This Saturday, two lightweight titans are clashing in the Octagon at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas in a contest for the championship belt. Reigning champ Charles “do Bronx” Oliveira will be putting his title on the line in his first defense, and his opponent is none other than Dustin “The Diamond” Poirier, the top-ranked fighter on the UFC lightweight roster. This is a pay-per-view event airing exclusively on the premium ESPN+ streaming platform, but the good news is that if you’re a new subscriber, you can sign up now and enjoy a $50 discount on the UFC 269 PPV. Here’s what you need to know.
UFC 269, like almost all numbered UFC events, is a pay-per-view. As of now (and for the foreseeable future), all UFC PPV shows air exclusively on ESPN+, the sports broadcaster’s premium streaming platform. ESPN+ costs $7 or $70 per year, while UFC pay-per-views will each set you back $70. That means that an annual ESPN+ subscription and a UFC PPV package together usually cost $140; however, if you’re a new subscriber, you can take advantage of a one-time deal that lets you bundle a year’s worth of ESPN+ with the UFC 269 pay-per-view for just $90. That saves you a cool 50 bucks.
UFC 269: Oliveira vs. Poirier is one of the most highly anticipated matchups of 2021. After passing on a title shot in favor of his trilogy bout with Conor McGregor, Dustin Poirier — who currently sits at the top spot on the UFC lightweight roster, right under champion Charles Oliveira — is finally going after the belt. He unsuccessfully challenged for the championship before in 2019 but lost to then-champ Khabib Nurmagomedov. With Khabib now in retirement, Poirier is the top contender to unseat Oliveira, who won the belt in May at UFC 262. UFC 269 will be the Brazilian champion’s first title defense. It’ll be a hard one, too, with a challenger as dangerous as Poirier on deck.
If you want to see how things shake out for yourself this weekend, then there’s still time to sign up for ESPN+ and grab the UFC 269 PPV bundle deal, but note that you can only redeem this offer once. Existing ESPN+ subscribers will have to shell out the usual $70 to watch UFC 269 online live. After you sign up, you can install ESPN+ on virtually any modern mobile device, streaming stick, smart TV, or gaming console (Xbox or PlayStation), or you can just livestream Oliveira vs. Poirier right in your computer’s web browser. The UFC 269 main event begins Saturday night at 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT.
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?