StillPaisleyCat

There were media reports last week noting that a new CBS Studios production, under the pseudonym ‘Dovercourt’, had been added to the Rumour section of the Directors Guild of Canada (DGC) Ontario hotlist.

As of today, there is more confirming information, and a clear indication that this is the greenlit Star Trek Section 31 movie event starring Michelle Yeoh.

‘Dovercourt’ has moved into the firmer preproduction section of the list. It’s identified as a TV movie. Olantudne Osunsami is listed as the director, with the two other EPs based in Canada Frank Siracusa and John Weber also listed. These all line up with the previous S31 direct to streaming movie announcement in the spring.

Preproduction is listed as running from May 1 to October 22, 2023. This implies that production design and costume design are underway in the Greater Toronto Area.

Paul Henry Kirby is listed as Production Designer (PD). He seems to be new to Star Trek. I find listings that he was PD on Shazam! Fury of the Gods and several other cinematic releases. He was Art Director on Batman Begins. (His portfolio is listed on a personal website paulkirby.com.)

The production location is given as Toronto rather than Mississauga, which suggests that the big volume leased soundstages at Pinewood Toronto Studios may be getting one more redress for the movie rather than using CBS’ own stages.

The hotlist says it is compiled by the guild from “from deal memos, callsheets, crew lists and Members updating their availability.“

If you’re not familiar, every month the main publisher of Trek fiction, Simon & Schuster puts out an offering of more than a half dozen ebooks for $ 0.99 in Canada and the US and at a similar low price in some other countries.

This month is a bit of a blast back to the late Berman era with a collection of DS9 Dominion War books, a Voyager Seven of Nine story and a few others.

The standout of the month however is the Star Trek TNG - X-Men crossover ‘Planet X’.

While my preference is for physical books, Simon & Schuster’s ebook deals got me invested in the high quality Trek Relaunch continuity of Treklit as well as helped fill in my collection of out-of-print standalone classics.

Can highly recommend taking a risk on adding ebook specials at low cost to your ebook summer reading.

Barbie has been a summer juggernaut as a cinematic feature despite outrage from the right in the United States. Dean Obeidallah argues that conservative boycotts and backlash only have traction in specific niches where their adherents are the majority of the market.

One wonders if Paramount will take note as they strategically rebrand their streaming offerings. Unfortunately, it seems they’ve been headed in the other direction.

While Discovery led the way in representation across many diverse groups, some of us have been concerned that Picard season three pulled back to more traditional gender roles and an emphasis on white cis-male heroes. SNW has a large female main cast, but the OG female command officer Number One doesn’t seem to be getting much opportunity to show heroic leadership.

Thought this conversation might be less fraught over here at Quark’s.

A bit late, but for those who aren’t aware, the small town of Vulcan, Alberta, has long embraced its connection to the franchise. A gigantic model, Trek themed uniforms for the town council, fairs and parades - nothing seems to be too much for this cheerful town of unabashed fans.

Conan O’Brien may have goggled to hear of it, but at this point it’s a point of multigenerational identity and civic pride.

I thought folks here might welcome a local take. (And I was myself taken aback by the local news site’s name ‘Chat News Today.’)

FAST - Free Ad-Supported Television on demand - was just taking off globally as the post-pandemic economic slowdown drove down the total available advertising revenue. It’s still a major source of revenue for Paramount Global however, and only promises to grow as advertising demand recovers.

This article provides a good evidence-based overview of Paramount’s dominance in this end of the market. As Star Trek fans have good reasons to be concerned about the state of Paramount+, it’s good to have some solid data on PlutoTV (where many of the older shows are available free) and the bigger picture of where Paramount Global is being successful.

In a Stream Metrics study for IndieWire, the analysts identified an owner for 1,364 of the channels. Most owners are in the single digits, but one company holds more than 20 percent of the channels studied: Paramount Global.

If you’re Paramount/Pluto TV, you can take it to the next level. Paramount has so many channels in part because it has its own platform with Pluto TV, which was launched in 2013 and purchased by Paramount (then ViacomCBS) in 2019. That allows Paramount to launch as many channels as it likes, without the licensing costs, and count the ad dollars. It needs that reliable cash; core streaming service Paramount+, like so many others in the SVOD category, hemorrhages mountains of money.

@GoodAaron@mastodon.social is boosting the news that the Save Prodigy petition has crossed 29k signatures.

Although change.org has become a monetized platform, those who are willing to use it and haven’t yet signed may wish to help it get to the 30k threshold that helped launch SNW and save The Orville.

The wonderful comedy of Vulcan manners, Charades, turns out to be a first time directing Trek for Newfoundlander Jordan Canning.

The Newfoundlanders on my spouse’s side will be stoked to learn this.

New federal legislation in Canada will enable taxes on very large corporations (Meta, Google) who benefit from advertising revenue without paying the news companies who create the content.

Meta has responded by excluding Canadian news sources from Facebook and more recently Instagram.

The federal public broadcaster CBC is letting people know how to ensure they still have access to its content.

N.B unsuccessfully attempted to crosspost from lemmy.ca

This article provides highlights from a fascinating podcast.

Here are a couple of extracts/examples.

I think this is extremely important, because when you think about why this was able to occur, which gets into the second part of this answer, cable was this beautiful, socialistic almost experiment, right? It was this idea that you wanted your competitors to perform extremely well. You wanted ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPN3 to perform really well, because that bled down to the lower average from demand, lower average from viewership, lower average from overall subscribers within the pay TV model. The more people that were taking in this $300 cable system, the less churn that you were seeing and the less you had to worry about each one of your single titles performing, because there was this security blanket of revenue coming in that was creating these extremely high profit margins.

I think the misconception that a lot of these legacy companies took was they looked at that and said, “Therefore, there is strong demand for our content as well on our own individual apps.” But they didn’t actually learn from the TV-everywhere, TV-anywhere situation, which was consumers don’t want a lot of apps. They want everything in one place, and they’re willing to pay for it. This was the beauty of pay TV. They didn’t necessarily want Bravo or they didn’t necessarily want ESPN, but they wanted enough of it that they were willing to say, “Yeah, OK, we’ll give you $200.”

While we just saw with the Nielsen numbers from June that SNW is continuing to perform well against other original streaming series, Parrot Analytics is demonstrating that the audience interest is being maintained through the season and the strikes. Only the Witcher and Stranger Things rank higher.

Parrot Analytics demand metrics pull together several different measures including social media engagement as well as their own surveys and focus groups.

They are one of a very few metrics that are designed to provide global measurement and comparisons between and across markets. They also capture demand on phones and PCs not just televisions. Here’s their profile for Strange New Worlds for the US. You can see other countries using the menu at the bottom of the page.

While there had been scepticism about how accurate they were for the US, since Nielsen’s streaming metrics have become available, Parrot has been confirmed to provide a fairly accurate estimate of where rankings of actual viewership will fall.

Here are the Mastodon posts directly from @GoodAaron@mastodon.social.

He also confirms that the DVD release of the back half of season one, with special features is going forward for September.

@GoodAaron@mastodon.social suggests there will be some new information on Prodigy tomorrow.

Is it possible that there may be some announcements at San Diego Comic Con?

Let’s keep boosting Prodigy positively.

For those who are willing to engage in change.org’s petitions (regrettably monetized), the Save Star Trek Prodigy petition is nearing 30k signatures, and could use the support to break the threshold during the SDCC weekend.