross-department collaboration that allowed each craftsperson's work to shine and work in concert with every other piece. Re-recording mixer Ron Bartlett said it all started with Villeneuve's deep study of the book. "It's better than the sum of its parts," Fraser said. "We are the culmination of Denis Villeneuve's combined group effort to make a movie, and that's what I'm most proud of." Several winners also called out editor Joe Walker as a key piece of the creation of Dune.
Besides the six Oscars it won, Dune had also been nominated for four other awards, including Best Picture.

Tonight's ceremony featured a tribute to 60 years of James Bond movies — and the franchise's most recent film also won the "Best Song" Oscar (for the song "No Time to Die" by Billie Eilish). This marks the third consecutive time that a James Bond movie's theme song has gone on to win the "Best Song" award.

And Apple TV+ became the first streaming service to ever win the prestigious Best Picture award for their movie CODA. NBC News calls this "a major moment for a film industry that has been dramatically transformed by the rise of direct-to-consumer streaming platforms and the growing popularity of at-home entertainment." (The film also won Oscars for best adapted screenplay and for best supporting actor.) In the days before the Oscars telecast, the best picture race came to be seen as a proxy battle between Apple and Netflix, the streaming giant that has been angling for Hollywood's marquee prize for at least the last half-decade, spending heavily on splashy promotional campaigns. Netflix was a double best picture contender this year, recognized for Jane Campion's haunting Western The Power of the Dog and Adam McKay's doomsday satire Don't Look Up.

Back in 1987 Alexander Trevor worked with the GIF format's creator, Steve Wilhite, at CompuServe. 35 years later Fast Company tech editor Harry McCracken (also Slashdot reader harrymcc) located Trevor for the inside story: Wilhite did not come up with the GIF format in order to launch a billion memes. It was 1987, and he was a software engineer at CompuServe, the most important online service until an upstart called America Online took off in the 1990s. And he developed the format in response to a request from CompuServe executive Alexander "Sandy" Trevor. (Trevor's most legendary contribution to CompuServe was not instigating GIF: He also invented the service's CB Simulator — the first consumer chat rooms and one of the earliest manifestation of social networking, period. That one he coded himself as a weekend project in 1980.)

GIF came to be because online services such as CompuServe were getting more graphical, but the computer makers of the time — such as Apple, Commodore, and IBM — all had their own proprietary image types. "We didn't want to have to put up images in 79 different formats," explains Trevor. CompuServe needed one universal graphics format.

Even though the World Wide Web and digital cameras were still in the future, work was already underway on the image format that came to be known as JPEG. But it wasn't optimized for CompuServe's needs: For example, stock charts and weather graphics didn't render crisply. So Trevor asked Wilhite to create an image file type that looked good and downloaded quickly at a time when a 2,400 bits-per-second dial-up modem was considered torrid. Reading a technical journal, Wilhite came across a discussion of an efficient compression technique known as LZW for its creators — Abraham Limpel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch. It turned out to be an ideal foundation for what CompuServe was trying to build, and allowed GIF to pack a lot of image information into as few bytes as possible. (Much later, computing giant Unisys, which gained a patent for LZW, threatened companies that used it with lawsuits, leading to a licensing agreement with CompuServe and the creation of the patent-free PNG image format.)

GIF officially debuted on June 15, 1987. "It met my requirements, and it was extremely useful for CompuServe," says Trevor....

GIF was also versatile, offering the ability to store the multiple pictures that made it handy for creating mini-movies as well as static images. And it spread beyond CompuServe, showing up in Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, and then in Netscape Navigator. The latter browser gave GIFs the ability to run in an infinite loop, a crucial feature that only added to their hypnotic quality. Seeing cartoon hamsters dance for a split second is no big whoop, but watching them shake their booties endlessly was just one of many cultural moments that GIFs have given us.

As viewership drops for Hollywood's annual Academy Awards ceremony, "Everyone has a theory about the decline..." argues an opinion piece in the New York Times.

"My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing." When the nominees were announced in February, nine of the 10 had made less than $40 million in domestic box office. The only exception, "Dune," barely exceeded $100 million domestically, making it the 13th-highest-grossing movie of 2021. All told, the 10 nominees together have earned barely one-fourth as much at the domestic box office as "Spider-Man: No Way Home." Even when Hollywood tries to conjure the old magic, in other words, the public isn't there for it anymore.... Sure, non-superhero-movie box office totals will bounce back in 2022, and next year's best picture nominees will probably earn a little more in theaters. Within the larger arc of Hollywood history, though, this is the time to call it: We aren't just watching the decline of the Oscars; we're watching the End of the Movies....

[W]hat looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation.... The internet, the laptop and the iPhone personalized entertainment and delivered it more immediately, in a way that also widened Hollywood's potential audience — but habituated people to small screens, isolated viewing and intermittent watching, the opposite of the cinema's communalism. Special effects opened spectacular (if sometimes antiseptic-seeming) vistas and enabled long-unfilmable stories to reach big screens. But the effects-driven blockbuster, more than its 1980s antecedents, empowered a fandom culture that offered built-in audiences to studios, but at the price of subordinating traditional aspects of cinema to the demands of the Jedi religion or the Marvel cult. And all these shifts encouraged and were encouraged by a more general teenage-ification of Western culture, the extension of adolescent tastes and entertainment habits deeper into whatever adulthood means today....

Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There's no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences. The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined...

[T]he caliber of instantly available TV entertainment exceeds anything on cable 20 years ago. But these productions are still a different kind of thing from The Movies as they were — because of their reduced cultural influence, the relative smallness of their stars, their lost communal power, but above all because stories told for smaller screens cede certain artistic powers in advance.
The article argues that episodic TV also cedes the Movies' power of an-entire-story-in-one-go condensation. ("This power is why the greatest movies feel more complete than almost any long-form television.") And it ultimately suggests that like opera or ballet, these grand old movies need "encouragement and patronage, to educate people into loves that earlier eras took for granted," and maybe even "an emphasis on making the encounter with great cinema a part of a liberal arts education. "

In 2014 one lone film-maker had even argued that Ben Stiller's spectacular-yet-thoughtful Secret Life of Walter Mitty "might be the last of a dying breed."

"It's no longer possible to watch any content starring Keanu Reeves in China," reports PC Magazine, "and searching for his name returns no results from search engines."

The AV Club explains: Earlier this year, about a month after the release of The Matrix Resurrections, Reeves was announced as a performer at the 35th annual Tibet House Benefit Concert. The concert was organized by Tibet House, a nonprofit founded by supporters of the Dalai Lama that Chinese authorities have labeled "a separatist organization advocating for Tibetan independence," according to The Hollywood Reporter....

Now, after his appearance at the show, it's being reported by the Los Angeles Times that the Matrix movies, Speed, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, The Lake House, and more films from the actor's catalog can no longer be streamed on platforms such as Tencent Video, Youku, and Migu Video.... The one Reeves picture that is still up and available to stream in the country is Toy Story 4 — but that's because the film's credits feature the dubbing cast, not the original cast from the American release.
But it's more than that, notes PC Magazine: As Reuters reports, the Chinese authorities have seemingly wiped the actor's existence from servers across the country.... And with the internet being so restricted and controlled there, it's relatively simple for those in power to digitally disappear someone. So far, Tencent and iQiyi have removed at least 19 of the actor's movies from their streaming platforms, and performing a search for either his English name or its Chinese translation will return zero results from search engines, apparently.
The Los Angeles Times supplies some context: The development emerged just after his latest film "The Matrix: Resurrections" became the first blockbuster to hit Chinese theaters in over two months, ending an unusually prolonged drought of censorship approvals on U.S. titles in a year of rising geopolitical tensions and a further cooling of relations with Hollywood.... "It's a curious case that's worth following. We tend to think of the censorship machine in China as this really coordinated monster, but the fact that we're seeing these conflicting signals [between the online and theatrical markets] suggests that some of these measures come from different places," said Alex Yu, a researcher at China Digital Times, a U.S.-based news organization that translates and archives content censored in China.

It's unclear who ordered the deletions, China's regulatory agencies or platforms acting proactively to remove potentially troublesome content, Yu said.... "Why all of a sudden did they decide to take this measure at this exact moment? It's a question we as outsiders might never be able to answer," Yu said. "The system is so opaque that it's pretty much impossible to pinpoint which agency or person is responsible...."

The ban on Reeves' past works bodes poorly for the China prospects of his upcoming projects. These include animation "DC League of Super-Pets," starring Chinese fan favorite Dwayne Johnson, and the pandemic-delayed sequel "John Wick: Chapter 4," which appears to target mainland viewers with its top billing of Donnie Yen, the Hong Kong action star known for his expressions of loyalty to China's ruling Communist Party....

Despite the original trilogy's popularity, "The Matrix: Resurrections" was a flop in China even before it faced nationalist backlash, grossing only $13.6 million and notching just 5.7 out of 10 on the taste-making ratings platform Douban.

If Netflix follows through with its test to charge an additional fee to users sharing passwords, it could rake in $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, according to a new Wall Street analysis. Variety reports: Last week, Netflix said it was launching a test in three Latin America countries (Chile, Costa Rica and Peru) to address password sharing. Customers will be able to add up to two Extra Member accounts for about $2-$3/month each, on top of their regular monthly fee. According to estimates by Cowen & Co. analysts, if Netflix rolls the program out globally it could add an incremental $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, or about 4% upside to the firm's 2023 revenue projection of $38.8 billion. The firm's estimate assumes that about half of non-paying Netflix password-sharing households will become paying members; further, the model predicts that of those, about half will opt to sign up for their own separate paid account.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last year, the Google TV app user interface was completely redesigned and transformed into a hub for browsing movies and shows from your favorite streaming apps all in one place. It now appears that more changes are coming to the platform as Google has announced that in May 2022, movies or TV shows will no longer be available in the Google Play store. Instead, the Google TV app will be the official home for buying, renting, and watching movies and shows on your Android device. Other apps, games, and books will continue to live on the store. On Google TV, the experience of using Google Play Movies & TV will still be the same and users will get access to the latest new releases, rentals, and deals. When taking a look at the new Google TV app, customers will see a Shop tab where they can find all the titles that the tech giant offers.