An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Spending on data center projects in the U.S. has exploded, surpassing offices for the first time at the end of last year. It's a trend Matt Kunz saw early on when Meta built a computing hub outside Columbus, Ohio. Other tech companies soon swarmed into the area, drawn by its stable economy, university talent pipeline and ample power, water and land, said Kunz, vice president and general manager at Turner Construction Co., the firm that led Meta's build-out. Since Meta broke ground in 2017, it's expanded its data center campus, and Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Microsoft Corp. made plans to join it nearby.

"When one shows up, almost all the other ones tend to follow," Kunz said. For Turner, a construction giant responsible for supertall office skyscrapers, sports stadiums and cultural venues around the globe, data centers are commanding more of its bandwidth. The company completed $9.4 billion of the projects last year, more than five times its 2020 total. Last month, Turner announced it was chosen as one of the contractors on a $10 billion data center for Meta in Indiana. Tech companies' needs for AI processing facilities have made data centers the latest darling of the real estate industry. The properties are figuring heavily into portfolios of major investors such as Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management and KKR, on a bet that long-term demand for computing power will continue to grow. At the same time, office development has slowed as cities across the U.S. contend with vacancies that have piled up since the Covid lockdowns.

Construction spending for data centers has climbed steadily in recent years, while outlays for general office projects headed downward, U.S. Census data show. The two crossed paths in December, with roughly $3.57 billion spent on data centers that month, compared with $3.49 billion for offices, according to preliminary estimates. The shift is likely to continue and "may perpetuate itself even further as AI is utilized for automating day-to-day jobs," said Andy Cvengros, co-lead of U.S. data center markets for the brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. "It's going to directly impact the amount of office space people need." According to Christopher McFadden, senior vice president at Turner, more than a third of the company's backlog is now tied to data centers.

"We're going to be building these at this scale for years to come," McFadden said. "There's a lot of wind in the sail."

Meta is shutting down three acquired VR studios as part of Reality Labs layoffs and a strategic pivot away from VR content toward AI-powered smart glasses. UploadVR reports: Meta shut down Twisted Pixel Games (Deadpool VR), Sanzaru Games (Asgard's Wrath), and Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR). [...] Twisted Pixel Games was founded in 2006 and mostly made Xbox games published by Microsoft for the first decade of its existence. In fact, Microsoft owned the studio from 2011 until 2015, when it became an independent company again. On contract from Facebook, between 2017 and 2019 Twisted Pixel released four VR games: Wilson's Hearth (Rift); B-Team (Go/Quest); Defector (Rift); and Path of the Warrior (Rift/Quest). In 2022, Twisted Pixel Games was acquired by Meta. And just two months ago, it released what it had been working on since then: Deadpool VR, the latest Quest-exclusive VR game. [...]

Sanzaru Games was also founded in 2006, and made a combination of its own games and contract titles for companies such as Sony, porting the original God of War series to PS Vita. Sanzaru Games was also contracted by Facebook to build VR games for the Oculus Rift and its Touch controllers, between 2016 and 2019: Ripcoil (2016); VR Sports Challenge (2016); Marvel Powers United VR (2018); and Asgard's Wrath (2019). In 2020, Sanzaru Games was acquired by Facebook, and in 2023 released Asgard's Wrath 2, taking the core essence of Asgard's Wrath to Quest 2 and Quest 3 standalone, with a semi-open world and a campaign more than 60 hours long. Exactly one year ago, Sanzaru released the last major content update for Asgard's Wrath 2, stating that it was now working on the "next big thing" with no detail released on what that would be before the studio closed.

Founded in 2008, Armature Studio was mainly a porting studio, bringing PC titles to consoles and console titles to PS Vita. Like Twisted Pixel and Sanzaru, Armature too was contracted by Facebook to build early consumer VR games: Fail Factory (2017); Sports Scramble (2019); and Resident Evil 4 VR (2021). Armature was acquired by Meta in 2022, and many VR gamers had been eagerly anticipating what it had been working on since. Whatever it was, Armature too is now shut down.

After popular arcade games like Mortal Kombat and Spy Hunter, Midway Games jumped into the home console market, and in 2003 launched their baseball game franchise "MLB Slugfest" for Xbox, PS2, and GameCube. But at times it was almost a parody of baseball, including announcers filling the long hours of airtime with bizarre, rambling conversations. ("I read today that kitchen utensils are gonna hurt more people tonight than lifting heavy objects during the day...")

Now former Midway Games producer Mark Flitman has revealed the even weirder conversations rejected by Major League Baseball. ("Ah, baseball on a sunny afternoon. Is there anything better? We've been talking about breaking pop bottles with rocks. I guess that is...") The nonprofit Video Game History Foundation published the text in their digital archive — and shared 79 seconds of sound clips that were actually recorded but never used in the final game. ("Enjoying some smoked whale meat up here in the booth today...")

Their BlueSky post with the audio drew over 5,500 likes and 2,400 reposts, with one commenter wondering if the bizarre (and unapproved) conversations were "part of the tactic where you include overtly inappropriate content to make the stuff you actually want to keep seem more appropriate." But the Foundation's library director thinks the voice actors were just going wild. "We talked with Mark on our podcast and it sounds like they just did a lot of improv and got carried away." He added later that the game's producer "would give them prompts and they'd run with it. The voice actors (Kevin Matthews and Tim Kitzrow) have backgrounds in sports radio and comedy, so they came up with wild nonsense like this."

The gaming site Aftermath notes the Foundation also has an archive page for all the other sound files on the CD. Maybe it's the ultimate tribute to the craziness that was MLB Slugfest. Years ago some fans of the game shared their memories on Reddit...

• "The first time my friend tried to bean me and my hitter caught the ball was so hype, we were freaking out. Every game quickly evolved into trying to get our hitters to charge the mound."

• "I just remembered you could also kick the shit out of the fielder near your base if he got too close. Man that game was awesome."

• "You could do jump kicks into the catcher like Richie from The Benchwarmers."

• "Every time someone got on base we would run the ball over to them and beat their asses for 30 seconds. Good times."

Six years after the launch of the franchise, Midway Games declared bankruptcy.

Can YouTube capture the hours people spending watching "traditional" TV? YouTube's CEO recently said its viewership on TV sets has "surpassed mobile and is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S.," writes The Hollywood Reporter. And YouTube is shelling out big money to stay on top: It's come a long way since the 19-second "me at the zoo" video was uploaded in April 2005. Now, per a KPMG report released Sept. 23, YouTube is second only to Comcast in terms of annual content spend, inclusive of payments to creators and media companies, paying out as much as Netflix and Paramount combined, $32 billion... The only question is what genres it will take over next, and how quickly it will do so. From talk shows to scripted dramas to, yes, live sports, there are signs that the platform's ambitions will collide with the traditional TV business sooner rather than later...

YouTube has slowly, then all at once, become the de facto home for what had been late night, not only for the shows on linear TV, but for an emerging crop of new talent born on the platform. As it happens, late night itself transformed YouTube when the Saturday Night Live skit "Lazy Sunday" went viral 20 years ago on the platform, which had only been live for a few months... As consumer preferences collide with a burgeoning ecosystem of video podcasts (YouTube now claims more than 1 billion podcast users monthly), the world of late night, and for that matter TV talk shows more generally, increasingly revolves around the platform. One current late night producer says that almost every A-list booking now includes some sort of sketch or bit that they think will play well on YouTube, but booking those guests in the first place has become less of a sure thing. A veteran Hollywood publicist says that for many of their clients, they are now recommending that YouTube podcasts or shows become the first stop, or at least a major stop, on press tours...

Nielsen has been tracking the streaming platforms that consumers watch on their TV screens ever since it launched what it calls The Gauge in 2021. But over the past year, YouTube's domination of The Gauge has unnerved executives at some competitors. The most recent Gauge report showed that YouTube was by far the most watched video platform, holding 13.1 percent share. Netflix, in second place, was at 8.7 percent.
The article suggests YouTube's last challenge may be "scripted" entertainment — where their business model is different than Netflix or HBO.

"On YouTube, it is up to the creator to finance and produce their content, and while the platform regularly releases new tools to help them (including AI-enabled tech that suggests video ideas and can create short background videos for use in Shorts), scripted entertainment is a particularly tricky challenge, requiring writers, directors, sets, costumes, lighting, editing, special effects and other production requirements that may go beyond the typical creator-led show."

Apple has struck a five-year, $750 million deal to become the exclusive U.S. home for Formula 1 starting in 2026. "Apple is paying a significant premium over the $90 million per year currently paid by ESPN, whose F1 broadcast deal expires at the end of 2025 after holding the rights in the U.S. since 2018," notes Variety. From the report: According to Apple, it will deliver the Formula 1 programming with a "more dynamic and elevated viewing experience," and both parties expressed optimism that the deal will attract new motorsports fans in America in the years ahead. The company is rebranding the video-streaming service, which launched in 2019 as Apple TV+, to remove the plus sign.

It's another big move by Apple into sports, which also has streaming deals with MLB and Major League Soccer. The F1 agreement and follows Apple's partnership with Formula 1 for original film "F1 The Movie," starring Brad Pitt, which raked in $629 million worldwide at the box office this year -- the highest-grossing sports movie of all time and Pitt's highest-grossing feature to date. "F1 The Movie" will debut on Apple TV on Dec. 12, 2025.

Meta has officially launched Horizon TV, a virtual reality "smart TV" app for its Quest headsets. The app mirrors modern smart TV interfaces with deep-linked streaming apps and curated recommendations -- but it's still missing major players like Netflix and Disney+. From a report: Except Horizon TV isn't running on a TV or streaming stick, but on the company's Meta Quest headsets. Unveiled at Meta Connect last month, the app is a big part of Meta's push to attract older, less gaming-focused audiences to VR -- a push that also includes a partnership with James Cameron, and investments into sports, and other types of leanback entertainment content.

Re-creating the smart TV experience in virtual reality also represents a monetization opportunity for Meta, which has for some time now tried to figure out how to bring advertising to VR. However, the approach also means that Meta is inheriting some of the very problems smart TV platform operators have struggled with for a long time. And if consumers do warm up to watching more content with their headsets, they're bound to realize that even in VR, you can't escape the collateral damage of the streaming wars.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Silicon Valley's AI talent war just reached a compensation milestone that makes even the most legendary scientific achievements of the past look financially modest. When Meta recently offered AI researcher Matt Deitke $250 million over four years (an average of $62.5 million per year)—with potentially $100 million in the first year alone -- it shattered every historical precedent for scientific and technical compensation we can find on record. [Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly also offered an unnamed AI engineer $1 billion in compensation to be paid out over several years.] That includes salaries during the development of major scientific milestones of the 20th century. [...]

To put these salaries in a historical perspective: J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project that ended World War II, earned approximately $10,000 per year in 1943. Adjusted for inflation using the US Government's CPI Inflation Calculator, that's about $190,865 in today's dollars -- roughly what a senior software engineer makes today. The 24-year-old Deitke, who recently dropped out of a PhD program, will earn approximately 327 times what Oppenheimer made while developing the atomic bomb. [...] The Apollo program offers another striking comparison. Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon, earned about $27,000 annually -- roughly $244,639 in today's money. His crewmates Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins made even less, earning the equivalent of $168,737 and $155,373, respectively, in today's dollars. Current NASA astronauts earn between $104,898 and $161,141 per year. Meta's AI researcher will make more in three days than Armstrong made in a year for taking "one giant leap for mankind." The report notes that the sums being offered to some of these AI researchers top even the most popular sports athletes. "The New York Times noted that Steph Curry's most recent four-year contract with the Golden State Warriors was $35 million less than Deitke's Meta deal (although soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo will make $275 million this year as the highest-paid professional athlete in the world)," reports Ars.

Google has unveiled a major overhaul of its search engine with the introduction of A.I. Mode -- a new feature that works like a chatbot, enabling users to ask follow-up questions and receive detailed, conversational answers. Announced at the I/O 2025 conference, the feature is now being rolled out to all Search users in the U.S. Engadget reports: Google first began previewing AI Mode with testers in its Labs program at the start of March. Since then, it has been gradually rolling out the feature to more people, including in recent weeks regular Search users. At its keynote today, Google shared a number of updates coming to AI Mode as well, including some new tools for shopping, as well as the ability to compare ticket prices for you and create custom charts and graphs for queries on finance and sports.

For the uninitiated, AI Mode is a chatbot built directly into Google Search. It lives in a separate tab, and was designed by the company to tackle more complicated queries than people have historically used its search engine to answer. For instance, you can use AI Mode to generate a comparison between different fitness trackers. Before today, the chatbot was powered by Gemini 2.0. Now it's running a custom version of Gemini 2.5. What's more, Google plans to bring many of AI Mode's capabilities to other parts of the Search experience.

Looking to the future, Google plans to bring Deep Search, an offshoot of its Deep Research mode, to AI Mode. [...] Another new feature that's coming to AI Mode builds on the work Google did with Project Mariner, the web-surfing AI agent the company began previewing with "trusted testers" at the end of last year. This addition gives AI Mode the ability to complete tasks for you on the web. For example, you can ask it to find two affordable tickets for the next MLB game in your city. AI Mode will compare "hundreds of potential" tickets for you and return with a few of the best options. From there, you can complete a purchase without having done the comparison work yourself. [...] All of the new AI Mode features Google previewed today will be available to Labs users first before they roll out more broadly.

In 2022, writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe the gradual deterioration of a service or product. The term's prevalence has increased to the point that it was the National Dictionary of Australia's word of the year last year. The editors at Ars Technica, having "covered a lot of things that have been enshittified," decided to highlight some of the worst examples the've come across. Here's a summary of each thing mentioned in their report: Smart TVs: Evolved into data-collecting billboards, prioritizing advertising and user tracking over user experience and privacy. Features like convenient input buttons are sacrificed for pushing ads and webOS apps. "This is all likely to get worse as TV companies target software, tracking, and ad sales as ways to monetize customers after their TV purchases -- even at the cost of customer convenience and privacy," writes Scharon Harding. "When budget brands like Roku are selling TV sets at a loss, you know something's up."

Google's Voice Assistant (e.g., Nest Hubs): Functionality has degraded over time, with previously working features becoming unreliable. Users report frequent misunderstandings and unresponsiveness. "I'm fine just saying it now: Google Assistant is worse now than it was soon after it started," writes Kevin Purdy. "Even if Google is turning its entire supertanker toward AI now, it's not clear why 'Start my morning routine,' 'Turn on the garage lights,' and 'Set an alarm for 8 pm' had to suffer."

Portable Document Format (PDF): While initially useful for cross-platform document sharing and preserving formatting, PDFs have become bloated and problematic. Copying text, especially from academic journals, is often garbled or impossible. "Apple, which had given the PDF a reprieve, has now killed its main selling point," writes John Timmer. "Because Apple has added OCR to the MacOS image display system, I can get more reliable results by screenshotting the PDF and then copying the text out of that. This is the true mark of its enshittification: I now wish the journals would just give me a giant PNG."

Televised Sports (specifically cycling and Formula 1): Streaming services have consolidated, leading to significantly increased costs for viewers. Previously affordable and comprehensive options have been replaced by expensive bundles across multiple platforms. "Formula 1 racing has largely gone behind paywalls, and viewership is down significantly over the last 15 years," writes Eric Berger. "Major US sports such as professional and college football had largely been exempt, but even that is now changing, with NFL games being shown on Peacock, Amazon Prime, and Netflix. None of this helps viewers. It enshittifies the experience for us in the name of corporate greed."

Google Search: AI overviews often bury relevant search results under lengthy, sometimes inaccurate AI-generated content. This makes finding specific information, especially primary source documents, more difficult. "Google, like many big tech companies, expects AI to revolutionize search and is seemingly intent on ignoring any criticism of that idea," writes Ashley Belanger.

Email AI Tools (e.g., Gemini in Gmail): Intrusive and difficult to disable, these tools offer questionable value due to their potential for factual inaccuracies. Users report being unable to fully opt-out. "Gmail won't take no for an answer," writes Dan Goodin. "It keeps asking me if I want to use Google's Gemini AI tool to summarize emails or draft responses. As the disclaimer at the bottom of the Gemini tool indicates, I can't count on the output being factual, so no, I definitely don't want it."

Windows: While many complaints about Windows 11 originated with Windows 10, the newer version continues the trend of unwanted features, forced updates, and telemetry data collection. Bugs and performance issues also plague the operating system. "... it sure is easy to resent Windows 11 these days, between the well-documented annoyances, the constant drumbeat of AI stuff (some of it gated to pricey new PCs), and a batch of weird bugs that mostly seem to be related to the under-the-hood overhauls in October's Windows 11 24H2 update," writes Andrew Cunningham. "That list includes broken updates for some users, inoperable scanners, and a few unplayable games. With every release, the list of things you need to do to get rid of and turn off the most annoying stuff gets a little longer."

Web Discourse: The rapid spread of memes, trends, and corporate jargon on social media has led to a homogenization of online communication, making it difficult to distinguish original content and creating a sense of constant noise. "[T]he enshittifcation of social media, particularly due to its speed and virality, has led to millions vying for their moment in the sun, and all I see is a constant glare that makes everything look indistinguishable," writes Jacob May. "No wonder some companies think AI is the future."

Major video game studios' pursuit of ultra-realistic graphics has led to diminishing returns and industry-wide layoffs, as younger players gravitate toward simpler, more social games, New York Times is reporting.

Sony's Insomniac Games spent $300 million developing Marvel's Spider-Man 2, triple the budget of its predecessor, before laying off staff amid Sony's 900-person reduction in February. The industry has cut more than 20,000 jobs in the past two years. Meanwhile, games with basic graphics like Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite continue to dominate, particularly among younger players.

Genshin Impact, a mobile game by Hoyoverse, generates approximately $2 billion annually through frequent content updates rather than cutting-edge visuals. The shift has forced studios to reevaluate their strategies. Warner Bros. Discovery lost $200 million on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, while Sony shuttered its Concord studio shortly after launch. Some industry figures see AI as a potential solution to reduce graphics development costs, the report adds, particularly in sports games.

Apple launched a dramatically smaller Mac Mini desktop computer on Tuesday, powered by its new M4 processor and featuring ray tracing capabilities for the first time. The redesigned Mini measures just 5 inches square, roughly half the size of its predecessor, while delivering up to 1.8 times faster CPU performance compared to the M1 model.

The base version starts at $599, while the more powerful M4 Pro variant begins at $1,399. The M4 Pro model sports 14 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores, with support for up to 64GB of RAM and 8TB storage. It introduces Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, offering data transfer speeds up to 120 Gb/s. Apple has revamped the port configuration, adding front-facing USB-C ports and a headphone jack. The rear features Ethernet, HDMI, and three Thunderbolt ports, though USB-A ports have been eliminated. The new Mini supports up to three 6K displays with the M4 Pro chip.

Fossil fuel companies pumped at least $5.6bn of sponsorship money into motorsports, football, golf and even snow sports in an effort to "buy social licence to operate," according to a new report. From a report: Almost no major spectator sport remains untouched by oil and gas money, according to research carried out by the New Weather Institute (NWI), a climate thinktank, which traced more than 200 sponsorship deals between sports teams and the industry. In addition, sports stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua have all been successfully recruited to spend time in the Middle East as part of sponsorship deals, the report says.

It comes as concern grows about the fossil fuel industry's increasing efforts to launder its global standing through "sportswashing" -- a practice, long used by nation states, of building associations with sporting events to improve tarnished reputations. In 2023, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, said: "If sportswashing is going to increase my GDP by 1%, then we'll continue doing sportswashing." According to NWI's Dirty Money report, Aramco, Saudi Arabia's national oil company, was the biggest single investor in sports sponsorship identified by NWI's report, handing out almost $1.3bn across 10 deals. The petrochemical company Ineos was second, with $777m in sponsorship deals; Shell had sponsored sports to the tune of $470m; and TotalEnergies, France's leading oil company, had $340m in deals.

Six months after going public, Reddit "is winning over advertisers," reports Bloomberg, "by showing that it's different than other internet platforms, which often rely on users' identities and personal information to target ads." Instead, Reddit is targeting people based on their interests, relying on the site's [100,000+] deeply detailed communities — called subreddits — to match advertisers with potential customers... Early returns on that strategy have been promising. The text-based site easily surpassed expectations in its first two earnings reports this year, disclosing strong sales and better-than-expected projected growth. The stock is up 66% from its $34 initial public offering price in March.

Beyond targeting subreddits, the company also can use specific keywords to sell what it calls conversation ads. If a Redditor in r/HydroHomies — a community about the benefits of drinking water that has more than 1.2 million users — asks for advice about a specific brand of water bottle, an ad for that exact product could appear next to that user's post. These conversation ads are the fastest-growing ad format on the platform, the company said. They also give marketers a chance to appear in subreddits where customers are already talking about them...

Despite being around for close to 20 years, Reddit only started investing heavily in its advertising business in 2018, and is now hoping that marketers and investors are ready to acknowledge the site has grown up. Executives often point to its unique form of content moderation as proof that it's a safer place for brands than other sites. Reddit largely relies on a group of more than 60,000 human moderators — users who volunteer to serve as a sort of content police — to flag or take down unsavory content. On top of that, the site has a voting system so users can rate the quality of content. "From everything we're seeing, they have a level of brand safety and content safety for advertisers that is very comparable to most other social platforms," said Jack Johnston, senior social innovation director at performance marketing agency Tinuiti, which buys ads on Meta, Pinterest, X and Reddit. "That wasn't necessarily the case a couple years ago."

Those improvements have paid dividends. Reddit recently signed new content partnerships with major sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA and MLB, and the majority of Reddit's advertising revenue comes from Fortune 500 companies. Last year, the site made close to $800 million in ad sales, and counts marquee brands like Toyota, Disney, Samsung and Ulta Beauty among its advertisers. This year, analysts expect Reddit's overall advertising business to eclipse $1.1 billion in revenue and see the company reaching $2 billion in sales as soon as 2027, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. To get there, Reddit will need to court smaller marketers, too. The company makes more than 25% of its revenue from just 10 advertisers, meaning any unexpected pullback from a key partner could have a significant impact on the company's business, said Dan Salmon, lead analyst at New Street Research. "This army of small businesses — that's the most important thing for all of those platforms, for Reddit, for Pinterest, for X," he said...

Advertisers large and small say they're already planning to spend more on Reddit in the coming quarters.
The article points out that more than 90 million people visit Reddit each day.

In a note to clients, seen by Slashdot, brokerage house Jefferies writes: Netflix's last price hike on the standard plan was in Jan 2022, its ad- supported plan remains the cheapest (among major players) in the industry, and its move into live sports increases pricing power - for these 3 reasons we suspect a price hike in Q4 or December of this year could be coming on the standard plan.

As stated in the Q4 2023 letter (following the announcement of WWE Raw coming in 2025): "As we invest in and improve Netflix, we'll occasionally ask our members to pay a little extra to reflect those improvements, which in turn helps drive the positive flywheel of additional investment." We believe Netflix has been positioning itself throughout this year for a year-end price hike. December / 2025 will have major content releases supporting a pricing increase including the Christmas NFL game, Squid Game 2 on Dec. 26th (season 1 - the #1 watched NFLX show of all time), WWE Raw starting Jan 2025, and Stranger Things 5 coming in 2025 (season 3 / 4 in top 10 of all-time).

Following in the footsteps of competitors Netflix and Disney+, Apple is reportedly working on bringing advertisements to Apple TV+ through an ad-supported tier. MacRumors reports: Apple has apparently been in discussions with the UK's Broadcaster's Audience Research Board (BARB) to explore the necessary data collection techniques for monitoring advertising results. Currently, BARB provides viewing statistics for major UK networks including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky, as well as Apple TV+ programming.

While BARB already monitors viewing time for Apple TV+ content, additional techniques are required to track advertising metrics accurately. This data is vital for advertisers to assess the reach and impact of their campaigns on the platform. In addition to the UK, Apple has also reportedly held similar discussions with ratings organizations in the United States. Apple has already included limited advertising in its live sports events, such as last year's Major League Soccer coverage, where ads were incorporated even for Season Pass holders. It is also notable that in March Apple hired Joseph Cady, a former advertising executive from NBCUniversal, to bolster its video advertising team.

Will Major League Baseball games use "automated" umpires next year to watch pitches from home plate and call balls and strikes?

"We still have some technical issues," baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said Thursday. NBC News reports: "We haven't made as much progress in the minor leagues this year as we sort of hoped at this point. I think it's becoming more and more likely that this will not be a go for '25."

Major League Baseball has been experimenting with the automated ball-strike system in minor leagues since 2019. It is being used at all Triple-A parks this year for the second straight season, the robot alone for the first three games of each series and a human with a [robot-assisted] challenge system in the final three.
In "challenge-system" games, robo-umpires are only used for quickly ruling on challenges to calls from human umpires. (As demonstrated in this 11-second video.)

CBS Sports explains: Each team is given a limited number of "incorrect" challenges per game, which incentivizes judicious use of challenges... In some ways, the challenge system is a compromise between the traditional method of making ball-strike calls and the fully automated approach. That middle ground may make approval by the various stakeholders more likely to happen and may lay the foundation for full automation at some future point.
Manfred cites "a growing consensus in large part" from Major League players that that's how they'd want to see robo-umpiring implemented, according to a post on X.com from The Athletic's Evan Drellich. (NBC notes one concern is eliminating the artful way catchers "frame" caught pitches to convince umpires a pitch passed through the strike zone.)

But umpires face greater challenges today, adds CBS Sports: The strong trend, stretching across years, of increased pitch velocity in the big leagues has complicated the calling of balls and strikes, as has the emphasis on high-spin breaking pitches. Discerning balls from strikes has always been challenging, and the stuff of the contemporary major-league pitcher has made anything like perfect accuracy beyond the capabilities of the human eye. Big-league umpires are highly skilled, but the move toward ball-strike automation and thus a higher tier of accuracy is likely inevitable. Manfred's Wednesday remarks reinforce that perception.

Sony Pictures Entertainment and Apollo Global Management have made a bid to acquire Paramount for $26 billion and take it private. Variety reports: Sony and private-equity giant Apollo submitted a letter with the non-binding offer Wednesday to Paramount Global, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The bid, which would include the assumption of debt and could be negotiated, would be a premium over the company's current $22 billion enterprise value. Shares of Paramount Global jumped 13% on news of the offer from Apollo and Sony Entertainment, closing at $13.86 per share Thursday.

It's not clear how Paramount's board will proceed on the Sony-Apollo proposal, having rejected previous overtures from the private-equity firm. The company has an exclusive negotiating window with Skydance that ends Friday (May 3), but discussions among the parties could extend beyond that. If it happens, the combination of Sony Pictures with Paramount Pictures would likely result in mass layoffs -- and knock the number of major Hollywood studios from five to four, after Disney took over 20th Century. Sony Corp., which acquired Columbia Pictures in 1990 for $3.5 billion, is the largest studio operator in the industry that does not have a broad-scale direct-to-consumer streaming play.

Under the proposed bid with Apollo, Sony would be the majority owner of the combined company. Sony Corp. would merge Sony Pictures Entertainment into a joint venture with Paramount Global. Sony and Apollo would both contribute cash to finance the deal. What's unclear is what would happen to the 28 local TV stations CBS owns; FCC rules bar foreign entities (i.e. Tokyo-based Sony) from having majority ownership control of broadcast TV stations, so Sony would need to carve out a separate U.S. ownership structure for the station group.

In the Skydance scenario, Redstone would sell her stake in National Amusements, which holds 77% of the voting shares in Paramount Global, to Skydance, whereupon Skydance would merge with Paramount Global in an all-stock deal that would value Skydance at roughly $5 billion. Paramount Global would remain a publicly traded company. Redstone would receive up to $2 billion from the Skydance-NAI transaction; in addition, Skydance would pay a premium for Paramount Global shares and pay $3 billion to the company to help pay down debt. Ellison would serve as CEO of the merged Paramount-Skydance, while Jeff Shell, the former NBCUniversal CEO who is chairman of sports and media at RedBird and works under founder and managing partner Gerry Cardinale, would take on a key management role.

Under a new agreement between the U.S. and Japan, the first non-American on the Moon as part of the Artemis lunar exploration campaign will be a Japanese astronaut. SpaceNews reports: At an event in Washington, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Masahito Moriyama signed an agreement regarding an additional Japanese contribution to Artemis, a pressurized lunar rover called Lunar Cruiser. NASA will deliver the rover to the moon, which the agencies said should take place ahead of the Artemis 7 mission scheduled for no earlier than 2031. NASA will also provide two seats on future Artemis lunar landing missions to astronauts from the Japanese space agency JAXA, the first agency other than NASA to secure spots on landing missions.

The Japanese rover will support extended expeditions from Artemis landing sites that are beyond the range of the Lunar Terrain Vehicle that three American companies are developing for NASA under contracts announced April 3. The rover is designed to accommodate two astronauts for up to 30 days, with an overall lifetime of 10 years. The announcement, though, offered no details about when the Japanese astronauts would fly to the moon. "It depends," Nelson said at an April 10 briefing when asked about schedules, noting that the two countries "announced a shared goal for a Japanese national to land on the moon on a future NASA mission assuming benchmarks are achieved."

"No mission has been currently assigned to a Japanese astronaut," added Lara Kearney, manager of NASA's extravehicular activity and human surface mobility program, at the briefing. The implementing agreement (PDF) said several factors will go into crew assignments, including progress on the pressurized rover, or PR: "The timing of the flight opportunities will be determined by NASA in line with existing flight manifesting and crew assignment processes and will take into account program progress and constraints, MEXT's request for the earliest possible assignment of the Japanese astronauts to lunar surface missions, and major PR milestones such as when the PR is first deployed on the lunar surface." The assumption among many in the industry, though, is that at least one of the astronauts will fly before the rover is delivered, and possibly as soon as the Artemis 4 mission, the second crewed landing, in the late 2020s.

"The San Francisco Giants are one of four teams in Major League Baseball this season offering fans a free shortcut through the gates into the ballpark," writes SFGate.

"The cost? Signing up for the league's 'facial authentication' software through its ticketing app." The Giants are using MLB's new Go-Ahead Entry program, which intends to cut down on wait times for fans entering games. The pitch is simple: Take a selfie through the MLB Ballpark app (which already has your tickets on it), upload the selfie and, once you're approved, breeze through the ticketing lines and into the ballpark. Fans will barely have to slow down at the entrance gate on their way to their seats...

The Philadelphia Phillies were MLB's test team for the technology in 2023. They're joined by the Giants, Nationals and Astros in 2024...

[Major League Baseball] says it won't be saving or storing pictures of faces in a database — and it clearly would really like you to not call this technology facial recognition. "This is not the type of facial recognition that's scanning a crowd and specifically looking for certain kinds of people," Karri Zaremba, a senior vice president at MLB, told ESPN. "It's facial authentication. ... That's the only way in which it's being utilized."
Privacy advocates "have pointed out that the creep of facial recognition technology may be something to be wary of," the article acknowledges. But it adds that using the technology is still completely optional.

And they also spoke to the San Francisco Giants' senior vice president of ticket sales, who gushed about the possibility of app users "walking into the ballpark without taking your phone out, or all four of us taking our phones out."

In 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the outlawing of sports betting in America.

But the Wall Street Journal reports that since then all the major professional sports bodies "now realize just how much they have to lose as the new era unfolds." "All it takes is for a reasonable fan to go, 'Am I just watching theater, or is this actually sport?' for the credibility of a sport to start crumbling,'" said Declan Hill, an expert on match fixing at the University of New Haven.

Since the prohibition on sports gambling was lifted, leagues that had once viewed betting as an existential threat to their integrity scrambled to partner with gambling companies and brought them into the tent.... The NBA itself also announced a new feature designed to mesh the betting experience with live action: Fans watching games on League Pass, the flagship streaming platform, would be able to opt in to view betting odds on the app's interface and click through to place wagers... Cleveland Cavaliers head coach J.B. Bickerstaff said that gambling had "gone too far... I personally have had my own instances with some of the sports gamblers," he added, "where they got my telephone number, were sending me crazy messages about where I live, and my kids and all that stuff."

NBA spokesman Mike Bass said that instances of reported harassment related to sports betting are investigated. Then, just days after Haliburton and Bickerstaff's complaints, the NBA found itself grappling with a new case... The league is investigating suspicious activity around [Toronto Raptors forward Jontay] Porter, after app users placed sizable wagers that his totals for points, rebounds and assists in a pair of games would all come in under the lines set by oddsmakers. When Porter's numbers fell below those marks and the bets paid out, it raised a red flag signaling possible irregularities....

The NCAA has turned to state legislatures to impose regulations that would take single players out of gamblers' crosshairs. The group is lobbying to ban player-specific proposition bets that aren't directly related to the final score of the game — the exact kind of wagers at the center of the Porter situation in the NBA
After noticing "the gambling-related negativity taking over his social-media feeds," pro basketball player Tyrese Haliburton gave the Journal his own assessment of how it's affecting the fan base.

"To half the world, I'm just helping them make money on DraftKings."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.