Just over a year ago, Verizon launched its FiOS Custom TV service, which offered customers the chance to subscribe to a base package and add additional smaller channel packages as they wanted. One of these was a sports package that included ESPN and ESPN 2, something the network wasn’t happy about — it wanted its channels included in the base package.
Prior to the launch of the Custom TV service, ESPN said its relegation to a sports package was in violation of its contract, but Verizon didn’t budge, so the network sued. The two companies won’t be heading to court, however, as today ESPN and Verizon announced that they had reached a settlement. The exact terms of the settlement aren’t being shared, and will remain confidential.
“We have a long-standing relationship with Verizon,” said Sean Breen, senior vice president, affiliate sales, Disney and ESPN Media Networks. “We look forward to working with them to provide great content to consumers for years to come.”
When Custom TV launched, customers paid $55 per month for the base package, with two bundles included in the base price, with extras for around $5 per month each. In January of this year, Verizon made changes to Custom TV, offering ESPN and ESPN 2 as part of a $70 bundle, though it said this was due to customer feedback.
This new comes just as Disney is preparing to report its earnings for the first quarter of 2016, as Variety points out, and Verizon might have its own reasons to want to settle quickly. With the announcements last week that both Hulu and YouTube are going to offer their own cable TV replacements in 2017, the company might deem it increasingly important to keep ESPN channels as part of Custom TV.
“ESPN is an important partner of ours,” said Terry Denson, Verizon’s vice president of content strategy and acquisition. “We look forward to further collaborating with them to deliver customers content across all of our platforms.”
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?