London-based broadcasting giant BBC is planning to drop its channel-based television and radio divisions to help reshape the company’s future for “content and audience-led divisions.” The Telegraph reports that the news will be unveiled in a speech by BBC director-general Lord Tony Hall. This may be the largest organizational overhaul in the broadcaster’s 93-year history.
For the time being, the existing television channels and radio stations will stay on the air. But according to Lord Hall, the blurring of boundaries between television, radio, and the Internet will lessen the demand for traditional broadcasts.
New divisions may include BBC Entertain, which will absorb Radio 2 and televised entertainment program, and BBC Inform, in which news services and other radio stations like Five Live will be found. Each new division will have smaller ones underneath it such as BBC Youth (a subdivision of BBC Entertain), which will include the online channel BBC Three and popular music station Radio 1.
Hall’s overhaul involves cleaning house by way of letting some key executives go and merging a large part of the corporation’s management. Lord Hall wants to “flatten the corporation’s labyrinthine management structures” and put more money into what you see on the screen. Channel controller jobs have been rolled into a single position: Charlotte Moore has been appointed the new controller of television channels and iPlayer for the BBC.
The recently departed director of television, Danny Cohen, will not be replaced. Cohen quit his $465,000-per-year job after disagreements with Hall and Alan Yentob, the former creative director. He quit the BBC after being asked whether he tried to influence the broadcaster’s coverage of the collapse of the Kids Company charity. Additionally, senior executive controller Kim Shillinglaw left her job at BBC Two last month after Hall’s decision to appoint Moore as the sole executive controller of channels, etc.
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?