The new seasons of The Leftovers, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Veep, Game of Thrones, and dozens of other HBO hit series could soon be available to you for free. AT&T’s DirecTV on Monday revealed that its streaming service, DirecTV Now, will offer HBO for free for an entire year to new customers.
To be eligible, you will need to sign up for either DirecTV Now’s Go Big or Gotta Have It packages. The Go Big package costs $60 per month and offers more than 100 channels. The Gotta Have It package will cost you $70 per month for more than 120 channels.
You do not have much time to decide if you should make the DirecTV Now switch — AT&T says the deal will end on March 30, according to Deadline. If you miss out, you will have to add an extra $5 a month to your DirecTV Now package to add HBO.
Free HBO is the latest promotion the nascent streaming service has offered since its November 30. For roughly its first six weeks, DirecTV Now was offering 100 channels for $35 per month to new customers. AT&T also offered a free Apple TV to customers who prepaid for three months of DirecTV Now service. That deal is also set to end on March 30.
HBO has been spreading itself around the streaming platforms in the past few years. The premium cable channel debuted its own stand-alone streaming service HBO Now in April 2015, with a $15 per month subscription price. At the end of last year, HBO began allowing Amazon Prime subscribers to add the channel to their subscription for the same price as HBO Now.
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?