On Monday, Spotify announced a new initiative that offers artists the chance to pay their way into automated recommendations. Gizmodo reports: In a carefully worded blog post, Spotify is framing its latest move as a test that will give artists more "input" into the recommendation algorithms that populate personalized playlists with fresh tracks. The company writes that its algorithms take "into account thousands of types of signals: what you're listening to and when, which songs you're adding to your playlists, the listening habits of people who have similar tastes, and much more." Today, Spotify is adding a new signal to the mix: $$$.

Artists uploading new tracks to Spotify will be able to choose "music that's a priority for them" and in exchange for accepting a "promotional recording royalty rate," Spotify's algorithms might just bless them with exposure. The company isn't making promises, it's only offering an opportunity. There's no guarantee of placement in playlists and the reduced royalty rate is only applied to songs that end up being served through the new recommendation system. What is a "promotional recording royalty rate," exactly? [A] spokesperson for the service told the Verge that they aren't making the rate public while it's in testing and Spotify will "calibrate to make sure that the widest group of artists and labels can find success."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Trey Parker and Matt Stone, best known for their cartoon South Park, have created a new comedy deepfake series called Sassy Justice. The star of the show, Fred Sassy, is a local news reporter from Cheyenne, Wyoming, with the face of US President Donald Trump. Other notable characters include, erm, "Dialysis King" Mark Zuckerberg. Politicians like former vice president Al Gore and White House family members Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner also appear. Kushner is portrayed as a man child.

If that sounds completely bonkers, that's because it is. They're all actually deepfakes generated using machine learning algorithms. Their faces have all been superimposed onto the bodies of actors. Not only is it pretty funny, the quality of the technology is shockingly good. The transitions and subtle facial expressions are smooth, apart from Zuckerberg who appears as robotic as ever, making it all the more realistic really. You can watch the first episode here.

In 1962 Sean Connery became the first actor to appear in movies as secret agent James Bond, and according to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 was "The best of the many Bonds, by far."

An anonymous reader writes: Connery influenced the character deeply. The Huffington Post once wrote that James Bond wasn't Scottish until Sean Connery played the role. Ian Fleming was still writing his series of James Bond novels, and "After seeing Connery in Dr. No and thinking the actor did a superb job, Fleming wrote Connery's heritage into the character. In the book You Only Live Twice, Fleming wrote that James Bond's father was Scottish and was from the town of Glencoe. Coincidentally, Connery would film Highlander in Glencoe decades later."

Sir Sean Connery — he was also knighted in the year 2000 — performed many other iconic roles throught his long career, even playing the father of Harrison Ford's character in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Leaving Bond behind, Connery appeared in many historical dramas, including the World War II movies The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far, as well as The Man Who Would Be King, The Name of the Rose, and (in 2003) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But throughout his life he was always in demand for high-quality action films, from The Hunt for Red October to The Rock, even co-starring with Catherine Zeta-Jones in the romantic caper film Entrapment at the age of 69.

And in Terry Gilliam's movie Time Bandits, Connery appears as more than one character, hinting that beneath the individual roles lay some timeless embodiment of strength and goodness itself.

Apple said on Friday that it's replacing AirPods Pro headphones that have sound problems. CNBC reports: These problems include a static or crackling sound that increases in loud environments and issues with active noise cancellation. Apple said AirPods Pro made after October 2020 don't have the problems. Owners who experience problems can contact Apple online or make an appointment at an Apple store to get their AirPods Pro replaced for free. Only devices that are confirmed to have the issue will be replaced. The replacement applies only to the buds, not the charging case. Apple's not offering a similar program for other AirPod models.

According to Nikkei, Sony is close to acquiring U.S. anime-streaming service Crunchyroll for more than $957 million. From the report: Sony has its own popular anime, titles like "Demon Slayer" and "Kimetsu no Yaiba," but has been licensing it to streaming services. Sony's Aniplex, the studio behind "Kimetsu no Yaiba," has a variety of content, including movies and music, that is mainly distributed by overseas companies. If the acquisition is realized, global competition for content among companies like Netflix and Hulu will intensify.

Crunchyroll was founded in 2006 and has its headquarters in San Francisco. In 2018, AT&T, the U.S. telecommunications giant, became its parent company. Sony recently obtained the exclusive right to negotiate for Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll has 70 million free members and 3 million paying subscribers in more than 200 countries and regions, including the U.S and Europe. Crunchyroll would also give Sony more than 1,000 titles that it can use to vary its offerings.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The RIAA is ramping up the pressure on a wide range of platforms allegedly involved in music piracy. Two DMCA subpoenas obtained against Cloudflare and Namecheap require the companies to hand over all information they hold on more than 40 torrent sites, streaming portals and YouTube-ripping services. Also included in the mix are several file-hosting platforms.

Sony PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan says virtual reality won't be a meaningful part of interactive entertainment in the near future. The Verge reports: Ryan indicated to The Washington Post that VR still has a long way to go, although he emphasized that Sony isn't giving up on the medium. The statement suggests that an update to Sony's PlayStation VR headset is years away.

"I think we're more than a few minutes from the future of VR," Ryan told the Post. "PlayStation believes in VR. Sony believes in VR, and we definitely believe at some point in the future, VR will represent a meaningful component of interactive entertainment. Will it be this year? No. Will it be next year? No. But will it come at some stage? We believe that." He notes that the upcoming PlayStation 5, which will be released November 12th, supports the old PlayStation VR headset with a special adapter.

T-Mobile is taking an aggressive new swing at the U.S. pay-TV sector, threatening to further roil the market's dynamics: The carrier announced a new suite of TVision internet packages, available nationwide, that start at just $10 per month. From a report: With the new over-the-top TV play, T-Mobile wants to attract cord-cutters -- and also poach existing cable and satellite TV customers who are fed up with traditional pay TV's high prices and restrictive channel packaging. The TVision services are available in-home and also on wireless apps virtually anywhere in the U.S. T-Mobile also is introducing TVision Hub, a $50 Android TV-based adapter (with a remote) that plugs into the back of an HDTV to provide access to the TVision OTT services and 8,000-plus apps including Netflix and YouTube. "People sure love TV -- but they sure don't love their TV provider," T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said in livestream announcing the TVision lineup. He said incumbent cable and satellite TV providers are holding customers "hostage," because they bundle in "live news and sports with hundreds of other channels you don't want."

Samsung and Stanford University have developed OLED technology that supports resolutions up to 10,000 pixels per inch -- "well above what you see in virtually any existing display, let alone what you'd find in a modern VR headset like the Oculus Quest 2," reports Engadget. From the report: The newOLED tech uses films to emit white light between reflective layers, one silver and another made of reflective metal with nano-sized corrugations. This "optical metasurface" changes the reflective properties and allows specific colors to resonate through pixels. The design allows for much higher pixel densities than you see in the RGB OLEDs on phones, but doesn't hurt brightness to the degree you see with white OLEDs in some TVs. This would be ideal for VR and AR, creating a virtually 'flawless' image where you can't see the screen door effect or even individual pixels. This might take years to arrive when it would require much more computing power, but OLED tech would no longer be an obstacle.

M.G. Siegler, former reporter at TechCrunch and now a VC at Google Ventures, writes: [...] It seems inevitable at this point that there's going to need to be a new path forward. And that path may very well be one that looks similar to a path forged at the beginning of the business. That is, studios owning theaters. People will remember that this type of vertical integration is what led to the Paramount Decree in the 1940s. The studios used to control not only the production of movies, but the exhibition of them and were forced to divest from the latter in the name of competition. As the above 400ish words should make clear: the world is very different now. And as a good bit of timing luck would have it, the consent decrees are being unwound. This doesn't mean studios will be able to partake in any kind of anti-competitive behavior, but it should mean they can own theaters again. Because, again, the world is a very different place than it was in the 1940s.

One could imagine Disney or the like stepping in to save AMC. Perhaps with the notion that they would still agree to show other studios' films as well. But perhaps they would go above and beyond to showcase their own. Or maybe Disney+ subscribers would get a deal. Etc. And then maybe ViacomCBS (Paramount) buys Regal. Comcast (Universal) buys Cinemark. Sony buys Cineplex. Etc. Or maybe Amazon buys one of them. Netflix has already bought/saved a couple of theaters, perhaps that continues. Again, in that case, it's less about the theatrical business model and more about marketing. And you know who loves marketing just as much as anyone else? Apple. A decade ago, it would have seemed comical to have Apple potentially owning movie theaters. Now with all the money they're pouring into Apple TV+ and wooing the best Hollywood talent, it may seem downright logical. Imagine a movie theater that isn't a public restroom, but instead is a cinematic palace. You know, like they were in the old days. Certainly, those still exist in places. But the AMCs of the world spent the last 20 years wiping them out and screening films in their hollowed out carcasses. It sounds crazy to hope for a world where some of the biggest companies on the planet -- the Amazons, the Apples, the Disneys -- step in to save movie theaters, but such is the state of the world.

Apple, Netflix and other streaming services explored the possibility of acquiring "No Time to Die," the upcoming James Bond movie that was originally slated to debut last April. From a report: The film's release has been postponed multiple times, with the Daniel Craig vehicle moving back to November before being pushed into 2021 as the number of coronavirus cases kept growing. MGM, the studio behind the film, reportedly lost between $30 million to $50 million due to the delays, insiders said. Bloomberg first reported the discussions, which have been the topic du jour in Hollywood this week. Other studios, such as Paramount and Sony, have raked in tens of millions by selling movies like "Greyhound," "Coming 2 America" and "Without Remorse" to streaming services while the exhibition sector continues to struggle during the pandemic.

However, multiple insiders at rival studios and companies said that a possible Bond sale was explored overtly, and believe that MGM was at least open to the possibility of unloading their crown jewel for a princely sum. The studio was said to be looking for a deal of roughly $600 million -- a price tag that was deemed too rich for two of the free-spending streaming services. A sale of this magnitude would be led exclusively by Kevin Ulrich, the chairman and CEO of MGM's majority owner Anchorage Capital Group, insiders said.

America's national health agency "halted a public-service coronavirus advertising campaign funded by $250 million in taxpayer money after it offered a special vaccine deal to an unusual set of essential workers: Santa Claus performers."

The Wall Street Journal reports: As part of the plan, a top Trump administration official wanted the Santa performers to promote the benefits of a Covid-19 vaccination and, in exchange, offered them early vaccine access ahead of the general public, according to audio recordings. Those who perform as Mrs. Claus and elves also would have been included....

The decision comes as the Covid-19 spread continues to accelerate in most states, and the vaccines are unlikely to be broadly available to the public before the holiday season. The coronavirus ad effort — titled "Covid 19 Public Health and Reopening America Public Service Announcements and Advertising Campaign" — was intended to "defeat despair, inspire hope and achieve national recovery," according to a work statement reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. It was to include television, radio, online and podcast announcements, starting immediately. The public-relations blitz began to fizzle after some celebrities, including actor Dennis Quaid, shied away from participating, a former White House official said, amid concerns that the campaign would be viewed as political rather than aiding public health....

[Former pharmaceutical lobbyist Alex Azar, now serving as America's Secretary of Health], has "ordered a strategic review of this public health education campaign that will be led by top public health and communications experts to determine whether the campaign serves important public health purposes," Health and Human Services officials said in a statement.
Santa's vaccines were the brainchild of Michael Caputo, a political strategist/lobbyist also appointed to America's Health and Human Services as assistant secretary, according to the Journal. But an HHS spokesman now tells them that the Santa "collaboration will not be happening."

They also get a quote from Ric Erwin, chairman of the Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas — who called the news "extremely disappointing." In a 12-minute phone call in late August, Mr. Caputo told Mr. Erwin of the Santa group that vaccines would likely be approved by mid-November and distributed to front-line workers before Thanksgiving.

"If you and your colleagues are not essential workers, I don't know what is," Mr. Caputo said on the call, which was recorded by Mr. Erwin and provided to the Journal. [In audio of the call published by the Journal, Santa responds by saying "Ho ho ho ho, ho ho ho. I love you."]

"I cannot wait to tell the president," Mr. Caputo said at another point about the plan. "He's going to love this." Mr. Erwin said on the call: "Since you would be doing Santa a serious favor, Santa would definitely reciprocate."

Mr. Caputo said: "I'm in, Santa, if you're in...."

Mr. Caputo said he wanted Santas to appear at rollout events in as many as 35 cities. In exchange, he said the Santas would get an early crack at inoculation.

"It's finally happening: Twitch is taking action against copyrighted music — long a norm among streamers — in response to music industry pressure," reports Kotaku.

But the Verge reports "there's some funny stuff going on here." First, Twitch is telling streamers that some of their content has been identified as violating copyright and that instead of letting streamers file counterclaims, it's deleting the content; second, the company is telling streamers it's giving them warnings, as opposed to outright copyright strikes...

Weirdly Twitch decided to bulk delete infringing material instead of allowing streamers to archive their content or submit counterclaims. To me, that suggests that there are tons of infringements, and that Twitch needed to act very quickly and/or face a lawsuit it wouldn't be able to win over its adherence to the safe harbor provision of the DMCA.
The email Twitch sent to their users "encourages them to delete additional content — up to and including using a new tool to unilaterally delete all previous clips," reports Kotaku. One business streamer complains that it's "insane" that Twitch basically informs them "that there is more content in violation despite having no identification system to find out what it is. Their solution to DMCA is for creators to delete their life's work. This is pure, gross negligence."

Or, as esports consultant Rod "Slasher" Breslau puts it, "It is absolutely insane that record labels have put Twitch in a position to force streamers to delete their entire life's work, for some 10+ years of memories, and that Twitch has been incapable of preventing or aiding streamers for this situation. a total failure all around."

Twitch's response? It is crucial that we protect the rights of songwriters, artists and other music industry partners. We continue to develop tools and resources to further educate our creators and empower them with more control over their content while partnering with industry-recognized vendors in the copyright space to help us achieve these goals.

Marketplace reports: Songwriter Tom Lehrer became a star in the 1950s and '60s writing and performing satirical songs that skewered just about everything... Lehrer, 92, announced Tuesday via his website that he's effectively putting everything he ever wrote into the public domain. That means his lyrics and sheet music are available for anyone to use or perform, without having to pay royalties or deal with lawyers... [Most of Lehrer's music "will be added gradually later with further disclaimers," according to Lehrer's web site.]

Lehrer's giving up those royalties. But in exchange, he's trying to give his work a new lease on life, said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. "Lehrer, in this case, is basically saying, 'Hey everybody, come revisit my material, come do with it what you want,'" he said... That could mean we'll be hearing more of Tom Lehrer's work, said Jennifer Jenkins, who runs the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. "There is empirical research showing that when material enters the public domain, it actually gets used more," she said.
Lehrer's lyrics touched on geeky subjects including nuclear weapons, Wernher von Braun, and one song where he set the names of the chemical elements to a tune by Gilbert and Sullivan.

Wikipedia notes he "largely retired" in the 1970s to become a mathematics teacher at the University of California, Santa Cruz (also teaching the history of musical theatre). In the same decade he also wrote ten songs for The Electric Company, an educational TV show about reading broadcast on America's public television, singing two of the songs himself — L-Y and Silent E.

Just days after US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played Among Us to an audience of more than 435,000 viewers, InnerSloth, the developer of the popular multiplayer title, is struggling to contain a spam attack that is affecting most of the game's community. Engadget reports: The hack started to spread through the game's userbase on Thursday evening. It causes players to spam their match's text chat with messages that direct people to the YouTube and Discord channels of a person who goes by the pseudonym "Eris Loris," threatening them if they don't subscribe. For good measure, some of the messages also promote President Donald Trump's 2020 campaign.

InnerSloth said it's "super duper aware of the current hacking issue" and that it had planned to roll out an emergency server-side update to address the spam. Forest Willard, one of three developers who make up the InnerSloth team, said they had begun rolling out the update at some point in the middle of the night, but it doesn't seem to have addressed the issue; new reports of spam-filled matches continue to flood Twitter. The studio is advising people to play private games with friends while it works to solve the problem.

As for the hacker, it appears their primary motive in all of this was to troll people. "I was curious to see what would happen, and personally I found it funny," they told Kotaku. "The anger and hatred is the part that makes it funny. If you care about a game and are willing to go and spam dislike some random dude on the internet because you cant [sic] play it for three minutes, it's stupid."

Jahta writes: The GitHub repository for the popular youtube-dl utility is offline after GitHub received a DMCA takedown notice from the RIAA. The notice claims that "The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use." "Whether you're looking to backup contents of your personal YouTube account or download some of your favorite YouTuber's videos for offline use, many turn to youtube-dl as the most reliable and in-depth tool for downloading videos from YouTube -- along with many, many other sites that have videos like Vimeo, CNN, etc," writes Kyle Bradshaw via 9to5Google. "Beyond simple downloading features, youtube-dl is also able to convert your download into nearly any format, including creating an mp3 of just a video's audio track."

"One of the primary bases for the RIAA's claim is that youtube-dl appears to be developed with the explicit intention of enabling the downloading of copyrighted works, with music videos from the likes of Icona Pop, Justin Timberlake, and Taylor Swift being used to test the tool's functionality, a claim which we were able to independently verify." It's now up to the project's creators to file a counterclaim in the hopes of restoring youtube-dl's status on GitHub.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: As a compositor for venerable visual-effects house Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), [Charmaine Chan] has worked on films like The Last Jedi, assembling various digital elements into a beautiful, seamless image. Her job changed while working on The Mandalorian, one of the first shows to use ILM's upgrade for the green screen: LED panels that use the same technology as video game engines to place a realistic-looking world behind the actors.

The result was a huge improvement, as green screens actually have a lot of drawbacks. Removing the green screen is never as quick as VFX artists would hope, and it also casts green light over the set and the actors. Even green-screen substitutes, like projecting an image onto a screen behind the actor, fail to dynamically respond to camera movements the way they would in the real world. ILM's solution fixes a lot of those problems. It also led to creative breakthroughs in which the old Hollywood order of making a TV show or movie -- wherein VFX came last -- was suddenly reversed. Now, artists like Charmaine work alongside actors, set designers, and other crew members during filming. That collaboration means this technology doesn't just eliminate a screen -- it eliminates a creative barrier. Watch the video [here] to see how it happens.

TV cord-cutting is picking up steam, and AT&T's CEO predicts there's a long way to go before it stops. From a report: On an earnings call Thursday, AT&T Chief Executive Officer John Stankey said "we're probably going to see a little bit of a plateauing" when the number of homes subscribing to pay TV hits 55 million to 60 million. Most of those homes will include sports fans, he said. It's a stark outlook for an industry that's already suffered a long subscriber exodus. There were about 91 million pay-TV subscribers at the end of 2019, including some 8 million who signed up to online-TV bundles like Hulu and YouTube TV. About 3.5 million people cut the cord in the first half of the year, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. While AT&T, Comcast, Charter and other TV providers are focusing their businesses on delivering internet service, owners of cable channels are especially vulnerable. That's because more cord-cutting means lower subscriber fees, a key revenue stream. Stankey added that AT&T is focusing on growing its new online streaming service, HBO Max, to prepare for the future. AT&T said Thursday that it shed another 590,000 TV subscribers last quarter. With customer losses mounting, AT&T has been looking to sell the majority of its satellite-TV business, DirecTV.

Quibi is considering shutting itself down, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter, a move that points to a possible crash landing for a once-highflying entertainment startup that raised $1.75 billion in capital. From the report: The streaming service has been plagued with problems since it launched in April, facing lower-than-expected viewership, disappointing download numbers and a lawsuit from a well-capitalized foe. The service is aimed at mobile viewers, but the coronavirus pandemic forced would-be subscribers away from the kinds of on-the-go situations Quibi executives envisioned for its users. Quibi attracted blue-chip advertisers including Pepsi, Walmart and Anheuser-Busch, securing about $150 million in ad revenue in the run-up to its launch. Those deals came under strain earlier this year amid lower-than-expected viewership for Quibi's shows, prompting advertisers to defer their payments. In recent weeks, Quibi hired a restructuring firm to evaluate its options, the people said. The firm recommended the options to the board of directors this week, laying out a list of options that included shutting the company down. Update: 10/21 19:44 GMT: The Information is reporting that Quibi has decided to shut down. From the report: The closure is a stunning end to Katzenberg's hopes of creating a new category of video entertainment, short programs of a few minutes in length that could be watched on the go. Katzenberg, a former Disney executive who later helped start DreamWorks, raised nearly $2 billion to finance Quibi. Among the backers were most of the major Hollywood studios, Google, Alibaba and the Madrone Capital Partners. Quibi scheduled calls with investors and employees on Wednesday afternoon to deliver the news.

Last month, Amazon announced a gaming platform called Luna that lets users play games via the cloud. The company is rolling out early access today, starting with a library of 50 games and support for Mac, PC, Fire TV, and iOS devices. The Verge's Chaim Gartenberg shares what it's like so far and how it compares to other streaming services out there like Microsoft xCloud and Google Stadia. Here's an excerpt from his report: The biggest question for Luna -- like any cloud gaming service -- is performance. For cloud gaming to work well, companies like Amazon need to rapidly deliver compressed video frames that respond to your button presses even if internet bandwidth dips and even if your house isn't located right next to an Amazon server farm. Amazon recommends a minimum connection speed of 10 Mbps for Luna, but your home's internal network also matters. We tested Luna on a variety of devices in two different Verge editors' homes across two different coasts with a variety of internet speeds and connection types. So far, 10 Mbps doesn't seem like nearly enough. We found that we needed a connection of at least 25 Mbps in order to have a consistently playable stream, with more bandwidth obviously being better. My colleague Sean Hollister limited his router to 10 Mbps, 15 Mbps, and 20 Mbps, but he'd still get stretches of choppy video.

The best performance (of course) came from a PC with a wired Ethernet connection and controller, with no other family members streaming video in the house. Playing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night on that solid of a connection was virtually indistinguishable from the game running natively. (Switching back and forth, you can tell it takes oh-so-slightly longer to swing a sword, but it felt perfectly playable.) Admittedly, there are few benefits to actually using Luna to stream the game on a capable PC. On the other hand, Metro: Exodus, one of the most graphically intensive games available to stream, looked and played decidedly worse streamed to a web browser than it does on a capable gaming PC. Honestly, it doesn't look great in either Luna or Stadia, but at least Stadia could keep up with a mouse and keyboard. Luna's mouse was extremely laggy.

Using wireless connections introduces a lot more variables into Luna's performance. If you have a steady, strong Wi-Fi connection, Luna works pretty well, with little to no lag, smooth HD video, and responsive enough gameplay to enjoy even fast-paced platformers like Sonic Mania on an iPhone with a paired Bluetooth controller. But when Luna has a bad connection, it's rough. For some reason, Amazon doesn't seem to degrade the quality of video streaming when connection speeds are bad; it just tries to power on through by dropping frames until speeds pick up. I also ran into issues where audio started to lag behind what was otherwise smooth gameplay, presumably due to a sluggish connection. Right now, it seems that Luna's performance is almost entirely dependent on having good internet. Further reading: iOS Web App, Game Library, and App Functionality