Communications Major

Read Slate's report card on last night's ad for America's biggest TV audience of the year. We saw Bob Dylan, Scarlett Johansson, Bruce Willis and scores of other celebrities, animals and regular Joes (and Joanns) pitching beer, cars, and other assorted blather. Here are the "best" and the "worst" of these with accompanying video clips.

Netflix has given a good shaking to the settled world of television: it has provided its own series, streamed them over the Internet and made them available all at once everywhere.

Bingeing on a TV show used to be something you'd only do when home with the flu. Now it's how we want to consume TV all the time.

Whether we’ve been buying the DVD box set, DVR-ing a full season of our favorite show on our DVRs, ordering from On Demand in bulk, or just streaming an old show from Netflix or Amazon, we are more and more an audience who wants our programming on our own terms.

Leave it to Jodie Foster, the venerable 50-year-old star with the 47-year career, to unbalance the Twitterverse in a way the social network has not quite experienced yet.

Sure, the hijinks and hoo-has of thousands of public figures have lit up Twitter, the online stream-of-consciousness of social media about once a week over the past half decade. But Foster kicked things up a notch with a rambling, off-kilter, pop culty, coming out speech at last Sunday night's Golden Globe awards that made for an instant tweet-up.

Foster, who was being honored with a lifetime achievement award, took the opportunity to touch on topics that are obviously near and dear to her - her need for privacy and her need to confirm an aspect of her private life that has long been, in pre-social media parlance, an "open secret."

NBC has taken a lot of flack for its tape-delayed Olympic coverage.. The outcry has spawned the Twitter hashtag #nbcfail, which viewers have been appending to their complaints. The network has countered, however, with huge ratings for the prime-time broadcasts. Those ratings — more than the 2008 Beijing Games — seemingly support in-house research that those who have indulged in spoilers before the events are shown on television are actually more likely to watch them.

So, who’s right? The network or Twitter Nation? And how should it affect the future of Olympics coverage?

Data suggests that anywhere from 25 percent to 75 percent of people watching TV today are engaging with another screen at the same time

NBC's Christin Cooper drilled Bode Miller with three questions that seemed like they were trying to make him break down on camera after his medal-winning run at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. And the online response from those watching at home was swift. In true champion fashion (and maybe a little help from a social media consultant), Miller tweeted a classy response to the interview awkwardness several hours later. 

Looks like Netflix is King of the Stream -- and it has indeed changed the way we watch TV. 

there’s an overabundance of free movies streaming at this very moment as well — many of them legally (it seems!), thanks our old friend “the public domain,” whereby films whose copyright has lapsed (or never existed in the first place) can be made available for public consumption. Others are hosted gratis by services that simply want to share the wealth of great cinema. Whatever the case, with an awareness of how much everyone loves free stuff, here are 50 free movies that are well worth a watch. Clear your schedule accordingly.

Facebook has compiled a list of top moments from Sunday's Super Bowl game, and two of the three most talked-about moments had little to do with football.