Mornin! This is Sean McNulty (connect with me on LINKEDIN here if ya like or email me at seanmcnultynyc@gmail.com), and here’s the Hollywood + Media news to know on Tuesday, July 7, 2026.

Where we have a new entrant in the “yeah, you have too much money, bro!” category at this year’s Overpaid Awards — snow rooms!

Yes, this year’s hottest trend among the stock-options class is to build rooms in their houses where, well, it’s snowing.

As for what you do in the rooms . . . well, you see, you put on your winter coat inside your house, as you do, and you go sit in a room that’s decorated to look like you’re outside in the snow — and then you sit there and think about all of the people you fired to be able to get the money from your Board to build this room. It’s very peaceful.

Don’t worry, I’m sure they’re totally energy efficient.

WELL: It looks like some folks had to choose between building snow rooms and paying for health insurance this year, thanks to Trump administration policies — here’s where folks lost their health insurance at the most alarming rate. Eh, I’m sure these people just switched to getting it from their employers, right?

THEN: TIFF will open with APPLE’s Being Heumann from Sian Heder (CODA), a 1970s-set pic about disability rights activist Judy Heumann.

• Prima Facie with Cynthia Erivo (based on the play) and The Assassin(s) from Hur Jin-ho were also announced as premieres.

YEAH: Ya gotta love the U.K.’s football devotion — the MEXICO vs. ENGLAND game got 7.8M viewers in the country last week, even though it started at 2 a.m. A 7 a.m. replay also got an additional 900k viewers.

PLUS: CBS is doing an hour-long weigh-in/interview special for UFC 329: McGregor vs. Holloway on Friday at 9 p.m. (the fight is the following night on PAR+).

OH: How’s this for a quarterly result? SAMSUNG is forecasting that its 2nd quarter profits will be +1800% YoY (thanks, AI chip sales!). In a nod to the totally sound state of the stock market, SAMSUNG stock was -10% on that news.

• Its Q2 operating profit is likely to exceed its entire 2025 operating profit.
• The company is also uprooting its U.S. headquarters from New Jersey to Texas, where I hear the tax policies are different.

AND: A new CTAM/HUB survey of 3,000 folks about streaming app UI preferences confirmed that a streamer emphasizing “discovery” (i.e., what we want you to watch, but you didn’t ask for) over simple things more friendly to subscribers like, say, “Just being able to find my shit,” is to their detriment.

• 36% of respondents said that a crappy user experience (UX) was the main reason they canceled a streaming app.
• Many cited the ease of simply finding their watchlists and the things they were last watching as 2 of the top UX preferences. Something I’ll personally second has become increasingly hard to find on some apps.
• The ability to “pin” things like Watchlists or Continue Watching features to the top area of one’s apps was cited as a popular idea, which I certainly second.

ALSO: The Indian government had to take the step to tell META to remove ads and content that promote or facilitate child sexual abuse material on INSTAGRAM.

• It came shortly after a BBC investigation was launched after it noticed INSTA was pushing sexually suggestive content, even when a user hadn’t searched for that kind of material. Their subsequent investigation showed that the content around kids was being sent to proxy accounts that it had created in the country.

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💻 The Media Biz

Accurately comparing TV audience sizes over time, RIP

As we have a summer of yet more viewing records being broken — the World Cup being the primary winner (likely peaking last night), though fireworks and July 4th also had moments this weekend — it’s time we have a #realtalk about where TV viewership data is heading.

Namely — the era of real, accurate historical NIELSEN TV viewership comps likely ends in 2026.