If you’re a DirecTV Now subscriber, get ready to pay a fair bit more for your entertainment. AT&T, which owns the streaming service, is planning to increase fees for existing subscriptions by $10 per month as part of a line-wide shake-up that’ll revamp DirecTV Now’s various subscription tiers, Cord Cutter Now reports.
The change shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to current DirecTV Now users. The company already raised all price plans by $5 per month in late 2018 and, as TechCrunch notes, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson announced upcoming price hikes back in December. DirecTV Now Customers can expect to receive official notification about the cost increases starting tomorrow, March 12. The new prices will take effect 25 days after the emails arrive.
Current DirecTV Now subscribers will be able to keep their current subscription, which range from the 65-channel Live a Little package to the 125-channel Gotta Have It tier, provided that they’re willing to pay the extra $10 a month. New users, however, will have to select one of DirecTV Now’s two new plans.
The new DirecTV Now Plus package will give users “more than 40” channels, including some local networks and cable mainstays like ESPN, CNN, Fox News, and TNT, for $50. For $70, DirecTV Now Max will offer everything in the Plus tier, plus more local sports networks and Cinemax. In a move that sounds a whole lot like what you’d expect from traditional cable and satellite plans, both of the new tiers will also include HBO (which AT&T acquired in its purchase of Time Warner Inc. properties) as a bonus to entice new subscribers to sign up.
AT&T will also launch a number of online-only versions of its standard DirecTV packages, which include the 65-channel Entertainment plan ($93 a month) at the lower end, and tops out at the 125-channel Ultimate tier ($135 a month). The streaming DirecTV packages may not include everything that a traditional satellite TV user will receive, however, so cord-cutters should make sure to check the channel line-ups and other features before signing up.
DirecTV Now, like YouTube TV, Sling TV, and PlayStation Vue, is an internet-driven live TV service designed to take the place of a traditional cable or satellite service. The service launched in late 2016 and has garnered over 1.6 million subscribers, although it’s not all good news for AT&T: in late 2018, DirecTV Now lost a quarter of a million subscribers thanks to rising fees and increased competition.
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?