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- Netflix’s Finger On the Button
Happy February Hollywood tech nerds!
In this week’s post:
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Over at his newsletter Lowpass, Janko Roettgers has a good breakdown of what a Netflix/Warner Bros. merger might mean for a small object with surprisingly big powers in the world of smart TVs: the streaming service remote control button.
I inquired about this with a friend of the newsletter who is a former employee of the now-defunct streaming service Crackle:
Having a TV model with a branded remote control button for the service was considered a huge get, because it drove views by people pushing the button on purpose and accidentally. When someone pushed our button (for whatever reason) and you had a few solid titles on the main page of the app, you would typically get a healthy amount of immediate engagement.
Roettgers’s reporting on smart TVs is essential reading for anybody working in streaming or at all streaming-adjacent, because such a huge number of US households interact with these services via these TVs. I have a Toshiba-made Amazon Fire TV and it is incredibly quirky: some streamers trigger motion-smoothing to activate even though I have it turned off, Disney+ currently plays content with random freeze frames throughout the program, Netflix’s audio levels play at totally different volumes than the rest of the services. I’m sure consumer opinions of some streamers are directly impacted by the TV they’re watching them on!
In his newsletter, Roettgers has covered:
…and countless others, with frequent scoops in the space.
Requiem for a Dream
If you spent any time on Twitter over the last week, you likely saw the trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s new AI-generated series about the Revolutionary War:
Naturally the AI boosters were out in force with language similar to the tweet above, making sure you don’t believe your lying eyes that yes, it is indeed just more slop. Critical viewers on Twitter had their own opinions:
Anyway, this all brought me back to a Vanity Fair article I bookmarked when it came out but didn’t write about at the time. Titled “Inside Hollywood’s AI Freak-Out, Featuring Darren Aronofsky, Natasha Lyonne, Tilly Norwood, and a Lot of Nervous Anonymous Sources”, it featured a few Aronofsky mentions:
Either way, in a war for diminishing attention spans, people like Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky have embraced AI almost as a kind of realpolitik. If the technology is going to arm the tech platforms with addictive, disposable content, Hollywood has little choice but to use it, and hopefully for good.
“You can sort of be afraid of it and attempt to fight it,” Aronofsky says. “Or you could try to figure out how to use it to tell different types of stories.”…
“What’s coming out of these machines now looks as good as anything Hollywood produces, but it’s really just for a moment. It’s for the eight seconds or the nine seconds that it exists, and it doesn’t stick in people’s heads,” Aronofsky says. “The race is on to figure out how to breathe emotion into that slop so that you can link shots together to start to tell stories.”
It’s funny how different this reads now that the product is visible. “The race is on to figure out how to breathe emotion into that slop so that you can link shots together to start to tell stories.” Oh well, seems like you failed, brother! This looks like shit.
As I always have to mention, I am not a Luddite and not opposed to the use of machine learning/AI as tools within storytelling. But the coverage of it within the context of entertainment continues to be dictated by mindless, dangerous boosterism!
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
A breakdown of the VFX behind some of the year’s best films. (link)
Crunchyroll is raising prices again. (link)
Everything coming to IMAX in 2026. (link)