In this issue: China’s film industry & the CCP / Email newsletter tips / AI news broadcasts / One of FB’s most successful publishers is a Pennsylvania retiree / The big business of in-flight entertainment / E3 tradeshow shutting down / Substack as a self-publishing platform / Amazon Prime adding more live sports / Netflix data dump / Writing tips from Y Combinator’s Garry Tan + more!
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
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“The Chinese audience for film, whether in cinemas or on online streaming, is now comparable in scale to the U.S. audience and still growing. By revenue, the U.S. domestic box office is still somewhat larger than the Chinese, at about $9 billion versus $7 billion projected for 2023. But by number of viewers, China is far larger. At an estimated 530 million, there are more moviegoers in China than there are people in the United States. Today, China’s film industry has summer blockbusters, diverse genre pictures, prestigious awards, and extremely popular celebrities—just like Hollywood, which dominates the global film industry. But in China, the entire film industry is not just legally regulated and censored by the information arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but in large part directly owned and operated by it too. Rather than importing Hollywood’s movies and stars, China has instead built its own Hollywood under the Party, and hopes to soon begin exporting its films to the world.”
“What I Wish I’d Known Before Launching My Newsletter. We asked more than 20 newsletter operators for the advice they wish they’d gotten. From content strategy to growth best practices, here’s what they told us.”
”The anchor is in studio, speaking directly to the camera then cuts to a news segment, one in which the words coming from a French-speaking man come out of his mouth as English.
This is one of the elements of an AI-produced newscast being introduced later today by startup Channel 1, set to run on its own site, Channel1.ai, as well as Crackle, Redbox Free Streaming and X/Twitter.
The Channel 1 startup, from entrepreneur Adam Mosam and producer Scott Zabielski, has a distribution deal with Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, and the plans are to introduce a FAST channel in February or March followed by mobile and connected TV apps, the latter of which will offer personalization of viewers’ news diets.”
”Catholic Fundamentalism first came to our attention in September, when the single most popular link on the platform for that month was “Do Catholics find ‘Life’ by being pleasing to God? The Psalms tell us! #17.” The page linking the post had 409,000 total interactions in September. For scale, the Associated Press obituary for Jimmy Buffet had 356,000 interactions over the same time. It was unusual, sure, but random sites spike inside of Facebook all of the time. What we’ve never seen before, however, is a single website dominate the platform like this completely. We’ve reached out to Meta for comment.
The blog and its Facebook page aren’t run by some think tank or even the Catholic Church itself (though the two pages are nearly the same size). Instead, the website that’s more popular than the BBC right now seems to be entirely run by a retiree in Pennsylvania.”
”Gone are the days when carriers showed a single movie to a plane full of passengers from tiny monitors under the overhead bins. Today they have teams carefully curating the choices we have when we fly. Airlines worldwide spend an estimated half a billion dollars a year on movies, television shows, live TV, podcasts and music, according to Anuvu, which helps United, Southwest and other airlines select the right mix of content.”
”E3, the once-popular videogame expo, is powering down.
The Entertainment Software Association, a videogame trade organization, said Tuesday it was ending its Electronic Entertainment Expo. The expo struggled to attract creators and top game companies in recent years.
Once a mecca for gamers and industry leaders showing off the newest innovations, the trade show never recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic, holding its last gathering virtually in 2021. The ESA had planned to host an E3 expo in June but canceled it.”
”Substack’s main purpose is publishing. It is a publishing platform. Specifically, it is self-publishing. Literary magazines will not accept submissions that have already appeared on Substack, in any form, because most have a policy against previously published material. Likewise, essays that appear on your own newsletter are not eligible for things like the Best American Essays anthology, because they do not consider work that has been self-published. Book publishers will republish work that has appeared on Substack, but that is in line with an existing willingness, even an eagerness, to repackage previously published essays, articles, and blogs. Substack can add nifty hang-out options like Notes or Chat or what have you, but it is still primarily a place to publish and read what others have published.”
”Amazon is in talks to invest in the biggest regional-sports programmer, a move that would advance the e-commerce giant’s aggressive push into sports content as it takes on streaming rivals like Disney and Netflix.
Diamond Sports Group, which carries the games of more than 40 major sports teams across the country and filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, is actively negotiating with Amazon about a strategic investment and a multiyear streaming partnership, according to people familiar with the matter.”
”Creators rejoice: Netflix is finally revealing viewership statistics on nearly all of its shows and movies.
Netflix released its first “What We Watched” report Tuesday, which ranks almost all of its shows and movies by amount of hours viewed over the past six months. Netflix will release updated reports every six months, the company said.”
”Y Combinator CEO: The Key To Writing For Startups & Entrepreneurs | Garry Tan | How I Write Podcast”
“I still don’t get bitcoin.”