Google is adding personalized TV and movie recommendations to search, in hopes of solving the age old question: what do you actually want to watch? From a report: Now, when you search Google for things like "good shows to watch" or "what to watch," there'll be a new carousel-style menu with TV shows and movies that you can swipe left and right on, similar to a dating app. Google says that it'll be able to curate those suggestions based on what you search: ask for "horror movies from the '80s," for example, and you'll get recommendations specifically for that.

At Disney's biannual D23 Expo executives revealed that episodes on the upcoming Disney+ streaming service will follow a weekly release schedule, unlike Netflix's binge-able season drops. "A show like the Marvel Cinematic Universe spinoff Loki, which is slated to run approximately six hours (likely meaning six episodes total) will come out over the course of six weeks," reports The Verge. "That's similar to the way Hulu (which is also owned by Disney), Amazon, and HBO Now operate." From the report: But while HBO Now doesn't have streaming exclusives and is tied into HBO's weekly release schedule, Disney and Hulu aren't tied to traditional network schedules. They've voluntarily chosen to release most episodes on a week-to-week basis. (Hulu often releases three episodes at once to kick off a season, then drops to one per week afterward.) Apple is reportedly planning to take the same route when its streaming service, Apple TV Plus, launches this fall.

The weekly release model is a smart move for Disney -- and potentially any new streaming service that's initially focused on building a subscriber base, rather than servicing a demanding, preexisting one. Tying new content to beloved franchises, then doling it out a bit at a time is a way for Disney, in particular, to keep subscribers hooked. When Disney+ launches, people who want to watch all of Jon Favreau's Star Wars series, The Mandalorian, will need to keep their subscriptions active for at least a couple of months. While cord-cutters routinely look for ways to dip in and out of new services, bingeing the content they care about, Disney is looking to keep its initial subscribers stable while adding more throughout the year. The strategy is crucial for Disney to reach its estimated goal of around 10 million customers by the end of 2020.

Get ready for yet another ad-supported video service: Media center app maker Plex is gearing up to add free movies and TV shows to its app, starting with content from Warner Bros. From a report: Plex announced a deal with Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution Thursday, which will allow it to add a still-unspecified amount of the studio's movie catalog to its app when it launches ad-supported video streaming later this year. But Plex isn't just looking to compete with ad-supported video services like Tubi and Pluto. Instead, the company is aiming to turn its app into a kind of one-stop-shop for digital media, capable of serving up anything you might want. To that end, Plex has plans to begin reselling video subscription services via its app, and add transactional VOD, in the first half of 2020.

"You shouldn't have to go to a lot of different apps to get the content you care about," said Plex CEO Keith Valory in a recent conversation with Variety. "This is going to be the one place for the media that matters most to you," added the company's vice president of marketing Scott Hancock. Plex executives know that they will never be able to offer access to everything you might want to watch -- Netflix originals in particular will likely not be available any time soon. However, they are confident that they'll be able to serve up much of the rest, including movies, TV shows, podcasts, news and webisodes. "75-85% of the content you care about, you'll get in one beautiful app," Valory said.

Tablizer shares a report from SFGate: Visitors to Disney's new Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge attraction, can choose from more than 1,000 unique items to take home as souvenirs. But if they plan on flying home, they'll have to leave at least one behind -- a specially designed "thermal detonator" Coca-Cola bottle the company made especially for the new attraction. TSA has told fans that the bottle, which retails for $5, looks too much like a replica explosive and therefore won't be allowed in carry-on or checked baggage. Fans, not surprisingly are not pleased with the decision. I hope they don't take away my lightsaber.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The UHD Alliance, a collection of companies who work together to define display standards, has announced Filmmaker Mode, a new TV setting that's designed to show films as they were originally mastered, with as little post-processing as possible. Although the mode will affect multiple settings like frame rate, aspect ratio, overscanning, and noise reduction, its most important element is that it turns off motion smoothing, which creates that horrible "soap opera effect" that makes even the most expensive films look cheap. LG, Vizio, and Panasonic have all expressed an interest in including the new mode in their TVs.

Of course, it's always been possible to turn off this setting (we've got a guide on how to do so right here) but TV manufacturers have an annoying habit of referring to the same setting by different names, confusing the process. LG calls it "TruMotion," Vizio calls it "Smooth Motion Effect," and Panasonic calls it "Intelligent Frame Creation," for example. The difference with Filmmaker Mode is that it will have the same name across every TV manufacturer, and the UHD Alliance also says that it wants the setting to be enabled automatically when cinematic content is detected, or otherwise easily accessible via a button on the TV remote. Over a dozen high profile directors have expressed support for the new mode, including Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, and JJ Abrams.

McGruber shares a report from Popular Mechanics: Jessi Combs -- vehicle builder, racer, fabricator, TV personality, and all-around automotive legend -- was killed on Tuesday in a crash while attempting to break her own land-speed record in southeast Oregon. She was 36. The crash occurred as Combs was piloting her jet-powered land-speed car on the Alvord Desert, a dry lake bed where several land-speed records have been set. According to local reports, the crash happened shortly after 4pm local time.

Combs held the title of "fastest woman on four wheels" after setting a record of 398 mph in her jet-powered North American Eagle Supersonic Speed Challenger in 2013. More recently, she had piloted that same car to 483.227 mph in a single shakedown run in October 2018, though that run ended prematurely with mechanical troubles. (Governing bodies require two back-to-back runs in opposite directions to set an official speed record.) Combs was also a host, builder, and technical expert on shows like Xtreme 4x4, Overhaulin', Truck U, and Two Guys Garage. She brought about Velocity channel's All Girls Garage, and was a host and builder on a season of Discovery Channel's Mythbusters.

Unless your Xbox is set as your "Home Console," you won't be able to play any apps or games until Microsoft's Xbox Live service gets fixed. According to The Verge, the service is experience issues today, preventing a large number of users from signing into their Xbox consoles. From the report: The issues appear to have started around 3PM ET today, and many Xbox users report that they're unable to sign in to Xbox One consoles and access some apps and games. Apps like Spotify, Plex, or Amazon Video require you to be signed into an Xbox One console, and The Verge has been unable to access these apps during this Xbox Live outage. Netflix continues to work, but games like Fortnite and Destiny 2 won't work correctly without being signed into Xbox Live. "We've seen reports that users are having trouble signing in," says Microsoft's Xbox support team on Twitter. "We have teams working on it now! We'll update you with additional details as soon as we can."

A federal grand jury yesterday indicted eight people who allegedly ran two pirate streaming services that "offered more television programs and movies than legitimate streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime Video," the Department of Justice said. From a report: Jetflicks, which operated from 2007 to 2017, obtained its video from torrent sites and Usenet sites "using automated programs and databases such as SickRage, Sick Beard, SABnzbd, and TheTVDB," the indictment said. Jetflicks made "those episodes available on servers in the United States and Canada to Jetflicks subscribers for streaming and/or downloading," the indictment said. Torrent sites that Jetflicks operators relied on allegedly included the Pirate Bay, RARBG, and Torrentz.

With this method, defendants often "provid[ed] episodes to subscribers the day after the shows originally aired on television," a DOJ announcement yesterday said. Jetflicks charged subscription fees as low as $9.99 per month, letting subscribers "watch an unlimited number of commercial-free television programs," the indictment said. The service claimed to have more than 37,000 subscribers.

One of the eight defendants, 36-year-old Darryl Julius Polo, left Jetflicks to create another site called iStreamItAll, which was still online today. iStreamItAll likely won't stay online long, though, as the indictment said the site's domain names are subject to forfeiture. The Jetflicks domain names were also subject to forfeiture orders, and the website is offline. Jetflicks "claimed to have more than 183,200 different television episodes," while iStreamItAll "at one point claimed to have 115,849 different television episodes and 10,511 individual movies," the DOJ said. iStreamItAll "publicly asserted that it had more content than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Amazon Prime," the DOJ said. (Netflix offered 4,010 movies and 1,569 TV shows as of 2018, according to Netflix search engine Fixable.)

A small but quickly growing online community believes that transforming randomly generated numbers into clusters of location data could help us tunnel out of reality. Their name for themselves: Randonauts. From a report: It's a sad truth that most of our lives are pretty boring, geographically speaking. Live in one place long enough and you will develop routines, walking the same streets and patronizing the same coffee shops and generally making it easy for a simulation, should one exist, to anticipate where you will be at any given time. Randonauts hope to use this tedium to their advantage, by introducing unpredictability. They argue that by devising methods that force us to diverge from our daily routines and instead send us to truly random locations we'd otherwise never think twice about, it just might be possible to cross over into somebody else's reality. "New information and causality can pull you out of the filter-bubble and change your life," writes The Fatum Project, the online team responsible for the technological and philosophical framework of the movement. Even if you don't buy into the dense thicket of theoretical quantum physics underpinning the logic of it all, going on a Randonaut-style adventure can be a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

According to the The Fatum Project, there's hard science behind all this. Building on research conducted by Princeton University's Engineering Anomalies Research Lab into whether human thought could influence real-world events, they hope that Randonauts will be able to leave their "reality tunnels" and discover new contexts, appreciate daily life in fresh ways, or even venture into parallel iterations of their own realities. Getting started is easy. Log into the Telegram messaging app and send the command "/getattractor" along with your location to @shangrila_bot (formerly, you could also message @Randonaut_bot). The bot will plot out thousands of nearby geolocation points using a quantum random number generator, and spit out the area with the highest concentration of points near you. Conversely, if computer-determined desolation is more your style, you can send the command "/getvoid" and through a similar process, the bot will send you a location where there are no randomly plotted points. On Reddit, Randonauts have reported finding things like an upside-down airplane; a llama, standing totally still; three identical black cats; a family of horses in a public park; and a bird that also refused to move. Under the auspices of "/getvoid," users have reported finding derelict locales, creepy signage, and other marks of decay. Think of it as geocaching by way of Marianne Williamson.

Netflix has shipped a total of 5 billion DVDs to its customers since first sending out those iconic red envelopes 21 years ago. The milestone was announced by DVD.com, the Netflix subsidiary that is now responsible for the company's physical disc subscriptions. From a report: Netflix began running a DVD-by-mail subscription service in April of 1998, and shipped its first billion DVDs by early 2007. The company launched its video streaming service soon after, offering it initially as an added bonus to DVD subscribers. Four years later, Netflix proceeded split its DVD and internet subscription services into 2 separate subscription plans and businesses. Since then, the user base of the company's DVD subscription service has steadily declined, from 14 million subscribers in 2011 to just 2.4 million subscribers at the end of the most recent fiscal quarter. The company ended that same quarter with more than 151 million paying streaming subscribers worldwide.

What's one movie that is lesser-known or underappreciated that you really enjoyed -- or found insightful? Last time we asked this question, it was 2003!

This weekend Disney revealed more details about Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, a cruise-like experience which promises "a two-night, all-immersive adventure," inviting visitors to "live your very own epic Star Wars story."

Gizmodo reports: Like a cruise ship, everyone boards at once and everyone leaves at once. How that works though is, you arrive to a special terminal in Orlando to check in. From there you get on a "launch pod" that blasts you into space. That's where you meet up with the Halcyon, the ship you'll be on the next two days, as you travel through space. Now, when I say "launch" and "travel through space" that's just the illusion, obviously. Disney didn't explain how they will achieve it but, probably lots of screens and different animations to try and make you feel like you are in a real space.

Once you get on the ship, how you experience the adventure is up to you. You can relax and watch the stars fly by as the Halcyon travels through space. Or you can take place in all manner of different activities to learn how to be a hero. You can use a lightsaber, you can help pilot the ship, or you can learn about the ship's defenses so that, just in case the First Order drops by, you'll be able to help. (They'll be dropping by.) The crew will be comprised of "aliens," every window has a view into space (including the one in your cabin), and characters new and old (they showed Chewie, Rey and Kylo) will be part of the experience. An experience that has one stop on it -- Batuu and the Black Spire Outpost, aka Star Wars Galaxy's Edge.
The Disney Parks blog promises the starcruiser "will fully immerse guests in a galaxy far, far away."

Filmmakers, Hollywood Studios, consumer electronics companies and the UHD Alliance have collaborated to make this next-level home theater viewing experience possible. By disabling all post-processing (e.g. motion smoothing, etc.) and preserving the correct aspect ratios, colors and frame rates, Filmmaker Mode enables your TV to display the movie or television show's content precisely as it was intended by the filmmaker. Launch partners include LG, Panasonic, and VIzio. From a press release: "When Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Coogler, Patty Jenkins, Martin Scorsese, and Christopher Nolan reached out to the UHDA about extending the cinematic experience into the living room, we were eager and ideally situated to engage in the conversation," said UHD Alliance Chairman, Michael Zink of Warner Bros. "The Ultra HD TVs from supporting CE members are capable of delivering a range of viewing options and the addition of Filmmaker Mode for cinematic content, which is based on input from a broad range of preeminent filmmakers, provides a way for consumers to better experience the filmmaker's vision."

Current TVs use advanced video processing capabilities to offer consumers a broad range of options in viewing various types of content, ranging from sports to video games. Filmmaker Mode will allow viewers to enjoy a more cinematic experience on their UHD TVs when watching movies by disabling all post-processing (e.g. motion smoothing, etc.) so the movie or television show is displayed as it was intended by the filmmaker, preserving the correct aspect ratios, colors and frame rates. "The thing that sets Filmmaker Mode apart is it will be a pure, clean expression of what the movie was meant to look like when it was made," said Rian Johnson, director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the soon to be released, Knives Out.

DevNull127 writes: The 77th World Science Fiction Convention announced the winners of the 2019 Hugo Awards at a ceremony Sunday night.

Here's some of the highlights. At least two of these stories can be read (for free) online:

BEST NOVELETTE: "If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again," by Zen Cho. The entire text is availabe online in the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, where it was published in November of 2018.

BEST SHORT STORY: "A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies," by Alix E. Harrow. The complete text is available online, published in Apex Magazine in February 2018.

BEST NOVEL: The Calculating Stars, which presents an alternate history in which a meteor "decimates the U.S. government and paves the way for a climate cataclysm that will eventually render the earth inhospitable to humanity. This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated timeline in the earth's efforts to colonize space..."

BEST NOVELLA: Artificial Condition: The Murderbot Diaries #2. ("it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more...")

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
The Daily Dot reports that there was also one very unusual winner: Archive of Our Own (AO3), the fan-run, nonprofit website that's home to more than 5 million transformative works like fanfiction, fanart, and podfics, won one of science fiction's most prestigious awards at Worldcon Sunday night.

The website (which is part of the Organization of Transformative Works) won the Hugo for best related works, a widespread category that sometimes encompasses making-of books, pieces of criticism, and biographies. Fellow nominees included a book on Ursula K. Le Guin's writing, a Hugo Award retrospective, a website that campaigned to sponsor Worldcon memberships for Mexican creators, and Lindsay Ellis' video series on The Hobbit...

The very existence of AO3's nomination was a way of legitimizing fanfiction as a form of expression. But its win validates it even further, particularly in the science-fiction and fantasy community...

Netflix is testing an all-new recommendation system called "Collections" that relies on humans instead of neural networks. TechCrunch reports: While Netflix today already offers thematic suggestions of things to watch, based on your Netflix viewing history, Collections aren't only based on themes. According to Netflix, the titles are curated by experts on the company's creative teams, and are organized into these collections based on similar factors -- like genre, tone, story line and character traits.

This human-led curation is different from how Netflix typically makes its recommendations. The streaming service is famous for its advanced categorization system, where there are hundreds of niche categories that go beyond broad groupings like "Action," "Drama," "Sci-Fi," "Romance" and the like. These narrower subcategories allow the streamer to make more specific and targeted recommendations. Netflix also tracks titles that are popular and trending across its service, so you can check in on what everyone else is watching, as well. The feature is currently in testing on iOS devices and can be found at the top right of the app's homepage, if you've been opted in to the test.

YouTube announced it is changing its policy in regard to how it treats videos targeted toward minors and young children. "The video platform says it will now remove all content that contains 'violent' or 'mature' themes if it is targeted toward kids, either through the title of the video, its description, or the accompanying tags," reports The Verge. From the report: Going forward, YouTube says this type of content "will no longer be allowed on the platform." Prior to this change, YouTube was age-restricting such videos, but now it's going a step further to help clean up the platform and make it a safer place for children amid intense regulatory scrutiny and nonstop criticism of its executive leadership. The policy change was announced two days ago, but it was done so on a YouTube Help community forum and appears to have gone largely unnoticed, with the post amassing only 20 replies and little news coverage. YouTube says it will begin ramping up enforcement of this new policy over the next 30 days, to give creators a chance to become familiar with the new rules.

As part of that process, YouTube says it will remove videos that violate the policy, but it won't be giving strikes to channels until the 30-day period is up. YouTube says it won't be handing out strikes to videos uploaded prior to the policy change, but it still reserves the right to remove those videos. YouTube advises creators check the YouTube Kids guidelines if they want to specifically reach children with their videos, and it also advises creators to make sure their descriptions and tags are targeting the right audience to avoid getting caught up in the ban. YouTube also says it will be age-restricting more content that could be confusingly viewed as kid-friendly, like adult cartoons.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an opinion piece from The New York Times, written by Matthew Ball, former head of strategic planning for Amazon Studios. Here's an excerpt: The next 12 months will see several video services come to market, including Disney+, AT&T/WarnerMedia's HBO Max, Comcast/NBCUniversal's unnamed service, Apple TV+ and Quibi from the Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. This increased competition will offer audiences even more high-quality series, the sorts of films that can no longer be found in theaters, interactive storytelling they've never seen before, and further improvements in navigation and advertising. Yet in this new multiplatform world, viewers will find they have to pay for a fistful of streaming subscriptions to watch all of their favorite programs -- and in the process, they'll again end up paying for lots of shows and movies they'll never care to watch. AT&T's WarnerMedia, for example, is bundling its TV channels, like TBS, HBO and TruTV, and film studios, including Warner Bros., DC Films and New Line, into its HBO Max service. Disney+ will have Marvel, Pixar and Lucasfilm, but also National Geographic, "The Simpsons" and Disney's offerings for children. And to navigate these many subscriptions, most households will want companies like Amazon or Apple to further bundle these services together into a single app -- just as they do with Dish or Xfinity. All of this bundling will eventually mean the return of a high monthly bill. Behind this bill is the cost of making high-quality programming. Although much has been said about how Netflix and Amazon have disrupted the video business, no media company has figured out how to make premium movies or TV shows significantly more cheaply. In fact, competition has driven production budgets even higher. Ultimately, these costs are paid by viewers (especially if they choose to watch without ads).

But the rise of digital video is bringing back more than just bloated bundles and bills. Many companies are returning to TV's original business model: selling you anything and everything but the television show in front of you. For decades, all TV content was "free." Networks like ABC and CBS distributed their shows free of charge because they weren't really in the business of selling audiences 30 minutes of entertainment. Instead, they were selling advertisers eight or so minutes of the audience's attention. While most digital video services do charge their viewers, their real objective is to lock audiences into their ever-expanding ecosystem. Their TV network is the ad. Amazon, Apple and Roku, for example, use their networks to drive sales of their devices, software, services and other products. For YouTube and Facebook, original movies and shows are about increasing the number of ads they serve and the prices they charge for these ads. "Even as the video industry reconstitutes with new players -- under old business models and familiar problems -- most people agree that TV has never been better," Ball writes in closing. "Consumers have more options, better shows and more diversity than ever before."

"But at the same time, weâ(TM)re entering a world in which our culture is programmed by vertically integrated trillion-dollar corporations," he adds. "This may help us escape high prices and ads in the short term, but eventually the bill will come due."

Spotify today extended the free-trial period for its Premium service from one month to three, tripling the amount of time listeners can take full advantage of the streaming giant's offerings without paying for them. From a report: According to the announcement, the offer is "always-on/not limited time," and will roll out across Spotify Premium plans globally: Individual and Student (where available) starting today, as well as Family (where available) and Duo (where available) in the coming months. The announcement notes that the free trial is open only to users who haven't already tried Premium (and is "not available on Headspace, non-recurring products and most carrier billing (except for individual in JP, AU, DE, CH and Student in JP)."

Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has pulled out of producing future Spider-Man movies. From a report: The news was first reported by Deadline and later confirmed by Sony Pictures. According to Deadline's reporting, the break is due to disputes between Sony -- which still holds the rights to the character -- and Marvel's parent company Disney over revenue sharing from films starring the web-slinging hero. The news means that Spider-Man's appearances in Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe films -- as well as crossovers from characters like Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man or Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury in future Spider-Man films -- could end with Spider-Man: Far From Home, released earlier this summer.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shares a report about Japan's virtual YouTubers or VTubers that act as live performers, corporate PR officials and even surrogate children. From The Wall Street Journal: Ryosei Takehisa, 24 years old, doesn't have any children -- unless you count an animated character with elfin ears called Mikuriya Kuon. In live appearances on YouTube, the kimono-clad Kuon character, voiced by an actor hired by Mr. Takehisa, dispenses advice about the latest video games and plays rock-paper-scissors with her fans. The creator says he considers Kuon his "real daughter" even though she "resides within pixels." While others may compete for fame or page views, "for me, I'm totally satisfied just with the fact that she was born and is continuing to live life in good health," says Mr. Takehisa. Digital avatars with human traits have long carved out a role on social media, on Instagram in particular. Japan, as it often does, has taken the idea and run with it, with its virtual characters now estimated to number more than 3,000.

Technology allows Kuon and her peers to have more direct engagement with fans -- and sometimes a family-like relationship with their own creators. The characters, known as virtual YouTubers or VTubers because many are active on YouTube, sing and dance at live performances and answer questions on webcasts. VTubers are so embedded in Japanese culture that one of them serves as a face of the Japanese government's tourism campaign. Another presented earnings results for game-site operator Gree Inc. in August last year, informing investors that "we will aggressively invest in strengthening our three earnings pillars." "VTubers are an evolution in Japan's long tradition of manga and anime, giving real-time interactivity to the sort of characters earlier depicted in comic books and on television screens," the report says. "The next step could be artificial intelligence to allow the VTubers to sing, dance and be mischievous without any backstage human help."

Sony is trying to further extend one of their latest pop sensations, a VTuber called Kaguya Luna, by building on its virtual-reality technology. "It has already staged concerts by Luna that fans view through a VR headset," reports The WSJ. "Next the company is looking into haptic technology -- which can convey vibrations and force -- to allow fans to get up close and personal with Luna."