☀️ NETFLIX TV Gets A Leadership Change

Where how about that pretty exciting personal news in the music business yesterday? Congrats to Thomas Rhett and his wife, Lauren Atkins, on the uh, well-timed announcement that they are expecting their 5th baby -- stay tuned to see if a baby boy joins their 4 daughters! BTW: That other big celeb news yesterday apparently happened about 2 weeks ago, according to poppa Ed Kelce . . . whose advice about location was apparently not heeded. Ed would not do well on today's social media: "And I told him repeatedly, you know, you could do it on the side of the road, do it any place that makes it a special event ... when you get down on one knee and ask her to marry you." THEN: Well, CRACKER BARREL logo -- it's been real. The company realized its half-hearted support letter yesterday just didn't do the trick to win folks over about the logo they were all very excited about, but uh, well -- hey, good news for Uncle Hershel! He's back. 🛢️ PLUS: A happy start of the Venice Film Festival to those making the jaunt over to Italy this year, and note the Gaza protest planned for Saturday. OH: DISNEY is suing ECHOSTAR/DISH over the company's move to offer $5 one-day passes to SLING streaming TV bundles . . . which kinda undercuts the whole $30-a-month-for-ESPN thing if you just wanna watch a couple of days of sports a month. AH: What were the odds on Don Jr. placing bets on both sides of the predictions market? #TakeTheOver YEAH: Gotta love when Trump's FCC head pokes into a private business negotiation not directly under its jurisdiction . . . urging "Get a deal done Google!" on X in regards to its FOX carriage deal standoff. AND: ANTHROPIC AI chose to settle the lawsuit it was facing from a group of authors over the use of their books to train its Claude AI bot. In response to my report on the summer movie spec sale market yesterday -- a thanks goes out to the industry veteran who sent me a THR PDF from 1997 with this stat: there were 325 deals for movie specs, pitches, novels and magazine articles in 1997 🤯, according to THR's year-end (print) edition. For a business that is often described as either quite troubled, antiquated or terrible -- you could really convince me otherwise given the activity around it in the past 9 months, between: