An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Altice, parent company of Internet provider Optimum, must disclose the personal details of a hundred alleged music pirates. The request comes from a group of prominent record labels and is part of an ongoing copyright infringement liability lawsuit (PDF). Altice, meanwhile, will receive anti-piracy information, including that related to a letter the RIAA previously sent to BitTorrent Inc., the owner of popular torrent client uTorrent. [...] Details are scarce, but the group will likely consist of subscribers who were repeatedly warned over alleged piracy activity. The music labels could use this information to gather further evidence to support their allegations. For example, subscriber testimony could help to strengthen the argument that the ISP failed to take effective measures against repeat infringers.

There's nothing to suggest that these people will be approached with any claims directly. The names, emails, and addresses of the subscribers are marked as "highly confidential" and can only be viewed by attorneys acting for the music companies. The subscribers will be informed about the forthcoming disclosure of their personal details and any objections will be heard by the court. [...] Subscriber details are just a fraction of the information requested by the parties during discovery. Altice, for example, will also gain access to some non-privileged documents and communications between the music companies and their anti-piracy partners, including the RIAA, OpSec, and Audible Magic.

This includes information regarding a letter (PDF) the RIAA sent to the company behind the uTorrent and BitTorrent clients in 2015. [...] The nature of information sought by Altice isn't clear. The company previously said that if music labels are concerned about piracy, they are free to go after developers of 'piracy' software. While neutral torrent clients don't fall into that category, the ISP will be interested in any related legal considerations that took place behind the scenes.

"[O]ur intrepid China reporter, Caiwei Chen, has identified a new trend unfolding within China's tech scene: Companies that were dominant in electric vehicles are betting big on translating that success into developing humanoid robots," writes MIT Technology Review's James O'Donnell. "I spoke with her about what she found out and what it might mean for Trump's policies and the rest of the globe..." An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the report: Your story looks at electric-vehicle makers in China that are starting to work on humanoid robots, but I want to ask about a crazy stat. In China, 53% of vehicles sold are either electric or hybrid, compared with 8% in the US. What explains that?

Price is a huge factor -- there are countless EV brands competing at different price points, making them both affordable and high-quality. Government incentives also play a big role. In Beijing, for example, trading in an old car for an EV gets you 10,000 RMB (about $1,500), and that subsidy was recently doubled. Plus, finding public charging and battery-swapping infrastructure is much less of a hassle than in the US.

You open your story noting that China's recent New Year Gala, watched by billions of people, featured a cast of humanoid robots, dancing and twirling handkerchiefs. We've covered how sometimes humanoid videos can be misleading. What did you think?

I would say I was relatively impressed -- the robots showed good agility and synchronization with the music, though their movements were simpler than human dancers'. The one trick that is supposed to impress the most is the part where they twirl the handkerchief with one finger, toss it into the air, and then catch it perfectly. This is the signature of the Yangko dance, and having performed it once as a child, I can attest to how difficult the trick is even for a human! There was some skepticism on the Chinese internet about how this was achieved and whether they used additional reinforcement like a magnet or a string to secure the handkerchief, and after watching the clip too many times, I tend to agree.

President Trump has already imposed tariffs on China and is planning even more. What could the implications be for China's humanoid sector?

Unitree's H1 and G1 models are already available for purchase and were showcased at CES this year. Large-scale US deployment isn't happening yet, but China's lower production costs make these robots highly competitive. Given that 65% of the humanoid supply chain is in China, I wouldn't be surprised if robotics becomes the next target in the US-China tech war.

In the US, humanoid robots are getting lots of investment, but there are plenty of skeptics who say they're too clunky, finicky, and expensive to serve much use in factory settings. Are attitudes different in China?

Skepticism exists in China too, but I think there's more confidence in deployment, especially in factories. With an aging population and a labor shortage on the horizon, there's also growing interest in medical and caregiving applications for humanoid robots.

DeepSeek revived the conversation about chips and the way the US seeks to control where the best chips end up. How do the chip wars affect humanoid-robot development in China?

Training humanoid robots currently doesn't demand as much computing power as training large language models, since there isn't enough physical movement data to feed into models at scale. But as robots improve, they'll need high-performance chips, and US sanctions will be a limiting factor. Chinese chipmakers are trying to catch up, but it's a challenge.

Apple has released an official Apple TV app for Android phones and tablets that's now available in the Google Play Store. You can download it here. 9to5Google reports: The newest Apple app on Android has a bottom bar with Apple TV+, MLS (Major League Soccer), Downloads for offline viewing, and Search. [...] The video player takes after Apple TV on other platforms, with a portrait mode available. There are convenient shortcuts to activate picture-in-picture, which works inside the app (while browsing) and system-wide, and mute to bring up the system volume bar. Playback is smooth and more stable than other streaming services.

At launch, the Apple TV app lacks Casting support and there do not appear to be new episode notifications. If you're already signed into Apple Music, you have to log in again to Apple TV. Another notable aspect is support for Google Play Billing instead of requiring out-of-app sign-up on another device. This applies to both the Google TV app (and Apple Music) today.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last night, Apple posted a new support document about migrating purchases between accounts, something that Apple users with long online histories have been waiting on for years, if not decades. If you have movies, music, or apps orphaned on various iTools/.Mac/MobileMe/iTunes accounts that preceded what you're using now, you can start the fairly involved process of moving them over.

"You can choose to migrate apps, music, and other content you've purchased from Apple on a secondary Apple Account to a primary Apple Account," the document reads, suggesting that people might have older accounts tied primarily to just certain movies, music, or other purchases that they can now bring forward to their primary, device-linked account. The process takes place on an iPhone or iPad inside the Settings app, in the "Media & Purchases" section in your named account section.

There are a few hitches to note. You can't migrate purchases from or into a child's account that exists inside Family Sharing. You can only migrate purchases to an account once a year. There are some complications if you have music libraries on both accounts and also if you have never used the primary account for purchases or downloads. And migration is not available in the EU, UK, or India. The process is also one direction, so you have to give some real thought to which account is your "primary" account going forward. If you goof it up, you can undo the migration. "The list of things you need to do on both the primary and secondary accounts to enable this migration is almost comically long and detailed: two-factor authentication must be turned on, there can be no purchases or rentals in the last 15 days, payment methods must be updated, and so on," notes Ars' Kevin Purdy.

To celebrate 2025's newest arrivals in the public domain, the Internet Archive held a special in-person event at their San Francisco headquarters, as well as a virtual celebration online. (It opens with an absolutely gorgeous rendition of "Happy Days are Hear Again" played on a musical saw.)

And somewhere in the festivities they announced the winners of this year's annual "Public Domain Day Film Remix Contest." These remarkable films not only reimagined and transformed public domain works but also demonstrated the boundless potential of remixing creative works to create something new... Explore all 140+ submissions at the 2025 Public Domain Day Film Remix Contest collection at the Internet Archive...

"The jury was deeply impressed by Queline Meadows's inspired mix of movies, images, music and text woven into a subtle and emotionally affecting video expressing a strong sense of nostalgia and the irretrievable passage of time," said film archivist Rick Prelinger... Filmmaker Samantha Close expresses both the breadth of 1929's production and the eternal bounty of the public domain, using images from 1929's films and public domain images from elsewhere and elsewhen.
One honorable mention entry was described as "an audacious and yes, dopey exploration of the essential greatness of Internet Archive and the dread near-infinity of copyright."

The Register highlights concerns raised at a recent UK parliamentary committee regarding AI companies' exploitation of copyrighted content without permission or payment. From the report: The Culture, Media and Sport Committee and Science, Innovation and Technology Committee asked composer Max Richter how he would know if "bad-faith actors" were using his material to train AI models. "There's really nothing I can do," he told MPs. "There are a couple of music AI models, and it's perfectly easy to make them generate a piece of music that sounds uncannily like me. That wouldn't be possible unless it had hoovered up my stuff without asking me and without paying for it. That's happening on a huge scale. It's obviously happened to basically every artist whose work is on the internet."

Richter, whose work has been used in a number of major film and television scores, said the consequences for creative musicians and composers would be dire. "You're going to get a vanilla-ization of music culture as automated material starts to edge out human creators, and you're also going to get an impoverishing of human creators," he said. "It's worth remembering that the music business in the UK is a real success story. It's 7.6 billion-pound income last year, with over 200,000 people employed. That is a big impact. If we allow the erosion of copyright, which is really how value is created in the music sector, then we're going to be in a position where there won't be artists in the future."

Speaking earlier, former Google staffer James Smith said much of the damage from text and data mining had likely already been done. "The original sin, if you like, has happened," said Smith, co-founder and chief executive of Human Native AI. "The question is, how do we move forward? I would like to see the government put more effort into supporting licensing as a viable alternative monetization model for the internet in the age of these new AI agents."

Matt Rogerson, director of global public policy and platform strategy at the Financial Times, said: "We can only deal with what we see in front of us and [that is] people taking our content, using it for the training, using it in substitutional ways. So from our perspective, we'll prosecute the same argument in every country where we operate, where we see our content being stolen." The risk, if the situation continued, was a hollowing out of creative and information industries, he said. [...] "The problem is we can't see who's stolen our content. We're just at this stage where these very large companies, which usually make margins of 90 percent, might have to take some smaller margin, and that's clearly going to be upsetting for their investors. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't. It's just a question of right and wrong and where we pitch this debate. Unfortunately, the government has pitched it in thinking that you can't reduce the margin of these big tech companies; otherwise, they won't build a datacenter."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: For all motorists, but perhaps the Ferrari-collecting rocker Rod Stewart in particular, it will be music to the ears: researchers have developed a road surface that heals when it cracks, preventing potholes without a need for human intervention. The international team devised a self-healing bitumen that mends cracks as they form by fusing the asphalt back together. In laboratory tests, pieces of the material repaired small fractures within an hour of them first appearing. "When you close the cracks you prevent potholes forming in the future and extend the lifespan of the road," said Dr Jose Norambuena-Contreras, a researcher on the project at Swansea University. "We can extend the surface lifespan by 30%."

Potholes typically start from small surface cracks that form under the weight of traffic. These allow water to seep into the road surface, where it causes more damage through cycles of freezing and thawing. Bitumen, the sticky black substance used in asphalt, becomes susceptible to cracking when it hardens through oxidation. To make the self-healing bitumen, the researchers mixed in tiny porous plant spores soaked in recycled oils. When the road surface is compressed by passing traffic, it squeezes the spores, which release their oil into any nearby cracks. The oils soften the bitumen enough for it to flow and seal the cracks. Working with researchers at King's College London and Google Cloud, the scientists used machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to model the movement of organic molecules in bitumen and simulate the behaviour of the self-healing material to see how it responded to newly formed cracks. The material could be scaled up for use on British roads in a couple of years, the researchers believe. Google published a blog post with more information about the "self-healing" asphalt.

The Beatles' final song "Now and Then," featuring John Lennon's AI-restored vocals from a 1970s demo, has won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr completed the track in 2023 using machine learning to isolate Lennon's voice from the original piano recording.

Google has open-sourced the PebbleOS, with the original founder, Eric Migicovsky, starting a company to continue where he left off in 2016. "This is part of an effort from Google to help and support the volunteers who have come together to maintain functionality for Pebble watches after the original company ceased operations in 2016," said Google in a blog post. The Verge reports: The company -- which can't be named Pebble because Google still owns that -- doesn't have a name yet. For now, Migicovsky is hosting a waitlist and news signup at a website called RePebble. Later this year, once the company has a name and access to all that Pebble software, the plan is to start shipping new wearables that look, feel, and work like the Pebbles of old. The reason, Migicovsky tells me, is simple. "I've tried literally everything else," he says, "and nothing else comes close." Sure, he may just have a very specific set of requirements -- lots of people are clearly happy with what Apple, Garmin, Google, and others are making. But it's true that there's been nothing like Pebble since Pebble. "For the things I want out of it, like a good e-paper screen, long battery life, good and simple user experience, hackable, there's just nothing."

The core of Pebble, he says, is a few things. A Pebble should be quirky and fun and should feel like a gadget in an important way. It shows notifications, lets you control your music with buttons, lasts a long time, and doesn't try to do too much. It sounds like Migicovsky might have Pebble-y ambitions beyond smartwatches, but he appears to be starting with smartwatches. If that sounds like the old Pebble and not much else, that's precisely the point. [...] Migicovsky also hopes to be part of a broader open-source community around Pebble OS. The Pebble diehards still exist: a group of developers at Rebble have worked to keep many of the platform's apps alive, for instance, along with the Cobble app for connecting to phones, and the Pebble subreddit is surprisingly active for a product that hasn't been updated since the Obama administration. Migicovsky says he plans to open-source whatever his new company builds and hopes lots of other folks will build stuff, too. Thank you Slashdot reader sziring for sharing this story.

At December's "Microsoft Excel World Championship" in Las Vegas, "finance professionals fluent in spreadsheets were treated like minor celebrities," writes the New York Times, "as they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people, and more watching an ESPN3 livestream."

The Times notes that "many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN's annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess and the World Dog Surfing Championships." But the contest's organizer envisions tournaments with "more spectators, bigger sponsors and a million-dollar prize" — even though this year's prize was $5,000 and a pro wrestling-style championship belt. The format for the finals was a mock-up of World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game. It required the 12 men (this particular nerdfest was mostly a guy thing) to design Excel formulas for tracking 20 avatars and their vital signs... To prepare, [competitor Diarmuid] Early adjusted the width of his Excel columns with the precision of a point guard lining up a 3-point shot. [Andrew] Ngai queued up a YouTube compilation of "focus music". After an announcer kicked off the 40-minute event — "Five, four, three, two, one, and Excel!" — the 12 players leaned over their keyboards and began plugging in formulas. One example: "=CountChar (Lower (D5),"W")" allowed one competitor, Michael Jarman, to figure out how many times the letter "W" appeared in a spreadsheet.
ZDNet points out that there's a seven-hour livestream of the event that's "worth checking out for the opening theme song alone."

The New York Times closes their article with a quote from super-fan Erik Oehm, a software developer from San Francisco who called the event "the Super Bowl for Excel nerds". Oehm watched excitedly from the front row as this year's winner — Michael Jarman — finally raised the championship belt overhead while someone dumped glitter on him. And then he said...

"You'd never see this with Google Sheets. You'd never get this level of passion."

Since launching in 2020, the nonprofit site RestofWorld.org has been covering tech news from 100 countries. And they've just announced the winners in their 2024 international photography contest.

"From Cape Verde to Bhutan, we received 227 entries from over 45 countries around the world, featuring everything from sprawling mines to biometric facial scans." Like last year, the majority of the entries in our 2024 photography contest captured on-the-ground realities of how technology is transforming lives in every corner of the world. We received submissions from over 45 countries, showcasing a stunning variety of perspectives on the intersection of technology and daily life.

Beyond striking visuals, the photographs tell us stories of how tech plays a role in local communities, from iris-scanning payment systems inside refugee camps to EV battery-powered music gatherings. The 227 entries we received from contestants — including from Mongolia, the Philippines, Argentina, and Jordan — not only celebrate these stories but reaffirm our commitment at Rest of World to challenge stereotypes about how people use technology in their daily lives.
An "honorable mention" photo shows immigrants from Africa arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa after a perilous boat journey. ("Upon their arrival, these refugees borrowed a smartphone from a bystander and started a video call to let their relatives know they survived the journey.") And the top photo shows a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent using a cellphone to collect facial scans from migrants entering the country from Mexico. ("After they make the crossing into the U.S., migrants are subjected to further data collection, including DNA samples.")

Biometric data collection was a recurring theme. A photo from Jordan shows a Syrian boy paying for groceries with an iris scanner at a supermarket "run jointly by the World Food Programme and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees." Eye-scanning technology is being used there "to ensure people use only their own credit and not borrowed or stolen cards. After having their iris scanned, Syrian refugees living in the camp can make use of services such as health care and shopping, using just their eyes."

Another recurring theme was energy. There's a lovely "honorable mention" photo from the Philippines showing two young people on a beach playing basketball "under the towering blades of the windmills in Bangu... Renewable energy has transformed this community, cutting household expenses and powering opportunities once thought to be out of reach." The third-place photo shows six children in a distant tent in "a mountainous, subarctic forest" in Mongolia" — all gathered around a laptop "to watch a documentary about a Norwegian reindeer herder" who had visited their region. ("Modern technology such as solar panels, car batteries, and the occasional Wi-Fi connection allows these families to stay connected with the world.") One photo shows a young boy carrying a solar panel down from the roof in a remote village in Jharkhand, India.

Another photo documents the largest salt flat in Argentina, part of the so-called "lithium triangle" with parts of Chile and Bolivia. A salt miner says "They started looking for lithium there in 2010. We made them stop; it was hurting the environment and affecting the water. But now they are back and I am afraid. Everything we have could be lost."

And a photo from Nigeria shows two people wearing traditional African attire but adorned with "goggles crafted from repurposed VHS tapes". RestofWorld says the goggles "represent how individuals and communities reclaim and reinterpret technology for art, commentary, and resilience. This practice reflects a community's ability to find new life in what others might discard, highlighting a deep relationship with both old and new technologies."

Chinese venture capital and private equity firm HongShan, formerly part of Sequoia, said on Friday it has struck a deal to acquire a majority stake in Marshall in a deal valuing the audio equipment maker at $1.15 billion.

Consumer spending on apps is projected to reach $150 billion globally in 2024, up 13% from the prior year. According to Sensor Tower's annual "State of Mobile" report, it's being fueled by a 200% surge in spending on generative AI apps like ChatGPT and Gemini, which collectively drew $1.1 billion. TechCrunch reports: If this rate of growth is sustained, this category of apps could move into the top 10 by consumer spending within a year, the firm notes. Though the release of new AI models, like OpenAI's GPT-4o last summer, helped drive app revenue up to record numbers at times, consumer demand for AI apps was consistent throughout the year -- not only during these peak surges. As a result, consumers spent nearly 7.7 billion hours using AI apps in 2024, while apps mentioning "AI" were also downloaded 17 billion times in the year.

ChatGPT alone reached 50 million monthly active users -- faster than Temu, Disney+, or YouTube Music, for comparison. This indicates there's still a growing appetite for AI apps and those with AI features.

YouTube Premium subscribers can now stream music videos at 256kbps bitrate audio quality, matching the high-fidelity standard previously exclusive to YouTube Music, the video platform said.

The audio upgrade comes as part of an expanded experimental features program that allows Premium users to test multiple new features simultaneously, departing from its previous single-experiment limitation, the company said.

David Lynch, a four-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker known for the 1984 sci-fi epic Dune and the Showtime drama Twin Peaks, has died. "In January 2025, Lynch evacuated his Los Angeles home due to the Southern California wildfires," writes longtime Slashdot reader Z00L00K. "According to Deadline, these events preceded a terminal decline in his health, and on January 16, 2025, Lynch's family announced that he had died at the age of 78." Deadline reports: Lynch had been diagnosed with emphysema. Sources told Deadline that he was forced to relocate from his house due to the Sunset Fire and then took a turn for the worse. In an interview with Sight & Sound magazine last year, Lynch revealed that due to Covid fears and his emphysema diagnosis, he could no longer could leave the house, which meant if he directed again, it would be remote. He then followed up the interview with a post on social that he "will never retire" despite his physical challenges.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don't enjoy making music. "We didn't just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people," Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. "And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It's not really enjoyable to make music now [...] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music."

Suno AI works like other popular generative AI tools, allowing users to generate music by writing text prompts describing the kind of music they want to hear. Also like many other generative AI tools, Suno was trained on heaps of copyrighted music it fed into its training dataset without consent, a practice Suno is currently being sued for by the recording industry. In the interview, Shulman says he's disappointed that the recording industry is suing his company because he believes Suno and other similar AI music generators will ultimately allow more people to make and enjoy music, which will only grow the audience and industry, benefiting everyone. That may end up being true, and could be compared to the history of electronic music, digital production tools, or any other technology that allowed more people to make more music.

Delta Air Lines has partnered with YouTube to provide ad-free YouTube Premium and YouTube Music to SkyMiles members on flights. "The deal includes a selection of curated content from key YouTube creators," notes Variety. The airline also said it would upgrade its fleet with better Wi-Fi and 4K HDR QLED displays, alongside AI-driven enhancements like a personal assistant on the Fly Delta app to improve travel experiences. From the report: Delta executives announced the YouTube deal and other flight-experience enhancements to its Delta Sync platform as the aviation giant gave an expansive presentation Tuesday evening at the Sphere in Las Vegas, in connection with the Consumer Electronics Show. Delta touted plans to mark the company's 100th anniversary this year, noting that it is the first airline to reach the centennial mark.

It's also no surprise that Delta is leaning hard into AI tech. The company hopes its Delta Concierge AI-powered personal assistant feature that is rolling out this year on its Fly Delta app will make strides in improving the overall customer experience. The goal is that with repeated use the Concierge tool will come to anticipate individual consumers' needs and help them streamline the logistics of travel -- or what Delta dubbed "contextualized guidance" on everything from departure gates to baggage claim details to alerting travelers to weather conditions at their destinations. [...]

Mary Ellen Coe, chief business officer of YouTube, emphasized that the ad-free YouTube offering will allow viewers to access streaming content as well as podcasts and music. She also asserted that consumers are increasingly gathering travel tips and inspiration through YouTube creators. "Creators are producing the must-see TV of today," Coe said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As music sales and streaming revenue reaches a high of $3 billion -- the highest since 2001, not accounting for significant inflation -- the UK video game market, which has grown almost continually for decades, has shrunk by 4.4%. The most significant decline was in boxed video game sales, down 35%.

Data from Digital Entertainment and Retail Association (ERA) puts the total worth of the UK video game market in 2024 at $5.7 billion, double the music market and behind TV and movies at $6.2 billion. The numbers show a shift in players' purchasing habits that has been ongoing for years, from physical games to digital downloads and in-game purchases in popular, established games such as Fortnite and Roblox. Boxed games now account for 27.7% of new game sales in the UK, according to ERA data.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Laptop screens can feel cramped. But what if you could magically get more real estate without having to carry around a portable monitor? That's precisely the purpose of Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable AI PC -- yes, rollable. It has an OLED display that, with the push of a button, extends the 14-inch screen upward to make for an awkward aspect ratio, but roughly doubles the screen space to 16.7 inches. Two screens are better than one for productivity, but what if one screen could be two but still one? Yes.

It plays a fun animation and some music when it does its rolling thing. You can also activate the rolling action with a palm gesture; once it scans your palm, shift it up or down to raise or lower the screen. (Pressing the button on the keyboard is way faster.) You can take advantage of Windows 11 window snapping features to put apps one on top of the other. I stacked two browser windows, but you can put other apps below too. Considering I'm already that guy who brings a spare portable monitor everywhere, this just seems like a more elegant solution that takes up less space in my bag. And of course, anyone can take advantage of the long aspect ratio to get a better look at documents, PDFs, and web pages.

Lenovo says it has tested the rolling function 30,000 times, and it has performed without flaws, so you can rest a little easier about reliability, though repairing this machine sounds like it will be a task. The whole laptop doesn't feel significantly different from a normal machine, weighing just 3.7 pounds -- that's 1 pound less than the 16-inch MacBook Pro. However, walking with your laptop open in your hand might be weird, as it feels a little top heavy. When closed, it's 19.9 mm thin -- the 16-inch MacBook Pro is 15.4 mm, so Lenovo's machine is thicker, but not as thick as a gaming laptop. Lenovo published a concept video on YouTube.

Samsung and Google are introducing Eclipsa Audio, an open-source 3D audio standard set to debut on select YouTube videos and Samsung's 2025 TVs and soundbars. The new format "could eventually serve as a free alternative to Dolby Atmos, the dominant 3D audio format that hardware makers like Samsung pay to license for TVs and other equipment," reports The Verge. "Samsung says that similar to Atmos, this audio format supports adjusting 'audio data such as the location and intensity of sounds, along with spatial reflections' to create a 3D experience." From the report: The two companies first announced a partnership to develop spatial audio technology in 2023, initially calling it Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF). At the time, Samsung spatial audio head WooHyun Nam said the format would provide "a complete open-source framework for 3D audio, from creation to delivery and playback."

The IAMF spec has also been adopted by the Alliance for Open Media, a group that has been pushing for royalty-free codec support since 2015 and counts companies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Netflix -- along with Samsung and Google -- among its members. If they also add support for this audio format, it could help it catch on, although it's already taken years for their AV1 video codec to see more use. Samsung and Google are also creating a certification program with the Telecommunications Technology Association "to ensure consistent audio quality" across devices using the format, which also sounds similar to the way companies like Dolby and THX manage the labeling for their specs.