Cordkillers 427 - Roku Lights, Roku Cameras, Roku Action!

Netflix dominated headlines with the final details of their new ad-supported plan, ratings, and their proposed new studio in NJ. Plus, Peacock is going to test interactive elements in a Real Housewives show and Roku announced eight new smart home devices. All that and more on Cordkillers!

This week on It's Spoilerin' Time: Star Trek: Lower Decks (308), She-Hulk (109), Miami Vice (310 - Streetwise)

Next week: Moonfall, Lower Decks (309), Miami Vice (316 - "Theresa")

Download video http://archive.org/download/cordkillers-ep-427/CordkillersEp427.mp4

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CordKillers: 427 - Roku Lights, Roku Cameras, Roku Action!
Recorded: October 17 2022
Guest: None

Intro Video
Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical

Primary Target
Netflix Launches Profile-Transfer Feature — Making It Easier for Password Freeloaders to Set Up Their Own Paid Accounts
- Monday, Netflix launched its profile transfer feature that lets anyone migrate a profile from an existing account to a brand new account. The transfer lets the user take their personalized recommendations, viewing history, list, saved games and other settings.

Netflix Is A Big Step Closer To Building Major New Jersey Production Studio
Netflix Released Record-Breaking 1,024 Original TV Episodes in Q3 — More Than Five Times Any Other Service
- Netflix is trying to by a former US Army base in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey to build a production studio. This would be almost as big as the one they have in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They need that because the company releases metric shittonnes of content. Netflix released 1,026 original episodes in the last three months. More than 5 times Amazon's 223 and Hulu's 194. Disney+ did 140 and HBO Max 114.

Netflix will finally disclose how many people watch its shows, in the UK at least
- And you might make a snide crack about the quality of those shows, but Netflix apparently has enough confidence in one market to come clean in public about its ratings. Netflix has joined BARB, a non-profit organization that measures TV ratings int he UK. BARB will begin including Netflix in its published ratings starting the second week of November. BARB says Netflix is the most accessed streaming service in the UK and accounts for 8 percent of all UK TV viewing. Nielsen offers Netflix ratings in the US but Netflix does not cooperate on them and often disputes their accuracy. But not for long. WHY?

Netflix Confirms Ad Tier to Launch in November, Reveals Pricing for Cheaper Basic Plan
- Netflix Basic with Ads will launch November 1st in Canada and Mexico and follow in Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. Netflix made the US launch on November 3rd as its highlight. The ad-supported service will cost $6.99 a month there. Basic with Ads will support 720p HD and the $9.99 a month Basic plan also gets upgrade from standard def to 720p HD. Some movies and TV shows have a license that prevents Netflix from showing them with ads. So about 5-10% of the catalog depending on the market, won't be available on Basic with Ads. In another quirk you'll have to include date of birth and gender when signing up so ads can be properly targeted. Variety says Netflix told buyers it expects to have 4.4 million users on the ad-supported plan by the end of the year.

Netflix Starting From $6.99 a Month
- And how do advertisers know their ad shows? They'll just have to trust Netflix at first but expect to see Netflix join more ratings agencies like it did with BARB in the UK. Variety says Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) service in the US will become available for Netflix Basic With Ads “sometime in 2023.”

How to Watch
ESPN Execs Talk Sports’ Migration To Streaming And The Steep Growth Curve For ESPN+: “Digital Is A Godsend”
- ESPN digital programming VP John Lasker told Deadline that the advantage of ESPN+ over ESPN is that it can hold a larger audience by showing all the games the audience is interested in, rather than being limited to 3 or 4 games on the available channels on cable. On September 17, ESPN+ aired 52 live college football games, generating its most viewership ever on a single day.

What to Watch
George R.R. Martin Says ‘House Of The Dragon’ Needs “Four Full Seasons” On HBO At Current Pace & Addresses Time Jumps
- One criticism of House of the Dragon has been huge time jumps such that in the first season two main parts and several supporting parts had to be recast with older actors to accommodate the move. George R. R. Martin wrote on his blog that he thinks it's OK to do that because they only get 10 episodes per season. He wrote “If House of the Dragon had 13 episodes per season, maybe we could have shown all the things we had to ‘time jump’ over… though that would have risked having some viewers complain that the show was too ‘slow,’ that ‘nothing happened.'” He estimates that it should take 40 episodes, so 4 full seasons to tell the full story of the "Dance of the Dragons" as related in the book Fire and Blood.

Harrison Ford Set As General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross For ‘Captain America: New World Order’, Will Star Opposite Anthony Mackie
- William Hurt played the role of Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross in five Marvel films, starting with the Incredible Hulk. Hurt died this year and now, Harrison Ford has agreed to play the part of Ross in the Thunderbolts movie coming July 26, 2024, but also in Captain America: New World Order on May 3rd that year.

Peacock experiments with interactive scenes to give fans a ‘Real Housewives’ deep dive
- Peacock will test a feature on its Roku app that lets viewers of episodes of Season 3 of The Real Housewives, access extended clips and extra footage from within an episode. Season 3 of the series premieres next year. At launch, premium subscribers can interact with three episodes of “The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip."

NBCUniversal Inks Deal With Meta to Bring Peacock, ‘The Office’ and More to Quest VR
- Meta announced that Peacock will be available in the Quest store for viewing on Quest VR headsets.

Eyes On:
Brian: CODA and Andor
Tom: BTS Yet to Come in Busan (Weverse, then Naver, then Twitch)
On the Lookout: Miami Vice is NOT streaming anywhere!


Front Lines
Roku’s new lights, doorbells, and switches are TV-centered (and very familiar)
- Roku announced eight new smart home devices-- lights, cameras, doorbells, and plugs-- that you can control from he Roku OS. You can also control them with a Roku Smart Home app on your phone. You can also control the devices by voice on the rook remote.
- Roku partnered with Wyze to make the line.
- The Roku video doorbell can send a picture-in-picture view to a TV and alert you when it sees packages or pets.
- The devices are also compatible with Google Assistant and Amazon compatibility is coming in early November. Roku is a member of the Matter Working Group but the devices are not yet certified as Matter compliant. The devices are available now with cameras starting at $27. You can order online or wait for them to show up inside Wal-Mart on October 17th.

Android 12 arrives on the two-year-old Chromecast with Google TV
- The 4K Google Chromecast that came out in 2020, is getting an update to Android 12. This adds a frame-rate-matching feature that should reduce judder and adds new settings for HDR and surround sound.

UK homes cancel streaming services to reduce spending
- Thanks to @gconnery for pointing this one out. The number of UK homes with one or more paid streaming subscription fell by 234,000 in Q3 according to Kantar Worldpanel. But those who are keeping services are adding them. The number of overall subscriptions rose to bring the average per home to 2.5 for a total of 28.2 million up 108,000. In summary, more people are cutting out paid streaming to save money but those who can afford streaming are adding services.

Apple is quietly pushing a TV ad product with media agencies
- Digiday's sources report that Apple is considering running some ads on its TV shows. This is all in the considering it stage, so who knows how it would be implemented. One could guess maybe free versions of new shows with ads? But however it worked, Apple would use first party data. Data it already knows about users from its own products like maps and music and such to target ads. So it wouldn't need to change any privacy policies to do it. Apple's just huge enough to possibly make it work.

‘Dune: Part Two’ to Debut Two Weeks Earlier in November 2023
- Dune Part Two will come to theaters November 3rd, 2023 moving two weeks up from its original date of November 17th. It takes the date freed up by Blade which has been moved off to September 6th 2024.

The TV show Dune: The Sisterhood is shooting at the same time and in the same place as Dune Part Two: in Budapest. 
YouTube Originals to Launch ‘Behind the Beats,’ Featuring Blondie, Snoop Dogg, L7
- YouTube Originals will launch "Behind the Beats" on November 18th, a series of 4 minute episodes for YouTube Kids, that tells how musicians came together to create new genres of music. Blondie, Snoop Dogg and L7 are all involved.

Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds Reimagine ‘A Christmas Carol’ With Song and Dance in ‘Spirited’ Trailer
- A trailer is out for yet another take on A Christmas Carol with Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds doing a musical version called Spirited coming to Apple TV+ November 11th.

‘Mythic Quest’ Season 3 Trailer Shows GrimPop Studios Preparing to Go to War
- And Apple released a trailer for season 3 of Mythic Quest arriving November 11th and running through January 6th.

Dispatches from the front
... my god was Slingbox cool back in the day. Around 2005-2010 when it was used in my family I was around the ages of 9-14, and it was so cool to be able to watch TV from a not-TV. My dad had the one with the tuner built inside just for standard cable, and my grandfather had the one that could interact with a cable box, and he even rented a DVR cable box just so he could DVR things and watch them or live pausable TV outside the house (or inside the house so he could have it up on a computer screen while working). What a time. And then when the iPhone came around and could have apps, it was so novel that you could watch live TV on a mobile device with a widescreen. Not so cool was the $30 price for the app, but hey, do you want to watch TV or not?

- Anthony

Dear Killers,

It's been a long time since I've written, but I figured I'd write y'all, as I have a couple cord-killing related things on my mind.

Firstly, I came across a video by a YouTuber who claimed that binge watching has harmed television, and I think I might agree, as the standard of television has changed from "it has to be good enough for you to come back next week" to "it has to not be so bad that you're going to turn off the autoplay and switch to something else". This has obviously led to the current less episodic form of television (it's strange that She-Hulk is one of the most episodic shows I've seen on streaming recently), but I think for shows that really are designed to be view as long movies, and have six to ten episodes (like the MCU shows, or Devs), it'd be 

interesting to see a daily release schedule. That way, you sort of avoid the spoiler hell that exists with complete season drops, while also not having to wait forever for the next part of the story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RgI1yH2_ys

From,
- Amar 

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