Everyone will be streaming for the weekend. Amazon today announced the first season of the company’s award-winning original series Transparent will be available for anyone to stream this Saturday for free.
Amazon will stream the series 24 hours on the web and to mobile devices, smart TVs, and computers through the Amazon Instant Video app. The celebration does not stop there, however. Inspired by winning two awards at the 72nd Annual Golden Globe Awards for Transparent, Amazon is also planning to reduce the cost of Prime membership to $72 on Saturday, a savings of more than 25 precent off the regular $99 membership fee. Sign ups for Prime using the one-day discount can be completed at Amazon.com/TransparentPrime.
Transparent’s fanfare has been apparent since the show was first ushered into our lives. On the day it debuted, 80 percent of everyone who watched Transparent binged on at least two episodes according to Amazon, and the show has been the no. 1 ranked series on Prime Instant Video since that day. The Golden Globes only intensified the Transparent love. The series enjoyed a 250 percent increase in viewership following the Globes win, according to Business Insider.
While Amazon hasn’t released viewership numbers for its shows, the sizable increase following the Golden Globes wins is very telling when compared to the Globes’ effect on traditional television. Gina Rodriguez surprised Hollywood with a Golden Globes win this year for Best Actress in a TV Series, Musical or Comedy win for her role as Jane on CW’s Jane The Virgin. 1.4 million viewers watched the first episode after the win, only a 20 percent increase of the show’s 1.2 million average weekly viewership. Then again, traditional TV shows aren’t as easily tracked down as those that arrive in a full season all in one place.
Offering one of the most critically-acclaimed shows of 2014 for free, and lowering the cost of Prime membership at the same time, Amazon is hoping to become every cord cutter’s best friend.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?