Category: iT news

Spanish-language cable company Hemisphere Media has launched a streaming service today in conjunction with Lionsgate’s film division, according to a press release.

This is the third streaming service Lionsgate has collaborated on in a little over a year, following Kevin Hart’s Laugh Out Loud in March 2016 and Comic-Con HQ in May 2016.

Image: Pantaya

The service, called Pantaya, will cost $5.99 per month and will be available in the US only. Subscriptions (and a seven-day free trial) are available for iOS, Android, and Roku apps, a browser version, and as one of Amazon Prime’s relatively new Amazon Channels. The service will include “current and classic” Spanish-language films, as well as documentaries and concerts. Notably, major Spanish-language film studio Pantelion (partly owned by Lionsgate) will add films to the service on the same day as their theatrical release.

Lionsgate, which owns the streaming rights to over 16,000 films, will contribute classic English-language movies dubbed in Spanish. Lionsgate stated in the release, “The service features the largest, most current, and most diverse selection of Spanish-language blockbusters and critically acclaimed films from Latin America and Hollywood.” Hemisphere CEO Alan Sokol emphasized that the service is targeted at “Hispanic movie lovers in the US,” looking to “connect with their cultures.”

Image: Pantaya

The interface looks pretty nice; it’s basically a teal-and-gray, pared-down version of Netflix. The intention to offer day-and-date film releases is another similarity between the two streaming services. However, Lionsgate’s approach differs in that it’s had a stake in Pantelion since 2010, and doesn’t need to cultivate a production arm from scratch. Yesterday, the LA Times reported that Netflix’s ambitious original content strategy has put it $20 billion in debt.

LG is set to debut a new device — likely its V30 flagship phone — on August 31st, a day before the IFA consumer electronics trade show in Berlin. Up until today, we had no idea of what to expect from the phone, apart from a rumored switch to OLED displays from LCD. Yesterday, though, we got the clearest image yet from OnLeaks. Unfortunately, it’s only an outline of the phone from its user manual.

The V30 looks a lot like the V20. It has a dual-camera system and a rear fingerprint sensor. The front-facing camera does seem to be arranged slightly differently in that it’s embedded in the top bezel, and it seems like LG is getting rid of the “second screen” that was on the prior two models, or at least blending it into the rest of the display.

LG reportedly considered adding a sliding secondary display that looked different than any other flagship device. I hoped it was real, although when VentureBeat‘s Evan Blass leaked images of it back in May, he noted that they were based on an old concept and didn’t represent a final product. Now we know for sure the second display isn’t happening. I’m sad! It was so cool! Let’s take a look at that old idea one more time:

Goodbye, phone concept. Maybe we’ll see you again someday in another device. We’ll be thinking of you.

Back in 2015, California-based startup 3D Robotics seemed poised to compete for the top spot in the consumer drone market. It had a great reputation among the hobbyist community and a slick unit called the Solo. Unfortunately, the Solo’s performance and sales didn’t live up to expectations, and last year, 3D Robotics bowed out of the consumer drone game.

The company is now focused on enterprise software, specifically an offering called Site Scan that aims to help construction and engineering firms better manage their building sites and operations. Starting today, 3D Robotics’ mobile app will work with DJI drones. “At this point it’s pretty clear DJI offers the best hardware platform for both consumer and commercial. In economics this is the division of labor, the specialization,” said 3D Robotics CEO Chris Anderson. “No one company can do it all, especially given the rapid growth of the commercial sector, where it’s all about integration with specific tool kits.” Growth in the use of drones for construction has been impressive, and is forecast to continue growing.

The dream of an American-made drone competing for the top of the market isn’t totally dead. GoPro has said publicly that it’s committed to its Karma line, despite technical issues that forced a recall late last year. And the Solo drone is now back as an open-source platform that any hacker or entrepreneur can build on top of. Meanwhile, companies like the Drone Racing League are building record-setting hardware.

For now, DJI — with its vertical integration and relatively closed operating system — is dominating the market. But that may change as more consumers and companies become interested in owning a flying camera. “The history of these industries would suggest that the marketplace wants competition, and that there are advantages to both the more open and more closed approaches,” says Anderson. The Android of aerial robotics may come from an unexpected place.

You may eventually be able to inspect food at the supermarket just by tapping it with your phone. The NFC Forum — the group behind the short-range wireless standard — said today that it has partnered with the Active & Intelligent Packaging Industry Association to help develop smart packaging for food and other products.

The groups expect early examples to include “interactive tags and labels” that would pull up information about a product on your phone. The groups also say NFC-enabled time and temperature monitors could be put to early use, possibly allowing grocers to know how long a cut of meat has been sitting out and whether its temperature has been properly maintained.

Nearly every phone on the market supports NFC, so embedding NFC into product packaging opens up a lot of possibilities. Plenty of packaging already includes QR codes, but those don’t provide a very elegant experience: you need to have an app that reads QR codes, open that app, then scan the code before being directed to a webpage. With NFC, you’d theoretically be able to get the information with just a tap.

That said, NFC presents a lot more hurdles: QR codes can just be printed on a box, while NFC requires electronics and a battery. And while that’s all relatively cheap compared to everything else inside a smartphone, it’s probably pretty expensive compared to typical product packaging.

Those hurdles suggest that, at least for a while, NFC-enabled packaging will likely only be used in limited circumstances. It could be used on packaging for higher-end products, or it might be better used for bulk packaging, since it could give people handling inventory more information on what they’re working with, rather than for every individual package presented to customers in a store.

The two industry groups expect the day to come when NFC is useable for that kind of consumer application, though. They claim NFC-enabled packaging will increase “at a double-digit annual rate” until “NFC becomes more commercially feasible for large-volume consumer products instead of for primarily high-value goods.” Their hope is that smarter packaging will let companies “lower costs, reduce waste, and increase profitability.” Though, again, they’ll have to do that to a large enough extent to offset the costs of embedding NFC equipment and other sensors all over the place.

In addition to its partnership on smart packaging, the NFC Forum announced a second agreement today: one with the Wireless Power Consortium to make NFC work better with the Qi wireless charging standard. It’s not entirely clear how the two groups see the two standards working together, but they claim the partnership could lead to smaller and cheaper charging devices.

Microsoft is launching a new Surface Plus program in the US today, helping spread the cost of a new devices over two years. Surface Plus acts like a cellphone contract, with a 24-month payment plan at zero percent APR for the first two years and 19.99 percent APR thereafter. Microsoft is also allowing Surface Plus customers to upgrade their devices after 18 months, providing the existing device is returned and in “good condition.”

The Surface Plus program will also include dedicated device service and support through Microsoft’s retail stores, alongside a year of free in-store support and technical assistance. Microsoft is also launching a business version of Surface Plus that allows businesses to have a mix of devices and even the 55-inch Surface Hub. The business version also includes flexibility on the length of contracts, with the ability to choose between 18, 24, or 30 month periods. Businesses will be able to upgrade devices after 12 months on a 24-month term, or after 18 months on the longer 30 month period. Both Surface Plus programs launch today in the US at 12PM ET / 9AM PT.

The internet is changing, and it is not doing so in favor of anything that is soft or weird or unprofitable. Vine is dead. SoundCloud is dying. Tumblr has been in crisis for years and is now owned by Verizon. YouTube, once a wonderland where it was easy and fun to find something bizarre to watch and share and love, has morphed over 10 years into a glorified ad platform with a homepage that favors music videos, movie trailers, and vloggers with professional setups and millions of subscribers.

But one good, soft, weird thing remains. And while it literally goes gentle into that good night, it won’t figuratively go gentle into that good night. That’s the acoustic song cover recorded in an ugly bedroom. As long as YouTube has existed, this has been a signature format. Most of the videos are recorded from an angle that implies the use of a built-in webcam. Most of the bedrooms are beige, with the minutiae of the parts of life that are spent indoors lingering around the frame. Most of the singers wear T-shirts and don’t bother to push piles of laundry and crumpled comforters out of the background.

In 2014, writer Paul Ford used amateur production YouTube videos to define “The American Room,” crediting this video style with a unique and useful window into the homes of the 100 million people who live in the nation’s suburbs. He wrote, “All of their frolic is bounded by a set of conventions that are essentially invisible yet define our national physical and technological architecture. Their dancing, talking bodies are the only non-standardized things in the videos.”

Non-standardized singing heads are comforting to me for two reasons. For one, they are acting out, as Ford argued, against the blandness of their surroundings. Almost any bedroom is just as stupid-looking as all of these, and it’s nice to consider yourself the only interesting thing in yours. More importantly, a video that takes place only in a bedroom, oriented solely around the quiet performance of a piece of music, doesn’t suggest anything of a world outside itself. Other than, by way of volume, the likely desire to go unheard by parents or siblings.

The outside world is coming for the rest of YouTube — with political scandals rocking its biggest communities, enormous personalities demanding their own tabloid coverage, and brands trying to figure out if there are non-risky ways to make some money on one of the web’s biggest platforms. But here, we’re just hanging out. We’re all fine. We just have a few minutes of free time.

You can find a nice bedroom cover version of essentially anything, making a song you’ve heard too many times fresh again with a new arrangement and a new voice with interesting flaws and vulnerable presentation. This is the only thing that I like at the end of a long, bad week online.

This young woman does a few nervous duck faces while she’s performing a relaxing ukulele cover of the best song of 2016. Her video was posted in October of last year, a full two months after Frank Ocean’s Blonde was released. I bet, for a lot of people, it was just the right moment for a cover that reminded them of the original that they had played 3,000 times, but also sounded a little different.

What a useful service, and it’s for free.

One of the best subgenres of acoustic bedroom covers is “teenagers covering The Strokes,” because there is just something really sweet about people who were babies when The Strokes were popular finding this song many years later and feeling a rush of discovery. I’ve watched at least a dozen covers of “Is This It” in particular and it’s beautiful that every single person uses the first “we’re not enemies” in the chorus to show off their chops. It’s an aspiring disaffected-cool-kid move to pick out a Strokes song, but the sincere kid peeks out from behind the curtain on that line seemingly every time.

The “stuff” in this video is worth noting, too. The hand-painted Snoopy poster, the cheap-looking candles, the bookshelf with what looks like some summer reading assignments — thank you for letting me into your life a little bit!

Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl” is a rock song, with a melodramatic, roaring guitar line. But it’s important that a version like the above cover exists. In the original, “I think I’ll regret this” is a throwaway line that you can easily just not even hear, but this woman pulls it out into a new emotional centerpiece of the song. I can see her Beyoncé poster and her laundry hamper while she’s breaking my heart, which is, I think, a fair exchange.

And she messes up a little at the 1:20 mark. Cover artists, maybe afraid that they won’t have the guts to start again if they have to stop, often make mistakes and keep going. This is anti-“content.” It hasn’t been scrubbed of its flinches or missed beats and edited to perfection. It’s a little bad, and I like that better.

With each new platform and software update, it feels harder and harder to come by authenticity online. But for all YouTube’s flaws, and all of its aggressive moves to turn teens into stars (and advertising commodities), the site still freely hosts young people with nothing more than a room, a guitar, a voice, and a little gumption.

It’s wild that finding them is still as easy as typing the name of any song you’ve ever liked into the YouTube search bar and then scrolling. If anything ever messes with this feature of the internet then forget it.

The thing about interactive head-mounted displays is that they hold great promise, but so far, have resulted in unnatural optics, awkward social interactions, and an overall sense of discomfort, whether it’s about the products themselves or the future that we seem to be barreling toward. Or, you could cite an example like Microsoft’s HoloLens, which, as a standalone PC on your face, is an impressive technical feat. But so far it has found a niche firmly in the enterprise market.

That’s what a company called Avegant thinks it can change. Avegant is most well-known for the Glyph, first introduced in 2013. The Glyph (now just called the Personal Video Headset) uses a patented technology called virtual retinal display, which is a technical way of saying the company came up with a way to shine videos directly into your eyeballs. But about two years ago, technologists at Avegant began looking into transparent display technology, and eventually landed on the thing it believes will someday replace our smartphones: light field displays.

For this episode of Next Level, The Verge video team and I visited Avegant’s headquarters in Belmont, California, and I experienced the latest version of Avegant’s light field display headset prototype. My co-worker Nick Statt also tried this back in March, but Avegant says the prototype has been significantly refined since then, and that no one has captured it on video before this.

Photo by Cynthia Gill / The Verge

From the exterior, Avegant’s headset prototype doesn’t look any more refined than most other “mixed reality” headsets we’ve tried. And unlike Microsoft’s HoloLens, it’s tethered (attached via cable) to a desktop PC running Unity’s game engine. But inside the headset’s optics engine is where things get interesting. Avegant is using what’s known as a “multi-focal plane approach” to send digital imagery directly to your eyes in a way that’s supposed to replicate the way our eyes naturally perceive things and shift focus.

It’s a highly technical concept, one that we explain in more depth in the episode, but one way to imagine it is this: normally, when we’re wearing “smart glasses” or another kind of AR / MR headset, you’re often seeing a flat, 2D image on the display, one with a fixed focal point. And when that display is mashed up against your face, it just doesn’t feel natural.

By creating a digital approximation of how our eyes normally perceive light fields, Avegant has made a headset that allows your eyes to shift focus from digital object to digital object and feel more… normal. So, as I shifted my eyes from planet to planet in a digital Solar System that floated around me, my eyes didn’t feel strained. Objects had volume, and although they were digital representations, they looked realistic. The same went for when I was holding digital objects in my hand, and moving my arm from a near position to an outstretched one.

All of this might have anyone who has followed the mixed reality space asking: But how does it compare to Magic Leap? Magic Leap is the super-secretive, Florida-based company that to date has raised more than $1 billion to finance development of a light field headset. The short answer is: we don’t really know yet. Relatively few people have seen or tried Magic Leap’s tech, and not surprisingly the company declined to share more specific details by phone. But Magic Leap has shared that it’s working on what you might call a “full stack” solution: it’s building the computing system, the processors, the headset, the software, and they’re even said to be working directly with content creators.

Photo by Cynthia Gil / The Verge

Avegant’s plan, on the other hand, is to license its technology to other hardware makers who either already are or looking to get into head-mounted displays. Chief executive Joerg Tewes says that Avegant’s technology will start showing up in other headsets by 2018, largely in the commercial space at first, but with consumer versions to follow.

But Avegant’s grander vision is that it’s this kind of technology that will make head-mounted displays so good, that they will eventually replace our smartphones. Both Tewes and chief technology officer Ed Tang told me that they think it’s only a matter of time before people are carrying around lightweight, light field glasses that can show us the information we need right in front of our eyes, which would supplant the glass rectangles we all stare at now.

“I think from the very get-go, one of the most exciting that things we saw happening in the space was this trend toward wearable computing,” Tang said. “We always knew that, as things were moving to mobile devices like phones and tablets, that the next evolution of that was this idea of the ambient computer. Something that I can put on like glasses, and wear, and suddenly I’m surrounded by these experiences, and not limited to the screens that we can fit in our pockets and in our bags… so first we set out to get rid of the screen.”

For more on how Avegant thinks it can make this kind of mixed reality our new reality, check out the Next Level episode above.

YouTube has been cracking down on extremist content over the past couple months, and today the company is announcing some details on its progress and a few additional policy changes. One of the biggest: YouTube will now begin limiting the reach of videos that have “controversial religious or supremacist content” but don’t strictly violate the website’s hate speech guidelines.

Videos that get flagged by users but, on review, aren’t deemed to be in violation of the site’s rules may now be subject to several new restrictions. That includes being placed behind an interstitial (showing some kind of warning), being unable to run ads, and the loss of community features such as comments, likes, and suggested videos.

The changes are an improvement over the status quo, but it’s not entirely clear why YouTube isn’t choosing to ban these videos outright if they’re deemed to be controversial enough to hide. Asked for clarification, a YouTube spokesperson pointed us to a line in an op-ed written by Google’s general counsel, Kent Walker, back in June, when plans for this policy were first announced. “We think this strikes the right balance between free expression and access to information without promoting extremely offensive viewpoints,” Walker wrote. He said the videos will “have less engagement and be harder to find” as a result of the changes.

It’s not entirely clear what YouTube will consider to be nearly but not quite in violation of its rules. YouTube’s existing rules say any video that “promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on certain attributes” such as gender or ethnicity isn’t allowed on the site. These changes will come to YouTube’s desktop site in the “coming weeks” and to mobile sometime “soon thereafter.”

YouTube also says it’s begun working with 15 additional expert groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, to help flag extremist content. YouTube announced earlier this year that it plans to expand the number of trusted review partners to over 100 — it started around 60 — and this appears to be part of that expansion.

But the thing that YouTube says has been most helpful so far is its increased reliance on machine learning to flag extremist content. After launching the feature in June, YouTube says it doubled the number of videos it removes for “violent extremism” and that 75 percent of those videos were removed before any humans flagged them. “Our machine learning systems are faster and more effective than ever before,” the company writes in a blog post.

Along with other social media sites, YouTube has been under pressure to better police the content users publish on its platform. The EU is close to requiring companies like YouTube to block videos that incite terrorism, and Germany recently passed a law doing much the same thing. YouTube has been addressing the issue in multiple ways, including both ramping up its efforts to remove violent and extremist content and directing people seeking out such videos to playlists that debunk their hateful rhetoric.

Google is planning to introduce a built-in ad blocker for its Chrome browser next year. While Google has already warned publishers about the change, the ad blocker is now starting to show up in pre-release versions of the Chrome for Android app. TechCrunch reports that the ad blocker can be found in the latest Chrome Canary app for Android. Testers can download the latest Chrome Canary build from Google Play to try out the ad blocker.

While Google makes the majority of its revenue through its own ad business, it’s determined to tackle what it describes as “intrusive ads.” Unacceptable ads are being determined by a group called the Coalition for Better Ads, which includes Google, Facebook, News Corp, and The Washington Post as members. The controversial addition of an ad blocker directly within Chrome will likely generate a lot of debate around Google’s control of the web and ads, and this test version will help direct that feedback to Google.

It’s not clear exactly when the ad blocker will make it into the beta or stable channels of Chrome, but Canary features often take months to reach a stable release. During our own testing at The Verge, we weren’t able to detect blocked ads, but it’s entirely possible this is a limited test right now.