The days when a cable subscription was your only option for getting your Game of Thrones fix are gone. HBO is embracing streaming these days, and with its upcoming series Animals, it’s actually encouraging users to watch the show via its streaming services instead of cable.
The show, an adult-themed animated series set in New York City, is set to premiere February 5. That’s still the case if you plan on watching the show on cable, but the series debuts a day early, on February 4, for those watching it via HBO Now or HBO Go, as Exstreamist recently reported. That’s not all, either.
“The series premiere will be available to stream Thursday, February 4, with subsequent episodes available to stream the following Thursdays ahead of their Friday night debuts on HBO,” the company announced in a statement. “HBO’s linear subscribers will also be able to watch the series one day early each week via HBO On Demand.”
Could this be the first in a long line of early premieres on the network’s streaming apps? It’s too early to call, but considering the early buzz that Animals is generating, this is an interesting move on HBO’s part. If nothing else, this shows that HBO considers its streaming apps first-class aspects of the network, rather than simply an attempt to curb piracy from those without cable subscriptions.
As the name hints, Animals focuses on those residents of New York that aren’t human — horses, pigeons, and mice are all represented. The show stars Ben Schwartz, Kumail Nanijiani, Marc Maron, Matt Walsh, and Nick Kroll, and will feature a wide array of guest stars.
“Whether it’s lovelorn rats, gender-questioning pigeons or aging bedbugs in the midst of a midlife crisis, the awkward small talk, moral ambiguity and existential woes of non-human urbanites prove startlingly similar to our own,” the official synopsis for the show reads.
If the description leaves you curious, or you simply don’t know how you can make it another day until the show’s debut, check out the series on HBO Now or HBO Go.
Updated 2/4/16 by Stephanie Topacio Long: This post has been updated to reflect the premiere of the show on HBO’s streaming platforms as well as include a new clip.
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?