An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A GitHub user who goes by the name "Widevinedump" has published several repositories that allow people to download HD video from popular streaming platforms, including Disney+, Amazon, and Netflix. The code appears to be the real deal but the 'free' use is fairly limited and may not be very secure either. [...] TorrentFreak spoke to a source who confirmed that these scrips are indeed the real deal. That said, they appear to be relatively old pieces of code that may not be the most secure. Using these tools could get someone banned by a streaming platform, or perhaps worse.

There is another major issue that raises suspicion. Most of the download tools don't come with the Content Decryption Module (CDM) that's included to download 4K content. To gain access to that, people are required to buy it from the leaker, who writes that people can contact them via email. That said, there is also a free L1 Content Decryption Module posted in the 'LenovoTB-X505X-L1-KEY' repository. A trusted source confirmed to TorrentFreak that this CDM is indeed working. However, as Widevinedump also notes, it may not be active for much longer.

While these leaks are a major blow to the streaming platforms, which do all they can to keep their content secure, the developer has another agenda. In addition to selling CDMs, the code was apparently leaked to "punish" some people on Discord, who we assume shared it privately. "Hi! My name is WVDUMP. I am Leaking the CDM to burn it & punish few idiots that think themselves as dicord lords [sic]," the developer writes. Needless to say, using these tools can lead to all sorts of trouble and is clearly in violation of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. As such, we doubt they will stay on GitHub for much longer.

When The Matrix Resurrections premiered in San Francisco, the city's mayor "celebrated the appearance of her fair city in the film and cheered the film's economic contributions to the region," reports SFGate. "But there's a problem of aesthetics at play here... It is undeniably a dystopian hellscape where police rule the city and technology looms over all..." In the first section of the movie, the metaphor of the Matrix mirrors that of the tech industry depicted in the film. Tech is stereotypical here — lots of T-shirt-wearing men playing ping-pong and talking about how to design the next great video game. The most annoying character in the film, Jude (Andrew Caldwell), is a proxy for all annoying tech bros...
Meanwhile Politico writes that the original 1999 film The Matrix actually "changed politics, almost entirely by mistake," and calls the new Matrix Resurections "a sophisticated self-critique of the culture that swallowed it." In the past two decades, the idea of a "red pill" has taken on a life of its own in American culture, most prominently at first in an infamous misogynist subreddit, and then more broadly as a symbol of any kind of political awakening, almost always on the right. The idea has proliferated wildly throughout politics, and especially the darkest ideological corners of the internet, in which to be "red-pilled" means to realize that American society has been hopelessly debased by liberals, requiring a total rethink of its premises... Hugo Weaving, who memorably portrayed the original films' villain, lamented in a 2020 interview how people "will take something that they think is cool and they will repurpose it to fit themselves when the original intention or meaning of that thing was quite the opposite...." [T]he Wachowskis have been largely silent about the "meaning" of their creation — a movie franchise that not only became a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon, but predicted the cultural tenor of politics in the digital age with an eerie, oracular accuracy. We know they got it right, but what did they think about it?

Wednesday saw the release of "The Matrix Resurrections," a long-delayed sequel from one of the original writer/directors (Lana directed; Lilly sat it out) — and also an answer to that question. As a movie, it's everything its predecessors was, an impressive feat of visual-effects artistry, action choreography and original sci-fi worldbuilding. But even more, it's a two hour and 27-minute-long piece of cultural criticism. The film interrogates, to a jarringly specific degree, not just its own iconography, but how American culture has evolved around and bastardized it over the past two decades. "The Matrix Resurrections" is both wildly successful popcorn entertainment and a window into a long-misunderstood creative mind. But in refitting its entire premise to the social media age, it illustrates just how much the contours of American society have changed in the intervening decades....

The original "Matrix" was deeply of its time. Reeves' Neo a was a quintessential late 1990s corporate drone, captive to the professional ennui also depicted in films of the era like "Fight Club" and "Office Space." Its modern incarnation is a cry of protest against something else: society's willingness to trade individual agency for the neurological reward pellets of the Online. Visual metaphors abound, with Reeves disoriented by a procession of mirrors that serve as gateways to another world, another possible truth. "Your brain is hooked on this shit the Matrix has been feeding you for years," one character tells him. "They don't know you like I do.

"I know exactly what you need...."
The movie is streaming now on HBOMax for subscribers in their $15 ad-free tier — but, like, Dune, only during its 31-day theatrical run.

While 1999 movie influenced everything from videogames to action movies to the metaverse, latest installment shows some restraint. From a report: The jaw-dropping visual effects in "The Matrix" transformed the quest to prove what is possible on screen. The franchise returns this week to find out if there is anything more that can be done. For the 1999 original, filmmakers invented a way to make Keanu Reeves's hero, Neo, defy physics while dodging bullets on screen. The effect blew enough minds to get a nickname -- "bullet time" -- plus changed the look of action movies, and influenced mediums from animation to videogames. For the new sequel, "The Matrix Resurrections," filmmakers deployed much-higher-caliber technologies, including three-dimensional imagery made using artificial intelligence. But after 22 years of digital evolution, high-end movie effects are approaching a plateau near perfection. "We went from pulling off what seemed to be impossible, to a sort of inability to create surprise" in the movie industry, says John Gaeta, who helped craft the bullet-time effect. He was a visual-effects designer on the first three "Matrix" films; now he is making things for the metaverse.

This year the movies presented us with a car slingshotting from cliff to cliff ("F9"); Ryan Reynolds running amok inside a videogame ("Free Guy"); and giant monsters crushing the Hong Kong skyline ("Godzilla vs. Kong"). Any viewers who paused to ask themselves -- "How did they do that?" -- likely came up with the same answer: "Computers." Human characters that are totally computer-generated and believable are still on the frontier, "but I'm not sure if there is anything else that can't be done given enough money or time," says Ian Failes, editor of befores and afters, a magazine covering visual-effects artistry. Despite any numbness among viewers to digital spectacles, Hollywood's demand for them has only increased. Visual-effects houses have raced to compete in a global production boom and fuel the streaming wars with flashy content. Some directors are reacting to the VFX arms race by practicing more restraint. Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" depicts settings such as the desert planet Arrakis with a naturalistic look. Instead of zooming viewers into a fleet of attacking space ships, the director presented the nighttime ambush in silhouette at a distance, conveying a somber sense of scale. "He was just showing the reality of the world," says Namit Malhotra, chief executive of DNEG, a visual-effects company that worked on "Dune" and "The Matrix Resurrections." He adds: "When you're spending that kind of money, it's hard for filmmakers to control the desire for more, a little more oomph."

In the new "Matrix" release, director and co-writer Lana Wachowski plays with expectations that the sequel must level up. Spoiler alert: In the movie, Mr. Reeves's character is reintroduced as a videogame designer whose big hit was called, yes, "The Matrix." The events in the film franchise supposedly happened within the world of his videogame -- including that signature action sequence in which Neo bends time and space. As a group of videogame developers brainstorm ideas for a sequel to "The Matrix," one declares, "We need a new bullet time!" The original bullet time was "a borderline hack," as Mr. Gaeta recalls it, that started with 120 still cameras firing off film photographs of Mr. Reeves dangling on wires. Those images were stitched together with software to simulate a swooping camera move in slow motion. The successor to that technique is known as volumetric capture. A camera array captures people or spaces from every angle, and then A.I. meshes this video into 3-D footage that can be viewed and manipulated from any perspective.

TikTok is testing a Windows program called TikTok Live Studio that will let users watch them play video games live on TikTok. TechCrunch reports: Once downloaded to your desktop, the program allows users to log in with their TikTok account and stream directly to TikTok Live. Within the program, you can communicate with viewers through the chat feature, and you can stream content from your computer, your phone or a gaming console. TikTok told TechCrunch that this program is currently available only in a handful of Western markets for a few thousand users. [...] Live Studio isn't guaranteed to roll out, the company told TechCrunch -- whenever TikTok tests a feature, that doesn't mean it's here to stay forever. But if we do see a true launch of TikTok Live Studio, the platform will study what creators are using the software for, then tailor it to better suit those use cases. [...] This streaming software could also mark an opportunity for TikTok to reach more desktop users.

Nearly six years after Netflix launched its service in India, the global streaming giant is still struggling to find customers willing to pay for what is already its cheapest subscription globally. From a report: The American firm on Tuesday further lowered the subscription price in India, cutting each monthly subscription tier's cost by at least 18% and up to 60.1%. The Netflix Basic plan, which permits streaming on any device but caps the resolution at 480p, now costs 199 Indian rupees ($2.6) in India, down from 499 Indian rupees ($6.6). Netflix Standard, which improves the video resolution to HD (720p) and permits two simultaneous views, now costs 499 Indian rupees, down from 649 Indian rupees ($8.5). Netflix Premium, which offers four simultaneous views and streams in UltraHD (4K) video quality, now costs 649 Indian rupees, down from â799 ($10.5).

Google is bringing Android games from Google Play to Windows laptops, PCs, and tablets, the company announced on Thursday. Gizmodo reports: Google announced a standalone Google Play Games launcher that lets gamers play mobile titles on Windows PCs at The Game Show Awards on Thursday. The upcoming app will allow players to close out of their game on one device and resume playing where they left off on another. This means you could switch between a Chromebook, Windows PC, and Android phone without losing saved data. The app, which is being built and distributed by Google, runs games locally on your system, no cloud streaming required. So far, Google has only teased the service in a brief video clip, so some important details haven't been revealed. We do, however, know it is set to arrive sometime in 2022.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Decrypt: Today, the publisher behind Assassin's Creed and Just Dance revealed Ubisoft Quartz, a platform that lets players earn and purchase in-game items that are tokenized as NFTs on the Tezos blockchain. Quartz will launch first in the PC version of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, the latest online game in the long-running tactical shooter series. Quartz will launch in beta on December 9 in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, and Australia. Ghost Recon Breakpoint players who have reached XP level 5 in the game can access the NFT drops. Ubisoft's release says that players must be at least 18 years old to create a Tezos wallet for use with the game.

Ubisoft is referring to its NFT drops as "Digits" and plans to release free NFTs for early adopters on December 9, 12, and 15, with further drops planned for 2022. An infographic shows items such as weapon skins and unique armor and apparel, along with a message that teases future initiatives: "This is just the beginning" [...] Much of Ubisoft's announcement today highlights the difference in environmental impact between the proof-of-stake Tezos blockchain and the energy-intensive Bitcoin. Tezos claims that a single transaction on its network uses "more than 2 million times less energy" than Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency. It also suggests that a single Tezos transaction uses about as much energy as a 30-second streaming video, whereas a Bitcoin transaction is estimated to measure up to the environmental impact of a full, uninterrupted year of streaming video footage.

"Streamers are not really known for hard partying..." writes the Guardian's videogames editor, after meeting the up-and-coming stars of Twitch.

"I was instead astonished — and, honestly, worried — by how hard they worked." The woman sitting next to me told me that she streams for eight to 10 hours every day, and when she wasn't live she was curating her social media, responding to fans, scouting for brand partnerships or collaborations with other streamers; throughout our conversation she was visibly resisting the impulse to check her phone, where new stats and fan comments and potential opportunities were presumably stacking up. I asked what she does for fun and she seemed genuinely confused by the question.

Playing video games for an audience for a living sounds like fun — and hell, there are many worse jobs out there — but it is also an ultra-competitive profession that attracts millions of aspiring kids with limitless energy and absolutely no concept of work-life balance. It involves extreme hours and intense pressure to be constantly available to the audience of viewers on whom they depend. And according to recently leaked Twitch data, the top 1% of streamers on its platform received more than half of the $889m (£660m) it paid out to creators last year; three quarters of the rest made $120 (£89) or less. Millions made nothing at all.

I was not surprised, over the following years, to read story after story about these energetic young people — with what must have seemed like the best job in the world — burning out. When you are broadcasting yourself so much of the time, when your hobby becomes your job and your job becomes your hobby, and when your personality becomes your brand and your brand becomes your personality, what does life offline look like for you? Who are you when the camera is off? The fact is that, especially for up-and-coming streamers trying to make it in the crowded world of playing video games on the internet, the camera is almost never off. Sticking to a regular schedule is the best way to build an audience on Twitch, and those schedules regularly involve at least eight hours of continuous streaming, five days a week or more... The reasons for these ultra-demanding hours are simple: the more you broadcast, the greater your chances of being featured on Twitch's homepage, the more followers you accrue, and the more money you might eventually make.
The article acknowledges that among Twitch streamers, "tens of thousands of creators make at least a livable wage.

"It is no wonder, then, that many streamers end up obsessed with the numbers and graphs and invisible algorithms that determine their fate."

The world's largest music company has created a band of four virtual apes. Bloomberg reports: Universal Music, the home to top-selling musicians like Drake and Taylor Swift, is working with collector Jimmy McNelis to convert four of his NFTs into a band called Kingship. Kingship consists of four digital characters -- three bored apes and one mutant ape -- all part of an NFT collection known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The club is one of the most successful NFT stories of the past year; it gave anyone who bought one of the apes full commercial rights to use the image.

10:22PM, one of Universal's labels, has hired a team of crypto artists and animators to turn the two-dimensional apes into three-dimensional beings. The company will record music for Kingship that it releases on streaming services. The "band" will perform and participate in video games, virtual-reality applications and across the constellation of digital experiences known as the metaverse. "You can call it an NFT band, or think of them as characters," Celine Joshua, the head of 10:22, said in an interview this week. "The characters will come to life. The apes will come to life."

As technophiles coalesce around the idea of Web 3.0 -- a decentralized internet -- Joshua has jumped into the world of NFTs. That's how she met McNelis, one of the leading collectors. McNelis acquired hundreds of ape NFTs from Yuga Labs LLC, the creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and has a collection that he estimates is worth more than $100 million. He was an early buyer of Ethereum, a cryptocurrency. Joshua pitched him on the idea of creating a new group, and picked four characters that she thought would work as a band. That includes a golden ape, another of which just sold at Sotheby's for $3.4 million. Kingship's golden ape is valued at around $190,000 at current prices, according to offer data on OpenSea, the largest marketplace for NFTs.

First it was called Freedive, then it was dubbed IMDb TV. Now, less than three years after launching its free ad-supported video-streaming service, Amazon is looking to rename it, The Information reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the situation. From a report: Amazon executives believe the existing name is too hard for people to pronounce, which hurts its popularity, said people familiar with the situation. Several alternatives have been tossed around in internal discussions, including Zon -- short for Amazon -- as well as Free TV and Free Streaming TV. The Zon idea was shot down but otherwise Amazon is yet to make a decision about the new name, the people said.

Ana Diaz writes via Polygon: Jack Morrison logs on to stream, he doesn't boot up Twitch, Streamlabs OBS, or speak into a fancy microphone. Instead, he grabs a basic circular mirror and sets it in front of his desktop monitor, facing the screen. Then he sits in front of his monitor, as usual, and plays the game, propping up his cell phone to face him and setting his camera live. When he boots up Apex Legends, viewers see the gameplay reflected in the mirror as they watch him play. This makeshift setup might have been surprising just a year ago, in an industry that seems to be more and more concerned with having the latest streaming technology. But it's become a rather common practice on TikTok, where video game streaming has picked up in the past few months. In September, the company said that one billion people in total use the app each month, and jokes and sounds riffing on video games have long proliferated widely across TikTok. Now, Morrison (JackMorrisonTV on TikTok) and other streamers with similarly crude setups have taken over the app's "LIVE" section, capturing as many as 2,400 viewers at a time.

These streamers are using low-key setups, in comparison to the complex (and expensive) setups that dominate Twitch, where a DSLR camera and the capture card to use it can cost over $800. The exact build of each TikToker's setup varies, but nearly all of them capture video via an external camera that's focused on a screen, or in Morrison's case, a reflection of a screen. A brief scroll through the gaming section of TikTok's live content shows these streamers' ingenuity; some will stream videos of tablets or phones as they play mobile games, while others will just put the camera in front of a screen. The games also vary widely, with people playing games like Snake, Minecraft, and Wordscapes in addition to shooters like Valorant.

The number of live streams is much smaller than the wave of short-form videos being pushed out every single day on the app, making them stand out more. It also feels like a more accessible platform, especially for people who are just getting started with streaming. TikTok streamers are using more basic technology, such as mirrors, cell phone stands, and the like. It's also less competitive than Twitch, which has over seven million unique streamers go live each month. [...] TikTok is also testing monetization features that might make it more appealing for streamers to use. [...] For now, streams seem like a quick and easy way to take advantage of TikTok's massive audience. Whether or not bona fide TikTok streaming stars will emerge on the platform or find a sustainable home there remains to be seen.

Netflix, the video-streaming giant, began its expected foray into video games with the introduction of five mobile games to its users worldwide, playable initially on Android devices. From a report: The titles are included in a Netflix subscription, and there'll be no advertising or additional purchases required, Mike Verdu, Netflix's vice president of game development, said Tuesday. The streaming company has targeted video games as its next big thing -- it's an industry that's larger than the movie and TV businesses. Players logging in will see a dedicated games row and tab where they can choose which titles to play. Games for Apple's iPhone are also planned. The initial offering includes titles linked to Netflix shows, such as Stranger Things: 1984 and Stranger Things 3: The Game. Also included are Shooting Hoops, Card Blast and Teeter Up.

Something is slowing internet subscriber growth at Comcast and Charter, reports Bloomberg, "raising concerns about an end to what has been a huge growth business."

But why? Explanations ranging from a slowdown in consumer spending to competition from phone giants. Slashdot reader JoeyRox shared this report from Bloomberg: Charter on Friday reported 25% fewer new broadband subscribers than analysts estimated and said the overall number of new customers would fall back to 2018 levels. Comcast, which had earlier cut its subscriber forecast, reported 300,000 new internet customers Thursday, less than half the number added a year ago. Analysts were expecting some slowdown in demand coming off 2020, a year when broadband sign-ups spiked as the pandemic shifted people to working and schooling from home. Still, with Charter echoing Comcast's gloomy picture from Thursday, suddenly there's a chill on the cable broadband front, which became the most prized segment of the business as consumers cut traditional TV service.

Charter's shortfall raises "questions about whether this is the beginning of the end of the cable broadband story," said Geetha Ranganathan, an industry analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence...

Both Charter and Comcast blamed a slower new home market for some of the slack in demand, leaving the companies to try and squeeze more business out of their saturated markets. Other factors could include a dropoff in lower-paying customers as government assisted broadband funds dry up... New competition from phone companies certainly doesn't help. AT&T Inc. is expanding its network and added 289,000 new fiber internet customers last quarter. Meanwhile, T-Mobile US Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. are very excited about new wireless home broadband offers that aim directly at cable and outlying areas where cable could potentially expand.

Changes in TV viewing may also be a factor. For decades, cable companies sold TV and internet in discounted bundles. With rise of streaming video "the cable promos aren't as appealing for broadband only," Lopez said. Even as Comcast and Charter deploy new faster network technology to attract more lucrative customers, cable's share of the market is starting to shrink, according to Tammy Parker, a senior analyst with GlobalData.

ISPs around the world claim the unprecedented bandwidth demands Netflix's Squid Game is placing on their broadband networks means they should be getting more money. From a report: But experts say that's not how telecom networks work, suggesting that already cash-flush telecom giants are just positioning themselves for an underserved hand out. The popular South Korean thriller, a not so thinly-veiled critique of late-stage capitalism, tracks a group of indebted people who compete in deadly children's games for cash. According to Netflix, Squid Game is the most popular show in company history, the number one program in 94 countries, and has been watched by 142 million households. ISPs around the world also claim the show's popularity is driving a massive surge in bandwidth consumption, and they want their cut.

In South Korea, Internet service provider SK Broadband sued Netflix earlier this month, claiming that between May and September the ISP's network traffic jumped 24 times to 1.2 trillion bits of data processed every second. This surge is Netflix's fault, the ISP insists, and Netflix should be held financially responsible. In the UK, British Telecom executives have been making similar complaints, insisting that Netflix should be forced to help pay for the surge in network traffic caused by the show. But broadband experts say that's not how broadband networks actually work. "It makes no sense for ISPs to cry victim because they provide a popular service, and are expected to provide it," John Bergmayer, telecom expert at consumer group Public Knowledge told Motherboard. "People subscribe to broadband to do things like stream video, and it's broadband customers who are requesting all these Squid Game streams. They are not somehow imposed on ISPs by Netflix."

Roku on Thursday told customers via a post on its corporate blog that it has still not been able to strike a distribution agreement with YouTube TV, which has been removed from Roku's channel store for five months. From a report: It's the first time Roku has directly acknowledged the issue to its customers. Roku says YouTube TV parent Google has made anti-competitive demands in distribution negotiations, which still haven't been resolved. In the blog post, Roku says Google has made anti-competitive demands in carriage agreements, including asking Roku to create a dedicated search results row for YouTube within the Roku smart TV interface and demanding certain features on Roku that they don't insist on getting from other streaming platforms. Roku reiterated that "our concerns with Google are not about money," but striking an agreement with fair distribution terms. "We have not asked for a single change in the financial terms of our existing agreement," Roku writes in the blog post. " In fact, Roku does not earn a single dollar from YouTube's ad supported video sharing service today, whereas Google makes hundreds of millions of dollars from the YouTube app on Roku."

Telkom SA said Netflix will no longer be available on the South African phone and internet company's set-top box from October. From a report: A deal between the parties has come to an end and will not be renewed, Content Executive Wanda Mkhize said in a statement, without giving a specific reason. Other content partnerships will be announced in due course, she said. The move comes after MultiChoice, Africa's largest pay-TV provider, signed deals with Netflix and Amazon.com to offer their streaming services through its new decoder. The continent is a small market for paid streaming video, with just a few million subscribers out of a population of more than 1 billion, and the U.S. giants have targeted it for future growth.

An unknown individual has leaked the source code and business data of video streaming platform Twitch via a torrent file posted on the 4chan discussion board earlier today. From a report: The leaker said they shared the data as a response to the recent "hate raids" --coordinated bot attacks posting hateful and abusive content in Twitch chats -- that have plagued the platform's top streamers over the summer. "Their community is [...] a disgusting toxic cesspool, so to foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space, we have completely pwned them, and in part one, are releasing the source code from almost 6,000 internal Git repositories," the leaker said earlier today. The leaker claims that the leak contains the "entirety of twitch.tv, with commit history going back to its early beginnings, mobile, desktop and video game console Twitch clients, various proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch, every other property that Twitch owns including IGDB and CurseForge, an unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios, and Twitch SOC internal red teaming tools."

Twitch has confirmed the breach. In a tweet it said, "We can confirm a breach has taken place. Our teams are working with urgency to understand the extent of this. We will update the community as soon as additional information is available."

Amazon has been successful in nearly every industry it has entered, from books and grocery shopping to cloud computing and movie streaming. So it has been puzzling to many that success in the lucrative video game business has eluded the tech giant. On Tuesday, Amazon gave producing its own video games another try. From a report: After more than a year of delays, it released New World, an online multiplayer game in which players join factions, fight monsters, fight one another and colonize a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The $40 computer game, which received generally positive reviews as players tested early versions over the past few months, arrives at a crucial time for the tech giant's disappointing gaming efforts.

After spending by some estimates hundreds of millions of dollars, neither of the other two big-budget games that Amazon announced it was producing in 2016 alongside New World exists today. Some of its top gaming hires have departed over the years without putting out any notable titles. Last year, the company also removed another game from storefronts after a poor reception. New World "has to be our breakthrough game -- there's no doubt about it," said Christoph Hartmann, the vice president of Amazon Games. "Just for morale of people, at some point you want to see some success." Amazon's biggest accomplishment in the gaming industry so far has been the acquisition of Twitch, the livestreaming video site, which the company bought in 2014 for about $1 billion. Amazon has also forged ahead with a new gaming subscription service, Luna, and recently announced a new development studio in Montreal.

Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou would appear in a Brooklyn federal courtroom today via streaming video and enter a plea regarding US charges against her. From a report: Canadian authorities arrested the Chinese executive in December 2018 on suspicion of violating US sanctions, and she has remained there on house arrest ever since, fighting US attempts at extradition. Hearings in her extradition case ended in August, with the ruling scheduled for October 21st. Meng was indicted on fraud charges claiming the Chinese technology and telecommunications company misrepresented its relationship with an Iranian affiliate, along with accusations it stole intellectual property from T-Mobile. The 13-count indictment named Meng, Huawei, and two of its subsidiaries -- Huawei USA and Skycom. On Friday afternoon, Meng pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors submitted a statement of facts asserting that in 2013 she told financial institutions the Iranian company Skycom was a partner of Huawei while knowing that Skycom was owned and controlled by a Huawei subsidiary to act as its agent in the region. As part of the deal in making this admission, the prosecution says "Meng has agreed to the accuracy of a four-page statement of facts that details the knowingly false statements she made to Financial Institution 1."

Comcast appears to be planning to offer TVs running its own software across at least two territories, according to recent reports from Protocol and The Financial Times. It comes a little more than a week after Amazon announced that it too will be getting into the TV set business. The Verge reports: In the US, the TVs will reportedly be branded as XClass TVs. Originally manufactured by Hisense, the 43 and 50-inch sets will run Comcast's X1 operating system, which is already found on its set-top boxes and Xfinity Flex streaming box. An Xfinity landing site confirms the "XClass TV" branding, while an FAQ spotted by Protocol says they'll aggregate "your favorite apps, live channels, and On Demand movies and shows together in one place."

Meanwhile in the UK, Comcast subsidiary Sky is reportedly planning to launch smart TVs of its own. The FT's report doesn't mention what operating system these TVs are likely to run. Sky already operates its Sky Q platform in the country, which currently runs on set-top boxes and shows satellite broadcasts alongside video streamed from services like Netflix and Disney Plus. As Protocol notes, the initiatives appear to be Comcast's attempt to insulate itself as customers turn away from traditional cable and satellite plans in favor of streaming services. By offering a platform that competes with the likes of Roku, Comcast would be able to maintain its direct relationship with customers. It could then aggregate content from other streaming providers alongside its own Peacock and Xumo streaming services. Controlling the viewing platform also gives Comcast and its subsidiaries the ability to negotiate with streaming providers to offer them better prominence on its platforms, the FT notes.