Netflix is moving up the timeline for the debut of its cheaper, ad-supported plan to November -- in order to get out before the Dec. 8 launch of the Disney+ tier with advertising. From a report: In July, Netflix told investors that it was targeting the launch of the ad-supported plan "around the early part of 2023." But now, Netflix's ad-supported is set to go live Nov. 1 in multiple countries, including the U.S., Canada, U.K., France and Germany, according to industry sources who have been briefed on the streamer's plans. That would be a little over a month before Disney+ Basic, priced at $7.99/month, hits the market in the U.S.

Netflix declined to comment. "We are still in the early days of deciding how to launch a lower-priced, ad-supported tier and no decisions have been made," a company rep said. Sources confirmed the new Nov. 1 launch date, which was previously reported by the Wall Street Journal. Netflix and its exclusive ad partner, Microsoft, have requested ad buyers submit initial bids next week, with a "soft $65 CPM" -- the cost per thousand views -- meaning that the company is open to negotiating the ad rates. That's well above industry CPMs of sub-$20. Sources speculate Netflix's request for proposals from ad buyers will function as a Dutch auction, with the company looking to see what the market will bear.

Some of the most acclaimed films in animation history are finally available to rent online. GKIDS, the animation specialist distributer, has released the catalog of acclaimed Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli starting Tuesday. From a report: 22 films from the studio -- including Oscar winner "Spirited Away" and nominees such as "Howl's Moving Castle" and "When Marnie Was There" -- will be made available to rent on all major digital platforms, including Apple TV, Amazon VOD, Vudu, Google Play and Microsoft. The films will be be priced at $4.99 per title, and all will be available in HD, with most being offered in the original Japanese language as well as English dubs.

The news marks the first time that Ghibli's films have been made available via digital rental. The catalogue has been one of the pillars of GKIDS' business since the distributer acquired the North American film distribution rights to the studio's films in 2011, followed by the home media rights in 2017 -- previously, the majority of Studio Ghibli films were distributed via the Walt Disney Company. Since 2017, GKIDS has partnered with Fathom Events to host a series of limited run screenings of the studio's films throughout the year. The catalog was made available for digital purchase in 2019, and GKIDS has an exclusive deal to stream the films in the United States on HBO Max, where they have been included since 2020.

Twitter has launched a test version of Twitter Spaces today that includes podcasts, "letting you listen to full shows through curated playlists based on your interests," reports The Verge. From the report: The redesigned Spaces tab opens with Stations, topic-based playlists combining podcast episodes pulled from RSS with Twitter's social audio events and recordings. It functions like a Pandora station but for spoken word and is pretty different from the a la carte listening podcast consumers are used to on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Live and upcoming spaces are still in the tab, further down the page. The test will roll out to a random group of users across the world, initially only in English. The more users listen, the more tailored the audio Stations will become. But Twitter isn't starting from square one -- the company is relying on what it already knows about its users' interests to curate the playlists. It'll draw from the interests of people they follow, as well.

"What we're really trying to capture here is as if it's like another user recommending you something," Twitter senior product manager Evan Jones, who focuses on audio, told Hot Pod. Podcast discovery is notoriously difficult, limited either to top 100 charts, hand-picked selections on apps, or -- more often than not -- word of mouth. No platform has managed to crack it, yet. It's easy to imagine the promotional possibilities around being able to share and listen to podcasts in the same app, but it's not quite there yet. The test does not yet have a clipping capability, and listening can only happen in the Spaces tab, not on the timeline. That being said, Spaces has a clipping feature that could be applied to podcasts at some point.

Fans think 2022 has been one of the best years for blockbusters this century. Critics think it's been one of the worst. From a report: When Sony released its film adaptation of the video game "Uncharted" in February, critics were quick to tear it apart. The Wall Street Journal called it "bloodless, heartless, joyless, sexless and, with one exception, charmless." New York Magazine deemed it "curiously empty." MovieFreak.com dismissed it as "a bona fide disaster." And yet, audiences ate it up. The movie, which stars Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, opened to $44.2 million at the domestic box office and went on to gross $401.8 million worldwide. It is one of the 10 highest-grossing movies of the year. "Uncharted" also initiated one of the biggest disputes between critics and fans in modern movie history. Audiences have given higher scores than critics to all 10 of the year's biggest movies. The average audience rating for "Jurassic World Dominion" on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb is a 67. The average critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic is 34. That is a difference of 33 points. "Jurassic World Dominion" is one of three movies (along with "Uncharted" and "The Gray Man") where audiences and critics disagree by more than 30 points.

It may seem as though critics typically pan the year's biggest hits. But that is not the case. While audiences do tend to give blockbusters a higher score than critics, the average gap in their ratings is usually around 5 points. There has been at least one year where critics gave the biggest movies higher ratings than audiences. And there have been many years where the difference is negligible. In 2022? It is not so much a gap as a chasm. Audiences have given the top 10 movies an average score more than 19 points higher than critics, by far the biggest difference this century. The only two of the year's 10 biggest movies where audiences and critics are even close are "Top Gun: Maverick" and "The Batman."

United Launch Alliance has been developing a heavy-lift space vehicle since 2014 (with investment from the U.S. military) called the Vulcan Centaur.

So CNN reports that the ashes of the late Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols "will head to deep space on a Vulcan rocket." Nichols' cremated remains will be aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight, which will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Celestis, Inc., is a private company that conducts memorial spaceflights. Among the remains also aboard the flight will be the ashes of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry; his wife, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who played various roles in the show and films; and James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in the films and TV series....

The spaceflight will travel beyond NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and into interplanetary deep space. In addition to cremated remains, capsules onboard will also carry complete human genome DNA samples from willing participants.

People can participate in the flight — by having DNA or loved ones' remains in a spaceflight container — for a price starting at $12,500, and reservations close August 31. (Celestis offers other voyages that don't travel as far, but can cost less than $5,000.) Ahead of the flight's liftoff, Celestis will host a three-day event with mission briefings, an astronaut-hosted dinner, launch site tours, an on-site memorial service and launch viewing. All events will be shown via webcast, according to Celestis.
An announcement on the flight's site invites fans of Nichelle Nichols to "share your own story about how she inspired you and it will be sent into deep space aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight — the Enterprise Flight, launching later in 2022."

Every Friday Politico interviews someone about "The Future in Five Questions". This week they interviewed Neal Stephenson (who they describe as "the sci-fi author who coined the term 'metaverse' and now a Web3 entrepreneur in his own right.")

Stephenson began by sharing his thoughts on a big idea that's underrated. Neal Stephenson: Desalination. It's an incredibly obvious, kind of simple process. Nothing is more basic than having water to drink, so it's kind of hiding in plain sight, but coupled with cheap energy from photovoltaics it's going to make big changes in the world. When you look at how much water, or a lack thereof, has shaped where people live and how people make food, the notion that we might be able to engineer ways to get fresh water in a new way could be revolutionary.

What's a technology you think is overhyped?

Stephenson: I'm going to go with an oldie: rockets. It's just a historical accident that chemical rockets became our only way of putting stuff into space, and if we had started at a different time we would have ended up doing something that works better.

One alternative would be beaming energy from the ground to vehicles, using lasers or microwaves. That seems like a doable project right now. There's nuclear propulsion, which I think is probably never going to happen at scale, because it's politically impossible, but even something as simple as constructing a very tall building or a tall tower and using that as a launch platform, or as a way to accelerate things up upward, could really change the economics of spaceflight.
Stephenson also says the book that most shaped his conception of the future was Robert Heinlein's 1958 novel Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. And the biggest surprise of 2022 was Ukraine's strong response after Russia's invasion. "Most people who are paying attention have understood that drones and other new technologies are going to change the way wars get fought, but we're seeing it unfold and mutate in real time in Ukraine.

"These guys are taking old Cold War grenades and disassembling them, and putting on homemade fuses and attaching 3D printed fins and dropping them out of consumer-grade drones, to a significant effect on the battlefield...."

In 2004 Neal Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

Polygon reports that during a streaming event, the publisher of the Magic: the Gathering card game promised a new themed set of cards commemorating Doctor Who's 60th anniversary. But that's not their only new set: The Lord of the Rings: Tales from Middle-earth is also releasing in Q3 of 2023, but it will be a fully draftable booster set and legal in modern format of competitive play....

Individual cards portray familiar heroes and villains including Frodo, Gandalf and the Balrog. In order to capture the scale of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy battles, the set will also feature new borderless scene cards. Each has a piece of art that can stand alone, but 18 of them will come together to produce a particularly epic scene from the trilogy — such as the Battle of the Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King. The art from Tyler Jacobson, who's provided illustrations for more than 100 Magic cards and for Dungeons & Dragons books including The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, is full of small details including the Dark Tower Barad-dûr in the background.
The article points out that the game publisher has previously published crossover decks for The Walking Dead and Fortnite.

This story is for long-time Slashdot reader tezbobobo, who argued earlier this week that Slashdot's been remiss in its coverage of Magic: the Gathering news: For years I've seen Dungeons & Dragons, Sony Playstation and Nethack show up occassionally on the front page of Slashdot. So where are the rest of the nerd games?

Magic: the Gathering has one of the most loyal and active fanbases, and the creators have been churning out new and interesting cards for decades. Even as it tops the trading card pile, it's made inroads into the digital sphere, with online version in Arena and Magic Online. It's available on PC, Mac, Ipad.

Crop of expensive fantasy adaptations from Amazon and HBO Max served up at subsidised prices. Financial Times: Since 2016, the veteran US television executive John Landgraf has been predicting the arrival of "peak TV" -- the moment when the number of new scripted shows reaches an all-time high. The streaming boom has proved him wrong every time but he gamely made the prediction again this month, telling guests at the Television Critics Association press tour that 2022 would mark "the peak of the peak TV era." Landgraf, chair of Disney's FX network, conceded that he could be wrong this time too. But there is little doubt that this autumn will present audiences with a flood of some of the most expensive television ever produced. On September 2, Amazon Prime will release its adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, with an estimated budget of $465mn for the first season -- almost enough to make Top Gun: Maverick three times over.

HBO Max's House of the Dragon -- the prequel to Game of Thrones -- is reported to have cost $200mn for the season's 10 episodes. At Disney Plus, Star Wars: Andor will lead a large slate of new programmes that include a Pinocchio remake, She Hulk, and a spin-off of the Cars franchise. These shows are being served up to consumers at subsidised prices by streaming platforms making record losses. The only profitable exception is Netflix, but the industry pioneer's market value has plunged almost $200bn over the past year because of slowing subscriber growth. Its share price is languishing at a four-year low. The forthcoming crop of new programming was given the green light during a headier time, when Wall Street cheered as streaming services committed lavish sums to compete. But faith in the streaming business model -- and investor tolerance for profligate spending -- has waned as Netflix's once-blistering subscription growth has gone into reverse.

[...] On top of that, there are growing concerns that inflation will bite into discretionary spending, including on streaming services. "Everyone [in Hollywood] is throwing big dollars after big things," said Niels Juul, who was an executive producer of Martin Scorsese's Netflix film The Irishman. "But [subscribers] are inundated now to the point where they are looking at their monthly bills and saying, 'Something's got to go -- I've got $140 worth of subscriptions here!'" Even so, Tom Harrington at Enders Analysis said consumers were still getting a better deal than the streaming companies themselves. "People get through $100mn of TV in a day and say: 'what's next?' From a consumer point of view that is great. But for a video operator, it's clearly unsustainable."

The world's largest comprehensive database on Japanese anime, Anime Taizen, was opened to the public today, August 25, at 13:00 (JST). Taizen means "A book that collects all things related to the matter" in Japanese. Crunchyroll reports: Since 2015, The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) has been promoting the "Anime NEXT_100" project to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Japanese animation. As a major initiative of the project, this database was first released on a trial basis on October 22, 2021, and after confirming functionality and operation, and making improvements and updates, it has now been released to the public. As of the end of July 2022, Anime Taizen has approximately 15,000 registered titles, mainly Japanese commercial anime works released from 1917 to the present. In addition to title name searches, the database has search functions for chronology, Japanese syllabary, keywords, etc. As a result of the research to date, the number of episodes amounts to approximately 180,000.

The rise and catastrophic fall of what was once Canada's most valuable company is set for the big screen. CBC.ca reports: Blackberry will tell the story of Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion (RIM), creators of the titular device, which for a time was the world's most popular smartphone. The film stars Canadian actor Jay Baruchel as company co-founder Mike Lazaridis and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Glenn Howerton as co-CEO Jim Balsillie. The film was adapted from the 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry, by Sean Silcoff and Jacquie McNish. Toronto's Matt Johnson directs and also appears in the film as RIM's other co-founder, Doug Fregin. The cast also includes Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek and Michael Ironside.

RIM was founded in 1984 by business partners Lazaridis and Fregin, who had previously worked together on a failed LED sign business. After a decade of dabbling in various other technology projects, they turned their attention to the two-way communications systems that would become the foundation for the BlackBerry device.

After years of revelations about strange lights in the sky, first hand reports from Navy pilots about UFOs, and governmental investigations, Congress seems to have admitted something startling in print: it doesn't believe all UFOs are "man-made." Motherboard reports: Buried deep in a report that's an addendum to the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, a budget that governs America's clandestine services, Congress made two startling claims. The first is that "cross-domain transmedium threats to the United States national security are expanding exponentially." The second is that it wants to distinguish between UFOs that are human in origin and those that are not: "Temporary nonattributed objects, or those that are positively identified as man-made after analysis, will be passed to appropriate offices and should not be considered under the definition as unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena," the document states.

The admission is stunning chiefly because, as more information about the U.S. government's study of UFOs has become public, many politicians have stopped just short of claiming the unidentified objects were extraterrestrial or extradimensional in origin. The standard line is typically that, if UFOs exist, then they're likely advanced -- although human-made -- vehicles. Obama refused to confirm the existence of aliens but did say that people have seen a lot of strange stuff in the sky lately when asked directly on The Late Show with James Corden, for example. But now Congress seems to want to specifically distinguish between objects that are "man-made" and those that are not. The admission is stunning chiefly because, as more information about the U.S. government's study of UFOs has become public, many politicians have stopped just short of claiming the unidentified objects were extraterrestrial or extradimensional in origin.

A large question, of course, is why Congress is seemingly admitting this now, in public. After all, lawmakers are privy to classified information that the general public isn't. "It strains credulity to believe that lawmakers would include such extraordinary language in public legislation without compelling evidence," Marik von Rennenkampff, an Obama-era DoD official, said in an op-ed in The Hill about the budget. According to the op-ed, the comments were first noticed by UFO researcher Douglas Johnson. "This implies that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee believe (on a unanimous, bipartisan basis) that some UFOs have non-human origins," von Rennenkampff continued. "After all, why would Congress establish and task a powerful new office with investigating non-'man-made' UFOs if such objects did not exist?" "Make no mistake: One branch of the American government implying that UFOs have non-human origins is an explosive development."

The first fruit of YouTube's new podcast strategy has taken shape with a new "Explore" page "Podcasts." 9to5Google reports: youtube.com/podcasts is now live and is linked to on the existing Explore page alongside: Trending, Music, Movies & Shows, Live, Gaming, News, Sports, Learning, and Fashion & Beauty. It appears to have first gone live in late July, and is slowly becoming more widely available as it's not showing up for all users we checked with today. Available on desktop web and mobile, it's very rudimentary at this point. There are carousels, which can be expanded via "Show all," for "Popular episodes," "Popular podcast playlists," "Recommended," and "Popular podcast creators." The rest of this page links to various categories: Comedy, True Crime, Sports, Music, and TV & Film.

You're just browsing through regular video thumbnails rather than anything more optimized. Meanwhile, tapping one just opens the regular player on Android, and doesn't even default to the "Listening controls" available for YouTube Premium subscribers. You get large buttons and shortcuts to like, save, and quickly adjust playback speed. The podcast experience for end users will presumably get more optimized over time, while it remains to be seen what the UI in YouTube Music is going to be.

MoviePass, a subscription service for movie theaters which shut down three years ago, is making a return. From a report: Remember the golden days of MoviePass, in early 2018, when $9.95 a month got you unlimited movies? And then, remember when right after, MoviePass reported a $40 million dollar loss in May 2018 and tried and failed over and over again to restructure, before finally calling it quits in 2019? Well, MoviePass is back! Starting on Aug. 25 at 9 am EDT, you can sign up for a waitlist at the MoviePass website for the beta version of the new model. But it's not the same MoviePass we once knew and loved, which, let's be real, was always too good to be true. Instead, this time there will be three subscription price tiers -- $10, $20, and $30 -- each with a different number of "credits" to use each month to see movies. MoviePass has not revealed how many credits each tier gets, nor how many credits are needed to reserve a ticket.

Slashdot reader alaskana98 writes: You may remember it — at the end of Return of the Jedi: Special Edition, a rare glimpse of Coruscant — the seat of the galactic empire — is shown in a celebratory state as news of the empire's defeat at Endor reverberated throughout the patchwork of worlds that make up the Star Wars universe.

One might imagine that most viewers at that time might have thought — "Oh, cool, so that's what Coruscant looks like" — then went on with their lives rarely to think about that scene ever again. In a recent ScreenRant article ,they take a deeper dive into what happened on Coruscant...
Yes, it turns out that both the later movies and licensed books revealed that Darth Vader's Galactic Empire survived: [C]itizens who set off fireworks, toppled statues of the Empire, and attacked stormtroopers were met with violent retaliation from Imperial forces, resulting in numerous extrajudicial killings and executions of civilians. Coruscant continued to serve as an Imperial stronghold until its liberation by the New Republic, which happened a year later in canon and two years later in Legends.... [T]he X-Wing novels mention that the Empire brutally quelled this initial uprising, and the Star Wars: Mara Jade — By the Emperor's Hand comic series showed Stormtroopers executing civilians via firing squad. Aftermath similarly describes civilians fighting against Imperial security forces after toppling a statue of Palpatine....

Young adults in the UK are spending more time scrolling on social media site TikTok than watching broadcast television, according to an Ofcom report on Wednesday that highlights the growing generational divide in media habits. From a report: In its annual survey of consumption trends, the media regulator found that those aged 16 to 24 spent an average of 53 minutes a day viewing traditional broadcast TV, just a third of the level a decade ago. By contrast, people over the age of 65 spent seven times as long in front of channels such as BBC One or ITV, viewing almost six hours' worth of broadcast TV a day -- a figure that has risen since 2011. The faster take-up of streaming services and social media among young people poses an ever greater challenge to broadcasters as they try to cope with an economic slowdown, satisfy their most loyal older viewers and invest to keep pace with fast-changing consumption habits.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It sounds like something out of an urban legend: Some Windows XP-era laptops using 5400 RPM spinning hard drives can allegedly be forced to crash when exposed to Janet Jackson's 1989 hit "Rhythm Nation." But Microsoft Software Engineer Raymond Chen stands by the story in a blog post published earlier this week, and the vulnerability has been issued an official CVE ID by The Mitre Corporation, lending it more credibility. According to Chen, CVE-2022-38392 was originally discovered by "a major computer manufacturer," and it can affect not just the laptop playing the song but adjacent laptops from other PC companies as well.

The specific hard drive model at issue -- again from an unnamed manufacturer -- would crash because "Rhythm Nation" used some of the same "natural resonant frequencies" that the drives used, interfering with their operation. Anyone trying to independently recreate this problem will face several obstacles, including the age of the laptops involved and a total lack of specificity about the hard drives or computer models. The CVE entry mentions "a certain 5400 RPM OEM hard drive, as shipped with laptop PCs in approximately 2005" and links back to Chen's post as a primary source. And while some Windows XP-era laptop hard drives may still be kicking out there somewhere, after almost two decades, it's more likely that most of them have died of natural causes. The PC manufacturer was able to partially resolve the issue "by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playbanck," says Chen. However, these HDDs would still crash if they were exposed to another device that was playing the song.

The amount of time US audiences spent watching online TV surpassed cable for the first time ever. From a report: Subscribers to services like Netflix and Hulu accounted for 34.8% of all TV consumption in July, the research firm Nielsen said Thursday. That edged out cable TV at 34.4%. Broadcast was a distant 21.6%. Audiences watched an average of 190.9 billion minutes per week of streamed content in July, Nielsen said. That passed the tally for April 2020, when people were stuck at home because of the pandemic. While consumers spent almost 23% more time streaming, cable and broadcast viewing slumped.

Netflix isn't planning to let users of its new ad-supported tier download shows and movies to their devices for offline viewing, according to code found inside of the company's iPhone app, removing a feature that customers enjoy on its regular service. From a report: The move suggests Netflix is doing what it can to distinguish the upcoming service from its current offerings. The streaming giant, which eschewed advertising for years, is planning to roll out the ad-supported level by early next year. But hints about the new service are already reflected in code hidden within its iPhone app. "Downloads available on all plans except Netflix with ads," according to text in the app that was discovered by developer Steve Moser and shared with Bloomberg News. The code also suggests that users won't be able to skip ads -- a common move in the streaming world -- and playback controls won't be available during ad breaks.

Matt Damon's pitch to invest in crypto has disappeared from US television sets. Same goes for glitzy commercials starring LeBron James and Tom Brady. From a report: The drop in national TV marketing by the industry in the US has coincided with the selloff in Bitcoin and other crypto assets, according to the TV-ad measurement company ISpot.tv, which tracks the spots. Damon's commercial for Crypto.com, which ends with him uttering "fortune favors the brave," last aired in February during the Super Bowl. The four-month national campaign cost an estimated $65 million, according to ISpot, exceeding the outlays by others in investment services, including giants such as Fidelity and Vanguard, over the same stretch.

"Ad sellers shouldn't expect growth in this vertical the remainder of the year due to the crash in crypto valuations and emerging allegations of fraud among companies in the crypto market," said Eric Haggstrom, director of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions, an industry researcher. "Crypto has been a boom and bust industry since its inception, and advertising budgets will follow the same trajectory." Spending by major crypto firms, including the trading platforms Crypto.com, Coinbase and FTX, fell to $36,000 in July in the US, according to ISpot. That's the lowest monthly total since January 2021 and is down from a high of $84.5 million in February, when the industry flooded the airwaves around the Super Bowl.

It is gradually getting tougher for streaming-video companies to hold on to their subscribers, as consumers who are flooded with options weed out services they don't need at any given time. From a report: Some 19% of subscribers to premium services -- a group that includes Netflix, Hulu, AppleTV+, HBO Max and Disney+, among others -- canceled three or more subscriptions in the two years up to June, according to new data from subscriber-measurement firm Antenna. That is up from 6% in the two-year stretch ended in June 2020.

The average rate of monthly customer defections among premium services in the U.S. was 5.46% in July, up from 4.46% a year ago and 4.05% in July 2020, according to Antenna. Many households signed up for multiple streaming services a few years ago as options in the marketplace proliferated, subscription prices were lower and the pandemic boosted demand for in-home entertainment. Slowly but surely, they have gotten more choosy and frugal. Some consumers cancel subscriptions when they finish a hit series on a service, then switch to another that has something else compelling.