A big part is also residuals, they don’t want to have to keep paying actors, directors, and others involved with production, after the fact on a losing property. If there is zero income there are zero continued payments.

Those are potential connections, outside will be how many you are actually connected to. The potential connections number also isn’t live so don’t take it as fact.

Yeah it’s pretty cool! Star Trek had been a bit of a directors boot camp for a while, I know several members from TNG, DS9, and Voyager went on into directing.

In regards to your question about hidden methods to catch people, back before digital each film print sent to a theater had a unique “CAP Code” printed directly onto the 35mm film. This was a series of dots in a unique pattern that would show up several times on screen. So when a cam rip would show up somewhere this could be used to narrow down which theater it was recorded at and identify trends after several films.

I don’t know if this was ever successfully used to prosecute anyone though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_anti-piracy

Viewing distance and bitrate are most important. Sitting too close will make many things look bad.

For a 32 inch display you want to be 4 and a half feet back, and for a cinematic view you want 3 feet back.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-relationship

https://youtu.be/HDJsDJ-DD98

This is from the finale, but I don’t think it’s the firework scene

Didn’t the caretaker want the array destroyed after his death so the kazon couldn’t get it and its tech, I believe voyager was worried about the kazon disabling any bomb they left behind.