Former Commumity star Donald Glover wants his new show to shed light on the nuances of Atlanta, Georgia, and FX is promoting it by giving a few samples away for free. Following the series premiere of Glover’s new FX show Atlanta on Wednesday, the pilot episode was made available to stream for free on Facebook and YouTube.
FX premiered the first two episodes of Atlanta, a show centered on Glover’s Earnest “Earn” Marks attempts at managing the burgeoning rap career of his cousin, Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles, while navigating through the madness of a culturally rich city like Atlanta. By Thursday, the pilot episode has racked up more than 350,000 views on YouTube. More than one million viewers checked out the new show on its official Facebook page the day after its debut on FX.
The two episode premiere attracted more than 2 million viewers, with the pilot episode drawing 1.1 million viewers and the following episode attracting 960,000 viewers. The show was also a hit on Twitter, with more than 167,000 tweets sent out about the first two episodes on its premiere night.
Glover’s Atlanta is the first show FX has released a full episode of on YouTube since its first upload in January 2014. While FX may have made the pilot episode free to stream, the following episode is not, unless you go through FX. Both episodes are free to stream on FX’s official website and FX Now app without a cable subscription as part of FX’s Preview Pass. The Preview Pass only gives you an hour of free streaming, but with both episodes clocking in under an hour combined, that Preview Pass is the most inexpensive way to catch up on the first two episodes of Atlanta.
FX is following in the footsteps of cable rival HBO by releasing a full episode on YouTube. Whereas Atlanta‘s pilot episode is the first full episode FX has made available on YouTube for free in more than two years, Vice News has made numerous full episodes of its HBO series Vice on HBO free to stream on YouTube since the series debuted in 2014.
FX’s parent company 20th Century Fox signed a multiyear agreement with Hulu in late 2014 to make it the default subscription video on demand (SVOD) destination for numerous FX shows. But, with FX’s biggest 2016 hit, The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, streaming on Netflix in 2017 instead of Hulu, Atlanta’s SVOD fate is still a bit uncertain.
Atlanta airs every Tuesday on FX at 10 p.m. ET.
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?