Around the world, the most popular tunes this month will be depressing ones [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled.]. From a report: Residents of the northern hemisphere might think that their moods are worst in January. Christmas is over, the nights are long and summer is a distant prospect. Newspapers often claim that "Blue Monday," in the third week of January, is the most depressing day. To create a quantitative measure of seasonal misery, The Economist has analysed music consumption. Our calculations use data from Spotify, which offers 50m tracks to 270m users in over 70 countries, mostly in Europe and the Americas. The firm has an algorithm that classifies a song's "valence," or how happy it sounds, on a scale from 0 to 100. The algorithm is trained on ratings of positivity by musical experts, and gives Aretha Franklin's soaring "Respect" a score of 97; Radiohead's gloomy "Creep" gets just 10.

Since 2017 Spotify has also published daily tables of the 200 most-streamed songs, both worldwide and in each country. We gathered data for 30 countries around the globe, including 46,000 unique tracks with 330bn streams, to identify the annual nadir of musical mood. Drum roll, please. The global top 200 songs are gloomiest in February, when their valence is 4% lower than the annual average. In July, the perkiest month, the mood is 3% higher. The most joyful spike comes at Christmas. Strikingly, this February slump occurs in some countries near the equator, such as Singapore, and far south of it, such as Australia -- even though their musical tastes differ. A few Latin American countries lack such a dip, perhaps because the algorithm sees Latin music as mostly happy. The icy north shows the biggest seasonal swings. Finland's mood in July is 11% happier than usual. Overall, on days when a country gets one more hour of sunlight than its annual average, the valence of its streams increases by 0.6%. In contrast, wet days bring particularly downcast tunes.

On Tuesday, Netflix lost a bid to escape a lawsuit brought by the trademark owner of "Choose Your Own Adventure" over the 2018 immersive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. The series' original publisher, Chooseco, sued the company early last year for $25 million in damages, as the company says that Netflix's new movie benefits from association with the Choose Your Own Adventure series, without the company ever receiving the trademark. From Hollywood Reporter: According to the plaintiff, it has been using the mark since the 1980s and has sold more than 265 million copies of its Choose Your Own Adventure books. 20th Century Fox holds options for movie versions, and Chooseco alleges that Netflix actively pursued a license. Instead of getting one, Netflix released Bandersnatch, which allows audiences to select the direction of the plot. Claiming $25 million in damages, Chooseco suggested that Bandersnatch viewers have been confused about association with its famous brand, particularly because of marketing around the movie as well as a scene where the main character -- a video game developer -- tells his father that the work he's developing is based on a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

In reaction to the lawsuit, Netflix raised a First Amendment defense, particularly the balancing test in Rogers v. Grimaldi, whereby unless a work has no artistic relevance, the use of a mark must be misleading for it to be actionable. U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions agrees that Bandersnatch is an artistic work even if Netflix derived profit from exploiting the Charlie Brooker film. And the judge says that use of the trademark has artistic relevance. Thus, the final question is whether Netflix's film is explicitly misleading. Judge Sessions doesn't believe it's appropriate to dismiss the case prematurely without exploring factual issues in discovery. Netflix also attempted to defend its use of "Choose Your Own Adventure" as descriptive fair use. Here, too, the judge believes that factual exploration is appropriate. You can read the full decision here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Valve's gaming marketplace Steam includes an opt-in hardware survey feature, and the results are published as percentages of surveyed users on a monthly basis. You'll find all kinds of data about Steam-connected computers every month, and this includes operating systems, video cards, VR systems, and more. In the latter case, that figure is counted out of all Steam users -- as opposed to a less-helpful stat like "70 percent of VR fans prefer Product A, 30 percent Product B." We were intrigued (but not surprised) to see a jump in connected VR devices for the reported month of December 2019. That's the holiday season, after all, and it's reasonable to expect Santa's deliveries of headsets to affect data.

What surprised us was the continued growth of that metric through the following month -- and a statistically significant one, at that. The latest survey, taken during January 2020, says that 1.31 percent of all surveyed Steam users own a VR system, up from 1.09 percent the month prior. By pure percentage points, this is the largest one-month jump in pure percentage since Valve began tracking VR use in 2016 -- by a long shot. (For perspective, the same survey indicated that 0.9 percent of Steam computers run on Linux, while 3.0 percent use MacOS or OSX.) Based on Valve's conservative January 2019 estimate of 90 million "monthly active users," Ars Technica estimates there are "1.17 million PC-VR users connecting to Steam."

"Drawing an exponential trend line of Steam's MAU between August 2017 and January 2019 would get us closer to a count of 1.6 million active VR hardware owners on Steam, and that doesn't include any estimate of Steam-ignorant Oculus users. However you slice it, the juiciest detail can't be argued: a 20.2% jump within a major PC-VR ecosystem in 30 days."

Streaming eats up a big chunk of viewers' time, though it's still outweighed by traditional linear TV. From a report: That's according to the latest Total Audience Report from Nielsen -- its first Total Audience Report to use smart TV data from Gracenote, and one that's particularly focused on "the flash point of the 'streaming wars'" (as Senior Vice President of Audience Insights Peter Katsingris puts it in his introduction). The firm reports that among U.S. homes that are capable over-the-top streaming, 19% of their TV time was spent on streaming during fourth quarter of 2019. Within that streaming time, Netflix accounted for 31%, compared to 21% for YouTube, 12% for Hulu, 8% for Amazon and 28% for other services. The Gracenote data also allows Nielsen to analyze the full universe of content available to U.S. viewers -- yes, there's a lot of content out there. The firm concludes that through December 2019, viewers had access 646,152 unique program titles, up 10% from 2018. And among those titles, 9% were available exclusively on subscription video on demand services like Netflix.

After capturing the U.S. television market with aggressively priced Roku TVs, China's TCL wants to replicate that success with inexpensive phones, IoT devices and connected appliances -- and in the process, turn its still relatively unknown brand into a household name. In other words: TCL wants to be the next Samsung. From a report: It won't be easy. The phone market, TCL's next target, is firmly dominated by Apple and Samsung and hard to penetrate for newcomers. The company also faces headwinds from the Trump administration's ongoing trade war with China, as well as political resistance to fellow Chinese tech companies like Huawei. And while TCL's partnership with Roku has been key to building its U.S. TV business, it has also forced the company to operate with razor-thin margins as Roku cashes in on a rapidly growing advertising business that's been a newfound source of revenue for other TV manufacturers.

TCL was founded as an audiotape manufacturer in China's Guangdong province in 1981. It has since become a growing force in the consumer electronics industry, manufacturing phones, TVs and appliances that are sold worldwide under a number of brands. In 2019, TCL sold 32 million TVs globally, it recently told investors. Across all of its businesses, TCL's 2018 revenue amounted to $16.3 billion, with a net profit of $586 million. Two-thirds of TCL's TV revenue already comes from overseas, and the company is looking to grow its international business even further. TCL is set to officially enter the U.S. smartphone market under its own brand in the second quarter of this year. After spending the last few years slapping licensed names like BlackBerry on phones it manufactures, the company previewed its first line of TCL-branded handsets at CES in January. It's expected to reveal official launch dates, specs and carrier partnerships at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Around Thanksgiving, it looked like this could have been Netflix's year to win it all at the Oscars. Critics were heaping praise on the epic scale of Martin Scorsese's mob movie "The Irishman," which felt destined to be the streaming giant's best shot at the elusive best picture trophy. The Los Gatos-based tech company put its weight behind the $159-million film, with its big stars and intricate age-altering effects, and pushed it hard through awards season with billboards along Sunset Boulevard. And yet, on Sunday at the Dolby Theatre, Netflix came up short. In total, Netflix's movies had 24 Oscar nominations, the most of any studio. [...]

Still, Netflix ended up winning just two awards, including supporting actress for Laura Dern's turn as a divorce lawyer in "Marriage Story." Netflix also won for documentary feature "American Factory," which was supported by Barack and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground Productions. It wasn't for lack of trying. Hollywood executives estimate that Netflix spent at least $70 million (WSJ pegs $100 million) to promote its eight awards contenders to academy voters. For most studios, an awards season budget of $15 million is considered an ample war chest for a best-picture contender. Netflix was hoping to succeed this year where it ultimately failed in 2019 in its quest to take home the big prize for Alfonso Cuaron's "Roma." Instead, best picture went to "Parasite," Bong Joon Ho's South Korean satirical thriller, which was released by the scrappy upstart New York distributor Neon and cost about $11 to make. "Parasite" also won for director, original screenplay and international film and became the first foreign-language film to win the academy's top honor.

The Warner Brothers/DC film Birds of Prey "is proving not to be the February box office success industry observers had hoped," according to The Wrap: After grossing $13 million on Friday from 4,236 screens, the film is now estimated to earn an opening weekend of $34 million, which would be the lowest start for a DC Comics adaptation since the $5.3 million opening of the box office bomb Jonah Hex in 2010. Heading into the weekend, trackers had been projecting an opening weekend of $55 million while Warner Bros. was more conservative with a $45 million start... Reports on the budget for "Birds of Prey" have varied but have tended to be around $85-95 million.
"Oof. That's not what was wanted or expected," writes Cinema Blend. First of all, the title probably didn't help... Second, Birds of Prey is rated R. Suicide Squad, which gave Margot Robbie's Harley her big showcase, was rated PG-13. As Deadline noted, a lot of young Harley fans -- who loved the animated series and Suicide Squad -- may have been shut out by that rating...

People are also comparing Birds of Prey to Deadpool, which opened to $132,434,639 in February 2016. It may seem like apples to oranges, but they are both R-rated comic book movies opening in February.
Here's a humorous sidenote. At one point in the film, Harley Quinn asks herself what she could've done to offend Ewan McGregor's narcissistic character -- with one possible reason appearing for a split-second on the screen: "Voted for Bernie."

"We just snuck it in there," director Cathy Yan told the Washington Post.

According to CNBC, ViacomCBS is planning the launch of a new streaming service that would expand upon the already successful CBS All Access with films from Paramount Studios and Miramax, plus TV program from networks like MTV and Comedy Central. As Ars Technica points out, both Star Trek films (Viacom) and TV series (CBS) would likely appear on this new service. From the report: The news follows a high-profile merger between Viacom and CBS. CBS had already launched its CBS All Access service before serious movement on the merger began, and Showtime (also owned by ViacomCBS) has offered streaming options for a while now. Previously, Viacom offered some streaming services of its own while also licensing its content to bigger players like Amazon Prime Video. Both CBS All Access and Viacom's existing streaming services would continue to exist alongside this new service in the company's current plans.

ViacomCBS owns such networks as MTV, VH1, CBS, BET, Showtime, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central, as well as the major film studio Paramount Pictures. It also owns publisher Simon & Schuster and a 50 percent stake in broadcast TV network The CW. (The other half is owned by Warner Bros., now owned by AT&T.) The CNBC report says that the ViacomCBS leadership is still finalizing its plans. However, the current thinking is that there will be both ad-free and ad-supporter tiers (as is the case with CBS All Access today), with Showtime included in at least one plan. Neither a name nor pricing have been decided.

Apollo Masters, one of two plants in the world that manufacture lacquers that are imperative to the process of making vinyl records, sustained a major fire yesterday and burned down. Loudwire reports: The Desert Sun confirmed that the fire began in the 15,000-square-foot building at 8am Feb. 6. There were multiple explosions reported, and 82 firefighters responded to the scene. The company posted a statement on their website addressing the event, as well as the uncertainty of its future: "To all our wonderful customers. It is with great sadness we report the Apollo Masters manufacturing and storage facility had a devastating fire and was completely destroyed. The best news is all of our employees are safe. We are uncertain of our future at this point and are evaluating options as we try to work through this difficult time. Thank you for all of the support over the years and the notes of encouragement and support we have received from you all."

The only other plant, MDC, is located in Japan. While there has not been an immediate impact, an eventual shortage of lacquers can lead to disruptions in the vinyl production process for companies all over.

Netflix has taken down just nine pieces of content around the world in response to written government requests since it was founded 23 years ago, the company revealed for the first time. From a report: In its first-ever report on what it calls Environmental Social Governance, Netflix says it has already received one takedown request this year from the government of Singapore to remove "The Last Hangover," a Brazilian comedy. To date, Netflix has received three written requests from the government of Singapore covering five pieces of content, and one each from New Zealand, Vietnam, Germany, and Saudi Arabia. All have been since 2015. Netflix says it will only take down content if it receives a written request from the government seeking the censorship.

ItsJustAPseudonym writes: "The number of Texas school districts with esports programs has exploded this school year, growing from about 20 to more than 300 in the span of a few months," reports KXAN-TV, citing the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA). "'It's been in colleges for the last few years, and now it's starting to move down into the high schools and in the middle schools,' said TCEA's executive director, Lori Gracey. 'Teamwork, cooperation, planning, problem-solving, thinking quickly,' Gracey explained, 'all of those are things we want our kids to be able to do. And you can do that through video games.'"

And, for the collegiate perspective on this: "High school is a really, really exciting place for esports to take root," said Austin Espinoza, president of Longhorn Gaming at the University of Texas at Austin. "Eventually, that's just going to trickle upwards into the college world." Yes, yes, it's VERY exciting. I'm sure the effect on grades will be *nothing* but positive, right? On the other hand, esports provides an opportunity for college students to earn some money to pay down their college debts, so that's a potential upside. Will colleges start recruiting and offering scholarships to esports competitors?

Netflix announced today that subscribers will now be able to disable the autoplay functionality that occurs on its homepage. The Verge reports: People can choose to disable autoplay in two different formats: one that automatically starts the next episode in a series and one that autoplays previews while browsing. Netflix rolled out an option to disable autoplay with episodes in a series way back in 2014, but this new setting specifically relates to the autoplay previews on the homepage.

Both features have amassed tons of complaints from subscribers and creators. Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Knives Out director Rian Johnson tweeted his "current favorite console game: navigating Netflix without triggering autoplay promos." There are Reddit threads, YouTube videos, and, of course, tweets from angry customers who have asked Netflix to please, for the love of all that's good in the world, stop with the annoying autoplay features. One person was so frustrated that they created an entire Twitter account just to ask Netflix to please stop. Users can visit an updated help page on Netflix's website to learn how to disable the function.

Netflix announced today that it's beginning to stream video using AV1 on Android. This high-performance, royalty-free codec provides 20% improved compression efficiency over VP9. 9to5Google reports: Developed by the Alliance for Open Media, founding members include Google, Netflix, and Amazon -- all large video providers. Netflix says its "goal is to roll out AV1 on all of our platforms." In starting on mobile, the service cites how "cellular networks can be unreliable" and "limited data plans." That is particularly the case for subscribers abroad, a key growth market. This results in an overall "good fit for AV1's compression efficiency."

At launch, the "Save Data" option -- More tab > App Settings > Cellular Data Usage -- must be set in the Android client. Netflix only specifies "selected titles" as being available to stream over AV1. Moving forward, Netflix's AV1 usage will expand to more use cases as "codec performance improves over time." The service is already working with "device and chipset partners to extend this into hardware."

Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games, is leaving the company in March after taking an "extended break" in the spring of 2019. "Rockstar Games was founded in 1998, and Dan Houser contributed prominently to the company's successful franchises, including Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, Red Dead Redemption, and more," notes The Verge. From the report: Take-Two Interactive is the holdings company for Rockstar Games, and it hasn't officially announced the departure yet. Here's the snippet in full, straight from [an SEC document registered by publisher Take-Two Interactive, which first confirmed the news]: "After an extended break beginning in the spring of 2019, Dan Houser, Vice President, Creative at Rockstar Games, will be leaving the company. Dan Houser's last day will be March 11, 2020. We are extremely grateful for his contributions. Rockstar Games has built some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful game worlds, a global community of passionate fans and an incredibly talented team, which remains focused on current and future projects."

Google Fiber, the division of Google parent company Alphabet that provides fiber-to-the-premises service in the U.S., today announced that it will no longer offer traditional TV bundles with news, sports, premium, and local broadcast channels. From a report: Current subscribers to Fiber plans that include TV won't see their existing service modified or changed, but new customers won't have the option of signing up for cable content going forward. "As we return our focus to where we started -- as a gigabit Internet company -- we're also ready to challenge the status quo, to finally come right out and say it: customers today just don't need traditional TV," wrote Fiber in a blog post. "The best TV is already online. And we want to help you watch it, in the ways that work best for your budget and your own viewing preferences."

Today Fox will broadcast the Super Bowl in 4K and HDR, reports Gizmodo's senior consumer tech editor. But "the 4K is fake 4K, and, according to Digital Trend's interview with one of the men producing the Bowl, there's a good reason for that..." The reason is that 4K is still really, really data intensive. A 4K video is often twice the size of a 1080p video. It's full of twice as much data which means storage drives need to be twice as big. It also means data pipelines need to be bigger, and processors need to be faster. That's pretty easy to do if you're handling a single 4K stream. But the Super Bowl broadcast will have to handle data coming from a hundred different sources, from cameras on the field, to drones, to big broadcast cameras pointed at the commentators.

"When we're doing a football game that is somewhere north of 100 cameras, there's no possible way we can do this in 4K," Michael Drazin, a broadcast engineering consultant working for Fox, told Digital Trends...

Instead, nearly all the cameras will shoot in 1080p HDR. A few cameras will shoot in 4K and 8K, giving the broadcast's directors the ability to crop and zoom in and without needing a big zoom lens. Then it will all be converted to a 4K HDR stream for 4K broadcasts, and a 720p SDR stream for terrestrial channel broadcasts.
Digital Trends is still calling it "the most grandiose single-day sporting spectacle of the year."

20 years ago, 11 different startups spent millions of dollars to run 30-second ads during the Super Bowl, reports the Hustle. Within one year 8 of the 11 companies "had either gone bankrupt or been sold in fire sales."
The how-to platform Computer.com spent $3m of its $5.8m in seed funding on an ad featuring its 2 founders holding a poster board sign. The site hadn't even launched yet. Not all the ads were quite as homespun. Another startup, Pets.com, spared no expense...to produce its 30-second ad for pet products that featured... a homemade sock puppet...

The 11 startups that bought ads for 2000's Big Game were hoping to replicate the success of 2 tech companies that came before them. HotJobs.com and Monster.com paid for ads in the 1999 Super Bowl, and both reported surges in web traffic during the game... [But in 2000] many advertisers' websites proved poorly equipped to handle the increased traffic... One startup's site slowed from 8 to 53 seconds; another's altogether crashed. "Everything was held together with glue and rubber bands," Hanlon, of LifeMinders, said...

Pets.com, whose $17m in marketing resulted in just $8.8m in revenue, declared bankruptcy less than 10 months after the game. Several months later, Pets.com sold off the branding rights to its celebrity sock puppet for $125k. LifeMinders.com, which had once been valued at $2.3B, had to sell for $68.1m in cash and stock. Computers.com also sold for an undisclosed amount...

[I]n this year's game, there aren't expected to be any startups advertising... According to the professors, modern startups are right not to focus on Super Bowl ads these days: For all but a few, it wouldn't be worth it.... The marketing professors looked back at Super Bowl XXXIV's defunct startups and saw something else: A lot of startups that fell victim to their own egos.
Although when it was all over, the Pets.com sock puppet ended up being interviewed on CNNfn.

CNET shares "the latest, strangest news from the world of Elon Musk...electronic dance music?" It's the second song he's released on Emo G Records' Soundcloud page following 2019's RIP Harambe.

On Thursday, Musk posted a series of tweets suggesting he'd written a song he was calling "Don't doubt yer vibe" and was releasing it on Emo G Records. There was a hint that we should expect some EDM coming our way. Never one to shy away from a meme that will undoubtedly be plastered across the internet, it seems Musk has followed through. "Don't Doubt ur Vibe" was posted to his Twitter account at 10:20 p.m. PT on Jan. 30.

Musk later tweeted he both wrote the lyrics and performed the vocals. Those lyrics are:

"Don't doubt your vibe,
because it's true.
Don't doubt your vibe,
because it's you...."

The album art also ties into Musk's passions -- it depicts a Cybertruck soaring over Mars, the planet he wants to put a million people on by 2050.
According to a retweet on his Twitter feed, Musk has also been telling his life story in the "Third Row Tesla" podcast. Part 1, which aired last week, was two hours and 16 minutes long, and Part 2 -- aired Thursday -- was another 76 minutes.

With some help from his robot (puppet) friends, TV's Joel Hodgson will heckle the movies "Circus of Horrors" and "No Retreat, No Surrender" live in San Francisco today -- before heading out to 26 other American cities (including Austin, Denver, Boise, and Salt Lake City). It's a final farewell tour for Joel, as local media outlets try to find an appropriate appreciation for his legacy:
These days, the act of reacting is everywhere. Twitter is essentially one giant stream of people's snappy takes on current events. An entire cottage industry of YouTube reaction videos thrives. Twitch allows you to watch thousands of people around the world narrating video games. Go back in time, though, and you won't find too much in the way of reacting-as-entertainment. That, is, except for Mystery Science Theater 3000, the quirky, groundbreaking TV show that premiered on a small Minnesota TV station in 1988... It predated even DVD commentary tracks, and presaged the way we consume entertainment today.
That's San Francisco's local PBS station KQED, reminding readers that these really will be Joel's final live shows: Hodgson is calling it his last Mystery Science Theater tour -- he's been on and off the road since the show was crowdfunded to resurrection on Netflix in 2017 -- and, in a short phone conversation from the road, he says he means it. "I'm turning 60 next month," Hodgson says. "My whole job now is to work with the brand and get it ready for the next guy."

That "next guy" is new host Jonah Ray, who stars in the new Netflix episodes. ("He's just a natural, positive force, and he's amazing in that role," Hodgson says.) But fans will always be particularly attached to Hodgson, who has had three decades of understanding the nerdy cult around the show. On tour, he meets many fans face-to-face, "and they're all super-sweet," he says. "You get a few people who are a little socially awkward, but I'm awkward in my own way, so it kind of works out...."

if Hodgson is sad about this being his final tour, he doesn't show it. "I'm pretty happy, and I'm totally thinking about the end of it, for me. You kind of age out of it at a certain point. I'm not going to be one of those guys that's so attached to it that they do it until they take him out in a box."
In 2008 Hodgson answered questions from Slashdot readers.

"I've been a fan so long, I can't even remember when," posted CmdrTaco.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Without giving users a justification, Roku just announced via mass email that after January 31, 2020, all Fox "standalone" channels with no longer be available on the service's streaming boxes or TVs equipped with its software. The email states that "You can still watch FOX channels through these services: FuboTV, Hulu + Live TV, SlingTV, YouTube TV and other live TV services," and goes on to add that "If you have a Roku TV, you may be able to receive FOX over the air with an antenna." The company hasn't issued an official public statement on the change, but according to its support account on Twitter and a statement from a company spokesperson, the move is triggered by the end of its distribution contract with Fox. It appears Roku and Fox are handling their contract negotiations in public view, with users' experience hanging in the balance. It's always possible Fox and Roku could come to an 11th hour agreement.