Welcome to Antertainment
News and analysis straight from the Ant hill
This is my first official post from Antertainment. Via the newly discovered free/paid newsletter platform Substack. I sort of knew about Substack in the periphery as I had seen a couple of writers and journalists on Twitter posting out invites to their newsletters.
Julia Alexander, streaming services reporter for The Verge has an “all things Disney” themed Substack. Matt Taibbi, ex-Rolling Stone journalist has a Substack for all his writings too. Both journalists I really respect and admire.
What converted me to Substack myself was Andrew Sullivan leaving New York Magazine to restart his Dish website as a newsletter on Substack. There was a tweet from Benedict Evans about Sullivan leaving New York Magazine and about how Substack is disrupting Medium. This rang true for me as I haven’t been liking the way Medium has been going about things with their business and strategic decisions lately. Well for a couple of years now at least. Especially with their paid membership programme and how they don’t let free articles be distributed widely to Medium users. They are strongly preferencing the membership proramme.
I figured I’d give it a go on Substack. I thought up a name for my newsletter. And here we are.
Streaming Services by the Dozen
There have been so many streaming services launching in the past year that it is now fastly becoming the equivalent cost to cable/pay television if you were to subscribe to the equivalent channels you got on pay but in the streaming world. But of course traditional pay TV doesn’t have the many streaming services that are causing these television/movie studios to launch competing over-the-top streaming services.
The launch of Peacock
Comcast/NBC/Universal launched Peacock this past week. It is lauching in the US only and it doesn’t seem like plans are on the horizon any time soon to expand it internationally. Peacock actually soft launched in April to elegible Comcast subscribers but this week saw the full rollout occur.
There are three tiers:
-free & ad supported with limited content
-$4.99 USD - all the content with ads
-$9.99 USD - all the content without ads
It’s interesting to have a free option for these premium streamers. There are a fair few free & ad-supported streamers out there but it seems the content is quite low quality compared to what you can get from Peacock.
Peacock launched with limited original programming and used some imports from the UK to fill out the roster. Brave New World is the marquee original show, based on the famous Aldous Huxley book.
If Peacock and HBO Max came to Australia my wallet would definitely be hurting as i tend to subscribe to the big streaming video services. But for now our Australian free to air TV channels and AVOD (advertiser supported video on demand) and Foxtel seem to pick up the slack.
The Streaming Services I Subscribe To
In the interest of disclosure I wanted to tell you, the new reader what video streaming services I subscribe to at the current time:
-Netflix Premium ($19.99 AUD a month)
-Amazon Prime ($59 AUD a year)
-Stan. ($17 a month)
-Apple TV+ (yearly with iTunes gift cards discounts)
-Disney+ (yearly. Around $89.99 AUD)
-Quibi ($12.99 AUD a month)
-Binge (on a 9 month free trial I got for being with Telstra. I do plan to cancel when I’m done at this stage)
I also subscribe to Spotify and Apple Music as I get something out of both of them. I love their apps on the Apple TV and often have music on in the background when I’m reading news articles on my Google Pixel 3 XL or iPad Pro 11-inch 2020. I also appreciate that Spotify has a Linux app and Apple Music has a web app which can soforth be used on Linux.
I’m also living in a houshold with a Foxtel Satellite subscription.
The Quibi Conundrum
So I kept Quibi on past the 90 day free trial. I wanted to give it a chance as I had watched a whole lot of content on there during that 90 days. But after I turbo charged and finished up most of what I wanted to watch post trial now I feel there is nothing left for me to watch and I find myself waiting for Mondays at 5pm AEST for new series of three episodes to drop. But it seems there is slim pickings on the horizon.
The Fugitive and Die Hart are supposed to be coming out very soon. But it’s not like I’m drowning in Quibi content. It seems moreso that Quibi itself is drowning as told by Swell Entertainment on YouTube:
Some of my favourite shows on Quibi so far have included:
-When the Streetlights Go On (teen murder mystery set in the 90s)
-You Ain’t Got These (Lena Waithe passion project about sneaker culture)
-Shape of Pasta (a pasta chef travels to Italy to Nonnas for inspiration)
-Run This City (the youngest corrupt mayor to run a city in the US)
-Most Dangerous Game (Liam Hemsworth thriller that is basically the flagship Quibi show at this point)
Shoutout to the r/Quibi subreddit on Reddit.
My News Diet
I consume what I think to be a fair amount of news. Here’s where I go for most of my daily news:
Australian news:
-The Australian Financial Review
International news:
Tech news:
All of the news that I read on these websites informs me greatly about the issues I crave to know about as well as a lot I need to know about.
I also use Twitter, Facebook (although a lot less than I used to) & Google News.
But my favourite news reading app is the news aggregator Nuzzel. It brings to the fore all the most popular shared stories on Twitter and Facebook. There is a Friends on Nuzzel section which ranks article links by how many people have shared them in your social network circles. You can get notifications whenever a certain amount of your friends on Nuzzel share an article. It’s really great. And there is the Friend of Friends section to burst your filter bubble. As well as Most Popular on Nuzzel with all of the most shared articles in the last 24 hours. I highly recommend Nuzzel as you can probably see.
Podcasts I Love
Here are all the podcasts I am currently subscribed to (in alphabetical order). Thanks Pocket Casts for the web.
Now I don’t listen to every episode of all of these podcasts because who would have the time for that? But I do keep an eye on the recently released episodes for anything that would interest me.
My top 5 podcasts out of the above:
-The Vergecast (the flagship podcast of The Verge. I seldom miss this podcast)
-Cordkillers (cordcutting news from the frontlines with Tom Merritt and Brian Brushwood who have been at it for 10+ years. Here’s their Patreon as I love their work so much)
-Business Wars (The best in the business of business rivalry podcasts)
-The Sounding Board (Craig Hutchison and Damian Barrett run through the media news of the week throug the lens of AFL)
-Recode Media with Peter Kafka (Peter Kafka of Recode lines up the heavy hitters to interview on this highly engaging podcast. It helps that he’s such a great interviewer)
Progress on my NBN Technology Choice journey
Anyone who has followed my work on Medium would know I wrote a quite scathing piece on NBN’s Technology Choice Program. Well it turns out I ended up going this route myself hypocritically I know.
I outlaid way more than I’d like to admit but I am mere weeks away from being hooked up to FTTP from copper based FTTN.
The contractors have been at my house and assessed a route for the fibre from the pit out the front to my house and are about three weeks away from installing it. I am 1200 metres from the node. So there’s a bit of work ahead of them.
I’m looking forward to having FTTH with an excellent Retail Service Provider in Aussie Broadband. I have the possibility of getting gigabit down speeds with 50 Mbps up. For $149 a month mind you. But it’s a start. I’ll probably test the waters with the 100 Mbps down / 40 Mbps up plan for a start. But if Aussie Broadband sounds brilliant to you. You can click here to sign up to them for a $50 discount off your first month.
That was but a taste of what is to come…
If you got this far in my inaugral newsletter kudos to you. This is just a taste of what is to come. You can expect deeper dives into topics of the moment as well as topics that are always occuring. I like this new format of breaking up into sections the things I want to talk about.
Thank you for reading.
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