The place you get your movie tickets could be the next place you watch TV under a new agreement, FandangoNow, the online ticketing service’s video-on-demand service, will begin to offer TV seasons and films from Showtime.
FandangoNow won’t be getting every original Showtime program immediately. At time of press, popular series Billions, Homeland, Dexter, and House of Lies, Penny Dreadful are among the few full series available. TV series that debuted on Showtime this year, including I’m Dying Up Here and the Twin Peaks: The Return are currently not available for purchase. More shows, including Californication, The Affair and Tudors will be available at an unspecified later date.
How much it will cost you to buy Showtime originals fluctuates depending on the title. The full, Emmy-nominated fifth Homeland season is available on FandangoNow at a price of $21 for standard definition quality, and $30 for high definition. Individual episodes will run you $2. But the final season of Dexter will cost $20 for an SD copy, and $25 for HD.
The home of the Carrie Fisher cry face is the latest premium cable network to join FandangoNow. In February, HBO signed on to the service, offering full seasons of some of its original TV programs. Don’t expect FandangoNow to keep you up to date with the latest happening on HBO. Current seasons of popular HBO shows Silicon Valley, Veep, and Game of Thrones are not available to buy and watch. Episodes for Game of Thrones’ seventh season won’t even be available on FandangoNow until September 25. For now, you can only pre-order the season for $27.
Fandango launched its own on-demand video service in March and offers you more than 50,000 titles to buy or rent. Fandango has been slowly trying to integrate FandangoNow into your everyday life. Since its launch, FandangoNow has been made accessible on Xbox One and Xbox One S, Vizio SmartCast app, Roku, Android TV, and numerous major smart TV models. Overall, the one-year-old service is available to more than 200 million devices. As of time of press, the FandangoNow app has been installed more than one million times from Google Play Store alone, roughly the same number as Showtime’s own standalone app, Showtime Anytime.
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?