By Walt Hickey

SVOD

Parks Associates, a market research group, reported a precipitous decline in household spending on streaming video on-demand services, with the average internet household spending $63 per month on streaming compared to $90 per month in 2021. Part of that is a decline in whales; in the first quarter of this year, 20 percent of internet households paid for nine or more streaming services, down from 29 percent two quarters earlier. Many are switching away from higher-cost services toward advertising-supported services.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Final

An average of 7.66 million viewers tuned in on Monday to watch Game 7 of the NHL playoffs, where the Florida Panthers beat the Edmonton Oilers. It’s the fifth-most watched Game 7 in the past 60 years, an impressive achievement given the size of the respective markets of the opposing teams. The game was especially contentious given that Florida won the first three games in the series but collapsed in the following three, which were taken by Edmonton, and Florida risked becoming the first U.S. professional sports team since 1942 to blow a best-of-seven championship after starting with a 3-0 lead.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Estuary

When lumber is hauled out on rivers, it’s often stored in log booms in the estuaries of British Columbia. The Cowichan River estuary is one such area, which drains 90,000 hectares and is an important habitat for lots and lots of animals. When timber companies store logs in those environments, it can cause serious problems, crushing or stranding seal pups, causing water quality to deteriorate as particulates are released, killing bottom-feeders with shedded bark, and blocking sunlight. One study of 153 kilometers of the lower Fraser River found that log booms lined 29 percent of it, and in one 13-kilometer stretch covered 51 percent of the shoreline. Another study found that during periods of high river flow, 100 percent of tagged chinook salmon survived in the absence of booms, but when they were present that fell to 63 percent.

Larry Pynn, Hakai Magazine

Translation

Even despite widespread and completely understandable skepticism of AI in the arts, translation remains an appealing avenue for the technology given what the tech is good at and the overwhelming backlog of untranslated material that could potentially find new audiences and fans. That’s one reason that translation tech start-up Mantra, which was founded by researchers from the University of Tokyo, just attracted a 780 million-yen ($4.9 million) investment from Japanese manga publishers like Shueisha, Shogakukan, Kadokawa and Square Enix. Mantra translates Japanese into 18 languages and is currently used on around 100,000 pages per month. Manga publishers have long been frustrated by piracy — industry figures put the damages from pirated content at 831.1 billion yen in 2022 alone — and any reader of a scanlation of a less-loved book will tell you the frustrations of a bad translation. The opportunity is real: As it stands, just 2 percent of Japanese manga works have been translated into English.

Annu Nishioka, Nikkei Asia

Oscars

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is the organization behind the Oscars, has invited 487 new members to join the group, which is just over 10,000 members as-is. That’s a jump from the past three years, when respectively 395, 397 and 398 invitations were extended, but still considerably less than the 819 invitations of 2020, the last year of significantly elevated invites following the organizational realignment that ensued after the Oscars So White controversies. The organization continues to expand outward: This year, 56 percent of invitations were to people outside the U.S., up from 52 percent last year.

Scott Feinberg, The Hollywood Reporter

Glauconite

A mineral on the floor of the Atlantic is causing problems for the installation of offshore wind turbines, forcing companies to reconsider the placement of turbines, which is also causing issues to flare up again with other stakeholders. Glauconite is a green sediment found in some places off the East Coast. In order to make a turbine, a hollow steel tube called a monopile is driven deep into the seafloor to support the tower. It’s cheap, direct and gets the job done. When glauconite is pounded by a pile driver, though, it shatters, forming a layer with the consistency of clay that is really hard to pound a pile through, eliminating the best way to get a turbine up. It’s been spotted in a number of the wind-lease areas in the north Atlantic, and its presence has potentially eliminated up to 22 locations for monopiles in the Equinor Empire Wind 1 and Empire Wind 2 projects alone.

Heather Richards, E&E News

Traffic

A new report from INRIX estimates that gridlock cost the United States more than $70.4 billion in lost productivity in 2023, up 15 percent compared to 2022, with the average American driver losing 42 hours to congestion alone. New York is the epicenter of this, the world’s most congested city, costing $9.1 billion in lost time alone and forcing 101 hours of lost productivity for the average driver. If only there were some kind of way we could assess a cost or a fine on this congestion in an attempt to both reduce demand for driving in areas that lack the capacity for it — perhaps Manhattan below 59th Street — and fund transit with the balance. But shucks, that could never work. I mean, it’s only been successfully implemented in Singapore, and Bergen, and Rome, and London in both 2003 and again in 2007, and Stockholm, and Oslo, and Milan, and Gothenburg. It’s probably more of a Shelbyville idea anyhow.

Michelle Kaske, Bloomberg

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