Comcast's NBCUniversal is launching a new streaming service in April called Peacock. With three pricing tiers from free to $10 per month, Comcast wants Peacock "to be an ad delivery system to destroy all others in its path," writes Ryan Waniata via Digital Trends. From the report: In a shockingly long investor call, NBC revealed its big new strategy for delivering its many intellectual property spoils online, which will be offered in a multi-tiered plan (with both ad-based and ad-free versions) rolling up a content hodge-podge, including NBCUniversal TV classics and films on-demand, a handful of new exclusive shows, and live content, from NBC News to the Tokyo Olympics. Peacock's ad-based service -- which rolls out first to the company's Xfinity and Flex cable customers from within their cable box -- will arrive in at least some form for zero dollars per month. A $5 monthly charge will get you more content (but still carry ads), while a $10 fee will get you ad-free viewing and the whole kit-and-caboodle. But here's the thing: The execs at Comcast don't even want you to buy that service. It's an also-ran. A red herring.

NBCUniversal Chairman of Advertising & Partnerships Linda Yaccarino spoke vociferously to the crowd of investors, saying, "Peacock will define the future of advertising. The future of free." To hook viewers into their ad-loaded trap, NBC execs have leveraged Peacock to offer "the lightest ad load in the industry," with just 5 minutes of ads per hour. To be fair, that ad-to-content ratio would be quite light these days in TV talk. But, Yaccarino continued, these would be revolutionary new ad innovations for Peacock, including ads that won't be as repeated over and over. Ads that will look "as good as the content" they accompany (whatever that means). Solo ads where "brands become the hero" and offer a TV show brought to you by a single advertiser. Ads. Ads. And more ads.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: In a move at once unsurprising and highly symbolic, the Walt Disney Company is dropping the "Fox" brand from the 21st Century Fox assets it acquired last March, Variety has learned. The 20th Century Fox film studio will become 20th Century Studios, and Fox Searchlight Pictures will become simply Searchlight Pictures. On the TV side, however, no final decisions have been made about adjusting the monikers of production units 20th Century Fox Television and Fox 21 Television Studios. Discussions about a possible name change are underway, but no consensus has emerged, according to a source close to the situation.

Disney has already started the process to phase out the Fox name: Email addresses have changed for Searchlight staffers, with the fox.com address replaced with a searchlightpictures.com address. On the poster for Searchlight's next film "Downhill," with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell, the credits begin with "Searchlight Pictures Presents." The film will be the first Searchlight release to debut with the new logo. "Call of the Wild," an upcoming family film, will be released under the 20th Century banner, sans Fox. Those logos won't be dramatically altered, just updated. The most notable change is that the word "Fox" has been removed from the logo marks. Otherwise, the signature elements -- swirling klieg lights, monolith, triumphal fanfare -- will remain the same.

Christopher Tolkien, the son of Lord Of The Rings author JRR Tolkien who was responsible for editing and publishing much of his father's work, has died aged 95. The Tolkien Society released a short statement on Twitter to confirm the news. The Guardian reports: Tolkien, who was born in Leeds in 1924, was the third and youngest son of the revered fantasy author and his wife Edith. He grew up listening to his fathers tales of Bilbo Baggins, which later became the children's fantasy novel, The Hobbit. He drew many of the original maps detailing the world of Middle Earth for his father's The Lord of the Rings when the series was first published between 1954 and 55. He also edited much of his father's posthumously published work following his death in 1973. Since 1975 he had lived in France with Baillie.

In an interview with the Guardian in 2012, Christopher's son Simon described the enormity of the task after his grandfather died with so much material still unpublished. Simon said: "He had produced this huge output that covered everything from the history of the gods to the history of the people he called the Silmarils -- that was his great work but it had never seen the light of day despite his best efforts to get it published." His son was left to sift through the files and notebooks and over the two decades after his father's death, he published The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, Beren And Luthien and The History of Middle-earth, which fleshed out the complex world of elves and dwarves created by his father.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Twitch has been and remains home to illicit sports broadcasts; a late December boxing match attracted over 86,000 viewers -- some of whom spammed ASCII genitalia in chat -- and a mid-January soccer match drew over 70,000 over three livestreams. Although Twitch often stomps them out mid-match, plenty of livestreams posted by throwaway accounts with innocuous names like "Untitled" slip through the cracks and garner tens of thousands of viewers. As the value of sports media rights has climbed to over $20 billion, copyright holders have more incentive than ever to guard their treasure. Yet piracy persists, in part because it's so burdensome for copyright holders to catch it. Stream aggregation site FirstRow Sports lays out a buffet of illicit livestreams for games ranging from ice hockey to basketball and attracts over 300,000 daily visitors, according to data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb. In January 2019 alone, sports fans accessed sports piracy sites 362.7 million times, according to data from digital piracy research firm Muso. On Discord, anonymous benefactors distribute links to soccer livestreams like handfuls of pigeon feed at the park. Once a stream is taken down, another immediately manifests. It's like 40 games of Whac-A-Mole simultaneously taking place in 40 adjacent arcades.

Increasingly, those links lead to Twitch, whose credentials as a mainstream platform make it a relatively safe option -- especially after Reddit shut down the popular soccer piracy subreddit r/soccerstreams. "The older days of streams (5+ years ago) was [sic] littered with ads and viruses," says a soccer stream Discord moderator who goes by Tom. "even though it is considered illegal, I see it being the same as watching porn and being under 18." He adds that some of the hairier-looking piracy sites are still more popular, offer higher-quality streams, and have live chats that utilize Twitch chats' code. Twitch's DMCA guidelines specify that copyright owners can submit takedown requests, and asks the people who submit them to add a "statement under penalty of perjury" that they're authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner. Occasionally, media companies file claims to Twitch impacting legitimate streamers who commentate over or react to games, television, or YouTube clips. Copyright holders can also choose to sue, as the third-largest internet company in Russia did against Twitch in December for broadcasting an English Premier League streams. It's a rare escalation, and one that underscores how serious an issue Twitch sports piracy has become. Twitch "only provides users access to the platform, does not post its own content, cannot change the content posted by users, or track possible violations of rights," says Twitch lawyer Yuliana Tabastayeva.

The live streaming service said it will "continue to, as has always been the case, effectively and swiftly address any violation of its terms of service with the removal of unlicensed copyrighted content."

This week a former engineer for the Microsoft Windows Core OS Division shared an insightful (and very entertaining) list with "some changes I have noticed over the last 20 years" in the computer programming world. Some excerpts: - Some programming concepts that were mostly theoretical 20 years ago have since made it to mainstream including many functional programming paradigms like immutability, tail recursion, lazily evaluated collections, pattern matching, first class functions and looking down upon anyone who don't use them...

- 3 billion devices run Java. That number hasn't changed in the last 10 years though...

- A package management ecosystem is essential for programming languages now. People simply don't want to go through the hassle of finding, downloading and installing libraries anymore. 20 years ago we used to visit web sites, downloaded zip files, copied them to correct locations, added them to the paths in the build configuration and prayed that they worked.

- Being a software development team now involves all team members performing a mysterious ritual of standing up together for 15 minutes in the morning and drawing occult symbols with post-its....

- Since we have much faster CPUs now, numerical calculations are done in Python which is much slower than Fortran. So numerical calculations basically take the same amount of time as they did 20 years ago...

- Even programming languages took a side on the debate on Tabs vs Spaces....

- Code must run behind at least three levels of virtualization now. Code that runs on bare metal is unnecessarily performant....

- A tutorial isn't really helpful if it's not a video recording that takes orders of magnitude longer to understand than its text.

- There is StackOverflow which simply didn't exist back then. Asking a programming question involved talking to your colleagues.

- People develop software on Macs.
In our new world where internet connectivity is the norm and being offline the exception, "Security is something we have to think about now... Because of side-channel attacks we can't even trust the physical processor anymore."

And of course, "We don't use IRC for communication anymore. We prefer a bloated version called Slack because we just didn't want to type in a server address...."

A new article in Rolling Stone argues that the forgotten 2013 hit song "Blurred Lines", which a court later ruled infringed on a 1977 song by Marvin Gaye, turned copyright law into "a minefield" -- for the music industry.
While copyright laws used to protect only lyrics and melodies (a prime example is the Chiffons' successful suit against George Harrison in 1976 for the strong compositional similarities between his "My Sweet Lord" and their "He's So Fine"), the "Blurred Lines" case raised the stakes by suggesting that the far more abstract qualities of rhythm, tempo, and even the general feel of a song are also eligible for protection -- and thus that a song can be sued for feeling like an earlier one. Sure enough, a jury in 2019 ruled that Katy Perry owed millions for ostensibly copying the beat of her hit "Dark Horse" from a little-known song by Christian rapper Flame, stunning both the music business and the legal community. "They're trying to own basic building blocks of music, the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone," Perry's lawyer Christine Lepera warned in the case's closing arguments.

That case, which Perry's team is currently in the process of appealing, suggests a second point: Plaintiffs in copycat cases are largely targeting megahit songs because they've seen where the money is, and the increasing frequency of those court battles in headlines is causing an avalanche effect of further infringement lawsuits.... While some record labels may have the budget to hire on-call musicologists who vet new releases for potential copyright claims, smaller players who can't afford that luxury are turning toward a tried-and-true form of protection: insurance. Lucas Keller -- the founder of music management company Milk and Honey, which represents writers and producers who've worked with everyone from Alessia Cara and Carrie Underwood to 5 Seconds of Summer and Muse -- recently began encouraging all his songwriter clients to purchase errors-and-omissions insurance, which protects creative professionals from legal challenges to their intellectual property. "We all feel like the system has failed us," Keller says. "There are a lot of aggressive lawyers filing lawsuits and going ham on people." (He's particularly critical of publishers whose rosters are heavier on older catalogs than new acts: "Heritage publishers who aren't making a lot of money are coming out of the woodwork and saying, âWe're going to take a piece of your contemporary hit....'â") Artists are understandably reluctant to publicly disclose that they have copyright insurance, which could open them up to an increase in lawsuits. But music attorney Bob Celestin, who's helped represent acts like Pusha T and Missy Elliott, says it is safe to assume that the majority of artists who show up in Top 10 chart positions are covered in this way...

The popularity of cheap music-production software, which offers the same features to every user, has added another layer of risk. "Music is now more similar than it is different, for the first time," says Ross Golan, a producer and songwriter who has released songs with stars like Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber. "People are using the same sample packs, the same plug-ins, because it's efficient."

Then there's the issue of the finite number of notes, chord progressions, and melodies available...

The social media team for a Minnesota football team playing against San Francisco's 49ers just incorporated "big tech" into its online trash talk, reports the San Francisco Chronicle's SFGate site. They call the resulting video "incredibly weird." The video in question depicts a time-lapse of [San Francisco's] Levi's stadium with two cartoon characters in the foreground that are basically team helmets with arms and legs. The 49ers character says "Welcome... to Silicon Valley" and we're then suddenly in the Matrix (?). The 49ers character pulls out a space gun that says "Big Tech" on it and starts shooting tech company logos at the Vikings character.

After slow-motion dodging Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google Chrome, Instagram, What's App, and Uber logos a la Neo, the Viking character jump kicks the 49ers character.

The whole thing is as odd as it sounds, and even users on Reddit struggled to understand it.
The Reddit post attracted over 2,100 upvotes and 253 comments (including "Unsportsmanlike conduct, kicking opponent in the head. 15 yards penalty.")

The video has now been viewed 117,162 times over the last 18 hours -- and attracted 27,827 likes.

The source code for acclaimed 2D puzzle platformer VVVVVV has been released by creator Terry Cavanagh to celebrate the title's 10th anniversary. Gamasutra reports: Breaking to news in a blog post, Cavanagh explained the code fro both the desktop and mobile versions of the game can now be grabbed over on Github, and confessed that "even by the standard of self taught indie devs, it's kind of a mess." The desktop code is the version that was ported to C++ by Simon Roth back in 2011 and later updated and maintained by Ethan Lee, while the mobile code is written in Actionscript for Adobe AIR and is based on the original v1.0 flash version of the game.

In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing. From a report: On Dec. 9, Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge took aim at the "content companies" entering the direct-to-consumer streaming business. The cable executive told a roomful of investment bankers in Manhattan that these new streamers are "creating havoc in the ecosystem." Rutledge wasn't talking about the proliferation of content or the fight to secure exclusive deals with talent. He was targeting the lax security and rampant password sharing that's prevalent across the streaming landscape. "Half the people in the country live in houses with two or less people in them, and yet these services have five streams," Rutledge added. "There are more streams available than there are homes to use them." Password sharing has serious economic consequences. In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing, and that will rise to $12.5 billion in 2024, according to data released by research firm Parks Associates.

For now, many streamers -- including Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Amazon Prime -- seem content to allow the practice to continue, even while they crack down on illicit password sales. But as services mature, priorities will likely change. "When the growth starts to flatten and you start to look at the balance sheet, you are going to be looking for revenue," says Jean-Marc Racine, chief product officer of video delivery and security firm Synamedia. The company (which counts Disney, Comcast and AT&T among its clients) conducted a study of two anonymous video providers and said Jan. 6 that it found they were losing more than $70 million annually from password sharing.

New submitter wolff000 writes: A group of researchers at the University of Minnesota have shown that cuttlefish see in 3D. They did this by making 3D glasses and then showing the cuttlefish movies of prey. "While cuttlefish wearing glasses is an unexpected sight, a University of Minnesota-led research team built an underwater theater and equipped the cephalopods with specialized 3D glasses to investigate how cuttlefish determine the best distance to strike moving prey," a report says. "The initial act of getting cuttlefish to willingly wear the glasses without trying to take them off and actually watch the screen was tough enough," reports Popular Science. "This process required gluing velcro to the top of its mucus-covered body, placing the glasses on their heads, and keeping the creatures happy and distracted enough to not mess with them (or ink all over the experiment). But when the animals finally focused on the screen, creating an illusion of depth that can only be seen when using binocular vision, they accurately 'hunted' the shrimp on screen."

"This illusion of depth is created by using two different colored images that are seen through the two different lenses, which the brain then calculates the distance between," the report adds. "Even though cuttlefish are colorblind, the colored filters in the glasses send the accurate color from the monitor to the right eye. They only see the image in each eye as a variety of greyscale intensities."

The study has been published in the journal Scientific Advances.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Verizon is changing the way it sells its internet and cable packages as customers are increasingly seeking ways to cut the costly cord. The company is eliminating bundles and contracts, Verizon announced Thursday. Instead, it will sell its Fios TV and internet services separately. Long-term contracts are also being trashed in favor of charging customers month-to-month. That is similar to how streaming services charge customers. Verizon is calling the new offers "Mix and Match on Fios." There are now three internet packages and five Fios TV packages. Notably, Verizon will continue selling Google's YouTube TV for $49.99 per month as a TV option under an agreement the two companies signed last year. A home telephone package will also be sold for $20 per month. The new bundle-free packages offer more price transparency for customers, Verizon claims. Not all surcharges are going away though. "Verizon will continue charging a $15 monthly fee for routers in some of its internet packages and a $12 set-top monthly fee in most of its Fios TV packages," the report adds. "But other fees it previously charged, including for regional sports networks, will now be included in the total Fios TV price."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Jeffrey Katzenberg insists that his new video-streaming service Quibi isn't competing against Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, or any of the other streaming services that have launched or are launching soon. Katzenberg and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman, who is best known as the CEO of HP and eBay, are publicly announcing Quibi at CES -- but not quite unveiling it -- after having raised $1 billion on the promise of a roster of Hollywood stars and supposedly revolutionary video-streaming technology that delivers portrait and landscape video at the same time. Everything on Quibi is designed for viewing on a phone, on the go, in 10 minutes or less. These chunks of video are called "quick bites" -- hence, "Quibi."

When Quibi arrives on April 6th of this year, it'll cost $5 a month for an ad-supported version or $8 a month for an ad-free experience. Katzenberg and Whitman formulated this idea nearly two years ago and have been relentlessly signing up the biggest names in Hollywood to be a part of it. And while there have been bumps along the road, including a raft of executive departures, everyone working with Quibi at CES talks about it as though it has already created the future of video -- like it already has millions of users. Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, who is executive producing a show called #Freerayshawn, says Quibi, before it has even launched, has created a "new language of cinema." It's like that.

Although TiVo has an exciting new product at CES with the TiVo Stream 4K media player, it also has some bad news for DVR owners: The promised ability to stream live and recorded video from TiVo to other streaming players in the home won't happen any time soon. From a report: TiVo's vice president of consumer products and services Ted Malone said in an interview at CES that the company's Roku and Apple TV apps in particular are "in limbo." Malone wouldn't say definitively that the apps have cancelled, and he believes Android TV support may arrive at some point as a tie-in to the TiVo Stream 4K, which runs Android TV. From there, adding Fire TV support wouldn't be difficult because Fire TV apps are based on Android as well. Still, he didn't give a timeline for either. "My bet is we'll get Android, and because of that we'll get the Fire TV, because it's the same app, just different qualifications," Malone said. "I think Roku and Apple are in limbo."

Warner Bros. is has made a pact with Cinelytic to use its AI-driven project management system that was launched last year. From The Hollywood Reporter: Under the new deal, Warners will leverage the system's comprehensive data and predictive analytics to guide decision-making at the greenlight stage. The integrated online platform can assess the value of a star in any territory and how much a film is expected to make in theaters and on other ancillary streams. Founded four years ago by Tobias Queisser, Cinelytic has been building and beta testing the platform for three years. In 2018, the company raised $2.25 million from T&B Media Global and signed deals with Ingenious Media (Wind River) and Productivity Media (The Little Hours). STX, which endured a number of flops in 2019, including Playmobil and Uglydolls, became a Cinelytic client in September.

While the platform won't necessarily predict what will be the next $1 billion surprise, like Warners' hit Joker, it will reduce the amount of time executives spend on low-value, repetitive tasks and instead give them better dollar-figure parameters for packaging, marketing and distribution decisions, including release dates. The platform is particularly helpful in the festival setting, where studios get caught in bidding wars and plunk down massive sums after only hours of assessment. "The system can calculate in seconds what used to take days to assess by a human when it comes to general film package evaluation or a star's worth," says Queisser. "Artificial intelligence sounds scary. But right now, an AI cannot make any creative decisions. What it is good at is crunching numbers and breaking down huge data sets and showing patterns that would not be visible to humans. But for creative decision-making, you still need experience and gut instinct."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Now that most smartphones don't have headphone jacks, there's no shortage of complaints about Bluetooth. This year at CES, the industry group in charge of defining the standard, the Bluetooth SIG, is introducing new features that should address some of them. Later this year, it will finalize new support for Bluetooth LE Audio, which is an umbrella term for a bunch of new features for Bluetooth devices. The new features include higher-quality audio, hearing aid support, broadcasting to many people, and working better with wireless earbuds. Unfortunately, as is the way with all industry specs, it will take some time for these features to make their way into consumer products. The old joke that "Bluetooth will be better next year" still holds true.

The feature that will likely affect the most people is the new "Low Complexity Communication Codec," or LC3. LC3 simultaneously reduces power consumption while increasing audio quality. Right now, the lowest common denominator for Bluetooth audio is the relatively old and relatively bad SBC codec, though many phones support Qualcomm's proprietary codec, AptX. In order to get SBC to sound good, you have to increase the bitrate, which increases power consumption. The Bluetooth SIG claims that, in its testing, users preferred the new LC3 codec, even at significantly lower bitrates. The group is also finally beefing up official support for Bluetooth hearing aids. It has worked in conjunction with a European hearing instrument association to ensure broad support in the coming years, including working with TVs and other devices. A new "broadcast" feature will theoretically allow an entire movie theater audience to use their Bluetooth headphones to tune in to the movie, although how exactly the pairing process would work is "TBD," the report says.

Bluetooth LE will natively support multistream audio, which "means wireless earbuds will be able to receive their own independent signal from a phone instead of having to communicate with each other," the report adds. "Multistream also will allow for easier sharing of Bluetooth audio among multiple users from the same source."

A new campaign launched Tuesday by one of the nation's largest labor unions -- and spearheaded by one of the leading video game industry activists in Southern California -- aims to organize video game studios and tech offices to form or join a union. The Los Angeles Times reports: The Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE for short) is a new project of the Communications Workers of America aimed specifically at unionizing video game and tech companies. It grew out of conversations between the CWA and Game Workers Unite, a grass-roots organization that sprang up in 2018 to push for wall-to-wall unionization of the $43-billion video game industry, alongside conversations with organizers across the larger tech industry.

The union declined to specify how much money it was putting behind the new effort, but has put two organizers on payroll to lead the push with support from dozens of CWA staff members across the country. One of the new staffers, Wes McEnany, comes from a more traditional labor organizing career with Boston-area unions and the labor-backed campaign for a $15 minimum wage. CWA also hired Emma Kinema, who co-founded Game Workers Unite and organized the Los Angeles and Orange County chapters of the group. The dedicated staff and national ambition set the CODE project apart from other efforts to organize tech workers, such as the United Steelworkers-backed Pittsburgh Assn. of Tech Professionals, which successfully unionized Google subcontractors in September. The organizers behind the new effort see the push for better working conditions and corporate ethics as one and the same. "The new project charts a path away from organizing video game workers along the Hollywood craft union model," the report adds. "SAG-AFTRA has represented video game voice actors for years, and called a strike in 2017 over pay and royalty structures. But CWA largely follows the industrial union model, which organizes entire companies at once rather than splitting workers who perform different jobs into specialized unions."

Slashdot reader sziring, who first brought the story to our attention, has raised the following questions/concerns: "If unions win out, will open source suffer? If a newly minted tech union worker wants to contribute time towards an open-source project will they be able to? Isn't rule one typically avoiding free work at all costs? I'm not debating if they should unionize but trying to understand the possible rippler effects if more coders fall under a union umbrella."

Anyone paying attention to the news coming out of CES this week has probably noticed that 8K TVs seem to be the next big thing. The science says your mortal eyes can barely tell the difference between 4K, however. From a report: Samsung announced one that's almost bezel-less. LG boasted a total of eight new 8K TVs. Meanwhile, there are two dueling standards bodies debating exactly how to define 8K. Given all this, you'd be forgiven if you thought 8K is the new high water mark for premium home entertainment and that your perfectly fine 4K panel is now no longer perfectly fine. Don't worry, it is. The coverage of 8K has really irked me. Nearly every article I've read that covers these newly announced 8K TVs seem to center around one criticism of the 8K trend: that no native content exists. This, while true, misses the point. Even if we had a surplus of available 8K content -- as we do 4K content from services like Disney+ and Netflix -- it wouldn't make that much of a difference. Why? Because whatever benefits might come from 8K probably aren't worth the added costs of getting it in the first place.

Without getting too bogged down in the science, let's touch on how the human eye sees detail. We have cells in our eyes called cones that are less sensitive to light but more sensitive to detail and color. Each of your eyes has about six to seven million cones that mostly provide data on the center of your vision, or focal point. Guessing the "resolution" of the human eye is complicated, but Roger N. Clark, an expert in digital imaging, has calculated the approximate resolution of the human field of view to be around 576 megapixels, or nearly 72 times the resolution of 4K. However, that's not the whole story. In Clark's view, the biggest factor that helps TVs make a more accurate image isn't necessarily their resolution, but their dynamic range capability, or the ability of current 4K HDR TVs to display greater contrast in the dark and bright parts of an image.

Karl Bode, writing for TechDirt: Disney has done amazing work driving new users to its Disney+ streaming service with low(ish) price point and exclusive programs like The Mandalorian. But users this week began noticing that movies that were on the service just last month are already falling out of rotation, without users being notified that they were disappearing: "...as 2020 began, some Disney Plus users noticed that a few films had gone missing from the streaming library. Dr. Dolittle, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Home Alone and Home Alone 2, and The Sandlot are no longer streamable on Disney Plus. All these titles disappeared without warning, and so far, Disney has not commented on the titles. Many fans are surprised by films dropping off the service, particularly since Disney hasn't issued press releases about the changes. Where companies like HBO and Netflix put out monthly bulletins of everything coming to and leaving their streaming services each month, so viewers can plan their last-minute binges, Disney has only emphasized new arrivals, not departures."

YouTube said Monday it is rolling out new protections for children viewing videos on its site (source may be paywalled; alternative source), an effort to satisfy federal regulators who last year fined the company tens of millions of dollars over alleged privacy violations. The Washington Post reports: The changes, which include limitations on data collection and advertising, are a step toward addressing concerns from advocacy groups who have complained the Google-owned company has run afoul of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which forbids tracking and targeting users 12 and under. As part of those changes, YouTube said it will seek to better distinguish which content is intended primarily for children, relying on a combination of self-identification from creators and software. That content cannot run with personalized advertisements, under the new rules that YouTube said it is instituting globally starting Monday.

YouTube said it will assume any viewer of child-friendly content is underage, treating that data as subject to COPPA rules. It has been limiting other features too, such as comments on children's videos and live chats. [...] Some YouTube content creators, however, said the changes were likely to crater their advertising business, because personalized ads tend to sell for more than contextual ads. Eyal Baumel, CEO of management company Yoola, said he is encouraging clients with more child-friendly videos to find new sources of revenue to cope with any dip in sales. "The concern is that a majority of revenue will disappear," he said. "Creators need to start thinking about selling books, selling merchandise." "A lot of creators are telling me they may quit if it's as bad as they fear," said Baumel. "There's just a lot of confusion about how this will play out, particularly among the smallest channels."

On January 6, 2001, Bill Gates and The Rock debuted the original Xbox, calling it "the most electrifying" games console on the market. GameRevolution reports: The surreal image of The Rock standing alongside Gates, telling the billionaire "it doesn't matter what you think, Bill," was certainly a unique way to debut the console. We're glad Microsoft opted for this unusual route, though, because if it hadn't we wouldn't have video footage of The Rock discussing symmetric multiprocessing.

The original Xbox released on November 15, 2001. [It debuted with a 32-bit 733 MHz, custom Intel Pentium III Coppermine-based processor, 133 MHz 64-bit GTL+ front-side bus (FSB) with a 1.06 GB/s bandwidth, and 64 MB unified DDR SDRAM, with a 6.4 GB/s bandwidth, of which 1.06 GB/s is used by the CPU and 5.34 GB/s is shared by the rest of the system, according to Wikipedia.] Its high manufacturing cost would wind up costing Microsoft a lot of money, with the company losing $4 billion on the console. It would also fall short of its predicted 50 million sales, with Microsoft only shifting 24 million units by the end of its life cycle. For comparison, the Xbox One X, which debuted on November 7, 2017, featured a SoC which incorporates a 2.3 GHz octa-core CPU, and Radeon GPU with 40 Compute Units clocked at 1172 MHz, generating 6 teraflops of graphical computing performance. It also includes 12GB of GDDR5 RAM with 9 GB allocated to games. Microsoft's next-generation Series X console is expected to deliver "four times the processing power of Xbox One X," although technical specs have yet to be announced.