The official premiere of Tenet has drawn many people to the movie theaters this week. On pirate sites, there's been plenty of interest too, as thousands of people are being tricked into downloading fake copies. Pirates are not the only ones being fooled though, as Warner Bros. has its eyes set on fake releases too. TorrentFreak reports: All around the world, millions of people have waited in anticipation for the release of Christopher Nolan's sci-fi thriller 'Tenet.' The film was initially scheduled to be released in July but, after several pandemic-related delays, Warner Bros. moved the premiere ahead to the end of August. [...] According to one anti-piracy expert, Tenet's release has all the ingredients for a "perfect storm for piracy." This prediction prompted us to take a look at how Tenet is doing on pirate sites today. This question is not hard to answer, as there is no 'real' pirated copy of the film out there. Instead, sites are overwhelmed with fake Tenet releases.

We didn't have to look far. Most torrent sites and other download portals have plenty of Tenet copies. Or at least, that's what uploaders lead users to believe. This includes The Pirate Bay, which faces a moderation backlog, by the looks of it. Most seasoned pirates will know how to avoid these fake torrents. That said, major titles such as Tenet often attract the attention of many novice users too, who will undoubtedly be disappointed. And not just because they can't see the film. These suspicious releases can lead to all sorts of malware, viruses, and worse. The two we downloaded appeared relatively harmless. They included a 700MB video file that shows a still image, asking people to check the readme file. The readme message itself sends people to a suspicious site that requests credit card details "for verification purposes." Needless to say, we declined that offer.

Lockdown measures enforced due to the Covid-19 pandemic brought about a surge in TV watching and online streaming, according to media watchdog Ofcom. From a report: Its annual study into UK media habits suggested adults -- many stuck indoors -- spent 40% of their waking hours in front of a screen, on average. Time spent on subscription streaming services also doubled during April. At the height of lockdown, adults spent an average of six hours and 25 minutes each day staring at screens. Screen time overall was up almost a third (31%) on last year. People watched streaming services, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+, for one hour 11 minutes per day, and 12 million people joined a service they hadn't used previously. Three million of these viewers had never subscribed to any service before.

Walmart said it's teaming up with Microsoft in a bid for TikTok. From a report: The retail giant confirmed to CNBC that it's interested in buying the tech company. TikTok is nearing an agreement to sell its U.S., Canadian, Australian and New Zealand operations in a deal that's likely to be in the $20 billion to $30 billion range, sources say. It has not yet chosen a buyer, but could announce the deal in coming days, sources say. With Walmart's confirmation, it joins several others bidding on the tech company, including Oracle. Walmart is pursuing the acquisition at a time when it's trying to better compete with Amazon. It plans to launch a membership program, called Walmart+, soon. The subscription-based service is the retailer's answer to Amazon Prime, which includes original TV shows and movies. In a statement, the big-box retailer said TikTok's integration of e-commerce and advertising "is a clear benefit to creators and users in those markets." It did not say how it would use TikTok or whether it would be part of Walmart+.

70% of America's movie theatres have now re-opened for business, reports NPR: "When our patrons come back, they'll see the safe environment we've provided for them," said John Fithian, president and CEO of the National Association of Theater Owners.

Fithian invited two medical experts and the heads of the country's biggest theater chains to launch a public awareness campaign dubbed "CinemaSafe," meant to ease moviegoer's fears. The campaign featured new industry-wide health and safety protocols, including mandatory face masks for moviegoers and employees, social distancing and regular sanitizing in theaters with better air ventilation, reduced theater capacity (most between 30% and 50%), and contact-less, electronic ticket sales.

Fithian says the protocols will be followed by more than 2,600 theater locations, including more than 30,000 screens in the U.S. The National Association of Theater Owners used guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

"It's important to understand that going to the movies is not risk free," said David F. Goldsmith, an epidemiologist at George Washington University who consulted with the National Association of Theater Owners on the protocols. Still, during the announcement, he said he had not seen any medical literature evidence showing movie theaters around the world have been a venue for viral transmission of COVID-19. "Honestly, time will tell," he said.
The New York Times reports that six U.S. states say it's still too dangerous to open their movie theatres — New York, California, New Jersey, North Carolina, Maryland and New Mexico.

But Megan Colligan, the president of Imax Entertainment, countered at a news conference Friday that "Some people go to the gym, some people go to church, some people need to go to the beach and surf, and some people really do need to go to the movies."

Want a movie where a protagonist your age, race, sexuality, gender, and religion becomes an Olympic swimmer? You got it. Want a movie where someone demographically identical to your boss gets squeezed to death and devoured by a Burmese python? Your wish is its command. From a report: Want to leave out the specifics and let fate decide what never-before-imagined movie will be entertaining you this evening? Black Box has you covered. After you make your choices -- and of course pay a nominal fee for the serious computational heavy lifting necessarily involved -- your order is received at Black Box HQ, and an original movie will be on its way shortly.

Black Box converts your specifications into data -- or if you didn't ask for anything specific, a blob of randomly generated numerical noise will do -- and the creation process can begin. That first collection of ones and zeros will become a prompt, and will be fed into a type of A.I. called a transformer, which will spit out the text screenplay for your movie through a process a little like the autocomplete function on your smartphone. That screenplay will then be fed into a variation on today's vector quantized variational autoencoders -- neural nets that generate music, basically -- producing chopped up little bits of sound that, when strung together, form an audio version of the spoken dialogue and sound effects in your custom movie, plus an orchestral score. Finally, in the most challenging part of the process, those 90 minutes of audio, along with the screenplay, get fed into the world's most sophisticated GAN, or generative adversarial network. Working scene by scene, the Black Box GAN would generate a cast of live action characters -- lifelike humans, or at least human-esque avatars -- built from the ground up, along with all of the settings, monsters, car chases, dogs, cats, and little surprises that make it feel like a real movie.

In honor of its 100th anniversary, AMC is reopening theaters across the nation today after closing down because of the coronavirus pandemic. "[F]or one day only, tickets will be priced at their 1920 cost of 15 cents apiece," reports CNET. From the report: More than 100 AMC locations are scheduled to reopen Aug. 20, including in areas across Georgia, Texas, Connecticut, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, Indiana, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, Minnesota, Ohio, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Kansas and Oklahoma, as well as Washington, DC. Some of the movies being shown on the 15-cent day include throwbacks like Inception, Black Panther, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Grease and Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Once the 100th anniversary pricing concludes, those movies will be priced at $5 per ticket.

The reopening is the first step in AMC's phased plan for the US. It aims to have 600 theaters, or two-thirds of its operations, open by Sept. 3 in time for the launch of Christopher Nolan's Tenet, which has been repeatedly delayed due to COVID-19. The rest of its theaters will reopen when state and local officials give the go-ahead.

Slashdot reader shirappu writes: A study published on June 25th in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia looked at creating an automated program to analyze the movements in video frames and create sound effects to match the scene. In movies and television, this work is called Foley and is considered an important part of crafting the experience, but is also time consuming and sometimes costly.

The AI Foley system created in the study works by extracting image features from video frames to determine appropriate SFX. It then analyzes the action taking place in the video, and attempts to synthesize SFX to match what is happening in the video. In a survey where students were shown automated sound effects, 73% though the automated effects were more genuine than the original sound effects. It's worth noting that the automated system performed best when timing was less important (e.g. general weather) versus when timing was key (e.g. typing, thunderstorms).

In recent years Amazon has become a major force in television and film, so we have seen that the company can succeed in generating popular mass entertainment. Why is the company struggling so badly with games? Discussing the question with people involved with Amazon Games, some common themes emerge. From a report: "We're bringing a lot of Amazon practices to making games," Mike Frazzini, Amazon's vice president for game services and studios, told me in March. That isn't working because video games are fundamentally a creative endeavor, not the sort of purely quantifiable mass consumer product or service that Amazon knows how to make. No less than great novels or films, great top-end games cannot be created through user data requirements, A/B testing, behavioral analytics, user surveys and iterative critiques by departments ranging from security to finance. Yet games must jump through all those hoops at Amazon, according to people in a position to know. That product development sensibility can work for chintzy mobile games that are made to extract as much money as possible from players but does not work in creating multibillion-dollar long-term franchises that generate not just revenue but emotional loyalty. Instead, thinking of games like tech products just leads to watered-down games without a strong point of view or creative direction.

For example, Amazon executives told me that while designing Crucible they solicited private input from hundreds of streamers and esports figures -- people who play video games for a living and definitely know fun when they feel it. So how could the company ingest that input and still churn out a mediocre product? Turns out, the questions Amazon asked the game pros were generally incremental -- "Which weapon do you prefer?" "What classes and enemies do you enjoy?" -- rather than stepping back and asking, "Does this overall concept work?" That's why Crucible can feel like it was put together with bits and pieces of other successful games, rather than forging a strong vision of its own. The entire structure of most successful game publishers is built around protecting and insulating the creative people -- writers, artists and designers -- from the business. Take-Two does not tell Rockstar what the story of the next Grand Theft Auto should be. Mike Morhaime spent decades shielding the creative engine at Blizzard Entertainment from various corporate owners as Blizzard created StarCraft, Warcraft and Diablo -- iconic franchises all.

Many precincts of the entertainment business are run by financial professionals, but the successful ones -- whether in television, music, film or games -- learn to let the creative people create. "Amazon is run not even by finance guys but by tech guys who instead of putting their creatives outside the bubble and protecting them from the culture, hired them into the bubble and expected them to work within that confine," said one person involved with Amazon's game efforts. "Amazon culture is great for product, horrible for creative endeavors." It is impossible to imagine Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios, issuing her own version of Frazzini's pronouncement: "We're bringing a lot of Amazon practices to making movies." That is because when it comes to film and television, Amazon lets people with deep industry experience run the show and acquire projects being made by outside professionals. Salke was president of NBC Entertainment before joining Amazon two years ago. Her boss, Mike Hopkins, who joined Amazon in February, was previously chief executive of Hulu and chairman of Sony Pictures Television. Frazzini, meanwhile, had no significant game industry experience before joining Amazon.

schwit1 writes: Moviegoers will have to pay only 15 cents for tickets at AMC cinemas on Aug. 20, when the chain starts to reopen amid the coronavirus outbreak. The cheap tickets will be available at more than 100 theaters across the U.S. The deal, a throwback to the price the company charged when it was founded in 1920, is intended to lure customers who may be worried about venturing into a theater because of the risk of contracting COVID-19.

The world's last Blockbuster is offering movie fans the opportunity to spend the night in the store by booking through Airbnb. The Independent reports: The opportunity to book a one-night stay in the last of the nearly defunct video rental stores, which only remains in Bend, Oregon, will be possible thanks to the property's owner, Sandi Harding. "As the last standing location in the world, our BLOCKBUSTER store is an ode to movie magic, simpler times and the sense of community that could once be found in BLOCKBUSTER locations around the world," Harding explains in the Airbnb listing.

Starting on 17 August, residents of Deschutes County will be able to book the store, which has been transformed into a living room complete with TV and pull-out couch, for either 18, 19, or 20 September. According to the press release, guests who successfully book the store, which will be available for just $4, will be treated to "all the movies your heart could desire." "Whether you want to stay up until sunrise or pass out on the couch, we've created the perfect space complete with a pull-out couch, bean bags and pillows for you to cosy up with 'new releases' from the 90s," the Airbnb listing reads. "Crack open a two-liter of Pepsi before locking into a video game, charting your future in a game of MASH, or watching movie after movie." Those who aren't eligible for the opportunity can visit the store's living room set-up as customers starting on 21 September -- or call the store for a personalized movie recommendation.

Microsoft plans to make its Project xCloud streaming service for its Xbox Games Pass subscription service available to the public starting Sept. 15, following nearly a year of public testing. From a report: The company said the service, which allows people to play games over the internet in a similar way we stream Netflix movies today, will be included in its $14.99 per month Xbox Games Pass Ultimate service. That subscription, which launched last year, gives players access to more than 100 games on the Xbox and PC, as well as access to Microsoft's Xbox Live social network. Microsoft plans to offer the accompanying app for its service for tablets and phones powered by Google's Android software, using a Wi-Fi or cellular connection. The company also teased a partnership with Samsung, which will likely be announced at that tech giant's big Unpacked event on Aug. 5. The company declined to say when a version of its app will be made available for Apple iPhones and iPads powered by that company's iOS software. "It's our ambition to scale cloud gaming through Xbox Game Pass available on all devices," a Microsoft spokesman added.

Netflix is letting people choose the speed at which they want to watch something on their phone or tablet with new playback controls. From a report: Netflix will allow anyone on an Android mobile device to stream at either 0.5x or 0.75x speeds for slowed-down viewing and 1.25x or 1.5x speeds for faster watching. Those are slightly fewer options than YouTube, which allows people to slow all the way down to 0.25x speeds, and speed up by twice the normal playback speed. Playback speed options are also available on downloaded titles that people have saved for offline viewing. Subscribers must opt in to use the playback speeds with every single title they want to watch; it won't just remain active when you pick something else to watch. This prevents people from accidentally watching everything at 1.5x speed if they don't want to. The feature is rolling out tomorrow and will be available to everyone globally in the coming weeks.

Netflix announced it was testing the feature in 2019 and was met with backlash from Hollywood's creative community. Actor Aaron Paul and director Brad Bird spoke out against Netflix's decision to introduce the playback controls, and director Judd Apatow tweeted in October that "distributors don't get to change the way the content is presented." Netflix's team is introducing a number of features with the rollout to try to work with the creative community to ensure the quality of the content isn't disrupted, including automatically correcting "the pitch in the audio at faster and slower speeds," according to the company.

AMC Theaters and Universal have reached a new agreement that dramatically shortens the theatrical exclusivity window -- the amount of time that films have to play in theaters before they'e allowed to be sold or rented in other places, like iTunes, Amazon, or AMC's own On Demand service -- down to just 17 days (ensuring that the films will hit at least three weekends in theaters). From a report: The new deal marks a radical shift from the standard theatrical release window, which has typically been between 70 and 90 days in recent years, and could vastly alter the landscape of both theatrical and digital film.

Netflix led the Emmy Awards race with a record-breaking 160 primetime nominations, beating the likes of linear television giant HBO and digital newcomers Disney+ and Apple TV+. Deutsche Welle reports: HBO came in second with 107 Emmy nominations, with its hit series "Watchmen" sweeping up 26 nominations, including a nod for the best limited series category. Earlier this year, Netflix hit all-time highs in viewership with industry observers pointing to lockdown measures that kept people in their homes for longer periods. Other digital streaming services have tried to make inroads during the pandemic, such as Disney+ and Apple TV+, which picked up its first nomination with Jennifer Aniston's best drama actress bid for "The Morning Show." Meanwhile, Amazon Prime, likely one of Netflix's biggest competitors, saw its comedy "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" pick up 20 nominations.

"Despite the unprecedented challenges facing the entertainment industry, it has been an extraordinary year for television," said Television Academy Chairman and chief executive Frank Scherma. "We are honored to be recognizing so many of the talented programs, producers, directors and craftspeople behind the remarkable storytelling that has brought us together while we remain apart." In some senses, next year's TV and cinema awards could be far worse hit than 2020's -- given that most of the series currently vying for gongs were produced long before the pandemic picked up pace.

What are some titles -- movies, TV shows, or any console video games -- that have helped you stay calm in recent months? (No need to limit the listing to recently releases.)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: [T]he story really starts in 2008, when Netflix broke into streaming in a big way, through a backdoor: It purchased the digital streaming rights to movies from Disney and Sony -- that is, movies you've heard of, like Pirates of the Caribbean -- from Starz, the pay TV channel. Starz had ambitions for its own streaming service, but those fizzled, which is why you have probably never heard of Vongo. And that's why Netflix got those movies for a song -- around $30 million a year -- while becoming a pretty good streaming service almost overnight. For context: In 2012, when Netflix wanted to make a new streaming deal for content from Disney, which by then had realized that streaming was a real thing, Netflix paid an estimated $300 million a year.

A contractual loophole let Netflix get Disney's and Sony's stuff without cutting deals with Disney and Sony. But soon enough, media companies were scrambling to sell their stuff directly to Netflix: They saw Netflix as an easy source of nearly free money -- if Reed Hastings and company wanted to pay them for old shows and movies they were already selling other places, then they'd be happy to do it. But that free money wasn't really free: Netflix took the stuff Hollywood considered its leftovers and built a giant business with it -- and ended up competing directly with the established media players, using their own content. Which leads us to today, where the biggest media companies in the world find themselves years behind what used to be a Silicon Valley upstart. The full story on the impact Netflix has had on Hollywood and the people who run it and work in it was told in this week's episode of Land of the Giants: The Netflix Effect.

In what sounds like a Black Mirror episode, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy complied with a hostage-takers demands and posted a six-second video urging the public to watch the 2005 film "Earthlings," a movie about mankind using animals for pets, food and clothing. "Everyone should watch the 2005 film 'Earthlings,'" he said in the video posted to his Facebook page, which has been since deleted. The hostage-taker eventually surrendered to police and the bus passengers were freed unharmed. Deutsche Welle reports: Ukrainian police say the armed man who took 13 people aboard a long-distance bus in the western city of Lutsk hostage on Tuesday morning has been detained after authorities stormed the vehicle. The country's SBU Security Service said no one was injured in the incident. A man with explosives and weapons seized the bus and took 13 people hostage in northwestern Ukraine early Tuesday morning, the SBU said in a Facebook statement. Metro reports: The man called police after taking control of the bus and introduced himself as Maksim Plokhoy, deputy interior minister Anton Gerashchenko said. But the minister added that police have identified the man as Maksim Krivosh, a 44-year-old Ukrainian born in Russia. In a Telegram account reportedly belonging to him, Krivosh apparently admitted taking people on the bus hostage, and said "the state has always been and always is the first terrorist," while demanding that senior Ukrainian officials release statements on their social media pages calling themselves terrorists. He also called for Ukrainian president President Zelensky to urge people to watch the 2005 movie Earthlings. The film chronicles the day-to-day practices of large industries, and how they rely on animals for profit.

The directing duo behind the highest-grossing film of all time are set to break another movie record for Netflix. From a report: This time, brothers and Avengers: Endgame filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo (who also helmed Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, and Avengers: Infinity War for Marvel) are headed to Netflix for the streaming service's biggest-budgeted movie yet -- and it looks to be a spy film that would have 007 raising his stirred-not-shaken glass. According to Deadline, Netflix is putting a massive, $200M+ budget behind an adaptation of The Gray Man starring Ryan Gosling and Captain America himself, Chris Evans. The plan is to make a new franchise out of the spycraft source material from author Mark Greaney -- something that would take Netflix's big-budget investments in a different direction from the prestige-oriented Martin Scorsese film The Irishman. Greaney is also known for taking over Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series after the author's death. With a pair of movie stars going full Spy vs. Spy in a film co-written by Joe alongside his frequent MCU collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the film looks to capitalize on a similar vibe as the Mission: Impossible movies or underappreciated The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Spy/assassin Court Gentry (Ryan Gosling) is being hunted by his old CIA co-worker Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans). Expect plenty of gadgets, double-crosses, and action setpieces.

America's studios, creators and marketers are relying, more than ever, on digital platforms that allow them to gauge what audiences like-- and would like to see more of. From a report: They're not just looking for test screenings, either. They're looking to check in with potential audiences at every stage of production, from before a script is written until the moment their new TV show, film or music video debuts. Ever since George Lucas ushered in the era of endless sequels (and prequels), Hollywood executives have tried to capitalize on the success of the Last Big Thing by churning out more of it. But content budgets are increasing far faster than established franchises can keep up. Netflix is projected to spend more on new and acquired content in 2020 -- $17 billion -- than Apple spent on research and development in 2019. With stakes that high, minimizing risk when creating new content "at scale" means treating it like any other mass-market product. Executives, producers, writers, directors and marketers need to be able to consistently craft programs that are more likely than not to find their target audiences. Critical approval and industry awards -- even box-office blowouts -- while nice, aren't the endgame for most.

The French Parliament unanimously agreed this week to introduce a nationwide age verification system for pornography websites, months after President Emmanuel Macron pledged to protect children against such content. From a report: Macron made the protection of children against adult content online a high-profile issue well before the coronavirus crisis hit. In January, tech companies, internet services providers and the adult movies industry signed a voluntary charter, pledging to roll out tools to help ensure minors don't have access to pornographic content. Within a broader law on domestic violence, the Senate decided in June to introduce an amendment requiring pornography websites to implement an age verification mechanism.

In order to enforce the law, the French audiovisual regulator CSA will be granted new powers to audit and sanction companies that do not comply -- sanctions could go as far as blocking access to the websites in France with a court order. The choice of verification mechanisms will be left up to the platforms. But lawmakers have suggested using credit card verification -- a system first adopted by the U.K., which mulled similar plans to control access to pornography but had to drop them in late 2019 because of technical difficulties and privacy concerns. Italy also approved a similar bill in late June, which raised the same concerns over its feasibility and compliance with the EU laws.