While Netflix is still the most formidable force in the streaming world, Amazon has always had its eye on the throne. It shouldn’t come as a shock, then, that the latter is reportedly looking into obtaining the rights to live sporting events, as a way to bolster Prime subscriptions.
According to Bloomberg, the streamer is kicking the tires on global sports like tennis, golf, auto racing, and the granddaddy of them all — soccer (“football,” of course, for our international audience).
But Amazon’s ambitions may be grander still, as the outlet is even exploring the possibility of acquiring the rights to domestic sports like baseball and basketball. Those are locked up for the next few years at least, but once the current contracts are up: Who knows?
It will be a tough nut to crack, but perhaps a more realistic point of entry could be taking sports leagues that have dedicated networks with their own streaming infrastructure (MLB, NFL, NBA) and offering add-ons to Prime. The streamer has integrated Showtime using this model already, so it’s not a huge stretch to imagine such a scenario. Of course, that would mean that sports-loving Prime subscribers would have to pay for an extra service on top of their standard membership dues.
For his part, Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos has shown little interest in adding live sports to the company’s streaming lineup. He has argued that it doesn’t fit with the on-demand nature of the service, but Amazon seems to disagree.
And Amazon disagrees vehemently enough, in fact, that the firm has had internal discussions about accumulating enough sports licenses to create a separate, sports-centric product.
Well, no one ever accused Amazon of not dreaming big.
We’ll have to wait and see how this works out, but be sure to stay tuned to this space.
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?