A fine day to you all,

First things first, if you miss FilmStruck greatly like I do, then The Criterion Channel is going to be doing their best to fill that necessary hole of classic films available on streaming. They just announced today that their independently-run streaming service will begin on April 8th. You can sign up here today and enjoy a movie every week until they launch their full service. Not only that, but the Movie of the Week today is Elaine May's underrated gangster classic, Mikey and Nicky. Speaking as a huge fan of Elaine May, John Cassavetes, and Peter Falk, I couldn't be more pleased with this decision of a first movie, and the service already seems like it's going to be a great edition. Check out the site here: https://www.criterionchannel.com/

I don't work for Criterion, nor FilmStruck or Turner Classic Movies, but as I said in the original petition and in the following updates, I am just a regular guy who knows about movies and thought that FilmStruck was just too precious to lose. Since then, I've been in contact with a number of different companies about FilmStruck and what it means, and more importantly, where do we go from here now that it's gone?

The good news is that our voices have been heard on some level. On top of The Criterion Channel launching, other businesses have been working on their own digital streaming sites that can provide access to similar films that FilmStruck curated for everybody. And in the meantime, there is a vast quantity of classic films that I didn't even realize were online on Amazon Prime, so if you ever want to do a deep dive one day, just search for the most obscure film or director you can think of and see what you can find on there. Of course, there's also Kanopy, which features a number of great films from Criterion, Shout! Factory, and some incredibly vast archives, all for free if you have your own library card.

In the last two weeks of FilmStruck, I was using the petition to reach out to a number of different people in the industry, both at Turner and at Warners. We spoke to nearly everybody that could give us information and explain how many people were already behind the petition (we were near 75K at that point). The unfortunate consensus was: This was the decision of a small handful of people who enjoyed the service and what it had to offer, but wanted to fold it into their major streaming site launching sometime in the fall. I'm not going to get into my personal feelings about that here at the moment, but it was clear that, unless we had literal millions of people sign this, that their decision was irreversible. On the one hand, it is nice to hear that they will be including FilmStruck in some capacity as part of their larger streaming service, but we all already know that, without the support of the number of talented and passionate curators and hosts of FilmStruck, it just won't be the same.

That's why I urge all of you to check out these smaller streaming sites, whether it's by signing up for The Criterion Channel, getting a library card (a worthy endeavor in and of itself) and using Kanopy, or signing up for something even more niche that maybe I don't even know about. People saw the outcry we had from this petition, which was far greater than any I could have imagined, and we have to make sure to put our money where our mouth is and support these outlets so they can stay open.

In the meantime, what is it that you would like to see out of a new streaming service? Put your thoughts in the comments below and maybe we can get this out to the Criterion Channel or some other places trying to get into the streaming game!

-Kevin