March usually means that the return of Game of Thrones is just a month away, but everything has changed this year. We’re stuck waiting till summer for more of the HBO drama — and being patient isn’t easy. The good news is that there is light at the end of the tunnel. The premium network has finally revealed the season 7 premiere date.
The big announcement came Thursday during a Facebook Live video. Fans had to wait more than an hour for a block of ice to melt down to show the date, but in the end, the information was revealed. Just as star Liam Cunningham (Ser Davos) recently suggested, Game of Thrones season 7 will premiere in July — on July 16, to be exact. At last, it is known.
The unique — but somewhat infuriating — fire-and-ice reveal foreshadowed a clash coming this season. We might be reading too much into this, but it was interesting to see that fire ultimately triumphed, slowly but surely. Either way, the meeting of fire and ice should play heavily into the season and the remainder of the series now that the real war is here. It was also the focus of the first Game of Thrones teaser poster.
Even with the premiere date finally unveiled, we still have many questions that only the show can answer. There is boundless drama ahead as the constant power struggles continue and the people of Westeros resume their game of musical chairs with the Iron Throne. Of course, we can’t forget the more terrifying threat in the White Walkers and the long winter.
The wait for season 7 is still far from over, but at least now we can plan our summers around winter in Westeros. Our patience will be rewarded when Game of Thrones returns on July 16.
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?