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Old 10-07-19, 07:06 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 13th, ’19

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"If your account is banned, it means that you lose access to all your digital purchases as well." – Asher Madan






































July 13th, 2019




Pirate Our Games, Don't Buy them from Key Resellers, Say Indies
Leo Kelion

Small video games studios are asking the public to stop buying their titles from "unauthorised" markets, saying the sales cost them more than they earn.

Several have said it would even be better if consumers pirated their games rather than purchased discounted unlock codes from the "key resellers".

One label is running a petition calling on the biggest such market - G2A - to halt sales of indie games outright.

But G2A has defended its business model.

It said the indies benefited from its policy of sharing a cut of sales made by third parties.

"Hundreds of developers earn money from selling their keys through marketplaces such as G2A," head of communications Maciej Kuc told BBC News.

"We don't plan on taking away that possibility anytime soon, as it would be hurtful not only to our customers but also to the many developers who use our platform to their benefit."

He added that G2A already took measures to tackle illegal sales.

And he said developers were partly responsible for some of the scams on its site because of the "thousands of free keys" they had created for giveaways.

The campaign's organiser, however, has dismissed this defence.

"They are harming our industry and the value of our games," Mike Rose, from the Manchester-based publisher No More Robots, told BBC News

Several other industry insiders have also tweeted concerns.


I am a developer and I have no problems with pirates because nobody is losing money or time. I have a problem with key resellers because they cost me time while they earn money for something I made with my time.
— Rami Ismail (@tha_rami) July 1, 2019


If you don't want to buy it full price, please pirate Nightmare Reaper when it comes out instead of getting in on G2A.
— ItBurn (@ItBurn_) July 5, 2019


Please do not buy Another Star from a third party reseller. Those are stolen codes I don't see a penny from them. At least have the dignity to pirate the game instead if you're going to short change me.
— Overworld Theme (@OverworldTheme) July 6, 2019


In my brief time handling such things I found the pirates converted to sales more often than any money made their way down from resellers.

Piracy is literally better for the bottom line. Not that we want to know when you do it.
— Jon Tetrino ☀️ (@JonTetrino) June 30, 2019


Chinese sales

The attraction for consumers of buying from key resellers is they typically offer titles at a fraction of the price they are available via either the games studio's own sites or through online stores such as Steam, with which the publishers have a direct relationship.

Studios have complained for some time about the trade. But tensions rose after G2A increased its social media activity and online ads to promote special deals tied to its fifth anniversary.

G2A does not buy and sell second-hand codes itself. Rather, it compares itself to other online marketplaces such as eBay, which provide a place for third-parties to sell goods.

But Mr Rose claimed it did not do enough to combat dishonestly obtained keys.

When sellers received an order, for example, they bought a code via Steam's Chinese store, where the keys were often sold at a quarter of their normal price.

To bypass Steam's own ban on such keys being passed to gamers in other markets, purchasers were told they must add another account to their friends list to receive the details, Mr Rose said.

This new "friend" was in fact a bot, he said, which generated a link to a separate site where the Chinese code could be transferred without the exchange being detected.

And the result was the publisher received a fraction of their normal cut, while the fee they had wanted to charge became seen as too high.

In other cases, Mr Rose said, dealers cancelled the credit card transaction with which they had bought a key, after selling it on.

By the time Steam chased this up and voided the sale, gamers may have tried the title out and moved on, never noticing they had lost access as a consequence, he said.

But as a result, the publisher was not paid.

"I'm seeing my sales happening - and then at the end of the month 30% of them are disappearing," Mr Rose said.

"I would rather people pirate the game."

'Face the consequences'

For its part, G2A said most keys on its market were sold by wholesalers who had bought large quantities directly from publishers at a discount.

It said only 1% of the transactions on its site were problematic in any way and it was easy for users to report suspect parties.

"If any key was illegally obtained, we'll remove it, block the seller and provide their personal data to the proper authorities," it said.

Furthermore, it said, a combination of the rating systems it provided and the anti-money laundering processes it employed acted as a deterrent.

"If someone wants to do something illegal, they know they will have to face the consequences," it said in a statement.

The site said it would also start offering developers refunds worth 10 times the sum lost if they could prove keys had been sold on G2A after being bought with stolen credit card details.

This offer is limited to cases in which the initial purchases were made on the developers' own stores and had resulted in the payment provider having to be reimbursed.

"We're not doing this because we're the ones to blame but because we want to finally stop the accusations we've been getting," G2A said.

And it suggested studios providing keys to "fake influencers" was a bigger problem.

"If the developer doesn't check them thoroughly, the keys sometimes end up in scammers' hands," it said.

"That's why all the developers who participate in G2A Direct have access to our database and can check on their own whether a review key ended up on G2A or not."

Fuelling demand

Mr Rose responded saying most developers relied on sales via Steam and other third-party stores rather than their own sites, so G2A's refund offer was a "red herring".

And he said the problem of fake influencers existed only because they had places to sell on the codes they had obtained in bulk.

"Literally in the time I've been talking to you, two of them have appeared in my inbox," he told BBC News.

"So much time in our job is taken up trying to deal with these people."
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48908726





TRON’s BitTorrent Speed Aims to Expedite File Sharing via Token Rewards
Julie Williams

The software company BitTorrent Inc., a subsidiary of one of the largest decentralized peer-to-peer networks across the globe TRON, recently announced the addition of a new ‘member’ to its ‘team’ – BitTorrent Speed. Launched this week, this amazing speedy software is proposed to help scaling up, uploading and downloading of files within the network.

According to the press release, BitTorrent Speed will make it possible for millions of users to gain fast and uninterrupted access to files on the network while being rewarded for activity with the BitTorrent (BTT) token, which was issued and sold out in January, for incentive. With BitTorrent Speed, users can now download and upload large files rapidly without any hassle.

If everything will go by the plan, we can expect to see a very fast system that could allow for downloading several tons of megabytes in a split second. However, the press release states that download optimization via BitTorrent Speed will be varied according to the number of users using the file at the same time and the amount of users who bid with tokens. Also, not only will this new invention make download way much easier and faster, but it is also proposed to help make download readily available.

This is such an amazing development in the BitTorrent and TRON network as the goal has always been to significantly scale up browsing time across the web. The addition of BitTorrent Speed is just another massive step towards creating the largest blockchain-based app for speedy download and upload of files in the world.

The San Francisco-based software company, which was bought by TRON, has successfully placed the last piece of the puzzle in the integration work of both decentralized networks – of BitTorrent and TRON.

This is also amazing news for users on the TRON network as they will have easy access to the newly-launched BitTorrent Speed. You will recall that since November 2018, users of Bitcoin (BTC), Binance (BNB), and TRON (TRX) now enjoy the opportunity of purchasing a yearly subscription of all BitTorrent and uTorrent products. With such an arrangement, it is very possible for crypto users on TRON and the Binance network to enjoy this speedy file sharing app.

Commenting on the launch of BitTorrent Speed, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of BitTorrent who also doubles as the CEO and founder of the TRON network, Justin Sun, stated that they expect to get astounding feedback from early users of BitTorrent Speed. And that they look forward to adding more features that will make the BitTorrent protocol so much better for millions of users across the globe.
BitTorrent to the Rescue after TRON’s Crypto Ponzi Scam Debacle?

The launch came at a great time for TRON, that recently infuriated many from its own community due to a crypto Ponzi scam from which the company didn’t make the petty effort to distance itself. This fiasco resulted in protests that ultimately trickled into the company’s offices in Beijing, which followed by a raid of the local police. On top of all that, TRON didn’t take any responsibility whatsoever for the damage, which angered even more the users who had been defrauded.

Perhaps now BitTorrent Speed might shift some of the negative publicity away.
Sharing Is Caring:
https://all-stocks.net/trons-bittorr...token-rewards/





To Combat Rampant Piracy, a U.N. Organization Launches a Global Anti-Piracy Database
Daniel Sanchez

To Combat Rampant Piracy, a UN Organization Launches a Global Anti-Piracy Database
So far this year, multiple piracy websites have gone down as part of a large-scale crackdown from the music industry.

Thanks to aggressive subpoenas from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), YouTubNow, a self-described “powerful” YouTube stream-ripper, has indefinitely closed its doors. But that’s just one theater in a broader war, one that also includes long-running litigation against ISPs.

In a surprise agreement with the RIAA, Cox Communications agreed to hand over the personal information of 2,793 pirating business subscribers. This includes the names, payment information, and addresses of business subscribers who have apparently downloaded illegal content. Only one business has challenged the ruling – a hospital and medical care facility.

Then, teaming up with the IFPI and Music Canada, the RIAA promptly shut down notorious pirate cyberlocker DBRee. The agreement forced the domain’s unnamed owner to write on his website,

“Making available copyright-protected music on the internet without authorization from the copyright holder is illegal. Willful, commercial scale copyright infringement could lead to a criminal conviction. Illegal music services exploit the work of artists and pay nothing to those creating and investing in music.”

Then, obtaining more subpoenas against NameCheap and Cloudflare, the industry successfully took down two music piracy websites – Mixstep and NoFile.

Yet, not everything has gone as well as the industry has hoped for.

Despite obtaining subpoenas, the RIAA remains locked in a fierce battle against Y2Mate, one of the world’s largest stream-rippers. The powerful organization also hopes American courts will rule against Russian stream-ripper FLVTO and its sister site, 2Conv, but that remains a steep uphill climb.

Now, a global organization has aided efforts to take down even more illegal websites.
Will a database help identify – and take down – suspected pirates?

Over in Australia, the music industry – led by Warner, Sony, and Universal Music – successfully won a major injunction. Two months ago, a federal judge issued a broad ruling, demanding major Australian ISPs to block stream-rippers.

According to Music Rights Australia (MRA), forced site-blocking remains a viable anti-piracy strategy.

“We use this effective and efficient no-fault remedy to block the illegal sites which undermine the many licensed online services which give music fans the music they love where, when, and how they want to hear it.”

All of those efforts are now being complemented by a worldwide blacklist.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) – part of the United Nations – has launched a new database. Dubbed Building Respect for Intellectual Property (or BRIP, for short), UN Member States will promptly report “problematic sites.” After looking at the database, advertisers may choose to block these “bad” websites.

WIPO first introduced the idea of a global anti-piracy database in 2017.

Explaining the purpose of BRIP, WIPO wrote,

“The BRIP Database is now open for the acceptance of Authorized Contributors from WIPO Member States and Authorized Users from the advertising sector.

“It comprises a secure, access-controlled online platform, to which authorized agencies in WIPO Member States may upload lists of websites which deliberately facilitate the infringement of copyright.”

In short, WIPO hopes BRIP will cut pirate sites’ revenue. The organization writes that this will “reduce the flow of money to illegal website operators.” In addition, brands no longer risk “tarnishment.” Legitimate advertising also won’t appear “illegally” on websites. This, writes WIPO, confuses consumers.

Member States will assign their own submitters who will add pirate websites to BRIP. AGCOM, an Italian telecom regulator, and KCOPA, a Korean copyright protection agency, tested the database prior to its launch.

Concluding its statement promoting BRIP, the WIPO wrote,

“The project responds to increased interest among policy-makers in methods of building respect for intellectual property which rely on voluntary cooperation, rather than on judicial or other compulsory measures.”

Yet, the organization conceded that the possibility for failure still exists. Member States must participate to ensure BRIP’s viability.

“Its success will, however, depend on the extent to which it is adopted by Member State agencies and the advertising sector.”
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/201...ions-v-piracy/





YouTube Revamps its Copyright Claim System for Creators

It now requires reporters to specify which part of a video infringes on their copyright.
Mariella Moon

Those in the business of hosting videos created by the public need to have a solid copyright protection and claim system in place. While YouTube's is far from perfect -- in fact, it's been abused and used to extort creators -- the company has rolled out changes to the system that make it easier to deal with infringement claims. To start with, people manually filing copyright infringement claims must now provide timestamps for the exact part of the videos they're reporting.

To prevent unscrupulous individuals from abusing the system, YouTube says it will revoke a user's access to manual claims if they repeatedly fail to provide accurate manual timestamps. YouTube scans video uploads against a database of files, so its content ID technology can find visual and audio matches. Any possible copyright infringement instances found during that process leads to automated content ID claims -- a "manual claim" is what YouTube calls complaints wherein the copyright owners themselves report the unauthorized use of their property.

The manual claim's recipient will see the timestamp indicated by the reporting party, making it much easier to figure out which part of the video to edit. If they do choose to alter their video instead of disputing the claim, they can use YouTube's updated editing tools to address the issue. Creators can now easily mute all sounds for the time-stamped segment or swap out the music with one of the platform's free-to-use songs from its Audio Library.

Finally, they can trim out that segment completely if they believe that's the best course of action. YouTube says it will continue beefing up its editing tools and will eventually give creators a way to trim claimed segments with just a single click. "Our work won't stop here. We're always looking to find ways to improve the creator copyright experience while also balancing the rights of copyright owners," Julian Bill, YouTube's Product Manager, wrote. The changes YouTube has rolled out already make dealing with copyright claims a lot less painful, but we hope the other features it comes up with can help make the experience even better.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/10/...system-revamp/





Microsoft: Playing Pirated Halo: Reach Beta Could Get You Permanently Banned

It's probably best to avoid it.
Asher Madan

What you need to know

• 343 Industries has launched the first test flight for Halo: Reach on PC.
• The flight allows players to play the "Tip of the Spear" mission.
• The test includes less than a thousand people.
• Pirated versions of the beta are available online.

The Halo: Reach beta rolled out to less than a thousand people a few days ago, but that hasn't stopped it from leaking out. Pirated versions can be found all over the internet, allowing anyone to play a selection of the game. Microsoft is aware of this problem and has promised to crack down on offenders.

It has come to our attention that the Halo Insider flight has been illegally distributed online. If you download or play this illegal copy, we have the right to ban all associated accounts and remove you from all current or future 343 programs.

Rules >>> https://t.co/UuPqv8obE1 pic.twitter.com/oqPjp3oyhi
— Tyler “Postums” Davis (@343Postums) June 29, 2019

Today, Community Support and Engagement Coordinator at 343 Industries Tyler Davis said that those who play the pirated beta will be banned. David added, "If you download or play this illegal copy, we have the right to ban all associated accounts and remove you from all current or future... programs." The beta only contains one mission and is currently just to test out delivery methods.

If your account is banned, it means that you lose access to all your digital purchases as well. Since many gamers use the same account for Xbox One and the Microsoft Store on Windows 10, a ban can be quite devastating. Hopefully, those pirating the game will keep this in mind.
https://www.windowscentral.com/micro...nned-xbox-live





Japanese Government Arrests Alleged Manga Pirate After Global Search

A Japanese manga pirate has been arrested
Matt Kim

An international manhunt by the Japanese government has led to the arrest of Romi Hoshino, the manager behind one of the largest, online manga pirating websites on the internet. Hoshino was arrested in Manila while attempting to leave for Hong Kong.

Hoshino, 27, was arrested Sunday at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila. Kotaku reports (via Mainichi News) that the Japanese Embassy in Manilla requested Hoshino’s arrest, and that the police operation was carried out in coordination between Japanese authorities and Phillippine’s Bureau of Immigration.

Hoshino operated the website “Manga-Mura” which was shut down by the Japanese government in April 2018. Prior to that, it was reported that the website drew over 100 million visitors each month and posted some 60,000 manga titles for free online.

NHK reports that Hoshino "played a major role" in operating Manga-Mura.

Manga-Mura was one of three websites the government of Japan approved to be blocked in order to curb internet piracy. Japan’s Content Overseas Distribution Association estimated that Manga-Mura’s operation cost publishers and IP holders about 319.2 billion yen ($2.93 billion USD).

Hoshino, a Japanese citizen, will be deported to Japan where reports say police have an arrest warrant for Hoshino. He is currently detained in an immigration facility in Manila.
https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/07...-global-search





Disney Won. Now What?

Between its army of beloved franchises and purchase of 20th Century Fox, Disney controls more of the movie business than any studio in generations. What will Hollywood look like under Mickey Mouse’s shadow?
Adam B. Vary

It’s been a brutal year for Hollywood. Box office numbers are way down. Summer movies keep flopping. Green Book won Best Picture. It’s all just been terrible.

Except for Disney.

For Disney, this is the year it released four global blockbusters, with several more to come. This is the year Disney cleared one of the biggest acquisitions in Hollywood history. And this is the year Disney forced the rest of Hollywood to confront just how it will live under the towering shadow of Mickey Mouse.

As a filmmaker behind several megahit movies put it to BuzzFeed News, “The days of competition are over. This is not, like, the Yankees win some, and the Red Sox win some, and occasionally the Marlins will slip in there and grab one or whatever. It’s just, like, Disney. They’re going to be No. 1.”

Like the best epic tales of triumph and conquest, however, Disney’s historic ascent is still laced with risk and uncertainty, as the very qualities that have propelled the company’s astronomic success could also force it to plummet back down to Earth.

The company has certainly known hardship before. Just seven years ago, Disney was at the bottom of a five-year box office slump. Other than the reliable hits provided by Pixar and Disney’s twin animation studios, the company had struggled to find a feature film strategy that worked at all. Instead, it had released a misbegotten Main Street parade of high profile disappointments and outright bombs including Race to Witch Mountain, Surrogates, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Tron: Legacy, I Am Number Four, Mars Needs Moms, Fright Night, Real Steel, and John Carter.

Then on a clear Los Angeles day in April seven years ago, amid a blaze of flashbulbs and a small army of movie stars, The Avengers premiered.

The cinematic universe–establishing mega-blockbuster was the first Marvel Studios film released by Disney after the company bought Marvel Entertainment for $4.24 billion in 2009. That acquisition has so far netted Disney more than $18.2 billion in global box office grosses alone, a historic financial windfall that would buoy any studio out of the box office doldrums. But Marvel was only one facet of a larger strategy at Disney, spearheaded by CEO Robert Iger, to rescue its box office future by buying up a confederation of film divisions with the same degree of widespread brand recognition already enjoyed by the company at large.

In essence, where the rest of the film industry built a business model dependent on individual movie franchises, Disney has built its film business by making its franchises into individual ministudios.

First, Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion (gross to date: $10.4 billion), then Marvel in 2009. Three years later, Disney bought Lucasfilm from Star Wars creator George Lucas for $4.05 billion, launching a brand new series of Star Wars movies starting in 2015 (gross to date: $4.84 billion), and the debut of two Star Wars–themed lands at Disneyland and Disney World.

After the success of 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, Disney even discovered a winning strategy for its namesake live-action division: remaking the company’s library of classic animated features — The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin — as (putatively) live-action films. Since 2010, that effort has grossed $6.2 billion worldwide.

This all would have been enough — more than enough — for any studio to thrive. And since The Avengers’ rapturous premiere, Disney hasn’t just thrived, it’s dominated like no studio has since the heyday of MGM in the first half of the 20th century. Historically, the movie business has been reliably cyclical, with each of the six major studios — Disney, 20th Century Fox, Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Sony Pictures — rotating through boom-and-bust years as audience tastes shift and big risks pay off or flop hard. But since 2016, Disney has upended that cycle, topping the domestic box office every year with an ever-increasing share of the market.

Disney, however, was not satisfied with mere domination. At the end of 2017, it began negotiations to buy most of the movie and TV assets of one of its biggest and most successful rivals: 20th Century Fox.

Due to the complexity of one massive media conglomerate purchasing another massive media conglomerate, the deal didn’t close until March 2019, for $71.3 billion. The timing, nonetheless, ended up being eerily perfect, as Disney is poised this year to exert an unprecedented degree of box office supremacy. Due to the success of Captain Marvel, Aladdin, and Toy Story 4 alongside the phenomenon of Avengers: Endgame, Disney has grossed $2.03 billion in the US and Canada alone. The next highest studios this year, Warner Bros. and Universal, haven’t made even half that amount.

Disney actually found itself in a similarly rarefied position at the midyear point in 2018, thanks to the one-two-three punch of Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Incredibles 2. The difference this year is that the second half of 2019 promises at least as many massive sensations for Disney as the first half provided, including The Lion King in July, Frozen 2 in November, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in December.

Put it this way: By the end of 2018, Disney had earned $7.33 billion worldwide for the year, a record second only to Disney’s all-time record of $7.61 billion in 2016. By the end of June 2019, the five films — five — that Disney released globally this year have already made over $5.61 billion worldwide, and the studio shows no sign of slowing down.

“Disney has lined up this row of killers between the final Avengers and the final Star Wars and sequels to their two biggest animated franchises in Frozen and Toy Story, and they’re still in the golden age of remakes with Aladdin and Lion King,” a top executive at a rival studio told BuzzFeed News. “What they’ve engineered within their own company that makes them kind of the name brand — we sometimes kid that we just call them ‘entertainment.’”

It’s a good joke, but it’s also an ominous one. The film industry is facing the biggest change to its fundamental business in decades, as audiences inexorably migrate away from movie theaters and toward digital streaming at home. The core reason Disney bought Fox was not to make it more competitive in the theatrical film business, but to draw from Fox’s vast library of film and TV titles for the upcoming Disney+ streaming service. And with 20th Century Fox no longer a separate studio, and Disney locked into its rigid franchise business model well into the 2020s, the company’s gargantuan size and success are already shaping Hollywood’s future for a generation.

“If you are so big that your marketing muscle, your market penetration, your ability to saturate screens and theaters, is so massive, how does a rival get a foot in the door, when you have a company that big?” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. “It’s really a conundrum.”

BuzzFeed News spoke with rival movie executives and veteran filmmakers (all of whom requested anonymity in order to speak candidly) about how the rest of the industry is adapting to living in Disney’s Hollywood, what it means for the kinds of stories that can be told, and how the studio’s winning strategy might also lead to its undoing.

What will non-Disney movies look like?

Even before Disney’s acquisition of Fox, the rest of Hollywood had grown accustomed to Mickey Mouse throwing his weight around in ways not immediately visible to general audiences, like snapping up the limited number of windows to exhibit films in IMAX theaters, which often command a premium ticket price. “They do start to monopolize the opportunities,” said the top executive at a rival studio.

After Disney’s purchase of Fox was finalized, the newly embiggened company made a much splashier display of its newfound power. On May 7, Disney announced release dates for a whopping 63 feature film titles that incorporated Fox’s pre-acquisition feature slate largely through 2020, and stretched all the way through to 2027. In doing so, Disney planted flags in virtually all the most highly coveted — and lucrative — release windows for the next four years, including Valentine’s Day week, Memorial Day weekend, Thanksgiving weekend, and especially the weekend before Christmas.

“They can just put down their big feet down on these dates, where everyone else is not just fighting for what’s available, but also fighting to get out of their way,” said a former 20th Century Fox executive. “They suck all the air out of the release schedule.”

The film industry long abandoned the concept of the “summer movie season” as summery franchise movies like The Hunger Games, Furious 7, and Black Panther have enjoyed blockbuster openings in nonsummer months. Still, the most immediate result of Disney’s aggressive release schedule will be studios choosing to release more so-called event movies during the few months left in the calendar that haven’t traditionally been venues for franchise movies of considerable size.

“I think you’ll see a lot more things congregate in January and September and October,” said the top exec. (It’s already started: Last year, Sony Pictures opened its superhero movie Venom in October, and made a tidy $855 million worldwide.)

But what if audiences stop racing out to see event franchise movies that aren’t made by Disney? They certainly haven’t been this year. Since Endgame demolished box office records in April, a string of big, expensive franchise films — including Warner Bros.’ Pokémon Detective Pikachu and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Universal’s The Secret Life of Pets 2, and Sony Pictures’ Men in Black International — have drastically underperformed. Dark Phoenix, the final film in 20th Century Fox’s 19-year-old X-Men franchise, was an outright flop.

“It feels like audiences are making appointments to go to these super event movies [from Disney], and everything else in between is suffering,” the top exec said. “The handoff kind of went from Endgame to Aladdin, and is probably going to go from Aladdin to Toy Story 4, and from Toy Story 4 to The Lion King.”

Part of the issue is simply that Disney’s franchise movies are, on balance, just better — the average Rotten Tomatoes score for the company’s releases in 2019 are a full 15 points higher than the next-better studio.

“For the most part, with very rare exceptions, [Disney’s] movies are quite good,” said the filmmaker with experience making movies for Disney and Fox. “It doesn’t feel like they’re just being manufactured, and it’s a crappy product.”

Audiences simply expect a Marvel Studios or Pixar movie to be superlative experiences worth the time and money to leave their homes and go to the theater, leaving other studios and filmmakers contemplating just how to build franchises that can compete with Disney’s blue-ribbon brand recognition.

“If you are an A+ [franchise], you’re great,” said a producer who has made both blockbuster and Oscar-nominated films. “If you’re an A, you’re pretty solid. If you’re an A– and a B+, all of a sudden, you’re starting to get a little dodgy. You know, Godzilla — is that an A franchise? Is that a B franchise? It’s clearly not impervious.”

The trick, the producer added, is to not try to “out-Disney Disney.”

“There’s a huge opportunity that has opened up for a studio,” he said. “It requires a very forward-thinking and confident studio chief to really carve out a place, like: Let’s be the home for filmmakers with original ideas.”

That is so much easier said than done. To mitigate the perceived risk of making enormously expensive movies on a blockbuster scale, Hollywood’s major studios have spent the last 20 years abandoning original ideas in favor of a franchise economy governed by established — and seemingly market tested — intellectual property. Since 2000, only one original movie has topped the box office for the year: Avatar.

“To get a studio to commit to $100 million-plus budget with no preexisting fanbase, or any sense of marketing wherewithal … unless like you’ve got James Cameron attached to either direct or produce a piece of original [intellectual property], you’re not gonna be able to sell it,” the filmmaker said.

The situation isn’t quite that dire — Christopher Nolan’s last two films, Dunkirk and Interstellar, were both original, reportedly cost over $100 million, and grossed several orders of magnitude more than their budgets globally. But while lamenting the fate of the original film, the filmmaker also stumbled into what may be the best way forward for Hollywood to withstand the Disney machine.

“Work will be largely dominated by franchise-able sequels, preexisting IP, you know, ‘Let’s do The Matrix again,’ ‘Let’s reboot Speed.’ I’m just, for some reason, only mentioning Keanu Reeves movies,” the filmmaker said with a chuckle. “But while we’re on the subject of Keanu Reeves, who would’ve known that John Wick would be a successful franchise? And certainly, who would have known that Fast and Furious would be a massive, multibillion-dollar franchise? My son is 12. He’s more excited to go see Hobbs & Shaw than he is any other franchise film this summer. And I’m like, ‘Really? OK!’”

That’s the thing about branding: It can cut both ways. If everyone knows what a Disney company movie is, they also know what it isn’t, and can’t ever be.

“It is not a big surprise that the two breakout successes of this year that weren’t Disney have been John Wick 3 and Us,” said the top executive. “Those are two movies that Disney can’t do.” Some other recent examples: Last year, Warner Bros. debuted two cultural landmarks in A Star Is Born and Crazy Rich Asians, and Paramount launched a new horror franchise with A Quiet Place; in 2017, Universal had the R-rated surprise sensations Get Out and Girls Trip; in 2016, Lionsgate had the bittersweet original musical La La Land and Sony Pictures had the raunchy adult animated comedy Sausage Party.

“There will be room for water between the rocks, especially as we move forward, that we can all find our way through,” the top executive said. “Disney is almost consistently making all audience movies, which leaves the rest of us to make movies for an audience that can sometimes cross over into being big events.”

One studio that had been arguably better at that than anyone else was 20th Century Fox.

What will 20th Century Fox look like?

When news first broke that Disney was aiming to buy up much of 20th Century Fox, it sent shockwaves through the industry — and then sadness.

“The glass half empty reaction was that’s one less studio to do business with,” the filmmaker said. “The world has gotten just a little bit smaller. The other part of it was a sense of resignation. This is the way the business has been trending for a while, and it’s a waste of time to be depressed about it.”

There were, of course, the jobs that were lost in the purchase — analysts projected as many as 4,000 layoffs since Disney took control of Fox in March. There was also the sense that Hollywood’s relentless franchise economy had cut down one of the fundamental ways the movie industry had become the leading form of entertainment in the world.

“They were actually doing what studios traditionally did [at Fox], which are big, movie star–driven movies with some deal of scope, but fundamentally are not experiences that audiences know that they wanted until they see that trailer for the first time,” the producer said.

In just the last five years, those kinds of films have included Bohemian Rhapsody, Widows, Murder on the Orient Express, The Greatest Showman, The Martian, Spy, and Gone Girl. Fox could just keep doing that for Disney, but, at the moment, the studio’s future remains frustratingly uncertain.

This fall, Fox will debut a few adult-driven dramas — the bestseller adaptation The Woman in the Window and the period docudrama Ford v. Ferrari — during the traditional “awards season” months of October and November. But one of Fox’s biggest movies of the year, the prestige sci-fi thriller Ad Astra with Brad Pitt, was pushed by Disney from a May debut to September, one of the hardest months of the year for an expensive, adult-skewing movie to gain a wide audience.

“[It] is a very strange place for [Ad Astra] to go,” said the top exec of the film’s release date. “I think they don’t have another place in their calendar to put it.”

Indeed, one of the most striking things about Disney’s mega-release calendar is how poorly situated many of Fox’s films are relative to the ones produced by Disney’s other divisions. The animated feature Spies in Disguise was pushed to Christmas Day, five days after the debut of the box office steamroller that will be Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The sci-fi thriller Underwater with Kristen Stewart was banished to the hinterlands in January 2020, and the animated feature Ron’s Gone Wrong will open on the same day in November 2020 as an untitled Marvel Studios feature.

The only Fox franchise that has prime release dates is the pre-Christmas debuts for four planned sequels to Avatar — which just happens to have its own theme park section in Disney World.

“There’s a Disney kind of arrogance and attitude that if it’s not ours, it’s not worth it,” said the former Fox executive. “You can feel that. I know from Fox people, they’ve said the same.”

In a quarterly earnings call in May, Iger said he guessed there will be five or six films a year from Fox, “but we’re not locking ourselves into that” — not exactly a full-throated endorsement of 20th Century Fox’s value, especially considering the studio had 12 wide releases in 2018.

A great deal of that reduction came from Disney’s surprise decision to shut down Fox 2000, the 25-year-old division devoted to the kind of movies that had become increasingly rare in the film industry: dramatic, mass market features that don’t cost a small fortune like event films, but aren’t the kind of rarefied, inexpensive indies released by its sister division Fox Searchlight. Fox 2000 has been responsible for some of the most acclaimed — and successful — films of the last quarter century, like Fight Club, Walk the Line, The Devil Wears Prada, Marley & Me, Life of Pi, The Fault in Our Stars, Hidden Figures, The Hate U Give, and Love, Simon.

“I could see how on paper, some Wall Street analysts can overlook it,” said the former Fox executive. “But you can’t overlook the fact that that division was run by and mostly staffed by women. The breadth of the movies they made probably weren’t going to be made by other studios. … To make them, like, really viable entertainment to get people into theaters is not easy.”

Many industry observers expected Disney would at the very least use Fox 2000 to make original films for Disney+, to directly compete with the similarly scaled original films currently popular on Netflix like To All the Boys I Loved Before, Bird Box, and Murder Mystery. Instead, Disney+’s initial “original” offerings will be TV series spinoffs of its Star Wars and Marvel Studios franchises.

“The quality of [Fox 2000] movies is so much better than what I’m seeing on the originals that Netflix is producing right now,” the former Fox executive said. “It takes experience and knowledge to do it.”

The exec sighed. “I worry what message it sends creatively, if you’re willing to shut that down.”

What will Disney movies look like?

The most immediate question about Disney’s future will likely be answered later in July at San Diego Comic-Con, when Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige is expected to unveil what the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe will look like. (Among the anticipated titles: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, sequels to Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and Doctor Strange, a Black Widow movie, and The Eternals with Angelina Jolie and Kumail Nanjiani.)

We also know Pixar will release two movies in 2020, neither of them sequels: the fantasy adventure Onward in March and the mysteriously conceptual Soul in June. That same year, the company’s live-action division will debut its new version of Mulan in March, its adaptation of the Disneyland attraction Jungle Cruise — with, who else, Dwayne Johnson — in July, and the 101 Dalmatians prequel Cruella with Emma Stone in December.

And by all appearances, the company plans to keep chugging along that path for years to come. In 2021, Disney has scheduled two untitled animated features (one from Pixar, one from Disney), three untitled Marvel Studios movies, and four untitled live-action features; that pattern will repeat in 2022, with one additional film from Pixar.

That will also be the year that Lucasfilm relaunches the Star Wars franchise after a three-year hiatus — and that’s where the unstoppable Disney juggernaut suddenly begins to look unsteady. In 2018, Solo: A Star Wars Story made plain that audiences do not have a bottomless appetite for Star Wars movies in the same way they do for Marvel Studios releases, so much so that Disney reportedly lost $50 million on the film, and canceled Star Wars spinoff feature films for the foreseeable future.

So expectations for The Rise of Skywalker’s performance are, er, sky high.

“If I’m sitting over at Disney, I know [The Rise of Skywalker] better be great, or else people are going to start to not get excited when they see the Lucasfilm logo pop up at the beginning of the trailer,” the filmmaker said. “Right now, Star Wars is powered by an intense sense of nostalgia for the people who grew up on Star Wars, but, you know, 20 years from now it’ll be entirely relying on what millennials think of Star Wars. And they’re wavering.”

If 20 years seems like an unreasonably long horizon to worry about, consider that Disney reportedly spent $1 billion alone to build out the Star Wars section of Disneyland, the largest single expansion in the park’s history. The company has long relied on its feature film division to be the leading edge of its sprawling entertainment-industrial complex, feeding popular content into its immense merchandising and theme park divisions. But the key word there is popular. If millennial and Gen Z moviegoers stop feeling passionate about Star Wars, why would they spend hundreds of dollars to bring their kids to ride the Millennium Falcon?

Disney, however, has an even more pressing hurdle looming within its feature slate. All expectations point to another extravagant box office bonanza when The Lion King debuts July 19, and in spite of less-than-stellar reviews, Aladdin has surpassed $875 million worldwide. Earlier this year, however, Tim Burton’s live-action version of Dumbo with Colin Farrell and Michael Keaton hasn’t made even half Aladdin’s grosses.

So with live-action versions of The Little Mermaid and Snow White already in the works, what happens when Disney runs out of animated classics that audiences today care about?

“Is Cruella going to have the same kind of neutron bomb effect as Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast?” the top exec at a rival studio said. “I would bet not.”

“They’ve kind of picked all of the low-hanging fruit,” echoed the producer. “Is a Fox and the Hound live-action movie going to be as successful as Lion King? I don’t know.”

To repeat, Disney has scheduled eight live-action films for 2021 and 2022. And the studio’s recent track record with live-action features that don’t draw from Disney’s past has been kind of terrible. (Let us never forget The Lone Ranger, though we may all want to try.)

Just as Disney’s firmly defined brands have allowed the company to hold an enviably steady purchase on the public’s imagination, they have also fixed the company onto an equally firm creative trajectory. And if audiences begin to pull away from what Disney’s offering, it could be punishingly difficult for the company to alter course.

“Especially with those super event movies, you’ve got consumer products and partner brands and promotions that are all lined up, and so you’re fairly locked in a year out or more, and there’s nothing you can do about that,” the top executive said.

It all underlines the truism in Hollywood that you’re only as good as your last movie — and it certainly helps that Disney’s deep resources afford them access to some of the best and most successful storytellers in the industry. Lucasfilm has hired Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to launch a new series of Star Wars movies; Marvel Studios has tapped acclaimed filmmaker Chloé Zhao for The Eternals and enticed Ryan Coogler to return for Black Panther 2. And the studio has also been at the forefront of the push for representation, centering women and people of color in massive franchises across the entire company.

But working within Disney’s lushly appointed cinematic kingdoms also means abiding with some meticulously maintained creative constraints.

“Can you do anything edgy?” the filmmaker said. “Is there a certain level of violence that Fox was able to do but Disney’s going to be like, ‘Nope!’ Now that Fox is gone, does that mean that John McClane, you know, can’t say, ‘Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker’ anymore?”

“If you want to work in the lane that Disney is working in, or you’re fortunate to be connected to the franchise, there’s no better place to do it,” the producer said. “If you want to do something where the Disney brand is going to be an impediment, I don’t know how you can get started.”

To break free of this reputation, everyone who spoke with BuzzFeed News for this story said the same thing: Disney needs to start investing again in original stories as thoughtfully and enthusiastically as it has its branded franchises.

“You want to have the next Star Wars,” the producer said. “You want to have the next thing that is relatively low risk and then can morph into one of these giant franchises.”

The biggest reason for Disney to shake up its astronomically successful movie business is simply because the movie business won’t be the future of entertainment — streaming will. And in the streaming space, Disney+ will be back to being just one of several giants, facing off against Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and WarnerMedia.

“If you want to do edgier stuff, I don’t think the business is constricted, because of television, because Netflix and Amazon and Apple and HBO, they’re all making content,” the filmmaker said. “The fact that there’s a five-part miniseries about Chernobyl that looks like they spent like $80 million … I go, like, wow, that’s cool that that exists. Should we all sit around complaining about how the movie business has contracted, or should we say, ‘Look at all this great content that is out there?’”
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...marvel-outlook





The Great Race to Rule Streaming TV

In their rush to match Netflix, competitors like HBO, Hulu and Amazon are ordering a slew of content — ushering out the age of “prestige TV” and ushering in an age of anything goes.
Jonah Weiner

When Nick Weidenfeld heard what happened at HBO last summer, he was thrilled. “Everyone I knew was texting that article around, saying, ‘What the [expletive]!’ ” Weidenfeld, an independent TV producer, recently recalled. A lot of people who work in Hollywood were spooked by the news, but not him: “I thought it was amazing.”

Weidenfeld was discussing the events of June 19, 2018, as reported in The Times: Around noon that day, Richard Plepler, then HBO’s chief executive officer, met with his new boss, John Stankey, at the network’s Manhattan headquarters. AT&T had recently completed its $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner — whose holdings included Warner Bros. and HBO — and chose Stankey to head up the resulting umbrella company, WarnerMedia. Plepler’s conversation with Stankey, framed as a company town hall, unfolded before some 150 HBO employees, who soon discovered that the new guy had big changes in mind.

“It’s going to be a tough year,” Stankey told Plepler. HBO’s tightly curated cluster of shows, released seasonally and in weekly batches, no longer amounted to a tenable strategy. “It’s not hours a week, and it’s not hours a month,” he said. “We need hours a day. You are competing with devices that sit in people’s hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes.” Ever more hours of overall watch-time were necessary to generate ever more data on viewing habits to help AT&T drive ever more lucrative “models of advertising” and subscriptions, Stankey declared. What was required of Plepler was a reconsidered network, “broad enough to make that happen,” as Stankey put it — because “we’ve got to make money at the end of the day, right?” When Plepler pointed out that HBO was already profitable, Stankey agreed, but then he added, “Just not enough.”

“It’s so good he said it,” Weidenfeld told me, sinking into a booth at Mama Shelter, a hotel in Hollywood where he likes to take working lunches and rough out deals. Weidenfeld, who is 39, sported a full beard and wore a color-blocked fleece pullover. His business lies in helping creators devise and develop shows, then in selling them to networks and platforms — and thanks to the industrywide hunger for “hours a day,” business is booming. In the past few years Weidenfeld has placed two series on Netflix; sold a variety of pitches and pilots he can’t discuss publicly; and struck a first-look deal with Hulu to take it show ideas before shopping them elsewhere. In a couple of hours, one of Weidenfeld’s many creative partners was due to join him to refine the pitch for a new game show, on the theme of impostors, which Weidenfeld described to me with a mirthful look as “so stupid but so sellable.”

Weidenfeld takes a wry, bird’s-eye view of the television industry — sketching out macrotrends, sorting them into taxonomies, prognosticating about where it’s all headed — and for him, the Stankey-Plepler meeting captured something essential about the current state of the medium. “I know it’s not pleasant to hear,” he went on. “Especially if you’re Plepler and you’re a genius and you’ve made all these great decisions. But Stankey’s right. It’s not enough hours.”

Looming over the HBO meeting was the shadow cast by Netflix. Since its metamorphosis in 2007 from a mail-based DVD-rental library into a streaming platform, Netflix has become an entertainment hegemon, spending heavily on original shows and movies (a reported 700 of them as of last year); minting new kinds of stars (the Tasmanian meta-comedian Hannah Gadsby, the Japanese home-organizing guru Marie Kondo); and growing its subscriber numbers to 149 million worldwide. Its rise coincides with a trend of major consolidations, including AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner and Disney’s recent acquisition of Fox’s entertainment properties. Each conglomerate is readying a new streaming platform, as is the Comcast-owned NBC Universal.

Weidenfeld is intimately familiar with the trend toward volume. He made his name as the head of development at Adult Swim, a job he got when he was 24, helping to bring several notable shows to that channel — among them the brilliant sketch-comedy series “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” which played like David Lynch directing public-access TV, and the monstrously successful cartoon “Rick and Morty.” In 2012, Fox hired Weidenfeld away to build an animation studio, and after it was shuttered, he became president of programming at Viceland, a new cable offshoot of the millennial-targeting media empire Vice. Equipped with a limited budget, he practiced a philosophy of low-cost, high-quantity development of the sort that streaming platforms now also practice, no matter how deep-pocketed they are. “To fill the hours in the day for sales, we had to make essentially 300 hours a year,” Weidenfeld explained. “So we could have made a huge show. The Vice version of ‘Mad Men,’ our version of ‘Game of Thrones,’ whatever.” He shook his head. “So what? We’re spending $8-to-$10 million an episode on it, and we’ve wasted our entire budget!”

Even at a much wealthier outfit, like HBO or Netflix, he said, “there’s only so many ‘Games of Thrones’ you can make, so what you wind up having is some premium-premium content, and then you need the low-cost, high-margin stuff,” Weidenfeld said. “If you’re AT&T, you have to say, ‘We’re gonna make premium content, but we also have to find an on-brand way to make game shows.’ ” He added: “That’s why when you open Netflix now, there’s this glut. I’m not hating on it. That’s the business, and cool things will come from it. But they have to feed the beast.”

As Stankey’s remarks to Plepler laid bare, the dominant force driving TV in the Netflix age is the same one driving social networks, video-sharing platforms and online publishers: the relentless pursuit and monetization of our attention. For media companies like AT&T, the real value of HBO-style “prestige” programming is not that it produces works of art as profound as “The Sopranos” but that it offers a viable market alternative to all the gaming videos, makeup tutorials and alt-right primers that millions of people spend millions of minutes watching on their phones every day. Randall L. Stephenson, AT&T’s chief executive, has expressed his desire for 20-minute edits of “Game of Thrones” — a length more optimal for mobile viewing. In a similar vein, the Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg is building a new streaming service named Quibi, for “quick bites,” devoted to lavishly financed, big-name programming that will reportedly be delivered in phone-friendly 10-minute chunks. As the Netflix boss Reed Hastings put it in 2017, making a half-joke about bleary-eyed binge-watching that was no less dystopian for its tongue-in-cheek delivery: “We actually compete with sleep. And we’re winning.”

One big question is what all this means for us, at home, fishing in the cushions for our remotes: If even a network as seemingly sacred as HBO can be pressured by corporate bosses to crank out more shows in order to better compete with smartphones, what new era are we entering?

I asked Weidenfeld if he could really see HBO experimenting with a game show anytime soon. He was emphatic — “Yes, 100 percent. They have to” — then thought for a moment. “They might not call it HBO. It might all go under this WarnerMedia O.T.T.” — an abbreviation for over the top, which is industry-speak denoting a stand-alone streaming service — “where you can have HBO still be premium. But yes, if you’re paying $10.99 a month for it, they have to have volume.”

All of our screens are now TVs, and there is more TV to watch on them than ever. More dramas, more comedies, more thrillers, more fantasy-adventure series, more dating shows, more game shows, more cooking shows, more travel shows, more talk shows, more raunchy comedies, more experimental comedies, more family comedies, more comedy specials, more children’s cartoons, more adult cartoons, more limited series, more documentary series, more prestige dramas, more young-adult dramas, more prestige young-adult dramas — more, more, more.

In the golden age of what’s now called linear television — when viewing patterns were more predictable and, DVRs notwithstanding, more controllable — people had to watch what they wanted to watch when networks wanted them to watch it. But the advent of digital platforms streaming video on demand (S.V.O.D.s, in trade lingo) has broken the 24-hour day into infinite possibilities. Questions once crucial have been made irrelevant: “Does this show deserve a prime-time spot?” “Would this make a good lead-in to that?” The success of a given streaming show isn’t determined by how many people watch it but by how many subscriptions it helps to generate or maintain. The programming goal of an S.V.O.D., then, is an overall atmosphere of plenitude, a constantly updating slate of would-be “tentpole shows,” buttressed with enough theoretically watchable other stuff that viewers don’t flee once “Stranger Things” is over. As one producer put it to me, the mission at a streaming service like Netflix is “to basically create channel surfing within Netflix” — to entice us into a walled garden where the plantings are so copious we never think of leaving.

If you were to argue that this hyperabundance is, on balance, more of a good thing than bad, you could point to an underlying economic truth of streaming-era TV: It puts less pressure on an idiosyncratic or otherwise “challenging” series, because the viewership numbers needed to justify a show’s existence are lower than ever. Precisely how low is hard to say — streamers like Netflix self-report their ratings in the very rare instances when they disclose them at all — but certainly much lower than was historically true in the broadcast-TV era, when prime-time real estate was scarce. And lower too, perhaps, than was historically true even at HBO, where a series as critically enshrined as “The Wire” teetered on the edge of oblivion throughout its five-season run, canceled, uncanceled and threatened with cancellation again, according to the show’s creator, David Simon, in the face of a consistently meager audience.

In the streaming era, “you don’t have to pull in a massive audience” to justify a show, says Ravi Nandan, who directs the television efforts of the boutique studio A24 — known for its dedication to moderately budgeted, auteur-driven material like the Oscar-winning film “Moonlight.” Nandan brought up an appealingly bizarre A24 series from 2017 called “Comrade Detective.” A mock Cold War thriller, it was set in the 1980s, shot in Romania for peanuts with local talent and featured the voice acting — dubbed with intentional ungainliness — of Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. “For us it was, ‘This is a fun experiment,’ ” Nandan said. “Who knows what the outcome’s gonna be, but we’re in a time when we can take this chance, so why don’t we do it?” That hunch proved true when Amazon bought the show.

The same principle holds at volume-driven Netflix, says Eric Newman, showrunner of the hit drug-trafficking series “Narcos.” “I don’t think they’re looking to hit the ball out of the stadium every time,” he said, “and that takes a lot of the pressure off.” The company, he noted, keeps viewership data even from him: “I’ve asked them: ‘Do people like this character? Should we kill them off in Episode 6?’ And they say, ‘Do you think we should kill them off?’ ”

That sense of creative freedom has enabled a fundamental mutation in television’s DNA. TV has long been a medium defined by familiarity — comforting narrative rhythms, stabilizing themes, repeatable formulas. In trusty 22-minute cycles, family tensions and romantic spats flared up only to resolve themselves in time for the end credits; crimes were committed, solved and punished; news anchors and late-night hosts, besuited and paternal, shepherded us through the day’s events from behind sturdy desks; their perma-tanned morning-show equivalents garlanded our breakfast hours with pleasant mundanities.

By contrast, the animating force behind today’s best streaming TV is a horizon-expanding sense of unpredictability, whether it’s the slippery narratives of offbeat magical-realist series like HBO’s “Russian Doll”; the impressionistic, shaggy-dog plots of “High Maintenance” (which began as a web series before moving to HBO); or the jarring encounters with broadly unfamiliar perspectives typical of “Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy,” a Netflix documentary series about the role of laughter in strife-torn international locales.

This means that characters can change as shows progress, instead of retracing the tightly drawn circuits of personality typical of network protagonists. Episode lengths have become similarly elastic — 60 minutes here, 16 minutes there — as has pacing. “Forever,” a dreamlike Amazon comedy starring Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen, took two episodes to even introduce its central conceit (spoiler): The protagonists die and are forced to navigate both marital troubles and mysteries of the afterlife. In a network context, “We would have had to explain it in the very first act, if not the very first scene, if not the very first line of the show,” Alan Yang, a former “Parks and Recreation” writer and a creator of “Forever,” told me. “We were excited about making something where it’s constantly evolving and you get genuine surprise because audiences have been so conditioned on what to expect.”

According to a 2019 survey by Deloitte, 77 percent of Americans who watched streaming TV consumed an average of four hours per sitting. Online binge-watching can have an emboldening effect on outré creative impulses. In addition to “Forever,” Yang was a creator of the Netflix series “Master of None,” with Aziz Ansari, following the romantic and gustatory searchings of Ansari’s lead character, Dev. “The ability to have all the episodes available at once,” Yang says of both shows, “made us feel like we could take bigger chances” — that is, they could move in unexpected ways from one episode to the next without disorienting people. Likewise, “Maniac,” a Netflix series starring Jonah Hill and Emma Stone, was able to play frenetically with genre, time and tone in a way that would have risked incoherence were the series released over several months rather than all in one go. (Releasing a whole season en masse is, of course, another way to keep us planted in front of our screens — and logged into one service — that much longer.)

Yet another upside to programmers’ boundless appetites has been the opening of television’s gates to historically excluded voices. This includes young showrunners of color, like Donald Glover (“Atlanta”), Ramy Youssef (“Ramy”) and Issa Rae (“Insecure”); and members of other marginalized groups, like Ryan O’Connell (a gay man with cerebral palsy who created and stars in the Netflix series “Special”) and Lindy West (the comedian and fat-acceptance activist whose writing inspired the Hulu series “Shrill”).

Established filmmakers, like David Fincher, Barry Jenkins and Errol Morris, are also making episodic TV for streamers in ever greater numbers. “It feels like I have the ability to tell a story outside any traditional format or structure,” says Ava DuVernay, whose feature films include “Selma” and “A Wrinkle in Time.” She has directed two Netflix titles: “13th,” an Oscar-nominated documentary about the racist underpinnings of the carceral state, and “When They See Us,” a four-episode drama about the black teenagers falsely convicted of raping a white jogger in Central Park in 1989. In envisioning the latter as a streaming mini-series, DuVernay told me, her thinking was, “We could make this a two-hour movie and put it in theaters, or we could make it a four-and-a-half hour movie” — divided into chapters and available on your laptop.

The appeal of streaming TV to Hollywood auteurs is that it can offer more expansive creative possibilities than the feature world. The appeal of such shows for platforms is manifold. Multiseason smashes like “Game of Thrones” and “The Sopranos” are still possible but increasingly rare. They require considerable budgets that, from a development perspective, might be more judiciously spent on a flurry of marquee titles, which run for only a season or two but still create a promise of quality amid the deluge and generate valuable buzz. Like the proverbial water-cooler hits of the linear era, these shows heighten our sense that if we don’t subscribe to a given S.V.O.D., we’re missing out on some vital part of the cultural conversation. The difference today is that it’s impossible ever to feel fully caught up on all the things your friends and the internet tell you “you’ve got to see” — a feeling that is great for getting us to shell out, month after month.

As rival megaliths face off in the streaming wars, it’s imperative for platforms that when we dig through their digital heaps we find something great, or at least great-ish, often enough that we don’t go digging elsewhere. This is where recommendation algorithms come in. Unlike an old-school broadcaster, a digital platform generates oceans of second-to-second data about viewing habits, sign-ups and subscription loss. Platforms use this data to group customers into different segments, organized around viewing preferences — and if all is working as it should to recommend shows that match those preferences.

Data affects deceptively simple decisions, like which still image will represent a given title in a scrolling menu: If you streamed a bunch of romantic comedies on Netflix, the image algorithmically deployed to tempt you into watching “Groundhog Day” might be one of Andie MacDowell building a snowman with Bill Murray. If your history is heavy on absurdist comedies, you might see a portrait of Chris Elliott wearing a beanie instead. If the algorithm decides correctly, this benefits Netflix’s relationship not only with customers but also with the creative community, helping to ensure that a show finds a substantial and enthusiastic audience. (One producer, who asked not to be named because he occasionally does business with Netflix, said he has heard creators express wariness about selling projects there, for fear they will get lost amid the surfeit of offerings.)

But how much does data influence the creation of shows in the first place? In March, I joined a meeting at Hulu’s headquarters, in Santa Monica, Calif., as 12 executives discussed concrete ways to bring data science to bear on content creation. Founded initially “to combat piracy,” as Craig Erwich, the company’s senior vice president of original programming, put it, Hulu began as a jointly owned venture between Fox and NBC, offering broadcast TV on demand. The platform, which is now under Disney’s full operational control, has also entered into partnerships with premium-cable channels like HBO and Showtime, and invested in originals: In 2017, Hulu became the first streaming service to win an Emmy for best drama series, for its hit adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

As we gathered around a conference table, I looked out at an airy communal space. Around the office, several employees worked at standing desks, including a guy perched atop some hoverboard-esque balance ball that, he explained, when I asked him about it, helped with “core strength.” On a set of blond-wood steps, life-size Simpsons statues sat together — referencing another Fox property that has slid into Disney’s pocket. When I asked Erwich how Hulu might change if assimilated into Disney+, he told me that given the latter’s family-friendly image, it could make sense to set off series like “The Handmaid’s Tale” — whose story lines have included rape and female circumcision — under a different shingle. In this scenario, Hulu’s originals would function, within Disney+, like a boutique tucked into a megamall.

In the conference room, Erwich introduced Jason Kim, head of analytics, who was “a half-week into four weeks of work” on a new data-research initiative. Speaking in a jargon-thick lexicon, he explained that this would involve “taking different content-investment scenarios” — What if we devoted this many dollars to these kinds of programming? — “pumping them through a model and then predicting the forecast subscriber growth as well as engagement growth” — how many more hours people spend on Hulu — “for each of those scenarios.”

Kim, who wore a fitted gray sweater and had spiky hair buzzed at the sides, clicked through graphs projected on an overhead screen. “We break down Hulu’s addressable market” — the pool of current and potential customers — “into these eight audience segments, which have distinct content-viewing behaviors and needs,” he said. “The healthiest of these segments is what we call ‘broadcast generalists.’ From a consumption standpoint, they overindex in” — watch above-average amounts of — “broadcast dramas and comedies. They value next-day TV” — last night’s episode, streamed today — “which is a core part of Hulu’s proposition, and they’re very healthy on our service. In 2018 they had the lowest churn” — cancellation — “of any of these segments, and they were one of the largest-engaging segments as well.”

Less healthy, Kim said, “were ‘content miners.’ They overindex in movie consumption. They really like to browse and treasure-hunt, and when they do watch TV it’s less next-day TV or broadcast TV and more cable series.” I recognized myself among this group — uninterested in last night’s “This Is Us,” eager to check out the season finale of HBO’s black comedy “Barry,” happy to discover that “Dazed and Confused” is streaming and disappointed to see that Andrea Arnold’s last movie, which I missed during its brief theatrical run, isn’t. The other audience segments included “comedy watchers,” “for the family” and “drama watchers.” Five of these, Kim said, “are generally pretty healthy,” as measured by how often they visit Hulu and for how long, whereas the remaining three were less so.

The originals team scrutinized Kim’s graphs, and Erwich piped up to identify the limits of the research so far: “This tells you, Maybe you need more” of a certain kind of drama. “What it doesn’t tell you is whether you should buy ‘CSI’ or make a new one.”
Kim nodded. “There’s a lot more to do,” he said.

Val Shimabukuro, Hulu’s content-scheduling manager, presented next. “When I schedule a show,” she explained, “I ask, Is this gonna be a subscription-acquisition driver, or is this gonna be a show to engage and retain our current subscribers?” These two categories translated, broadly speaking, to “tentpole series” and “smaller, niche shows,” with Shimabukuro trying as much as possible to steer audiences attracted by the former toward the latter. Hulu has more than 25 million subscribers, and Shimabukuro noted the importance of spontaneous P.R. opportunities in attracting new ones. When Hulu learned that Netflix was preparing to release a documentary about the Fyre Festival controversy — in which a supposed grifter sold exorbitantly priced tickets to a functionally nonexistent Bahamas music festival — they saw a chance to kneecap it. Hulu had its own Fyre documentary ready to go, which it rush-released in what Shimabukuro referred to as “a surprise stunt.”

Toward the end of this presentation, Belisa Balaban, responsible for documentaries at Hulu, mentioned that she and Shimabukuro had discussed timing the debut of a film acquired at Sundance, about a prominent sexual predator, to coincide with “The Handmaid’s Tale,” all the better to feed off what she called “the ‘Handmaid’s’ halo” of viewership. Erwich furrowed his brow at this line of reasoning. “That’s a stretch,” he said.

Old-fashioned guessing, it turned out, still played a role in such matters. Shimabukuro pressed the case: “I think it could be an audience that’s interested in strong female, #MeToo movement. ...”

Erwich squinted. “All right,” he replied, not yet fully sold. “O.K.”

After the meeting, Beatrice Springborn, Hulu’s vice president of content development, told me she enjoyed attending such data-heavy presentations: That way, “you’re not saying, ‘Why is this piece of development good’ in a bubble.” All the same, she added, “You have to bring a human touch to it.” Springborn studied journalism in college, later getting a job in development at Pixar. At Hulu, she has instituted recurring “quiet-time” meetings for the originals team: “Just us sitting there, zoning out, saying: ‘What do you wish was on TV? I just saw this Eric Rohmer movie I loved — is there a version of that that’s a TV show?’ ” Without such introspection, Springborn said, “it’s a content farm.”

Success in the streaming game isn’t zero-sum, but it might be close. According to a February report by the research firm Ampere Analysis, after years of growth, the S.V.O.D. market is “showing signs of reaching saturation,” with the number of subscriptions per household staying firm at about three from late 2017 through late 2018. You can get an anecdotal sense of the ceiling for this market by asking yourself, How many different companies am I willing to pay $6 to $15 a month for TV before I max out?

At Netflix, the strategy from the beginning has been to try to please as many people as it can. As Cindy Holland, Netflix’s vice president of original content, put it to me, “We want to entertain the world.” Treating that as a concrete objective rather than a bit of grandiose sloganeering, she explained, required forethought and infrastructure. “When we first set out thinking about original series, I asked, What do other networks do?” she went on. “Well, most have a command-and-control-style organization system, usually personality-driven, with decisions coming from one person at the top. Depending on what kind of network it is, say they have a 10-to-30-show slate of scripted originals. We knew our long-term appetites would be bigger, so very quickly I thought, from an organizational standpoint, How do I accomplish the goals not of one network but of six networks? So my team is essentially the equivalent of six or so networks, on the scripted side. Each has their own focus in terms of content they’re searching for, and I’ve delegated authority so the power to greenlight extends down.”

Echoing what I heard at Hulu, Holland told me that when it came to data, Netflix uses it mainly for “sizing investments.” She said, “We have projection models to help us understand what the minimum audience threshold for a given project might be.” For example, Netflix knew from DVD-rental histories and other consumer habits that Kevin Spacey vehicles and David Fincher films performed well on the service, which bolstered their decision to spend hundreds of millions of dollars making “House of Cards.” More recently, “Stranger Things” came to life not long after Netflix gleaned from its data that there was an unmet audience desire for what Holland called “higher-budget young-adult programming.”

When Netflix began streaming its own series, it adhered to recognizable prestige-cable contours: “House of Cards” and “Orange Is the New Black” could have fit on HBO or Showtime. As the company’s offerings have multiplied, that has changed. “Nailed It!” a hit baking-competition show, looks and feels like a Bravo title; you could imagine “BoJack Horseman” on Comedy Central; “Amazing Interiors” might be an HGTV show. As for Netflix’s brand-new game show, “Awake” — in which sleep-deprived contestants are made to compete in “challenges both eccentric and everyday for a chance at a $1 million prize” — it’s hard to say where such a concept would fit in. Japanese reality TV? Hell?

It bears noting that Netflix, the most consequential contemporary force in Hollywood, was born 335 miles north, in Silicon Valley — a place driven by venture capitalists who, seeking gargantuan investment returns, prize scale above all else. Netflix tends to play down the threat posed by its streaming rivals. Yang says that when he first started working with Netflix, the feeling was: “We don’t see ourselves becoming the next HBO; we see ourselves becoming the entirety of cable.” In a late-2018 earnings letter, the company situated itself on an even grander plane of competition, reporting that “we compete with (and lose to) ‘Fortnite’ ” — a multiplayer online video game — “more than HBO,” and mentioned that, when YouTube experienced a global outage in October, Netflix’s own new-subscription and engagement numbers rose. (YouTube has experimented with original series, but its principal draw remains ad-supported user-posted videos.)

It’s fair to wonder how far any TV-maker can spread itself before its output suffers. For all the talk of epochal change around streaming television, the emphasis on sheer volume at Netflix and other platforms has already created a dispiriting new phenomenon reminiscent of old ones — like entering a Blockbuster in 1994 and navigating aisle after aisle of VHS tapes, half of which seem to be “Jurassic Park,” and straining to find one you actually want to rent; or flicking through 150 cable channels in 2004 and wondering if anything decent is on now that “Sex and the City” is over.

When I brought up the tension between quality and quantity to Holland, she rejected the premise. “That’s a paradigm set by our competitors,” she argued, “who have much smaller budgets and less ability to provide a large volume of content to their viewers.” But budgets are only one part of the equation. Someone who works in series development framed this matter for me using the benchmark example of “The Sopranos”: When HBO broadcast that series, beginning in 1999, it boasted a roster of not just top-tier actors, writers and directors but also of cinematographers, casting directors, location scouts and so on. This was possible because its creator, David Chase, enjoyed his pick of talent in an industry that had done a pretty good job till that point of squandering it on far less ambitious shows (if not outright junk). Twenty years later, it’s harder to picture that kind of concentration of talent in a single project, because the proliferation of shows has splintered and scattered those writers, actors and scouts — leading the medium from its early-aughts “golden age” to what some critics have called the era of “good-enough” TV.

The move into streaming can put premium-cable programmers in an especially awkward position: The attributes of their networks that people most cherish — craftsmanship, discernment, consistency — seem directly at odds with the growing mandate to pump out hours. And John Stankey’s comments last June did not inspire confidence that HBO, the golden-age standard-bearer, was going to lead the good-enough era anywhere better. After the town hall, higher-ups there and at AT&T strove to soften that impression. Casey Bloys, HBO’s president of programming, recently assured me, “We’re not looking to increase volume by lowering our standards.” And Randall L. Stephenson likened Plepler’s network to Tiffany & Company. But another troubling indication of AT&T’s priorities arrived last fall, when it spiked the beloved arthouse-cinema streaming service FilmStruck, describing it as “niche.” Then last February, Plepler announced his departure from HBO amid reports he was unhappy with his decreased autonomy. (Plepler gently declined my request for an interview, citing his desire “to allow the current team to have the stage to themselves.”)

Bloys, who now reports to Plepler’s replacement, Robert Greenblatt, conceded, however, that the ever-increasing drive for volume creates distinct pressures. “My challenge is to make sure we don’t lose the handmade feel,” he said. “That’s partly a matter of hiring more staff for our programming teams. It’s also about making sure we’re not taking on things we wouldn’t otherwise have done.” Bloys estimates there will be about 50 percent more hours on HBO in 2019 than there were last year — a result of development decisions that predate the AT&T merger but that an infusion of AT&T cash made possible. All the same, he emphasized, “there’s nothing on our air in ’19 or even looking forward to ’20 that we wouldn’t have programmed five or 10 years ago.”

Using Nick Weidenfeld’s example, I asked Bloys whether viewers could expect to see an HBO game show soon. He replied in two parts: “There’s no newfound mandate to go into new areas all in the name of volume, but at the same time, we’ve never been totally closed off to anything. We’re not actively looking for game shows, but I can tell you, a few years ago we were thinking about a game show, saying, Could we do our version of that?”

Not all networks have responded to the demand for volume in the same way — a point underscored when I spoke with Gary Levine, president of entertainment at Showtime. Like HBO, Showtime established itself in the ’80s and ’90s as a premium cable channel and has since entered the nonlinear world: You can watch its shows through a stand-alone streaming app or add it to your Hulu or Prime subscriptions. Showtime’s recent flagship titles include the brash late-night show “Desus & Mero,” the soapy Wall Street hit “Billions” and well-pedigreed limited series like “Twin Peaks: The Return,” a continuation of the surrealist ’90s mystery from David Lynch and Mark Frost.

Unlike HBO, Showtime was not recently purchased by a telecom company with a stated interest in bulking up. “I don’t have a John Stankey telling me I have to produce more,” Levine said good-humoredly. Showtime is part of the CBS corporation, which announced last year that Showtime’s subscriber numbers exceeded 25 million for the first time. That figure is half of HBO’s domestic subscribers, but the message to the press from Showtime is that bigger isn’t necessarily better, as long as the network makes money and remains adaptable. On the subject of industry consolidation, Levine said: “We’ve never been arrogant about hoarding our programming. We’re happy to get it to people through Comcast or Charter or AT&T or Amazon or whoever. We don’t mind being the add-on.”

Speaking in relaxed tones, Levine sounded convincingly like a man positioned to one side of the fray — happy to be in a position to share.

Before I left the bar at Mama Shelter, Nick Weidenfeld put TV’s current upheavals into historical context for me. Much was new about streamers, he said, but in one regard they were retracing a path trod decades ago by cable TV: “Everyone starts off licensing other people’s catalogs or libraries, ’cause the margins are the best,” he said. At a certain point, “you’ve built a brand on other people’s content, and you say, we don’t own this, we can’t merchandise it, we can’t license it, we don’t have any revenue streams against it, but we do have X number of viewers coming to our network — why aren’t we making our own stuff?”

He took the example of Cartoon Network, which started as a venue for Ted Turner to sell ads against material from the Hanna-Barbera library, among others, and which he gradually augmented with originals whose copyrights he owned, like “The Powerpuff Girls” and “Johnny Bravo” — “shows with billions of dollars in merchandising, and now that’s your money,” Weidenfeld said. “And that’s the entire industry.”

The parallels to Netflix were obvious: Start out licensing, then create programming you own outright. But Netflix’s exorbitant push into originals — the company says that as of next year, it will devote a vast majority of its multibillion-dollar programming budget to such content — speaks to a contemporary dynamic. Those platforms that control the largest content libraries are regarded as having the best shots at streaming-war success. This means that many rights-owning studios once happy to earn extra money licensing shows to Netflix are letting such agreements expire as they build S.V.O.D.s of their own: Why let others thrive off your titles when you can use them to lure customers your way, instead? This is long-game thinking, with studios betting that what they sacrifice in licensing revenue will be justified down the line by the market edge they create for their streamers. In turn, the portion of Netflix’s library consisting of stuff owned by others is increasingly imperiled.

There’s a particular pressure on WarnerMedia to make its service alluring: In figuring out how much to charge for monthly subscriptions, which will include access to HBO, WarnerMedia must remain sensitive to the rates currently charged for that channel by its cable-carrier partners, whom Warner relies on for significant revenue. That sensitivity has already created an effective price floor of $15 on HBO’s O.T.T. service, HBO Now, which is roughly what most cable providers demand from customers wanting to add the channel to a monthly package. This makes it trickier, in turn, for Warner to charge less than $15 monthly for their entire streaming service — which is more than competitors currently charge (though rates across the sector are expected to keep rising).

It’s unsurprising, then, that one emblematic streaming-war skirmish centers on a WarnerMedia property, “Friends.” That epochal ’90s sitcom remains so valuable to Netflix that the company, which once reportedly licensed the series for $30 million, agreed at the end of 2018 to pay Warner a sum approaching $100 million for one more year of nonexclusive rights. Just a few weeks ago it was announced that Netflix’s library will soon take another hit: Despite a reported $90 million bid to keep the rights to “The Office,” that series will head over to NBC Universal’s new streaming service in 2021. [Update: After this article went to press, AT&T announced that the name for its streaming service will be HBO Max; that it will include programming from HBO, Warner Bros., CNN, TBS and Turner Classic Movies, among others; and that “Friends” will leave Netflix and become exclusive to this platform.]

In the ongoing scramble for hours, international shows have emerged as another significant frontier. Importing such shows was once largely the province of PBS, but now Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime are full of series licensed from or made in partnership with studios from Britain (“Fleabag”), Spain (“Money Heist”) and Scandinavia (“The Bridge”). Executives see them as affordable — which means that they are becoming more expensive.

When it comes to building a viable streaming service, the cost of entry has become prohibitively high and is rising. For its Apple TV+ service, Apple is spending a reported $2 billion to create original shows and movies, featuring prominent partners like Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and A24. Amazon, which is cagey about numbers but has an estimated 101 million Prime Video customers, is investing heavily in both licensed material and splashy programming of its own, recently paying, according to news accounts, some $250 million for the rights to make a new series based on “The Lord of the Rings.” Weidenfeld told me that, a few years ago, he investigated starting a streaming platform devoted to animation: “I was looking at financing, and they told me, straight up, ‘You need X amount of hours per month to make Y amount of subscriptions.’ It’s a math equation.” When I asked Nandan whether A24 had considered starting its own streaming platform, he laughed before answering: “Starting a subscription service today without billions and billions of dollars is virtually impossible.”

It was on this theme that Nick Weidenfeld’s mood, otherwise so bright about the state of television, started to darken. Right now, he said, it was a very fun moment to develop and sell TV shows, because a variety of well-funded competitors were adopting messy, fecund, throw-mud-at-the-wall programming tactics. But he feared that this moment was about to grind to a halt. The exorbitant costs involved in amassing hours of programming, he explained, combined with parent-company consolidation, were already ushering in a period that he called “the Great Reclamation of Content — everyone’s gonna pull back what they own.” The coming landscape, as he envisioned it, sounded grim. “Once it consolidates and settles, like anything else, certain production methodologies and creative methodologies will be put in place, and they’ll become sacrosanct, and that’s all there’s gonna be for a while.”

The nightmare version of this would be a TV replication of the Hollywood blockbuster model. It’s possible that Disney — whose holdings include ESPN, Pixar, the “Star Wars” franchise and a vast chunk of the Marvel universe — will program its streaming service much the same way it programs its theatrical slate, organized around a loud parade of Jedi titles and interconnected superhero movies. In the movie business, the supremacy of blockbusters has come at the expense of a once-robust calendar of smaller-bore, midbudget titles. It would be paradoxical, though hardly inconceivable, if TV — a much-heralded refuge for exactly that kind of storytelling — fell victim to a similar fate.

“Three giant telecoms are gonna make and own all the content, and they’re not gonna want anyone else to make it,” Weidenfeld went on. “There’s not gonna be a lot of innovation. ‘Russian Doll’s won’t get made for a while.” Weidenfeld grinned. “In a few years,” he predicted, “it’s gonna suck.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/m...lu-amazon.html





‘Friends’ to Leave Netflix for WarnerMedia’s HBO Max Streaming Service in 2020

Greg Berlanti, Reese Witherspoon sign on to produce movies for HBO Max
Todd Spangler

Get ready to make “Friends” with HBO Max: That’s the name of WarnerMedia’s new direct-to-consumer streaming service, set to launch in the spring of 2020 with some 10,000 hours of content, including all episodes of ’90s hit “Friends.”

However, WarnerMedia still hasn’t announced pricing for the service, which will compete with Netflix, Hulu, and Disney Plus, among others.

Under a new deal with Warner Bros. Television, HBO Max will have exclusive streaming rights at launch to all 236 episodes of “Friends” — which will roll off Netflix in 2020. “We’re sorry to see ‘Friends’ go to Warner’s steaming service at the beginning of 2020 (in the US),” Netflix tweeted after WarnerMedia’s announcement. “Thanks for the memories, gang.”

Netflix had reupped its deal with Warner Bros. TV for exclusive streaming rights to “Friends” through the end of 2019, but AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson recently said that WarnerMedia would be reclaiming popular titles that were licensed to others for its own subscription VOD service.

WarnerMedia also announced new exclusive movie production deals for HBO Max with Greg Berlanti and Reese Witherspoon. Under the pacts, Berlanti will produce an initial four movies in the young-adult genre, while Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine will produce at least two films for the service.

Berlanti, the prolific producer behind such shows as “Arrow,” “The Flash,” “Riverdale” and “Blindspot,” said in a statement about the HBO Max pact, “What I’ve always loved about creating shows that connect with a young audience is that these fans grow up with the programs and will remember them for the rest of their lives. Now I get to do even more of that for HBO Max, where viewers will be able to discover shows on their own time, in their own way.”

In addition, HBO Max will include all episodes of “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” starring Will Smith and “Pretty Little Liars,” the ABC Family/Freeform hit — which also will be leaving Netflix.

Moreover, HBO Max will be the exclusive streaming home new Warner Bros.-produced dramas for The CW starting with the fall 2019 season, including the DC Entertainment series “Batwoman,” and “Katy Keene” (a spinoff of “Riverdale”). CW shows going forward will be available on HBO Max beginning 30 days prior to the TV premiere of the next seasons of those shows. CW shows currently licensed to Netflix, which include “Riverdale,” “The Flash” and “Arrow,” will remain on Netflix for the next few years.

Overall, HBO Max will combine content from HBO with a slate of originals and programming from Warner Bros., New Line, DC Entertainment, CNN, TNT, TBS, truTV, The CW, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Crunchyroll, Rooster Teeth, and Looney Tunes. In its announcement, WarnerMedia highlighted some of the content coming to HBO Max, including previously announced originals.

“HBO Max will bring together the diverse riches of WarnerMedia to create programming and user experiences not seen before in a streaming platform,” Bob Greenblatt, chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment and Direct-To-Consumer, said in a statement.

It’s still not fully clear how HBO, as a standalone service, will be differentiated from HBO Max. WarnerMedia has been considering a price point of $16-$17 per month for the new SVOD product and would likely bundle in HBO and Cinemax, the Wall Street Journal reported a month ago.

HBO Max programming will continue to be overseen by Casey Bloys, programming president of HBO. According to WarnerMedia, HBO’s investment in original programming has increased 50% over “normal spending” leading up to the launch of HBO Max in 2020.

Kevin Reilly, president of the WarnerMedia Entertainment Networks that include TNT, TBS, and truTV, also serves as chief content officer of HBO Max overseeing all new originals and library content. Tony Goncalves, CEO of Otter Media, now oversees the development of HBO Max with Andy Forssell, also from Otter Media and formerly CEO of Hulu, as the general manager. In May, Brad Bentley exited WarnerMedia Entertainment group as EVP and GM of direct-to-consumer development after six months in the role.
https://variety.com/2019/digital/new...ng-1203262335/





Serious Zoom Security Flaw Could Let Websites Hijack Mac Cameras

Not good
Dieter

Today, security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh has publicly disclosed a serious zero-day vulnerability for the Zoom video conferencing app on Macs. He has demonstrated that any website can open up a video-enabled call on a Mac with the Zoom app installed. That’s possible in part because the Zoom app apparently installs a web server on Macs that accepts requests regular browsers wouldn’t. In fact, if you uninstall Zoom, that web server persists and can reinstall Zoom without your intervention.

Using Leitschuh’s demo, we have confirmed that the vulnerability works — clicking a link if you have previously installed the Zoom app (and haven’t checked a certain checkbox in settings) will auto-join you to a conference call with your camera on. Others on Twitter are reporting the same:

This Zoom vulnerability is bananas. I tried one of the proof of concept links and got connected to three other randos also freaking out about it in real time. https://t.co/w7JKHk8nZy pic.twitter.com/arOE6DbQaf
— Matt Haughey (@mathowie) July 9, 2019

Leitschuh details how he responsibly disclosed the vulnerability to Zoom back in late March, giving the company 90 days to solve the problem. According to Leitschuh’s account, Zoom doesn’t appear to have done enough to resolve the issue. The vulnerability was also disclosed to both the Chromium and Mozilla teams, but since it’s not an issue with their browsers, there’s not much those developers can do.

Turning on your camera is bad enough, but the existence of the web server on their computers could open up more significant problems for Mac users. For example, in an older version of Zoom (since patched), it was possible to enact a denial of service attack on Macs by constantly pinging the web server: “By simply sending repeated GET requests for a bad number, Zoom app would constantly request ‘focus’ from the OS,” Leitschuh writes.

You can “patch” the camera issue yourself by ensuring the Mac app is up to date and also disabling the setting that allows Zoom to turn your camera on when joining a meeting, illustrated below. Again, simply uninstalling Zoom won’t fix this problem, as that web server persists on your Mac. Turning off the web server requires running some terminal commands, which can be found at the bottom of the Medium post.

In a statement to The Verge and other publications (here’s ZDNet), Zoom says it developed the local web server in order to save the user some clicks, after Apple changed its Safari web browser in a way that requires Zoom users to confirm that they want to launch Zoom each time. Zoom defends the “workaround” as a “legitimate solution to a poor user experience, enabling our users to have seamless, one-click-to-join meetings, which is our key product differentiator.”

The company says it will tweak the app in one small way: starting in July, Zoom will save users’ and administrators’ preferences for whether video will be turned on, or not, when they first join a call. Overall, it sounds like Zoom doesn’t plan to drastically change how its app behaves on Macs to avoid getting sucked into an unwanted call, but will instead rely on users to turn their cameras off by default.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/8/20...ck-mac-cameras





Google Contractors are Secretly Listening to Your Assistant Recordings
Rachel Kaser

Not only is your Google Home device listening to you, a new report suggests there might be a Google contractor who’s listening as well. Even if you didn’t ask your device any questions, it’s still sending what you say to the company, who allow an actual person to collect data from it.

A new report from Belgian broadcaster VRT News describes the process by which Google Home recordings end up being listened to by contractors — and the scary part is that it apparently doesn’t take much, if anything, to start a recording. While the recordings are not listened to live, audio clips are sent to subcontractors.

Hard Fork

VRT, with the help of a whistleblower, was able to listen to some of these clips and subsequently heard enough to discern the addresses of several Dutch and Belgian people using Google Home — in spite of the fact some hadn’t even uttered the words “Hey Google,” which are supposed to be the device’s listening trigger.

The person who leaked the recordings was working as a subcontractor to Google, transcribing the audio files for subsequent use in improving its speech recognition. They got in touch with VRT after reading about Amazon Alexa keeping recordings indefinitely.

According to the whistleblower, the recordings presented to them are meant to be carefully annotated, with notes included about the speakers presumed identity and age. From the sound of the report, these transcribers have heard just about everything. Personal information? Bedroom activities? Domestic violence? Yes, yes, and yes.

While VRT only listened to recordings from Dutch and Belgian users, the platform the whistleblower showed them had recordings from all over the world – which means there are probably thousands of other contractors listening to Assistant recordings.

The VRT report states that the Google Home Terms of Service don’t mention that recordings might be listened to by other humans.

The report did say the company tries to anonymize the recordings before sending them to contractors, identifying them by numbers rather than user names. But again, VRT was able to pick up enough data from the recordings to find the addresses of the users in question, and even confront some of the users in the recordings – to their great dismay.

Google’s defense to VRT was that the company only transcribes and uses “about 0.2% of all audio clips,” to improve their voice recognition technology.

One can easily imagine when these types of recordings should be absolutely off limits, even when anonymized. VRT overheard countless men searching for porn, arguments between spouses, and even one case in which a woman seemed to be in an emergency situation. The whistleblower told the Belgian media company they did not have any guidelines about what to do in such a situation.

This doesn’t only raise ethical concerns, but also shows how easily our privacy at home or work is being violated again and again by companies that keep promising improvement. Let’s hope these types of reports make them really listen to us – with permission this time.
https://thenextweb.com/google/2019/0...nt-recordings/





Australia's Anti-Encryption Laws Being Used to Bypass Journalist Protections, Expert Says

New legislation has given AFP ‘power to strike a chilling blow against press freedom’, cybersecurity researcher tells parliamentary review
Josh Taylor

The anti-encryption laws passed by the federal parliament last year have been used to bypass journalist protections in other national security laws, a cybersecurity researcher has said.

The parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security has launched a review into the Telecommunications (Assistance and Access) Act, which passed into law at the end of 2018.

The legislation made a number of changes to existing laws governing law enforcement access to data, and in what situations tech companies are required to help law enforcement to be able to view that data, even if that data is encrypted.

One part of the law updated the powers law enforcement have in executing a warrant. Added into the Crimes Act was the power for agencies to “add, copy, delete or alter” data on computers as part of the execution of warrants.

It was this new power the Australian federal police relied on, in the now-infamous photos of AFP officers clicking through and reviewing files for hours on end at the ABC headquarters.

The Department of Home Affairs admitted to using the new power in a submission to the review, stating the AFP relied on the power in raiding the ABC and the Canberra home of News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst in June.

“In June 2019, the Australian federal police executed two search warrants in relation to secrecy offences in part 6 (offences by and against public officers) and part 7 (official secrets and unlawful soundings) of the Crimes Act,” the Department of Home Affairs stated.

“In executing these search warrants, the AFP used section 3F of the Crimes Act, which was amended by schedule 3 of the Assistance and Access Act.”

This undermined protections granted to journalists under other national security legislation, said cybersecurity researcher Riana Pfefferkorn, an associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Centre for Internet and Society.

Data retention legislation passed in 2015 had a carve-out for journalists that required law enforcement to obtain a special journalist information warrant, but Pfefferkorn said in a personal submission to the review that the combination of the new powers meant the information warrant need not be obtained.

“Law enforcement’s powers granted under the Data Retention Act in 2015 were augmented by the new powers the Assistance and Access Act provided at the end of 2018, creating the framework that authorised the federal police in mid-2019 to raid the homes and offices of journalists over articles published in July 2017 and April 2018, in defiance of international norms,” she said.

“Because parliament passed these laws, the federal police had the power to strike a chilling blow against press freedom in Australia, and call it lawful.”

Tech companies remain concerned at the implementation of the encryption law overall.

The Australian Information Industry Association, which represents a wide range of tech companies including Apple, Adobe, Cisco, Deloitte, Google and IBM, said that some multinational members of the association had already considered pulling out of Australia due to the legislative compliance obligations.

“There is broad consensus across the ICT industry on the adverse effects this legislation will have for Australian business and economic interests, the group said.

The commonwealth ombudsman, too, repeated concerns about the scope of the new laws.

In a submission, the ombudsman said that the law still gives the home affairs minister the power to delete content from reports by the commonwealth ombudsman if the information could prejudice an investigation or compromise an interception agency’s operational activities.

This is a power no other minister has, the ombudsman said, and should be reconsidered.
https://www.theguardian.com/australi...ns-expert-says





Revealed: This Is Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops
Caroline Haskins

Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis. The company acts as an information management service for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporations like JP Morgan and Airbus, and dozens of other local, state, and federal agencies. It’s been described by scholars as a “secondary surveillance network,” since it extensively catalogs and maps interpersonal relationships between individuals, even those who aren't suspected of a crime.

Palantir software is instrumental to the operations of ICE, which is planning one of the largest-ever targeted immigration enforcement raids this weekend on thousands of undocumented families. Activists argue raids of this scale would be impossible without software like Palantir. But few people outside the company and its customers know how its software works or what its specific capabilities and user interfaces are.

Through a public record request, Motherboard has obtained a user manual that gives unprecedented insight into Palantir Gotham (Palantir’s other services, Palantir Foundry, is an enterprise data platform), which is used by law enforcement agencies like the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. The NCRIC serves around 300 communities in northern California and is what is known as a "fusion center," a Department of Homeland Security intelligence center that aggregates and investigates information from state, local, and federal agencies, as well as some private entities, into large databases that can be searched using software like Palantir.

Fusion centers have become a target of civil liberties groups in part because they collect and aggregate data from so many different public and private entities. The US Department of Justice’s Fusion Center Guidelines list the following as collection targets:

The guide doesn’t just show how Gotham works. It also shows how police are instructed to use the software. This guide seems to be specifically made by Palantir for the California law enforcement because it includes examples specific to California. We don’t know exactly what information is excluded, or what changes have been made since the document was first created. The first eight pages that we received in response to our request is undated, but the remaining twenty-one pages were copyrighted in 2016. (Palantir did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

The Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives. The capabilities are staggering, according to the guide:

• If police have a name that’s associated with a license plate, they can use automatic license plate reader data to find out where they’ve been, and when they’ve been there. This can give a complete account of where someone has driven over any time period.
• With a name, police can also find a person's email address, phone numbers, current and previous addresses, bank accounts, social security number(s), business relationships, family relationships, and license information like height, weight, and eye color, as long as it's in the agency's database.
• The software can map out a person's family members and business associates of a suspect, and theoretically, find the above information about them, too.

All of this information is aggregated and synthesized in a way that gives law enforcement nearly omniscient knowledge over any suspect they decide to surveil.

TERMS TO KNOW

Most of the Palantir guide is written in the company’s technical language, so it can be hard to parse if you haven't used the software or aren't familiar with it. Here are the important terms to know:

OBJECTS: Any piece of data. This data could be a name, address, phone number, bank account number, etc.

HISTOGRAM: A chart. Specifically, a chart that looks like a web and makes connections between things. This feature kind of looks like the "detective wall" trope from TV and movies, but since it’s digitized, it’s much more fast, powerful, and dense.

ALPR/AUTOMATIC LICENSE PLATE READER: A camera that takes pictures of cars and license plates. They’re usually located at toll booths, or intersections on heavily trafficked roads, though police also have mobile versions of them and massive databases of license plate information. Each city in California has different ALPR privacy policies about how the information can be used and shared.

HEATMAP: A map that shows how many things there are in a particular area. A higher concentration of things is usually shown in a darker or richer color. Palantir advertises Gotham as a tool that transforms huge amounts of data into actionable maps for police investigations.

THE DATA

All data points in Palantir are referred to as “Objects,” and these objects can be practically anything. But they boil down to three main categories: Entities, Events, and Documents. The possibilities of these categories are shown below.

The “Person” Entity Type doesn’t just include a person’s name. It also includes their emails, bank account numbers, phone numbers, current and previous addresses, social security number(s), and driver’s license data such as height, weight, eye color, and date of birth. (The email address example shown in the user guide is jbg01@DownWithTheUS.org.)

There’s also “Property Types”—which basically list different traits that can be attributed to Objects, or data points. The different Property Types are:

1. Label
2. Data Source
3. Agency
4. Address
5. Data Range and Location
6. Date
7. Incident Type
8. Geographic Area
9. Incident Number
10. Incident Disposition
11. Incident Status
12. Cross Street
13. Comments
14. Phone Number
15. Name
16. License Plate
17. Gender

The Palantir guide shows that this data is pulled from several different management systems at once. For instance, a Palantir screenshot included in the guide show that the NCRIC lets police pull from the record management systems of the San Mateo and Palo Alto Police Departments. This exemplifies Palantir's selling point: the system can synthesize enormous amounts of data from various sources. Palantir can also make connections across that data, making it accessible for users in a way that would be extremely time-intensive to do manually.

In order for Palantir to work, it has to be fed data. This can mean public records like business registries, birth certificates, and marriage records, or police records like warrants and parole sheets. Palantir would need other data sources to give police access to information like emails and bank account numbers.

“Palantir Law Enforcement supports existing case management systems, evidence management systems, arrest records, warrant data, subpoenaed data, RMS or other crime-reporting data, Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) data, federal repositories, gang intelligence, suspicious activity reports, Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) data, and unstructured data such as document repositories and emails,” Palantir’s website says.

Some data sources—like marriage, divorce, birth, and business records—also implicate other people that are associated with a person personally or through family. So when police are investigating a person, they’re not just collecting a dragnet of emails, phone numbers, business relationships, travel histories, etc. about one suspect. They’re also collecting information for people who are associated with this suspect.

SEARCHES

The guide explains how to make two types of searches: people record searches, and vehicle record searches.

With the people record search, police can start out with a person’s name. Police can also input a phone number (with or without area code), a license plate number, or the dates of cases associated with that person. The name that the Palantir guide uses as an example is "John Badguy Smith."

“The results that appear are from LAPD and LASD data sources,” the Palantir guide says, “and include person records linked to crimes, citations, and arrests.”

With the vehicle record search, police start by entering a license plate number. The results spit back any and all relevant information about that vehicle, and Palantir gives police the option of mapping or visualizing this information.

“The results show if the vehicle appeared in any crimes, arrests, field interviews, incidents, or citations, across both LAPD and LASD sources simultaneously,” the Palantir guide says.

TOOLS

The Palantir user guide also explains how to use three types of tools: the Histogram tool, the Map tool, and the Object Explorer tool. These tools all let police graph, map, visualize, and connect dozens of different types of data points. So, police can chart the relationships between individuals. Police can click on an individual on this chart and see everything about them: their email addresses, their bank account information, their license information, etc. Police can also put current addresses, previous addresses, locations of a suspected crime, work locations, family addresses, and travel history (as captured by ALPR-cameras) on a map.

Histogram Tool

The Histogram tool, as stated by the Palantir guide, helps police find “correlations” and “trends” between different Objects, or data points. This can help police decipher a person’s behavior. Police can also create “Virtual Dossiers” at the end of their investigations, which centralizes their analysis into a single place.

Map Tool

The Map tool lets police do three things: complete “Geosearches,” create “Heatmaps,” and search an Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) database.

Geosearches lets police see Objects, visually, within a certain radius on a map.

“The purple radius, polygon, route, or recent buttons allow you to draw a shape and search for objects/properties that are within the search area,” the Palantir guide says.

Heatmaps show the concentration of Objects on a map. Using a Legend tool, police can adjust the coloring and display of objects on the map.

The ALPR search, meanwhile, lets police view license plate data captured within a certain search radius on the map. Police have to first enter a search purpose, which can be a “a DR or case number,” according to the guide. Then, police have to enter the center of their search radius, and a license plate number they want to search. Police can, optionally, select a date range they want to search.

The results show images of the license plates as captured, the car associated with the license plate, time stamps, and the location that the license plate information was captured (Image of this is near the top of the article.)

Object Explorer

The Object Explorer is a comprehensive analysis tool that lets police filter, sort, map, analyze, and export dozens of different data points. A huge part of the Object Explorer is visualizing data, which can be done in four main ways: numeric charts, histograms, timelines, and pie charts. The Palantir guide explains that depending on which Objects police are analyzing, the appropriate visualization tool may vary.

The document obtained by Motherboard for this story is public and viewable on DocumentCloud.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9...anual-for-cops





F.T.C. Approves Facebook Fine of About $5 Billion
Cecilia Kang

The Federal Trade Commission has approved a fine of roughly $5 billion against Facebook for mishandling users’ personal information, according to three people briefed on the vote, in what would be a landmark settlement that signals a newly aggressive stance by regulators toward the country’s most powerful technology companies.

The much-anticipated settlement still needs final approval in the coming weeks from the Justice Department, which rarely rejects settlements reached by the agency. It would be the biggest fine by far levied by the federal government against a technology company, easily eclipsing the $22 million imposed on Google in 2012. The size of the penalty underscored the rising frustration among Washington officials with how Silicon Valley giants collect, store and use people’s information.

It would also represent one of the most aggressive regulatory actions by the Trump administration, and a sign of the government’s willingness to punish one of the country’s biggest and most powerful companies. President Trump has dialed back regulations in many industries, but the Facebook settlement sets a new bar for privacy enforcement by United States officials, who have brought few cases against large technology companies.

In addition to the fine, Facebook agreed to more comprehensive oversight of how it handles user data, according to the people. But none of the conditions in the settlement will impose strict limitations on Facebook’s ability to collect and share data with third parties. And that decision appeared to help split the five-member commission. The 3-to-2 vote, taken in secret this week, drew the dissent of the two Democrats on the commission because they sought stricter limits on the company, the people said.

Until now, the biggest fines and restrictions against tech companies have come from Europe. Officials there have imposed several charges of antitrust and privacy laws against Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Last year, the European Union fined Google $5.1 billion for abusing its large market share in the mobile phone industry. More recently, numerous officials and lawmakers around the world have rushed to regulate Facebook.

The F.T.C.’s investigation was set off by The New York Times and The Observer of London, which uncovered that the social network allowed Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm to the Trump campaign, to harvest personal information of its users. The firm used the data to build political profiles about individuals without the consent of Facebook users.

The agency found that Facebook’s handling of user data violated a 2011 privacy settlement with the F.T.C. That earlier settlement, which came after the company was accused of deceiving people about how it handled their data, required the company to revamp its privacy practices.

American regulators and lawmakers of both parties have also taken a more combative stance toward the tech giants in recent weeks. Congress started an antitrust investigation into how the biggest tech companies have harmed consumers and impeded competition. The Justice Department and the F.T.C. divvied up responsibility for potential antitrust investigations into several of the companies.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump took shots at Facebook and other social media companies, accusing them of being biased against conservatives. He also took to Twitter to criticize Facebook’s latest initiative into cryptocurrency — a project called Libra, which is still in its early stages — saying that Facebook’s proposed coin would never usurp the dollar. David Marcus, the Facebook executive in charge of Libra, is scheduled to appear before Congress next week to explain and defend the initiative.

Peter Kaplan, a spokesman for the F.T.C., declined to comment.

Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook, also declined to comment.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported on the vote by the commission.

The commissioners agreed many months ago to pursue a substantial penalty against the company, in an effort to show the agency’s teeth, according to several people briefed on the discussions. But they were split on the size and scope of the tech company’s punishment. One of the most contentious issues was whether Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, should be held personally liable for any violation of the 2011 agreement.

The internal debate mirrored the larger debate in Washington over just how far the government should go to regulate Big Tech.

Many Democrats and Republicans have thrown their support behind privacy regulations. But some Democrats, including presidential candidates like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have called for breaking up some of the biggest companies.

Lawmakers urged the F.T.C. to be aggressive in its investigation of Facebook. The agency oversees deceptive and unfair business practices. It is also the main watchdog for the internet industry that protect users privacy by policing companies for misleading users on how their personal data is collected and shared.

New revelations of privacy violations reported throughout the year added to evidence of problems at the company but also complicated the ability of the F.T.C. to conclude its inquiry.

Republicans said little about the F.T.C. vote on Friday. But numerous Democrats said the agency did not go far enough.

“The F.T.C. just gave Facebook a Christmas present five months early,” Representative David Cicilline, Democrat from Rhode Island, said in a statement. “It’s very disappointing that such an enormously powerful company that engaged in such serious misconduct is getting a slap on the wrist.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in an interview that meaningful enforcement of Facebook would have included deep structural reforms. Without that, he said, “the message to the world is that, sadly, American consumer privacy protection is a hollow paper tiger, which is deeply disappointing.”

Despite all the criticism of the company, it has continued to do well financially. The social network reaped more than $55 billion in revenue in 2018 — 10 times the amount of the fine approved by the commission — as the digital advertising industry has consolidated to increasingly drive dollars to a handful of tech companies.

In April, Facebook reported a record first quarter of revenue of nearly $15 billion. And the company is sitting on more than $40 billion in cash reserves.

Shares of Facebook rose to $205.27 — the stock’s highest price in the past year — in after-hours trading on Friday after news of the vote became public.

Some privacy and consumer advocates pointed to the company’s value on Wall Street as proof that the settlement would not curb the company’s behavior.

“It’s a bad sign that markets are reacting to Facebook’s settlement with the F.T.C. by jumping the value of the company’s stock,” Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, a consumer interest group, said in a statement.

Mike Isaac contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/t...-ftc-fine.html





Prenda Law Porn-Troll Saga Ends with Prison for Founder

Disbarred former lawyer John Steele said he made "stupid decisions."
Kate Cox

Former attorney John Steele was sentenced this week to five years in prison for his role in the Prenda Law porn-trolling scheme, putting an end to a years-long legal drama wild and stupid enough to be prime-time TV.

Steele pleaded guilty in 2017 to federal charges of fraud and money laundering and then cooperated with authorities in the investigation into his former legal partner Paul Hansmeier. That cooperation weighed heavily in Steele's favor at his sentencing, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.

US District Judge Joan Ericksen said federal guidelines recommended a sentence of 10 to 12-1/2 years for Steele's "vile scheme" but agreed that given Steele's extreme willingness to cooperate, his defense attorney's recommendation of five years was "eminently fair."

Ericksen also said Steele and Hansmeier were liable for paying about $1.5 million in restitution, separate from all the fines and sanctions the two already accrued in recent years.

Steele at the hearing said he had made "stupid decisions," and his own attorney agreed that his client's actions were "reprehensible, abhorrent, and criminal," adding, "I wish I did not like John as much as I do."

Hansmeier was sentenced in June to 14 years in prison for his role in the scheme.

The Prenda Law saga kicked off in 2012, when the copyright troll firm sued Comcast and AT&T, claiming they were accessory to their subscribers "stealing" certain pornographic content. A chain of courtroom events unfolded from there, and in 2013 a judge sanctioned the firm and referred Steele and Hansmeier for criminal investigation.

Prenda made its money by suing people who allegedly downloaded pornographic films online. Its targets frequently agreed to settlements worth a few thousand dollars rather than facing a courtroom process. These copyright trolling tactics netted the company more than $6 million between 2010 and 2013.

But eventual criminal investigations revealed that rather than representing real companies who had a real product that was being traded in violation of copyright law, Prenda was filming its own porn, inventing fraudulent shell companies, and uploading those supposed companies' content to torrent sites itself. Then the settlement money went directly into the Prenda attorneys' pockets.

Hansmeier's law license was suspended in 2016 and Steele was disbarred in 2017, while the criminal cases were in progress.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...n-for-founder/

















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