In August, we reported that David Letterman had signed on with Netflix for a six-episode talk show. The show, which we now know is titled My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman, will air once a month, with each episode running for a full 60 minutes. Each of Letterman’s six guests was announced by Netflix in the video above, but if you don’t feel like watching it, the first guest — whose episode will air on Friday, January 12 — is former president Barack Obama, one year removed from office.
According to Netflix, the series will utilize a unique format that combines traditional onstage talk show interviews with segments recorded in the outside world, where Letterman will explore specific topics of interest. For those curious about the full lineup of guests, Netflix US sent out a tweet.
Obama.
Clooney.
Malala.
Fey.
Stern.
Jay-Z.#MyNextGuestNeedsNoIntroductionWithDavidLetterman@Letterman do you think we need a shorter hashtag?
— Netflix (@netflix) January 5, 2018
In addition to Obama, that’s (in chronological order): Actor/director George Clooney (Money Monster); 20-year-old Pakistani activist and Nobel Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai; actor/writer Tina Fey (Whiskey Tango Foxtrot); radio host Howard Stern; and hip-hop mogul Jay-Z. Netflix said that the series will focus on in-depth examinations of the guests and their lives, rather than talking about recent news.
Letterman is more than two years removed from his 22-year stint hosting the Late Show with David Letterman on CBS, where he was succeeded by veteran comedian Stephen Colbert (Letterman remains the longest-tenured talk show host in history, having surpassed Johnny Carson). Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants, also produced The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and a slew of network comedies, including Everybody Loves Raymond.
This isn’t the first time Netflix tried its hand at a talk show; Chelsea Handler’s program was canceled in October after receiving a lukewarm reception for two seasons. Handler’s series ran three episodes each week in its first season before cutting down to just one weekly episode in its second season; hopefully, with more time to work on each episode, Letterman’s series will fare a bit better.
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?