The new version of Samsung's Eco Remote features "RF harvesting capabilities that let the remote preserve its charge by 'collecting routers' radio waves and converting them to energy,'" reports The Verge. It can also be charged with solar energy. From the report: Aside from the new RF harvesting option, the Eco Remote can be charged from both outdoor and indoor light or (for the fastest results) over USB-C. Samsung says it's introducing a white model of the remote this year, which the company says is meant to better complement its "lifestyle" TVs like The Frame, Serif, and Sero. As with the original remote, the intention here is to ditch AAA batteries. Samsung has previously estimated that switching to solar-powered remotes could avoid 99 million discarded batteries over the course of seven years. It has also explored other ways of self-charging the internal battery such as "harnessing the kinetic energy that's created when the remote is shaken" and "using the vibrational energy that's created when the microphone picks up sounds." But this time around it settled on adding RF harvesting as another way to keep the clicker functioning whenever you need it.

Russia's state media watchdog will require Netflix to offer state television channels to its Russian customers after it added the U.S.-based streaming service to its register of "audio-visual services" this week. From a report: Roskomnadzor's register, which was created in late 2020, applies to online streaming services with over 100,000 daily users and requires them to comply with Russian law and register a Russian company. Registered services are also required to provide streams of 20 major Russian federal television channels. From March 2022, Netflix will be obliged to offer broadcasts from flagship state-owned Channel One, entertainment-focused NTV and the Russian Orthodox Church's in-house channel Spas, which means "Saved," to its users within Russia. The laws that Netflix must now obey include controversial provisions banning the promotion of "extremism" -- a restriction which has been used against supporters of the anti-Kremlin opposition.

The top eight US media groups plan to spend at least $115bn on new movies and television shows next year in pursuit of a video streaming business that loses money for most of them. From a report: The huge investment outlays come amid concerns that it will be harder to attract new customers in 2022 after the pandemic-fuelled growth in 2020 and 2021. Yet the alternative is to be left out of the streaming land rush. "There is no turning back," said media analyst Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson. "The only way to compete is spending more and more money on premium content." The Financial Times calculated the planned expenditures based on company disclosures and analyst reports. One entertainment executive called them "mind-boggling." Most of the companies -- a list that includes Walt Disney, Comcast, WarnerMedia and Amazon -- are set to rack up losses on their streaming units. Including sports rights, the aggregate spending estimate rises to about $140bn. Disney's investment in streaming content is likely to grow 35-40 per cent in 2022, according to estimates by Morgan Stanley. The company's spending on all new movies and TV shows is expected to reach $23bn, though the number rises to $33bn including sports rights -- up 32 per cent from its total content spending in 2021 and 65 per cent from 2020.

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has lost two floppy disks containing personal information on 38 people, the department announced on Dec. 27. From a report: The MPD said the floppy disks contained personal data on 38 people who had applied for public housing in Tokyo's Meguro Ward. The ward office had provided the personal information to the MPD to check if the applicants were affiliated with organized crime groups. Police said no leaks or misuse of the information have been confirmed at this point. According to the MPD's third organized crime control division, the names, dates of birth, and sex of 38 men in their 20s to 80s who had applied for Meguro Ward-run housing were recorded on the floppy disks. None of them were apparently affiliated with gangs. The police division and Meguro Ward signed an agreement in 2012 to check whether public housing applicants were affiliated with crime syndicates. Police received the floppy disks from the ward in December 2019 and February 2021 to conduct background checks, and kept them in the division's locked storage. The loss of the disks emerged after a Meguro Ward employee made a new inquiry to the police division on Dec. 7 and police went back to the disks to return them. Police say the disks may have been discarded accidentally.

LG is having a busy CES 2022 and the show hasn't even started. The company already revealed two bizarre OLED concepts and a pair of odd TVs, but today it made its most significant announcement yet by debuting OLED EX, the next generation of its OLED display technology. From a report: OLED EX (the EX stands for Evolution and eXperience, unfortunately) promises to boost maximum brightness, enhance picture quality, and allow for smaller display bezels. The underlying technology -- millions of individual self-lit pixels -- hasn't changed, but the use of an isotope called deuterium combined with algorithmic image processing can increase brightness by up to 30% over conventional OLED displays, LG claims. As boring as that may sound, the science behind it is actually pretty fascinating. LG found a way to extract deuterium, a rather scarce isotope (there is one deuterium atom in 6,000 hydrogen atoms) that's twice as heavy as hydrogen from water, then applied it to its TV's OLED elements. LG says stabilized deuterium compounds let the display emit brighter light while improving efficiency over time. Moving to the second change, LG is using a "personalized" machine learning algorithm that predicts the usage of each light-emitting diode (on up to 8K TVs) based on your viewing habits, then "precisely controls the display's energy input to more accurately express the details and colors of the video content being played."

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) wants to buy the defunct movie rental business Blockbuster and create a decentralized film streaming service out of it -- "with plans for movie financing and production down the road," reports The Block. From the report: The new DAO's name is, aptly, BlockbusterDAO. [...] To achieve its goals, BlockbusterDAO intends to raise $5 million to purchase Blockbuster from Dish Network, an American television provider that bought the movie rental company in 2011. BlockbusterDAO aims to raise the cash by selling BlockbusterDAO NFTs for 0.13 ETH (about $530 USD).

"One reported offer 'low-balled' $1.8 million for the brand, but it seems that the price tag is going to be higher to beat out any counter-offers," wrote the DAO's creator on Twitter. DAOs gained prominence in 2021 as a way for groups to democratically make decisions and achieve a common goal. They often use NFTs, governance tokens or other forms of cryptocurrency to vote on these decisions and raise funds for the DAO.

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.

Peter Jackson's seven-hour documentary "Get Back" (now streaming on Disney+) edits footage from the Beatles' ambitious recording sessions for their 1970 album Let It Be. But long-time Slashdot reader MattSparkes writes that the whole documentary "would have been impossible without custom-made artificial intelligence, say sound engineers." Sixty hours of footage were recorded but most of the audio was captured by a single microphone that picked up the musicians' instruments in a noisy jumble rather than a carefully crafted mix. It also recorded background noise and chatter, which made much of the footage unusable.

The team scoured academic papers on using AI to separate audio sources but realised that none of the previous research would work for a music documentary. They consulted with Paris Smaragdis at the University of Chicago and started to create a neural network called MAL (machine assisted learning) and a set of training data that was higher quality than datasets used in academic experiments.
The Washington Post describes it as "a sort of sonic forensics," adding that the name MAL was a deliberate homage to the HAL computer in 2001: a Space Odyssey — and to the Beatles' beloved road manager and principal assistant, Mal Evans. Using MAL, Jackson and his colleagues were able to painstakingly and precisely isolate each and every audio track — be it musical instrumentation, singing or studio chatter — from the original mono recordings made for most of "Let It Be." "What we've managed to do is split it all apart in a way that is utterly clean and sounds much better," Jackson said.
Other interesting observations from the Post:

• "Get Back" tapped nearly 120 hours of previously unheard audio recordings. Jackson and his team started work in 2017.

• Jackson's team also "carefully restored, upgraded and enlarged the grainy original 16-millimeter" footage from the 1969 documentary Let It Be "so that it now pops with vibrant color."

• Jackson's documentary "was originally set to open in theaters last year as a two-and-a-half hour feature film, but was pushed back by the pandemic. With more time unexpectedly on his hands, Jackson transformed his feature film into the six-hour epic...."

• Jackson would also like to release an expanded director's cut sometime in the future, "but there are no current plans to do so."

• "At one point, Jackson's favorite version of his Get Back film clocked in at 18 hours..."

SFGate visits a San Francisco elementary school where there's absolutely no trace of warehouse that used to be there where Tim Burton kicked a hole in the wall during the arduous two-year filming of "The Nightmare Before Christmas".

At least one animator remembers Burton at the time was directing Batman Returns, and only stopped by every month or so to check on the film's progress and "actually got to witness, proof positive, how the crew suffered to create his vision...."

Slashdot reader destinyland shares SFGate's report: Disney initially had reservations about the film, releasing it under the Touchstone banner with a PG rating that was uncommon for an animated feature at the time. Nonetheless, "The Nightmare Before Christmas" became a sleeper hit — Disneyland's Haunted Mansion is annually remodeled with a seasonal overlay inspired by the film, and it clocks in at #7 on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the best Christmas movies of all time. It was immortalized in a Blink-182 song, and Roger Ebert went as far as to compare the originality of the worlds captured in "The Nightmare Before Christmas" to the planets in the "Star Wars" franchise....

[A] team of 120 animators, puppet fabricators, camera operators, and more moved into San Francisco Studios — later renamed Skellington Productions — in July of 1991, with production expected to begin later that October. The 35,000-square-foot warehouse on 375 7th Street was outfitted with 19 soundstages where 227 puppets — many of them duplicates of the main characters — were painstakingly assembled and animated. Passersby in SoMa likely had no idea the studio existed, and if they did, they were completely unaware of what was going on inside.

Unlike studios such as Pixar and Dreamworks, where each animator is usually seated at a computer in a cubicle, these soundstages were massive and sectioned off with thick black curtains, said animator Justin Kohn, who lived in a Sausalito apartment next to Smitty's Bar during filming and still resides in Marin. "It was like visiting this crazy museum," he said. "You'd part the curtain, and it was like visiting a whole new world with clouds and stars everywhere." Set pieces were built no larger than two feet tall and wide so an animator could easily reach inside and move the puppets around. Each character had to be posed 24 times for every second of animated footage, while many of the scenes required 20-30 lighting instruments on top of that to create lifelike visual effects. "It was the most sophisticated stop motion ever done in the world up until that point," said Kohn...

All the while, they wondered if the hours of tedious work would pay off. When the film was completed, most of the sets and puppets were thrown away, with animators taking home some of them as keepsakes — Kohn still has a Jack Skellington puppet and the sleigh displayed in an office.

"Do you need a last-minute gift these upcoming holidays," asks the Free Software Foundation, "one that will keep on giving for the rest of the year?

"Free your own digital life and the ones of those you love by opting to give them a gift that will raise their social consciousness, create more lasting cheer, and defend #UserFreedom: Gift a Free Software Foundation (FSF) associate membership!" After donating, you'll receive a code and a printable page so that you can present your gift as a physical object, if you like. The membership is valid for one year, and includes the many benefits that come with an FSF associate membership, including a USB member card [16GB and pre-loaded with the fully free GNU/Linux distribution Trisquel Live], email forwarding, access to our Jitsi Meet videoconferencing server and member forum, discounts in the FSF shop and on ThinkPenguin hardware, and many more.

Looking for more gifts? You can also check out the latest FSF Giving Guide, or have a look at the great list of potential gifts our operations assistant Davis Remmel made for this very purpose!
"If you're unsure what to get that special someone, or just want to treat yourself," Remmel writes, "consider our Emacs de Luxe Bundle: it has manuals, tutorials, references, mugs, shirts, and just like Emacs it includes the kitchen sink stickers.

"For privacy lovers (or those who have ever uttered the word, "cryptography"), we have a NeuG USB True Random Number Generator (RNG). Your cryptographic keys will be stronger than an ox, without any need to trust your CPU's definition of "random." I recommend this RNG in conjunction with our anti-surveillance webcam stickers, which don't leave residue and can also cover microphone holes."

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.

"YouTube TV's battle with Disney is over almost as soon as it began," reports Engadget. "The two have struck a deal that restores access to ESPN, FX and other Disney channels on YouTube's streaming service..." As is often the case with disputes like this, each side blamed the other. Disney claimed YouTube TV "declined to reach a fair deal," while YouTube maintained that it was advocating on "behalf" of viewers...

It's not just that channels like ESPN remain a major draw for live TV services â" it's that Disney could easily have siphoned some of those customers to its equivalent Hulu offering. YouTube may have decided that any increased costs (and possible rate hikes) were less painful than losing viewership.
The base subscription rate is returning to $65 per month, but Reuters reports YouTube TV promised that "all impacted members" would still receive a one-off $15 discount.

The World Science Fiction Society has selected this year's winners for their prestigious Hugo award.

The best novel award went to Network Effect, the fifth book in the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, which also won this year's Hugo award for best series. (And Network Effect also won 2021's Nebula award for best novel, given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.) Here's how publisher Tor.com begins their description: You know that feeling when you're at work, and you've had enough of people, and then the boss walks in with yet another job that needs to be done right this second or the world will end, but all you want to do is go home and binge your favorite shows? And you're a sentient murder machine programmed for destruction? Congratulations, you're Murderbot.

Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable A.I. you'll read this century.
The best novelette award went to Two Truths and a Lie by Sarah Pinsker — available now for free reading online (which also won a Nebula award). The best novella award went to The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo. (Both were also published by Tor.com.) Also available for free reading online is the Hugo winner for best short story, "Metal Like Blood in the Dark" by T. Kingfisher. (And Kingfisher won a second Hugo this year — the Lodestar award for best young adult book for A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking — which also won a Nebula award.)

A special award for "Best Related Work" went to Beowulf: A New Translation. ("Maria Dahvana Headley's decision to make Beoulf a bro puts his macho bluster in a whole new light," wrote the New York Times.) And the Best Graphic Story award went to Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, written by Octavia Butler and adapted by Damian Duffy...

Netflix won a Hugo award for The Old Guard ("Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form"), while the final 53-minute episode of NBC's TV show The Good Place won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Shortform. (The episode also won this year's "Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation".)

And there were also awards for best fan podcast, best fan writer, and best fanzine, as well as special one-off Hugo award for best video game, which went to the game Hades.

Variety argues that young men — the key audience for comic book and science-fiction films "have been fueling attendance for pandemic-era hits..."

But even with that, this weekend Spider-Man: No Way Home "crushed box office expectations, generating a mammoth $253 million from 4,336 theaters in North America." It was easily the best domestic opening weekend turnout of any movie in pandemic times. Prior to this weekend, no other COVID-era film had been able to cross even $100 million in a single weekend. The biggest domestic debut previously belonged to another Sony comic book sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which generated $90 million in its initial release. And after only three days in cinemas, Spider-Man: No Way Home is already the highest-grossing film of this year (and last). Overseas, the latest Spidey outing has collected $334.2 million from 60 international markets for a global tally of $587.2 million.

It ranks as the third-biggest worldwide opening weekend ever....

The film is experiencing the kind of demand that hasn't been witnessed in theaters since Disney's every-hero-but-the-kitchen-sink mashup Avengers: Endgame, which collected a historic $357 million in its 2018 debut. Spider-Man: No Way Home isn't quite reaching those (basically unattainable) heights, but the movie has been a formidable force, zooming past opening weekend tickets sales for box office behemoths like 2015's Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($247 million), 2017's Star Wars: The Last Jedi ($220 million), 2015's Jurassic World ($208 million), 2012's The Avengers ($207 million) and 2018's Black Panther ($202 million). It stands behind Avengers: Endgame, and 2017's Avengers: Infinity War ($257 million debut) to land the third-best opening weekend in history. Counting No Way Home, only eight films have ever crossed $200 million in ticket sales in a single weekend....

The film's remarkable box office revenues coincide with the rapid spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, which is already leading to restaurant, concert and live-theater closures in New York City....

Box office experts believe there's one reason why "Spider-Man: No Way Home" is turbo-charging the box office: superheroes sell. In other words, the comic book adventure's performance doesn't reverse fortunes for the beleaguered movie theater business. Rather, industry insiders believe it punctuates the reality that multiplexes have been — and will continue to be — more reliant than ever on big-budget spectacles, particularly of the superhero variety.
The same weekend Guillermo del Toro's $60-million movie Nightmare Alley brought in $3 million.

Long-time Slashdot reader kjshark writes: Eric Clapton has successfully sued a German woman who posted an illegal recording for €9.95, about $11 on eBay. The CD was a single-bootlegged recording of a Clapton concert from the 1980s.

After Clapton sent a court in Düsseldorf an affidavit stating the recordings were illegal, the defendant claimed she was unaware the CD was recorded illegally and that her late husband originally purchased the CD at a department store in 1987. Her appeal was rejected by the court.

The court ruled that the woman pay the legal fees for both parties which amount to around $3,500 and that if she continues to keep the recording up on eBay she'll face six months in prison or a fine of around $283,000.

Apple is rebuilding Apple Music as a full native app with the first beta of macOS Monterey 12.2. 9to5Mac reports: Back in 2019, when Apple introduced macOS Catalina, the well-known iTunes was replaced by the Music app to better reflect the company's strategy on iOS and tvOS. However, although under a new name, the Music app on macOS retained the iTunes backend, which was basically a bunch of web content loaded into an app. While this works for most users, having web content within apps makes the experience less fluid. Luckily Apple is finally changing this with macOS Monterey 12.2 beta, which includes some big changes to the Music app backend.

As first noted by Luming Yin on Twitter, Apple Music in macOS 12.2 beta now uses AppKit -- which is macOS' native interface framework. 9to5Mac was able to confirm based on macOS code that the Music app is now using JET, which is a technology created by Apple to turn web content into native apps. Some parts of the Music app were already native, such as the music library. But now Mac users will notice that searching for new songs in Apple Music is much faster as the results pages are displayed with a native interface instead of as a webpage. Scrolling between elements has also become smoother with the beta app, and trackpad gestures are now more responsive.

YouTube TV yesterday warned that it could lose all Disney-owned channels after Friday because of a contract dispute and said it will temporarily reduce its price by $15 a month if that happens. Ars Technica reports: "We're now in negotiations with Disney to continue distributing their content on YouTube TV so you can continue watching everything from your favorite teams on ESPN to The Bachelor to Good Morning America. Our deal expires on Friday, December 17, and we haven't been able to reach an equitable agreement yet, so we wanted to give you an early heads up so that you can understand your choices," the Google-owned YouTube wrote in a blog post.

"[I]f we are unable to reach a deal by Friday, the Disney-owned channels will no longer be available on YouTube TV and we will decrease our monthly price by $15, from $64.99 to $49.99 (while this content remains off our platform)," the blog post said. YouTube noted that users can pause or cancel their YouTube TV subscriptions at any time and subscribe to the Disney Bundle for $13.99 a month.

YouTube's statement that it wants "equitable" terms indicates that it is seeking a most-favored-nation (MFN) clause from Disney. "Our ask to Disney, as with all our partners, is to treat YouTube TV like any other TV provider -- by offering us the same rates that services of a similar size pay, across Disney's channels for as long as we carry them. If Disney offers us equitable terms, we'll renew our agreement with them," YouTube wrote. When contacted by Ars, Disney said that the contract is scheduled to expire on Friday at 11:59 pm ET and covers "the ABC Owned Television Stations, the ESPN networks, the Disney channels, Freeform, the FX networks, and the National Geographic channels." In an email to Ars, Disney expressed confidence that the companies can get a deal done: "Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution has a highly successful track record of negotiating such agreements with providers of all types and sizes across the country and is committed to working with Google to reach a fair, market-based agreement. We are optimistic that we can reach a deal and continue to provide their YouTube TV customers with our live sporting events and news coverage, plus kids, family, and general entertainment programming."

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).

An anonymous reader shares a report: Four years running, we've been jazzed by the potential of HDMI 2.1 -- the relatively new video connector standard that can provide variable refresh rates (VRR), automatic low latency connections (ALLM), and of course, a giant pipe with 48Gbps of bandwidth (and fixed rate signaling) to deliver up to 10K resolution and up to a 120Hz refresh rate depending on your cable and compression. But today, I'm learning that not only are all of those features technically optional, but that the HDMI standards body owner actually encourages TV and monitor manufacturers that have none of those things -- zip, zilch, zero -- to effectively lie and call them "HDMI 2.1" anyhow. That's the word from TFTCentral, which confronted the HDMI Licensing Administrator with the news that Xiaomi was selling an "HDMI 2.1" monitor that supported no HDMI 2.1 features, and was told this was a perfectly reasonable state of affairs. It's infuriating.

It means countless people, some of whom we've encouraged in our reviews to seek out HDMI 2.1 products, may get fooled into fake futureproofing if they don't look at the fine print to see whether features like ALLM, VRR, or even high refresh rates are possible. Worse, they'll get fooled for no particularly good reason: there was a perfectly good version of HDMI without those features called HDMI 2.0, but the HDMI Licensing Administrator decided to kill off that brand when it introduced the new one. Very little of this is actually news, I'm seeing -- we technically should have known that HDMI 2.1's marquee features would be optional for a while now, and here at The Verge we've seen many a TV ship without full support. In one story about shopping for the best gaming TV for PS5 and Xbox Series X, we characterized it as "early growing pains."

The vacancies at cable news companies are piling up as networks and journalists begin to eye streaming alternatives. Axios reports: Why it matters: Primetime cable slots and the Sunday shows are no longer the most opportunistic placements for major TV talent.

Driving the news: Long-time "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace is leaving the network after nearly two decades, he announced Sunday. He will be joining CNN as an anchor for its new streaming service, CNN+. Wallace will anchor a new weekday show and will contribute to the network's daily live programming, per CNN. It was his decision not to renew his contract with the network, which expired this year, CNN's Brian Stelter reported.

The big picture: Wallace marks the latest in a string of cable news host departures and shakeups in the past few weeks and months. There are now several holes cable bosses will need to fill in coming weeks. [...] Major networks are investing heavily to lure talent to streaming alternatives in light of the decline of linear television. CNN hired NBC News veteran Kasie Hunt as an anchor and analyst for CNN+, reportedly for a salary of over $1 million. It's hiring hundreds of new roles for the streaming service, set to launch next quarter. NBC News has already hired the majority of the 200+ new jobs it announced over the summer for its new streaming service and digital team, a top executive confirmed to Axios last month. One of its linear TV anchors, Joshua Johnson, moved full-time to host a primetime streaming show for NBC News Now. Fox News launched a new weather-focused streaming service in October. A Fox executive said last week the company is prepared to migrate Fox News to a streaming platform when the time is right. CBS News changed the name of its streaming service recently from CBSN to "CBS News" to represent a new streamlined vision for streaming. "TV networks won't stop seriously investing in linear news programs until sports move out of the cable bundle, and that won't be for another few years," adds Axios.