Hope you’ve had a great weekend. Time now for TVWriter™’s latest look at our most popular blog posts and resource pages during the week ending yesterday. They are, in order:
Big thanks to everybody for helping us have another terrific week at TVWriter™. Don’t forget to click above and read what you missed and re-read what you loved!
More cord cutting news for all you crazy, zany refugees from the tyranny of satellite and cable TV, from Luke Bourna at CordCuttersNews. FWIW, Roku still doesn’t move us – too many mandatory add-ons, in our experience, and a service as underused as YouTube TV raising its price? Sheesh, doods, get a clue:
chance to learn the entertainment business through paid internship programs. Lionsgate is the first entertainment company to join forces with Howard University to start the educational institute’s program that has allows six to 12 students to learn the filmmaking and television businesses. This particular program was launched by UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.
The idea for this came from Sen. Kamala Harris, who is a Howard alumni and mentioned to Lionsgate that intern programs with higher education could increase diversity across the entertainment business. “She was one of the catalysts to help raise awareness around this opportunity,” Jay Tucker, Exec Director at the Center for MEMES (Media, Entertainment & Sports) at UCLA told Deadline. “It really helped to get the ball rolling.”
“Howard University has produced several graduates from film, law, business and theater who have paved their own paths into Hollywood through their persistence, however there is more work to do before the entertainment industry reflects the diverse audiences it serves,” said Howard University President Wayne A. I. Frederick in a statement to Deadline. “I applaud our partners at Lionsgate for building a bridge from higher education to the workplace which will help diversify Hollywood behind the camera and create a new generation of executives.”
Lionsgate and UCLA hope to grow this program to include other HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities) and women’s colleges to give students who would normally not have the chance a pipeline into the industry. They are also hoping to have other studios, networks and production companies join the program to help in diversifying the ranks in Hollywood.
HBCU higher education institutions were established before the 1964 Civil Rights Act with the primary intention of serving African-American communities. Howard University is one of the highest-ranking HBCU in this nation.
“The courses that we focus on here, they are really only the only courses that students can take that combines guests lectures, field trips and they also have capstone projects built into each class — these are resume building, hands-on projects,” Tucker said. “We have tons of access to executives and we really use the city as a lab. The program with Howard University (helps) the diversity pipeline. No one is offering what we can with the combination of what we have. Lionsgate has really been instrumental in pushing this initiative and we hope others in the industry will join in to help us with this all-important program.”
The students are undergrads placed in companies for 20 to 25 hours in paid internships at roughly $13 to $15 an hour.
Lionsgate employed three interns motion picture, production, worldwide TV/digital distribution and talent acquisition. One of the interns has already been hired for an entry level position at the company. They are also recruiting and will be hiring more interns this summer.
“Greater diversity and inclusion makes our industry stronger and our films and television series better,” Lionsgate Vice Chairman Michael Burns told Deadline. “Not only are we creating opportunities for the students in the program, but they in turn are creating opportunities for us to make our workplace more diverse and our storytelling richer and more varied.”
(UPDATE: Bear with us. This gets complicated. Shortly after we prepared the article below for publication, Starz tweeted an apology and explanation to TorrentFreak.) You can find it HERE.
(Maybe this is over now. Or maybe it isn’t? Guess we’ll have to see.)
At TorrentFreak, we have been covering copyright and piracy related news for well over a decade.
We write about things that copyright holders are not happy with, and similarly, we report on bad news for pirates as well. The leading factor is always whether we believe something is newsworthy, or not.
Earlier this week we published an article that definitely fits that category. In the span of a few days, several TV-show episodes leaked online before their official release, which is something that rarely happens.
Due to the leak, complete seasons of unreleased TV-shows such as “The Spanish Princess,” “Ramy,” and “The Red Line,” surfaced on pirate sites. In most cases, there were visible signs revealing that the leaks were sourced from promotional screeners, but other than that information remains scarce.
Among the treasure trove of leaks were also several unreleased episodes of the Starz hit series “American Gods.” This is obviously not the type of news the American entertainment company wanted to see published, but in our niche, it’s a big deal nonetheless.
As with all our news articles, we automatically posted a link to it on Twitter, to share it with the audience there. The tweet was just a simple description, with an image and a link to the news report. Nothing out of the ordinary, one would think.
The tweet
To our surprise, however, this tweet is now no longer available. Twitter informed us a few hours ago that The Social Element Agency asked it to remove the “infringing” tweet on behalf of Starz.
The social media platform complied with the request and as a result, our tweet is now “withheld,” or removed if you will.
According to the takedown notice, Starz argues that the tweet is infringing because it links to an article where people can see “of images of the unreleased episodes” and find more “information about their illegal availability….”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Shortly after we prepared the article below for publication, Starz tweeted an apology and explanation to TorrentFreak.) You can find it HERE
As Cord Cutting Grows The Disney Channel Has Lost 72% of Its Average Audience
by Luke Bouma
This week, The Information wrote an expansive story about Disney and Netflix as Disney gets ready to launch Disney+.
What was maybe the most shocking news was that since 2014 the Disney Channel has lost 72% of its average audience. This is a huge decline for any company especially one that relies heavily on ad revenues like Disney.
It’s not just Disney who is in trouble. BTIG, a research group focused on topics like TV, has reported that network ratings are down on average 18% in 2019 compared to 2018. The biggest drop is ABC, which is seeing its viewing down 22% in the ever-important 18-49 demographic….
