It’s been clear since for a while that TV’s evolution from linear to digital was not going smoothly. Since February, @LaneBrown and I have been digging into the story of how it all went awry, why those who make TV are so angry, and what comes next. vulture.com/2023/06/stream… We talked to scads of writers, producers, execs and agents during our reporting, and our tale starts with some of the more striking things they told us. I could fill another story with the quotes we couldn’t fit in. Needless to say, there’s a lot of pessimism out there.

Fact-check on NBC Olympics claim that the "TV-only" audience average of 10.7M viewers is more than any non-NFL primetime show.

Yes, excluding DVR replays, no entertainment shows average more than 9M viewers. But DVRs aren't "streaming"; they're tied to linear TV! NBC Entertainment has spent close to 20 years loudly arguing that DVR views count. NBC Sports now wants to make DVR replays sound as cagey as digital views, but only for the purpose of this one stat. It ignores that huge swaths of the audience watch scripted shows via DVR

Seeing some folks talk about Goldie Hawn as if she's some radical Trumper or even anti-masker. But if you dig a little, you'll find that the UK tabloids and folks like John McCain's Daughter™️ warped her words on FNC to fit their agenda. (Shocking, I know.)

THREAD AHOY: I forced myself to sit through her appearance Friday on Fox and Friends. The framing begins at the start, with the usual "FREE OUR KIDS" propaganda and even some flat-out lies, like including NV in the states which have mask mandates for kids (as of Friday, it didn't)

Lucy.....you don't got any 'splainin to do.

BEING THE RICARDOS attracted more viewing than Netflix's DON'T LOOK NOW the week of 12/20, per Nielsen. It was the No. 1 original movie for the week as well.

BTR: 604 million minutes
DLU: 521 MM

Some context below.... BTR debuted 3 days before DLU, so it had more time to grab eyeballs. On the other hand, DLU is 20 minutes longer, which helps pad its total minutes tally.

Don't know exactly how many Prime Video subs there are in US, but Netflix is generally seen as bigger (@RichLightShed ?)

Just wanna put this out there before the flood of numbers and spin: The best way to compare Super Bowl audience size is by household ratings, i.e., the percent of TV homes which watched, and not total viewers.

The reason: Population grows! Ratings are static Nets of late love to put out releases that say "A Record 110 Million People Watched SB," which...yes, that could be true.

But there are 330M+ potential US viewers today. In 1980, just 220M.

110M in 2021 is 1/3 of America. 109M in 1980 is half.

1980 SB would be much bigger!

More than two years in the making, it's finally #AppleTVPlus launch day. There's been a lot of focus on its new shows (understandably so!) and what it doesn't have (old stuff.) But what's Apple's bigger play with TV+ --and the TV app? I wanted to find out (thread ahoy) Since Apple hired two former Sony execs to run TV, people in Hollywood have been trying to figure out what the heck was going on in Culver City (where Apple video is based.) Was the plan to buy a studio/network & knock off Netflix? Maybe it just wanted to sell a few more phones?