Business of Media
Consumers crying out for streaming simplicity, Foxtel CEO Patrick Delany says
Australians are cutting back on streaming services and are increasingly frustrated with the growing number of apps and services to keep on top of, research from Accenture has found, with Foxtel chief executive Patrick Delany confident his upcoming product, Project Magneto, can provide the solution, reports The Australian’s David Swan.
The Accenture Reinvent for Growth surveyed 6000 consumers globally, including over 500 Australians. It found that two-thirds of Australians surveyed feel overwhelmed with the number of streaming services available to choose from – which was 11 points higher than the global average, while 55 per cent of Australian households said they would pay for a single app that could provide all the services they wanted on a single platform.
The research comes amid rising prices from video streaming services, and an increasing reliance on advertisements from the likes of Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video.
Rupert Murdoch thought $787.5m Dominion suit would cost Fox $50m, Michael Wolff book says
In winter 2022, at a hideaway in St Barts, Rupert Murdoch directed “sudden fury” at Donald Trump, who he thought would lose the 2024 Republican presidential primary to Ron DeSantis, but who the media mogul also said was likely to cost him “fifty million dollars”, through a lawsuit regarding Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, reports The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly.
The lawsuit was filed by Dominion Voting Systems, over Fox News’s broadcast of Trump’s lies. Settled this April, it cost Murdoch considerably more than he predicted: $787.5m, to be precise.
Murdoch’s wildly off miscalculation and his anger at Trump – in conversation with friends at the idyllic Caribbean getaway – is described by the journalist Michael Wolff in his new book, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, in a passage set towards the end of Murdoch’s marriage to the model Jerry Hall.
ChatGPT can now generate images, too
ChatGPT can now generate images — and they are shockingly detailed, report The New York Times’ Cade Metz and Tiffany Hsu.
On Wednesday, OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up, released a new version of its DALL-E image generator to a small group of testers and folded the technology into ChatGPT, its popular online chatbot.
Called DALL-E 3, it can produce more convincing images than previous versions of the technology, showing a particular knack for images containing letters, numbers and human hands, the company said.
John Grisham, other top US authors sue OpenAI over copyrights
A trade group for U.S. authors has sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court on behalf of prominent writers including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult and Game of Thrones novelist George R.R. Martin, accusing the company of unlawfully training its popular artificial-intelligence based chatbot ChatGPT on their work, reports Reuters’ Blake Brittain.
The proposed class-action lawsuit filed late on Tuesday by the Authors Guild joins several others from writers, source-code owners and visual artists against generative AI providers. In addition to Microsoft-backed OpenAI, similar lawsuits are pending against Meta Platforms and Stability AI over the data used to train their AI systems.
Radio
Nova’s Tim Blackwell won lunch with his hero. The mix was interesting
One is a conservative talkback radio legend, the other co-hosts a top-rating national drive show on youth-oriented Nova. Yet in 2019, octogenarian John Laws and Tim Blackwell, then in his late 30s, found themselves lunching together at Sydney’s exclusive Otto, where Beyonce, Zac Efron and other A-listers have also dined, reports Nine Publishing’s Michael Lallo.
When Laws asked Blackwell what he’d like to order, he replied: “‘I’m just going to do, eat and drink everything you do’ – and I did exactly that, including the Wild Turkey and Coke at the end of the meal. Interestingly, he had the Wild Turkey in one glass and the Coke in another; he’d take a sip of Wild Turkey and then a sip of Coke but he never mixed them, which I thought was interesting.”
Television
Russell Brand allegations show how TV tolerated ‘terrible behaviour’, says C4 chief
Channel 4’s boss has said the allegations against Russell Brand show how “terrible behaviour” against women has been tolerated in the television industry, reports The Guardian’s Jim Waterson.
Alex Mahon, the broadcaster’s chief executive, said one of the most shocking elements of the documentary was seeing “what appeared on air not that long ago”, when broadcasters were happy to show footage of Brand making misogynistic jokes about sex.
Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary included a clip from Brand’s 2006 standup tour, which was released on DVD, where he told a laughing audience he liked “blowjobs where mascara runs a little bit”.
Queensland’s famous five re-open Rock Island Mysteries
The idea of 20 episodes of live action drama is almost unheard of these days, reports TV Tonight.
But Nickelodeon’s second season of Rock Island Mysteries is just that. With Season One also tallying 20 episodes, it’s a bumper output for the Queensland-made series.
Jonah Klein, Fremantle Producer and Script Development exec agrees, saying, “There aren’t many shows being produced at that number of episodes outside of Home & Away or something like that. What it did for our cast & crew is not only give them longer term employment, but also for those who are stepping up into new levels of roles, the opportunity to really hone their craft and gain that experience.”
See Also: Why bringing Nickelodeon to FTA has been a good slime for Paramount