In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing. From a report: On Dec. 9, Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge took aim at the "content companies" entering the direct-to-consumer streaming business. The cable executive told a roomful of investment bankers in Manhattan that these new streamers are "creating havoc in the ecosystem." Rutledge wasn't talking about the proliferation of content or the fight to secure exclusive deals with talent. He was targeting the lax security and rampant password sharing that's prevalent across the streaming landscape. "Half the people in the country live in houses with two or less people in them, and yet these services have five streams," Rutledge added. "There are more streams available than there are homes to use them." Password sharing has serious economic consequences. In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing, and that will rise to $12.5 billion in 2024, according to data released by research firm Parks Associates.

For now, many streamers -- including Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Amazon Prime -- seem content to allow the practice to continue, even while they crack down on illicit password sales. But as services mature, priorities will likely change. "When the growth starts to flatten and you start to look at the balance sheet, you are going to be looking for revenue," says Jean-Marc Racine, chief product officer of video delivery and security firm Synamedia. The company (which counts Disney, Comcast and AT&T among its clients) conducted a study of two anonymous video providers and said Jan. 6 that it found they were losing more than $70 million annually from password sharing.

New submitter wolff000 writes: A group of researchers at the University of Minnesota have shown that cuttlefish see in 3D. They did this by making 3D glasses and then showing the cuttlefish movies of prey. "While cuttlefish wearing glasses is an unexpected sight, a University of Minnesota-led research team built an underwater theater and equipped the cephalopods with specialized 3D glasses to investigate how cuttlefish determine the best distance to strike moving prey," a report says. "The initial act of getting cuttlefish to willingly wear the glasses without trying to take them off and actually watch the screen was tough enough," reports Popular Science. "This process required gluing velcro to the top of its mucus-covered body, placing the glasses on their heads, and keeping the creatures happy and distracted enough to not mess with them (or ink all over the experiment). But when the animals finally focused on the screen, creating an illusion of depth that can only be seen when using binocular vision, they accurately 'hunted' the shrimp on screen."

"This illusion of depth is created by using two different colored images that are seen through the two different lenses, which the brain then calculates the distance between," the report adds. "Even though cuttlefish are colorblind, the colored filters in the glasses send the accurate color from the monitor to the right eye. They only see the image in each eye as a variety of greyscale intensities."

The study has been published in the journal Scientific Advances.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Jeffrey Katzenberg insists that his new video-streaming service Quibi isn't competing against Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, or any of the other streaming services that have launched or are launching soon. Katzenberg and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman, who is best known as the CEO of HP and eBay, are publicly announcing Quibi at CES -- but not quite unveiling it -- after having raised $1 billion on the promise of a roster of Hollywood stars and supposedly revolutionary video-streaming technology that delivers portrait and landscape video at the same time. Everything on Quibi is designed for viewing on a phone, on the go, in 10 minutes or less. These chunks of video are called "quick bites" -- hence, "Quibi."

When Quibi arrives on April 6th of this year, it'll cost $5 a month for an ad-supported version or $8 a month for an ad-free experience. Katzenberg and Whitman formulated this idea nearly two years ago and have been relentlessly signing up the biggest names in Hollywood to be a part of it. And while there have been bumps along the road, including a raft of executive departures, everyone working with Quibi at CES talks about it as though it has already created the future of video -- like it already has millions of users. Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, who is executive producing a show called #Freerayshawn, says Quibi, before it has even launched, has created a "new language of cinema." It's like that.

Warner Bros. is has made a pact with Cinelytic to use its AI-driven project management system that was launched last year. From The Hollywood Reporter: Under the new deal, Warners will leverage the system's comprehensive data and predictive analytics to guide decision-making at the greenlight stage. The integrated online platform can assess the value of a star in any territory and how much a film is expected to make in theaters and on other ancillary streams. Founded four years ago by Tobias Queisser, Cinelytic has been building and beta testing the platform for three years. In 2018, the company raised $2.25 million from T&B Media Global and signed deals with Ingenious Media (Wind River) and Productivity Media (The Little Hours). STX, which endured a number of flops in 2019, including Playmobil and Uglydolls, became a Cinelytic client in September.

While the platform won't necessarily predict what will be the next $1 billion surprise, like Warners' hit Joker, it will reduce the amount of time executives spend on low-value, repetitive tasks and instead give them better dollar-figure parameters for packaging, marketing and distribution decisions, including release dates. The platform is particularly helpful in the festival setting, where studios get caught in bidding wars and plunk down massive sums after only hours of assessment. "The system can calculate in seconds what used to take days to assess by a human when it comes to general film package evaluation or a star's worth," says Queisser. "Artificial intelligence sounds scary. But right now, an AI cannot make any creative decisions. What it is good at is crunching numbers and breaking down huge data sets and showing patterns that would not be visible to humans. But for creative decision-making, you still need experience and gut instinct."

Karl Bode, writing for TechDirt: Disney has done amazing work driving new users to its Disney+ streaming service with low(ish) price point and exclusive programs like The Mandalorian. But users this week began noticing that movies that were on the service just last month are already falling out of rotation, without users being notified that they were disappearing: "...as 2020 began, some Disney Plus users noticed that a few films had gone missing from the streaming library. Dr. Dolittle, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Home Alone and Home Alone 2, and The Sandlot are no longer streamable on Disney Plus. All these titles disappeared without warning, and so far, Disney has not commented on the titles. Many fans are surprised by films dropping off the service, particularly since Disney hasn't issued press releases about the changes. Where companies like HBO and Netflix put out monthly bulletins of everything coming to and leaving their streaming services each month, so viewers can plan their last-minute binges, Disney has only emphasized new arrivals, not departures."

"Iranian officials are likely considering a cyber-attack against the U.S. in the wake of an airstrike that killed one of its top military officials," reports Bloomberg: In a tweet after the airstrike on Thursday, Christopher Krebs, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, repeated a warning from the summer about Iranian malicious cyber-attacks, and urged the public to brush up on Iranian tactics and to pay attention to critical systems, particularly industrial control infrastructure... John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at the cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc., said Iran has largely resisted carrying out attacks in the U.S. so far. But "given the gravity of this event, we are concerned any restraint they may have demonstrated could be replaced by a resolve to strike closer to home."

Iranian cyber-attacks have included U.S. universities and companies, operators of industrial control systems and banks. Iranian hackers tried to infiltrate the Trump campaign, and they have launched attacks against current and former U.S. government officials and journalists. The U.S., meanwhile, has employed cyberweapons to attack Iran's nuclear capabilities and computer systems used to plot attacks against oil tankers, according to the New York Times....

James Lewis, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, said Iranian retaliation may include the use of force, but the government is also likely asking hackers for a list of options. "Cyber-attacks may be tempting if they can find the right American target," Lewis said. "The Iranians are pretty capable and our defenses are uneven, so they could successfully attack poorly defensed targets in the U.S. There are thousands, but they would want something dramatic."
Mother Jones shares another perspective: There's little reason to think that Iran could pull off a truly spectacular attack, such as disabling major electric grids or other big utilities, said Robert M. Lee, an expert in industrial control systems security and the CEO of Dragos. "People should not be worried about large scale attacks and impacts that they can largely think about in movies and books like an electric grid going down." Instead, Iran might choose targets that are less prominent and less secure.

"The average citizen should not be concerned," he said, "but security teams at [U.S.] companies should be on a heightened sense of awareness."

Apple has signed HBO's former chief executive Richard Plepler for a five-year exclusive deal (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) to produce feature films, documentaries and original series for Apple TV+. The New York Times reports: The gregarious executive, a quintessential New York power player who spent 27 years at HBO and left eight months after AT&T became its owner, is rebooting himself as a producer. And he will do it with Apple. In a recently signed five-year deal, Mr. Plepler's new company, Eden Productions, will make television series, documentaries and feature films exclusively for Apple TV Plus, the streaming platform that started in November. The arrangement gives Mr. Plepler a significant role in an expanding streaming universe soon to include HBO Max, a supersize platform that has been a focus of his former corporate home since he departed in February after having lost some of his autonomy.

"It was instantaneously clear to me that I had a wonderful and very privileged run at HBO and I wasn't going to be able to duplicate that again," Mr. Plepler said in his first interview since leaving the network. "And I didn't want to try to duplicate that again. It felt very clear to me that I just wanted to do my own thing." Mr. Plepler, 61, was a key figure in helping make HBO into an original-programming powerhouse. In the years he was in charge, the network won more than 160 Emmys, including for series like "Game of Thrones," "Big Little Lies" and "Veep." Apple is hopeful he still has the magic touch, this time as a producer. The company has not yet disclosed the number of Apple TV Plus subscribers or how many people have watched its series. [...] A New Yorker through and through, Mr. Plepler intends to provide series and movies for the Cupertino, Calif., company from the second floor of a townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side, which he has been using as his office since August.

You don't need special glasses to see what it looks like when smart people run out of ideas. From a column: The breakout hit of the Consumer Electronics Show in 2010 was a television set. Hard to believe now, maybe, but it's true; for one shining moment, the Toshiba Cell TV was the most exciting new thing in tech. Its name invoked the overkill processors inside. It was one of the first sets to promise "Net TV Channels" that would let you stream directly from Netflix or Pandora. And it could show pictures in three dimensions. [...] Five years later, 3D TV was dead. You probably haven't thought about it since then, if you even did before. But there's maybe no better totem for the last decade of consumer technology. It's what happens when smart people run out of ideas, the last gasp before aspiration gives way to commoditization. It was the dawn of all-internet everything, and all the privacy violations inherent in that. And it steadfastly ignored how human beings actually use technology, because doing so meant companies could charge more for it.

What I remember most from those press conferences in 2010 was the assuredness that millions of people somehow actively wanted to have to put glasses on their faces in order to watch television. Even then, it made no sense. TV viewing has always been a large passive experience, something to do while you're doing other things. And besides that, only certain types of shows -- movies, maybe some sports -- actually benefited from 3D in the first place. Or would, if the television sets were any good; most of the early ones stuttered and flickered even when you sat dead center in front of them. Stray a few feet to either side, and the viewing angle shot the experience altogether. It gets worse. Different manufacturers backed different 3D TV formats and technologies, meaning one set of glasses wouldn't necessarily work on a competitor's set. The simple act of watching in 3D caused eye strain in a significant chunk of the population. And the list of available things to watch never hit critical mass.

"After opening 20 percent behind Star Wars: The Last Jedi last weekend, Skywalker has almost caught up with its predecessor as it heads for the $1 billion mark in a fitting end to Disney's unprecedented domination at the 2019 box office," writes the Hollywood Reporter.

But Forbes senior contributor Paul Tassi notes that critics seem to hate it -- while it's been embraced by Star Wars fans: Rise of Skywalker now has some critics calling JJ Abrams' finale effort one of the worst in the series, oftentimes even more so than the dreaded prequels. In contrast, a good chunk of fans seem to enjoy the finale and think it's a fitting end to the series, and "fixes" much of what went wrong from with The Last Jedi... You can actually see this play out in the numbers. I went through and measured the critic score versus the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes for every Star Wars film... the biggest gap in favor of fan approval, by a huge margin, is Rise of Skywalker, with fans rating it a full 31% better than the critical average...

[W]hat's going on here, really? To me, the impression I'm getting is that critics have overreacted to Rise of Skywalker's flaws just like fans overreacted to the problems with The Last Jedi. Neither of these films are even close to the worst Star Wars film in the grand list. Critics are insane to say that Rise of Skywalker is worse than movies like Attack of the Clones or Phantom Menace, so much so that it almost seems spiteful to try and make that case. And the same goes for The Last Jedi haters who would rate it as the worst Star Wars move in history by a 13% margin under the worst prequel, Attack of the Clones. Just... absolutely no way.

To sum up what happened, fans were mad that The Last Jedi took traditional Star Wars arcs and shattered them, ignoring questions like the mystery of Snoke and Rey's origins, and that the film turned Luke from shining hero to grumpy sacrificial lamb. And that's exactly what critics liked about the film, that it broke away from tropes and tried something new. That's why those same critics are so mad now, because JJ Abrams did everything possible to undo so much of what Johnson did in The Last Jedi, providing specific answers to those questions that Johnson said weren't important. Abrams sidelines lambasted characters like Rose, he mocks Last Jedi moments like the Holdo maneuver or Luke throwing away his lightsaber. It's such a complete rewrite of The Last Jedi it actually feels vengeful.

But fans like it A) because they got those Last Jedi "fixes" they were looking for and B) it was specifically...made for fans. The film is rife with fan service, which is often viewed as a negative by critics, but you know who likes fan service? Fans.
He also shares some "lessons learned" for Disney: that one person should be in charge of an entire film series, and "that maybe we don't always need a trilogy, and stories should be as long as they need to be."

"Technically JJ Abrams' Force Awakens and Rise of Skywalker could have just been a two-film set, given how much of The Last Jedi was flat-out erased."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Clint Eastwood's new movie Richard Jewell recounts the incredible tale of the security guard. Jewell was later [erroneously] considered a suspect after being hailed by the media for saving many from injury or death by discovering a backpack containing three pipe bombs in Atlanta's Centennial Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics and helping to evacuate the area before the bomb exploded. Despite never being charged, he was subjected to an intense "trial by media" before receiving an apology from Attorney General Janet Reno and ultimately being completely exonerated.

The movie prompted Henry Schuster, an investigative producer for CNN at the time of the bombing, to offer an overdue apology in the Washington Post for his and the press's role in turning Jewell from a hero to a villain by serving as "the FBI's megaphone...."

Schuster warns, "Think how much worse it would have been for Jewell in 2019."
The article mostly shares the thought processes of that investigative producer. (He remembers that in 2005, "I sat at the computer and started my letter of apology, got frustrated and hit save. A year after that, Jewell died at 44, after months of failing health; my letter remained unfinished and unsent.")

But the CNN producer also writes that in the 23 years since the incident, social media has "made the rush to judgment instantaneous -- as quick as machine trading on Wall Street, but without any circuit-breakers." Would that have changed the way things played out if the incident happened in 2019? It's an interesting thought exercise -- so share your own thoughts in the comments.

Would social media have made life worse for Richard Jewell?

dryriver writes: The 2010s were not necessarily the greatest decade to live through. AAA computer games were not only DRM'd and internet tethered to death but became increasingly formulaic and pay-to-win driven, and poor quality console ports pissed off PC gamers. Forced software subscriptions for major software products you could previously buy became a thing. Personal privacy went out the window in ways too numerous to list, with lawmakers failing on many levels to regulate the tech, data-mining and internet advertising companies in any meaningful way. Severe security vulnerabilities were found in hundreds of different tech products, from Intel CPUs to baby monitors and internet-connected doorbells. Thousands of tech products shipped with microphones, cameras, and internet connectivity integration that couldn't be switched off with an actual hardware switch. Many electronics products became harder or impossible to repair yourself. Printed manuals coming with tech products became almost non-existent. Hackers, scammers, ransomwarers and identity thieves caused more mayhem than ever before. Troll farms, click farms and fake news factories damaged the integrity of the internet as an information source. Tech companies and media companies became afraid of pissing off the Chinese government.

Windows turned into a big piece of spyware. Intel couldn't be bothered to innovate until AMD Ryzen came along. Nvidia somehow took a full decade to make really basic realtime raytracing happen, even though smaller GPU maker Imagination had done it years earlier with a fraction of the budget, and in a mobile GPU to boot. Top-of-the-line smartphones became seriously expensive. Censorship and shadow banning on the once-more-open internet became a thing. Easily-triggered people trying to muzzle other people on social media became a thing. The quality of popular music and music videos went steadily downhill. Star Wars went to shit after Disney bought it, as did the Star Trek films. And mainstream cinema turned into an endless VFX-heavy comic book movies, remakes/reboots and horror movies fest. In many ways, television was the biggest winner of the 2010s, with many new TV shows with film-like production values being made. The second winner may be computer hardware that delivered more storage/memory/performance per dollar than ever before.

To the question: What, dear Slashdotters, will the 2020s bring us? Will things get better in tech and other things relevant to nerds, or will they get worse?

Over the past decade, Netflix and its rivals have come to rely heavily on the power of algorithms, those top-secret computer programs designed to connect audiences with the programming they're most likely to enjoy based on what they've previously watched. But as Peak TV gives way to the era of Too Much TV and an even more ridiculous amount of content spreads across a rapidly multiplying number of services, platforms are supplementing that sophisticated software with a more low-tech method of helping subscribers find their next favorite show: human beings. From a report: While computer-generated suggestions aren't going away, companies are increasingly looking for other means to help viewers discover shows and movies they might otherwise have missed in a world where something significant premieres almost every day. The industry calls this "human curation," which is basically a fancy phrase for describing nonautomated ways of hyping specific content. AT&T-owned WarnerMedia's upcoming HBO Max service, for example, plans to expand its sister cable network's "Recommended by Humans" promotional campaign by having the stars and producers of its shows, as well as other celebrities, make short videos to highlight particular projects. Those videos will be embedded directly on the service in the hopes that, say, a testimonial from Zac Efron might prompt a young millennial to watch The Exorcist for the first time.

Meanwhile, Netflix, the platform known for its "Because You Watched ..." algorithmic suggestions, is currently beta testing something called "Collections," which are thematic playlists made by company staffers instead of its computers. Netflix isn't saying yet whether it plans to expand the test beyond a select pool of Apple iOS users or make it a permanent feature. Platforms are turning to human curation because of what they see as the limits of reactive recommendation algorithms: They can predict what you might like based on what you've watched in the past, but they can't forecast how your tastes might change or how you're feeling physically and mentally.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Jonathan Kay, co-author of the new book Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life, has largely given up on movies and TV, and has instead made tabletop gaming his primary mode of recreation. "It has a social function in my life, and an intellectual function," Kay says in Episode 392 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I've now written a book about it, so I guess it has a professional, editorial function. It's a huge part of my life." Kay wrote the book together with Joan Moriarty, who works full-time at the Snakes & Lattes board game cafe in Toronto. The concept of a board game cafe may be unfamiliar to many, but Kay believes that Snakes & Lattes is an important institution.

"I'm not sure if it's still the biggest board game cafe in North America, but I think it might be the oldest single-purpose urban board game cafe," he says. "And the Snakes & Lattes business model became a model for people creating board game cafes in other cities." The rise of such cafes is a testament to the growing popularity of board games. Sales quadrupled between 2013 and 2016, and the annual Gen Con convention now attracts over 70,000 attendees, Kay among them. He enjoys the laid back atmosphere among the mostly quiet, bookish gamers. "Introverts are actually usually very careful about their social interactions, because they know that if there's conflict that emerges, they won't know how to manage it," he says. "So as a result there's a heightened sense of politeness and consideration at these places."

After 42 years the final installment in the 9-movie Star Wars franchise arrived this weekend during a "moment of transition for the movie business," reports Variety: Its $176 million debut, though massive, ranks as the lowest opening of the most recent three films in the saga, falling far below 2015's "The Force Awakens" ($248 million) and 2017's "The Last Jedi" ($220 million). Enthusiasm for the series is beginning to flag (2019's spin-off "Solo: A Star Wars Story" did the impossible, becoming the first Star Wars movie to lose money). Reviews were lackluster and it's unclear what Star Wars' future will be on the big screen... Disney, the company that bought the rights to the space opera with its $4 billion purchase of Lucasfilm, once envisioned something different for "Star Wars." It believed that the mythology of virtuous Jedi warriors and evil Sith lords was so rich it could spawn a movie a year, making it analogous to Marvel, another in-house purveyor of global blockbusters. Faced with diminishing box office returns, it has been forced to acknowledge that it may have done too much, too fast. Even its ambitious Disneyland theme park, Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, has been a disappointment, with attendance far lower than expected.

The one, recent bright spot for Star Wars lovers has been "The Mandalorian," a Disney Plus series that follows a planet-hopping bounty hunter and a co-star in Baby Yoda that boasts a face cute enough to launch a thousand memes. Buoyed by that success, Lucasfilm is moving along with other Disney Plus shows set in a galaxy far, far away, including one featuring Ewan McGregor reprising his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi. This flurry of activity indicates that Star Wars' future may not lie in cinemas. It may be in streaming.

If that's the case, "Star Wars" is pivoting along with the rest of the movie business.
The Los Angeles Times seems to agree, noting that this year 10 movies accounted for 38% of the total box office "that's dominated by intellectual-property-powered blockbusters, at the expense of almost everything else." As the studios become increasingly risk-averse, much of the market for midbudget comedies, dramas and rom-coms has migrated to streaming services such as Netflix. Studios are loath to risk the embarrassment of a flop, and streamers are more than happy to use such content to draw subscribers...

"The studios are more corporate-driven and guided by marketing and bean counters than ever before, and the ability to invest in originality is all moving toward streaming," said Rick Cohen, who runs the five-screen Transit Drive-In in Lockport, N.Y. "But they still have $200 million to throw at 'Dark Phoenix.' You could have made 10 original movies for that budget."

Though its poster promises "the most joyful event of the holiday season," the new movie Cats scored just 18% with professional critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and the $100 million adaptaton of the Broadway musical has so far earned just $6.5 million at the box office.

Its director apparently doesn't want that to be the last word. "You've seen movies receive visual touch-ups in special edition re-releases, but Universal is trying something new: it's updating a movie while it's still in the middle of its initial theatrical run," writes Engadget, on a move that the Hollywood Reporter calls "unheard of for a finished title already in release, according to cinema operators and Hollywood studio executives." Insiders talking to the publication said that director Tom Hooper wanted to alter some of the effects after rushing to get the movie ready in time for its December 16th premiere screening. Reportedly, the updated movie is available for theaters to download today (December 22nd) from a satellite server, while those theaters that can't download it will get a hard drive by December 24th...

The tweaks aren't likely to change the general outlook on the movie, which has been...less than favorable. Many viewers are still likely to experience the uncanny valley as they watch anthropomorphized felines dance on screen.
The Daily Beast even argues the film marks the day that Hollywood musicals became "about the perversion of the human body through technology": Nothing can prepare you for the faces. You can read a hundred pieces about Cats, director Tom Hooper's adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's beloved-ish musical about cats having a singing competition, and nothing, nothing you read about it could prepare you for the pure, unnerving spectacle of seeing a computer trying to affix human faces to a fucked up, motion-capture cat with human body parts, a tail, and a big human nose, sitting right there in the middle of a cat's head, sitting on human shoulders, doing dancing routines in a world scaled to cat size...

[T]he second anyone starts moving their body, the effect goes haywire. The face always seems a step or two behind the moving body -- a human visage temporarily displaced from the twisted cat demon. Especially in a movie theater, watching on a high-definition projector, your attention affixed to the horror show going on in front of you, you can't help but notice... It's honestly a miracle a movie this twisted got made, in a world where every movie that costs more than $50 million is engineered for maximum inoffensiveness...

[T]he attempt to bridge the gap between cat and man, to make human beings into dancing cats using computers, just transforms the whole thing into a freakish nightmare...

dryriver writes: 27 years ago, the BBC's "Tomorrow's World" show broadcasted this little gem of a program [currently available on YouTube]. After showing old Red-Cyan Anaglyph movies, Victorian Stereoscopes, lenticular-printed holograms and a monochrome laser hologram projected into a sheet of glass, the presenter shows off a stereoscopic 3D CRT computer display with active shutter glasses. The program then takes us to a laboratory at Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, where a supercomputer is feeding 3D wireframe graphics into the world's first glasses-free holographic 3D display prototype using a Tellurium Dioxide crystal. One of the researchers at the lab predicts that "years from now, advances in LCD technology may make this kind of display cheap enough to use in the home."

A presenter then shows a bulky plastic VR headset larger than an Oculus Rift and explains how VR will let you experience completely computer-generated worlds as if you are there. The presenter notes that 1992 VR headsets may be "too bulky" for the average user, and shows a mockup of much smaller VR glasses about the size of Magic Leap's AR glasses, noting that "these are already in development." What is astonishing about watching this 27-year-old TV broadcast is a) the realization that much of today's stereo stereo 3D tech was already around in some form or another in the early 1990s; b) VR headsets took an incredibly long time to reach the consumer and are still too bulky; and that c) almost three decades later, MIT's prototype holographic glasses-free 3D display technology never made its way into consumer hands or households.

Meet Red Carpet Entertainment, the opposite of Netflix in the fast-changing home-video world. From a report: Unlike the famous streaming service, which serves up thousands of films and TV shows to millions of subscribers for about $13 a month, this startup by two entertainment-industry veterans is seeking just 3,000 rich Americans who'll put up $15,000 and pay $2,500 per movie to watch the latest theatrical releases in their homes. Since launching in October, Red Carpet has attracted just a sliver of the customers it hopes to sign up in the U.S. in the next two years, founders Fredric Rosen and Dan Fellman say. And they know they aren't the first to market a high-end, first-run film service to the ultra-rich. But the two say their knowledge of the entertainment industry gives them a fighting chance. "Everyone is looking for a new, ancillary business," said Fellman, who spent 37 years at Warner Bros, retiring as president of domestic distribution. "So we thought: How do we start a small, ancillary business, but that's not disruptive?"

66-year-old Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy reveals what they'll do after Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Kennedy says that streaming "is a really important transition... What we've been focused on these last five or six years is finishing that family saga around the Skywalkers. Now is the time to start thinking about how to segue into something new and different."

Kennedy also blames the poor box office of the 2018 movie Solo on the release of too many Star Wars movies too quickly, and remembers getting Disney's okay on a "pause" before future films. "We're literally making this up from whole cloth and bringing in filmmakers to find what these stories might be," Kennedy said. "It can take a while before you find what direction you might want to go. We need the time to do that." The next "Star Wars" film is expected to arrive in 2022, and that's essentially all that's known about it. Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has an idea for a "Star Wars" movie, but it's in the early stages, according to Kennedy. Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed "The Last Jedi," is also developing more "Star Wars" films.

Kennedy said she plans to make key decisions about the direction of the franchise in the coming weeks. But some things she already knows. While the "Skywalker" saga is ending, the company won't abandon the characters created in the most recent trilogy. Additionally, she said, the plan is to move beyond trilogies, which can be restricting. "I think it gives us a more open-ended view of storytelling and doesn't lock us into this three-act structure," she said. "We're not going to have some finite number and fit it into a box. We're really going to let the story dictate that."
The article also notes that George Lucas complained there was "nothing new" in The Force Awakens, according to Bob Iger's recent book The Ride of a Lifetime. And though that film was a commercial and critical success, the Times also writes that "Debates over the franchise persisted." "The Last Jedi," for example, was criticized in some circles for going too far in subverting "Star Wars" tropes. Kennedy says the company heeds feedback from "Star Wars" fans. For example, Lucasfilm decided to revive "The Clone Wars" TV series for Disney+ following a prolonged campaign by viewers. "It does matter what they say and what they care about," Kennedy said. "All of those things play a role in our decision making."

Aside from films, Lucasfilm has ample "Star Wars" material in the works, especially for Disney+. The studio is working on shows starring Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Diego Luna as his rebel spy character from "Rogue One." Additionally, the company is experimenting with new formats. Lucasfilm's ILMxLab, a virtual reality and augmented reality unit founded in 2015, this year released a VR series called "Vader Immortal" that puts users face-to-face with Darth Vader and trains headset users to wield a lightsaber.

An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: Two programmers in Las Vegas recently admitted to running two of the largest illegal television and movie streaming services in the country, according to federal officials... An FBI investigation led officials to Darryl Polo, 36, and Luis Villarino, 40, who have pleaded guilty to copyright infringement charges for operating iStreamItAll, a subscription-based streaming site, and Jetflix, a large illegal TV streaming service, federal officials said Friday.

With roughly 118,000 TV episodes and 11,000 movies, iStreamItAll provided members with more content than Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and Vudu, according to prosecutors. Polo urged members of iStreamItAll via email to cancel licensed services in favor of pirated content, according to his plea agreement. He also admitted to earning $1 million from his piracy operations, officials said. He also admitted to downloading the content from torrent websites. "Specifically, Polo used sophisticated computer programming to scour global pirate sites for new illegal content; to download, process, and store these works; and then make the shows and movies available on servers in Canada," officials said.

Last weekend saw the death of Rene Auberjonois at age 79, writes Variety.

schwit1 quotes their report: Auberjonois was a prolific television actor, appearing as Paul Lewiston in 71 episodes of 'Boston Legal' and as Clayton Runnymede Endicott III in ABC's long-running sitcom 'Benson.' He played Odo in 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,' and carried that role into video games, voicing the same role in 'Harbinger' and 'The Fallen.' He appeared in the movie 'MASH' as Father Mulcahy in the first of several collaborations with Robert Altman. Other film credits include Roy Balgey in 1976's 'King Kong' and Reverend Oliver in 'The Patriot,' as well as parts in 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller,' 'Eyes of Laura Mars' and 'Walker.'
He also played the French chef in Disney's The Little Mermaid -- a role which Rene reenacted live at the end of this video where he discussed his friendship with William Shatner.

And this week ET shared footage of Rene thoughtfully reflecting after filming the last episode of Deep Space Nine.