Attracting all of the attention and making competition virtually nonexistent is common for the 2015-2016 Golden State Warriors team that recently broke the single-season record for wins set by the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls in 1996. The Warriors’ final two games against the Oklahoma City Thunder in the seven- game Western Conference Finals series dominated Twitter during Memorial Day weekend, attracting more Twitter activity than every popular TV program and sports event combined.
Steph Curry and the Warriors, who won 73 games during the regular season, clawed back from a 3-1 series deficit to win the next three games and advance past Kevin Durant and the Thunder for a berth in the NBA Finals. According to Nielsen’s Twitter TV data, game 6 and game 7 of the conference finals attracted a combined 3.61 million tweets sent from 1.21 million unique Twitter accounts. Monday night’s game 7 finale attracted the lion share of the Twitter activity, with the game accumulating 2.32 million tweets sent from 769,000 unique Twitter accounts.
Those two games made it seem as if nothing else was being talked about on Twitter the entire Memorial Day weekend. Starting Friday, 20 different TV shows and 18 other sporting events charted in Twitter’s daily TV ratings. Those shows and events combined for a Memorial Day weekend haul of 2.54 million tweets sent from 932,8000 unique Twitter accounts. The Golden State Warriors duels with the Oklahoma City Thunder attracted more than a million more tweets sent from more than 250,000 more unique Twitter accounts.
This is no small feat as those two games were up against Game of Thrones, the Indianapolis 500, Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals, the French Open, and the History Channel’s debut of its new miniseries Roots, the retelling of the Alex Haley’s 1976 novel of the same name.
Curry and company also obliterated the Twitter activity of Lebron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers, the Warriors’ upcoming opponent in the NBA Finals. The Cavaliers eliminated the Toronto Raptors from the Eastern Conference Finals in game 6 on Friday. That game only attracted 413,00 tweets sent from 176,000 unique Twitter accounts, a fraction of the Twitter activity from either one of the Warriors’ games with the Thunder this weekend.
Curry’s brilliant performance in game 7 led the Warriors to a second consecutive NBA Finals appearance and affected more screens than those watched by people who tweet. Monday night’s game had an overnight rating of 11.2, the highest-rated NBA game on cable television ever.
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?