404 Media's Claire Woodcock writes: As prices for streaming subscriptions continue to soar and finding movies to watch, new and old, is becoming harder as the number of streaming services continues to grow, people are turning to the unexpected last stronghold of physical media: the public library. Some libraries are now intentionally using iconic Blockbuster branding to recall the hours visitors once spent looking for something to rent on Friday and Saturday nights.

John Scalzo, audiovisual collection librarian with a public library in western New York, says that despite an observed drop-off in DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra disc circulation in 2019, interest in physical media is coming back around. "People really seem to want physical media," Scalzo told 404 Media. Part of it has to do with consumer awareness: People know they're paying more for monthly subscriptions to streaming services and getting less. The same has been true for gaming.

As the audiovisual selector with the Free Library of Philadelphia since 2024, Kris Langlais has been focused on building the library's video game collections to meet comparable interest in demand. Now that every branch library has a prominent video game collection, Langlais says that patrons who come for the games are reportedly expressing interest in more of what the library has to offer. "Librarians out in our branches are seeing a lot of young people who are really excited by these collections," Langlais told 404 Media. "Folks who are coming in just for the games are picking up program flyers and coming back for something like that." IP disputes are fueling the shift, too.

The report notes how rights and licensing battles are making some films harder to access -- from titles that quietly slip out of commercial circulation, to streaming-only releases that never make it to disc, to entire shows vanishing during mergers like HBO Max-Discovery+. One prominent example is The People's Joker, which was briefly pulled from the Toronto International Film Festival over a conflict with Batman's rightsholders.

Situations like that are pushing librarians to grab physical copies while they still can, before these works risk disappearing altogether.

Today is Record Store Day, an annual event celebrating the culture of independently-owned record stores. And music industry players have said they actually got more money from the sale of vinyl records than they do from YouTube.

But is that changing? The New York Times reports those figures are from a time when YouTube was only selling ads on (or beside) music videos and then sharing that cash with the record labels and performs: Fast forward to last week, when YouTube disclosed that it paid music companies, musicians and songwriters more than $4 billion in the prior year. That came from advertising money and something that the industry has wanted forever and is now getting — a cut of YouTube's surprisingly large subscription business. (YouTube subscriptions include an ad-free version of the site and a Spotify-like service to watch music videos without any ads.) The significance of YouTube's dollar figure is that it's not far from the $5 billion that the streaming king Spotify pays to music industry participants from a portion of its subscriptions. (A reminder: The industry mostly loves Spotify's money, but some musicians ïsay that they're shortchanged by the payouts.)

Subscriptions will always be a hobby for YouTube, but the numbers show that even a side gig for the company can be huge. And it has bought peace by raining some of those riches on those behind the music. Record labels and other industry powers "still don't looooove YouTube," Lucas Shaw, a Bloomberg News reporter, wrote this week. "But they don't hate it anymore."

The YouTube turnabout may also show that complaining works. The music industry has a fairly successful track record of picking a public enemy No. 1 — Pandora for awhile, Spotify, YouTube, and more recently apps like TikTok and Twitch — and publicly browbeating it or playing one rich company against another to get more money or something else they wanted.
While the article cites concerns that YouTube is still paying too little (and failing to stop piracy), "just maybe, YouTube has shown that it's possible for digital companies to both upend an industry and make it stronger."

The lion's share of U.S. consumers say the streamer has the best original programming, according to a new Morgan Stanley survey. Variety reports: Netflix remains the most frequently cited as offering the best original programming -- with 38% of survey respondents picking it as No. 1, per the Wall Street analyst firm's 2021 streaming survey. That's roughly in line with Morgan Stanley's previous surveys. On the 2021 survey, 12% of respondents said Amazon Prime Video offers the best original programming, followed by Disney Plus, Hulu and HBO Max which each scored 6%-7% of total responses.

Among Netflix customers, the top reasons cited for subscribing to Netflix were "broad selection of content" (55%), "good original programming" (51%), "adds content I like" (49%) and "no commercials" (46%). In 2021, Netflix is projected to spend about $19 billion on content according to a forecast by financial research firm Bankr, up about 10% from last year. Netflix retains the No. 1 spot as the most widely used streaming service with 58% of respondents saying they use the service. Amazon Prime Video came in at 45% (up 400 basis points year over year), Disney Plus was at 31% (up 650 basis points), and HBO/HBO Max was 20% (up 500 basis points).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: U.S. military pilots and satellites have recorded "a lot more" sightings of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, than have been made public, Donald Trump's former intelligence director John Ratcliffe said. Asked on Fox News about a forthcoming government report on "unidentified aerial phenomena," Ratcliffe said the report would document previously unknown sightings from "all over the world." "Frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public," he said. "Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have been seen by navy or air force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don't have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom."

The UFO report must be published by early June, pursuant to a clause in a Covid relief and spending package signed by Trump before he left office. [...] The forthcoming report is to be issued by the defense department and intelligence agencies. When an unidentified aerial phenomena is identified, Ratcliffe said, analysts try to explain it as a potential weather disturbance or other routine spectacle.

"We always look for a plausible application," he said. "Sometimes we wonder whether our adversaries have technologies that are a little but farther down the road than we thought or that we realized. But there are instances where we don't have good explanations. So in short, things that we are observing that are difficult to explain -- and so there's actually quite a few of those, and I think that that info has been gathered and will be put out in a way the American people can see." Asked by Bartiromo where the unidentified phenomena were sighted, Ratcliffe replied, "actually all over the world, there have been sightings all over the world. "Multiple sensors that are picking up these things. They're unexplained phenomenon, and there's actually quite a few more than have been made public."

Game streaming has been slowly growing in recent years with the launches of Nvidia's GeForce Now, Google's Stadia, Microsoft's xCloud and Amazon's Project Luna. This year, however, it looks to finally be picking up more steam. At CES 2021, LG announced that some of its 2021 TVs will support apps for playing games from Google Stadia and GeForce Now right on the TV. From a report: Those who subscribe to Stadia Pro, Google's subscription offering for Stadia that runs $10 per month that allows gamers to play an assortment of games for free, will be able to stream in 4K HDR, 60 FPS and 5.1 surround sound to their LG TVs. Stadia support is expected to arrive in the second half of the year in a handful of countries including the US, Canada, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway the Netherlands and Belgium. At launch, the app will only work on LG TVs running the company's webOS 6.0 software though the company says it will come to webOS 5.0 TVs "later this year." Support for Nvidia's platform is slightly less vague, with LG only promising that it will be available in the fourth quarter. The company did not mention which countries would be able to access the service.

TV cord-cutting is picking up steam, and AT&T's CEO predicts there's a long way to go before it stops. From a report: On an earnings call Thursday, AT&T Chief Executive Officer John Stankey said "we're probably going to see a little bit of a plateauing" when the number of homes subscribing to pay TV hits 55 million to 60 million. Most of those homes will include sports fans, he said. It's a stark outlook for an industry that's already suffered a long subscriber exodus. There were about 91 million pay-TV subscribers at the end of 2019, including some 8 million who signed up to online-TV bundles like Hulu and YouTube TV. About 3.5 million people cut the cord in the first half of the year, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. While AT&T, Comcast, Charter and other TV providers are focusing their businesses on delivering internet service, owners of cable channels are especially vulnerable. That's because more cord-cutting means lower subscriber fees, a key revenue stream. Stankey added that AT&T is focusing on growing its new online streaming service, HBO Max, to prepare for the future. AT&T said Thursday that it shed another 590,000 TV subscribers last quarter. With customer losses mounting, AT&T has been looking to sell the majority of its satellite-TV business, DirecTV.

GameSpot calls it "like an AOL chat room" combined with Netflix. The Guardian reports: You log in, share a viewing link with friends, choose one person to be in charge of picking what you watch and, as your chosen show plays out in the bulk of the screen, a chatroom pops up on the right-hand side. You can discuss the show with the people in your room, or argue, or flirt, or veer wildly off-tangent because you've realised that you've picked an absolute dud to watch.

Right now, Netflix Party feels absolutely necessary. Self-quarantine has atomised us, and if this is the closest we can get to watching films and TV shows with our friends, then we'll grab it with both hands. But then again, even if this wasn't a time of enormous struggle, Netflix Party would be a terrific idea. Because the biggest downside to this vast glut of non-linear content is that nobody watches the same thing at the same time any more. There are no more water cooler series, because everyone at the water cooler has to tiptoe around the fact that they might be a few episodes ahead of everyone else, and one stray spoiler slip might ruin it for everyone else.

Television has always been a social pursuit, but this element has been lost in recent years.
"Twenty servers were added today to help more people spend time together without leaving home," notes Forbes.

According to TV metrics company Nielsen, a whopping 88% of Americans stare at screens while staring at other screens. Nate Anderson from Ars Technica discovered the stat while combing through Mary Meeker's annual "Internet Trends" report: My attitude, when watching TV, is that a show you pay attention to precludes the use of phone or laptop; if you're using another screen, you're not actually watching the show. Pick better shows to watch, people! And then watch them! [...] I got to thinking about the ways in which we use television, and not all of them involve watching dark prestige dramas with 80+ Metacritic scores. Perhaps you're watching (ugh) live TV, either because you are a masochist or you love sports. (If you are watching baseball, perhaps it's both!) Picking up a smartphone during commercial breaks is arguably better than being bombarded with the consumerism of late-stage capitalism.

Say you use your TV not as a way to consume compelling crafted content, but as background noise that helps you relax. (I highly recommend Sunday afternoon golf for this purpose.) Tooling around on a laptop while the TV plays in the background is now not quite so odd. Or perhaps you watch TV simply as a way to kill time. Perhaps you're in pain, or recovering from illness, or simply bored out of your mind. The goal is not necessarily to direct your full and undivided attention to the screen; it is to get through the day until something better comes along. Using a second screen here, too, makes sense. [...] Still, I can't shake the feeling that the majority of time spent using one digital device while another displays video content nearby is low-quality time, where we aren't really paying attention to what's on either screen and so are using the planet's resources, cluttering our lives with extra noise, and reinforcing our slavish devotions to screens for little to no benefit... Do you ever find yourself browsing your phone while watching TV? If so, can it be explained by one of Nate's reasonings?

Netflix has begun testing a shuffle button with some users of its Android app. "Spotted by one our tipsters, the Android app (specifically v7.6.0 build 19 34157) offered to randomly select something to watch," reports Android Police. "And in the playback controls, there's a shuffle icon with a 'Random Episode' label." From the report: It's unclear at this point whether this is just an experiment or if we'll see this roll out to a wider batch of people soon. For now, if you don't have this, you're stuck with picking something on your own.

Motherboard's Matthew Gault provides another possibility for how OpenAI's bots managed to beat professional human players in two consecutive games of Data 2. Gault argues that "it was only possible thanks to significant guardrails and an inhuman advantage" -- not necessarily because the AI was more clever than the humans. From the report: The OpenAI Five bots consisted of algorithms known as neural networks, which loosely mimic the brain and "learn" to complete tasks after a process of training and feedback. The research company put its Dota 2-playing AI through 180 days worth of virtual training to prepare it for the match, and it showed. However, the bots had to play within some highly specific limitations. Dota 2 is a complicated game with more than 100 heroes. Some of them use quirky and game-changing abilities. For this exhibition, the hero pool was limited to just 18. That's an incredible handicap because so much of Dota 2 involves a team picking the proper group composition and reacting to what its opponents pick. Reducing the number of champions from more than 100 to 18 made things much simpler for the AI.

The OpenAI Five bots also played Dota 2 by reading the game's information directly from its application programming interface (API), which allows other programs to easily interface with Dota 2. This gives the AI instant knowledge about the game, whereas human players have to visually interpret a screen. If a human was able to do this in a competitive match against other humans, we'd probably call it cheating. Even with this AI advantage, Walsh and his team beat the bots in the third game, when the match organizers turned hero selection over to the crowd, which gave the AI a weak hero composition. Walsh thinks he and his team could eventually beat the AI in a fair right, even given the limited hero pool and other restrictions.

In a world where artificial intelligence is no longer just a Spielberg-Kubrick collaboration, could algorithms be better at picking the next big blockbuster than studio execs? From a report: "Filmmakers are getting closer to understanding what moviegoers go to theaters to see thanks to neural networks fed off of data from previous box office hits," says Landon Starr, the head of data science at Clearlink, which uses machine learning to help companies understand consumer behavior. "Although this technology isn't spot-on quite yet, AI-powered predictions are likely stronger than the human calculations used in the past." And they're advancing quickly.

Vault, an Israeli startup founded in 2015, is developing a neural-network algorithm based on 30 years of box office data, nearly 400,000 story features found in scripts, and data like film budgets and audience demographics to estimate a movie's opening weekend. The company is only a couple years in, but founder David Stiff recently said that roughly 75 percent of Vault's predictions "come 'pretty close'" to films' actual opening grosses.

Scriptbook takes a similar approach, using its own AI platform to predict a movie's success based on the screenplay only. The Antwerp startup's AI analyzed 62 movies from 2015 and 2016, and claims it was able to successfully predict the box office failure or success of 52 of them, judging 30 movies correctly as profitable and 22 movies correctly as not profitable.

Jimmy Iovine, one of the heads of Apple Music, has long expressed desires to make Apple Music "an entire pop cultural experience." The company, he has previously said, will do so partly by including original video content into its music app. Now, in an interview with Bloomberg, he added that the company plans to include original shows and videos with high-profile partners such as director J.J. Abrams and rapper R. Kelly. Iovine adds, from the interview: A music service needs to be more than a bunch of songs and a few playlists. I'm trying to help Apple Music be an overall movement in popular culture, everything from unsigned bands to video. We have a lot of plans. We have the freedom, because it's Apple, to make one show, three shows, see what works, see what doesn't work until it feels good. The article also sheds light on Iovine's personality: Iovine fidgets when he talks. As his mind wanders, he takes his jacket off, then puts it back on. He frequently clutches his legs, contorting himself into a ball. He's a font of ideas with industry contacts to help execute every one of them. He turned to Pharrell Williams and Gwen Stefani for help picking the model for Beats headphones. Some ideas get Iovine into trouble. He's taken meetings with artists and made arrangements to release music without telling anyone in advance, frustrating colleagues. He's persuaded artists to release music exclusively with Apple, frustrating record labels.

As if we don't already have enough devices that can listen in on our conversations, security researchers at Israel's Ben Gurion University have created malware that will turn your headphones into microphones that can slyly record your conversations. TechCrunch reports: The proof-of-concept, called "Speake(a)r," first turned headphones connected to a PC into microphones and then tested the quality of sound recorded by a microphone vs. headphones on a target PC. In short, the headphones were nearly as good as an unpowered microphone at picking up audio in a room. It essentially "retasks" the RealTek audio codec chip output found in many desktop computers into an input channel. This means you can plug your headphones into a seemingly output-only jack and hackers can still listen in. This isn't a driver fix, either. The embedded chip does not allow users to properly prevent this hack which means your earbuds or nice cans could start picking up conversations instantly. In fact, even if you disable your microphone, a computer with a RealTek chip could still be hacked and exploited without your knowledge. The sound quality, as shown by this chart, is pretty much the same for a dedicated microphone and headphones. The researchers have published a video on YouTube demonstrating how this malware works.

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: "The code that took America to the moon was just published to GitHub, and it's like a 1960s time capsule," reports Quartz. Two lines of code include the comment "# TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE," and there's also a quote from Shakespeare's play Henry VI. In addition, the keyboard and display system program is named PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHT, and "There's also code that appears to instruct an astronaut to 'crank the silly thing around.'"

A former NASA intern uploaded the thousands of lines of assembly code to GitHub, working from a 2003 transcription made from scans inherited by MIT from a Colorado airplane pilot, and developers are already using GitHub to submit funny issue tickets for the 40-year-old code -- for example, "Extension pack for picking up Matt Damon". Another issue complains that "A customer has had a fairly serious problem with stirring the cryogenic tanks with a circuit fault present." Because this issue succinctly describes the Apollo 13 mission in 1970, the issue has been marked "closed".

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Of the 18-to-24-year-olds surveyed, 28% cited social media as their main news source, compared with 24% for TV. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism research also suggests 51% of people with online access use social media as a news source. The report, now in its fifth year, is based on a YouGov survey of about 50,000 people across 26 countries, including 2,000 Britons. Facebook and other social media outlets have moved beyond being "places of news discovery" to become the place people consume their news, it suggests. And news via social media is particularly popular among women and young people. The study found Facebook was the most common source -- used by 44% of all those surveyed -- to watch, share and comment on news. Next came YouTube on 19%, with Twitter on 10%. Apple News accounted for 4% in the US and 3% in the UK, while messaging app Snapchat was used by just 1% or less in most countries. According to the survey, consumers are happy to have their news selected by algorithms, with 36% saying they would like news chosen based on what they had read before and 22% happy for their news agenda to be based on what their friends had read. But 30% still wanted the human oversight of editors and other journalists in picking the news agenda and many had fears about algorithms creating news "bubbles" where people only see news from like-minded viewpoints. Most of those surveyed said they used a smartphone to access news, with the highest levels in Sweden (69%), Korea (66%) and Switzerland (61%), and they were more likely to use social media rather than going directly to a news website or app. The report also suggests users are noticing the original news brand behind social media content less than half of the time, something that is likely to worry traditional media outlets.

theodp writes: You don't have to be Mitt Romney to question PBS's announcement that it will air the Microsoft-funded 'reality' show Code Trip, in which Roadtrip Nation and Microsoft YouthSpark will send students across the U.S. for a "transformative journey into computer science." Of the partnership, Roadtrip Nation co-founder Mike Marriner said, "Roadtrip Nation is proud to partner with Microsoft's YouthSpark initiative not only to inform others of the many career routes one can take with a computer science background, but also to engage in the much-needed conversation of diversifying the tech field with more pluralistic perspectives." YouthSpark is part of Microsoft's National Talent Strategy (pdf), which the company describes as "a two-pronged approach that will couple long-term improvements in STEM education in the United States with targeted, short-term, high-skilled immigration reforms." The Official Microsoft Blog reports that filming of Code Trip began this week, with the three students traveling around the country to speak with leaders including Hadi Partovi, the co-founder of Code.org and 'major supporter' of FWD.us, who coincidentally once reported to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and is the next door neighbor of Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith and a jogging partner of Steve Ballmer.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Lee Hutchinson writes at Ars Technica that when you're picking out a DVR for your home, there's a pretty short list of candidates — TiVo has its new 6-tuner DVRs, or you can get something from your cable provider, or you can roll your own. But SnapStream makes a line of 30+ channel DVRs that can record dozens of TV shows simultaneously. Its products are the monster trucks of the DVR world, used by popular shows like The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and The Soup. A SnapStream cluster can repackage, transcode, and distribute content for re-use — functionality you won't find on a consumer-grade DVR. 'Being able to record, say, all of the news channels was something companies were interested in,' says Aaron Thompson, SnapStream's president. 'The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and so on all use it to record a bunch of stuff, find what they want to make fun of, and quickly get it into their editing bays to get it on air.' Prior to SnapStream, the big media companies were using isolated DVRs to record all the different television channels and shows like The Colbert Report had armies of interns to watch and catalog all the recorded TV, but SnapStream can search the entire recorded library for video based on keywords in the closed captions. 'We bring some of the power of 'new media,' the ability to search, copy and paste, and e-mail clips, to the old media of television for organizations,' says Rakesh Agrawal . 'You weren't able to search television before, but now you can. Now you can pinpoint stuff and you can hold people accountable and move at the same speed at which media works in the online world.'"

First time accepted submitter NewtonBoxers writes "Considering the amount of time most of us spend at work, it's surprising how few novels are set in the workplace and base their plot on the goings-on there. Perhaps, having spent a long day slaving in the corporate salt mines, many of us would rather forget about such humdrum matters and take refuge in books that offer us more excitement. Others, though, seem to enjoy the humor that can derive from the very things that drive us mad – management incompetence, byzantine procedures, pointless meetings... in short the stuff of everyday office life. We read Dilbert, we watch The Office, and we could do a lot worse than read Augustus Gump's very funny second novel, The Rise and Fall of T. John Dick. " Read on for the rest of NewtonBoxers's review.

theodp writes "In 2005, Microsoft came under fire after withdrawing support for an anti-gay-discrimination bill. 'I don't want the company to be in the position of appearing to dismiss the deeply-held beliefs of any employee, by picking sides on social policy issues,' explained CEO Steve Ballmer. That was then. Microsoft — like Google and Amazon — has since very publicly declared its support for gay-marriage legislation, which means it — unlike Chick-fil-A — needn't worry about the 'deeply-held beliefs of any employee' causing it to be blocked from doing business by the mayors of Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. I guess we'll never know what Microsoft versions of 'Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day' or 'National Same-Sex Kiss Day' would have looked like."

T-Kir writes "Apparently 20 years ago, instead of the Fremont Experience, downtown Las Vegas was actually close to building a life sized version of the refit USS Enterprise, and would have — had it not been for the then studio chairman Stanley Jaffe nixing it at the final meeting. The project had support from Paramount licensing and then-CEO Sherry Lansing, the Las Vegas Mayor, and the downtown redevelopment committee, but not opinion of Mr Jaffe: 'I don't want to be the guy that approved this and then it's a flop and sitting out there in Vegas forever.' As a Trek fan, I'm saddened that this never got built because I feel that this would've appealed to a much wider audience than science fiction fans. Props to io9 for picking this story up."