HBO Max just got a lot more interesting. AT&T hosted a “preview day” for the upcoming streaming service, and revealed a launch date, as well as some of the programming headed to WarnerMedia’s Disney+ and Netflix competitor.
HBO Max will launch in May 2020 at $15 a month. That’s the same price as a regular HBO subscription, but it’ll get you a lot more stuff. About 31 original series will arrive on HBO Max during its first year. By the end of 2021, that number will be over 50. Instead of focusing on the amount of content available, which seems to be the strategy employed by Netflix and Disney+, WarnerMedia is playing up the quality of its offerings and its “Recommended By Humans” curation options.
Original series coming to HBO Max include two new DC Comics-inspired shows. One, Green Lantern, will focus on the popular space cops who patrol the DC Universe’s cosmos. The other, Strange Adventures, will be an anthology series starring more obscure members of DC’s deep roster. Both shows will be produced by Greg Berlanti, who currently oversees the ever-growing DC Comics “Arrowverse” on The CW. The service will also include HBO shows, like the newly announced Game of Thrones spinoff, House of the Dragon.
Other original productions announced today include Tooned Out from Robert Zemeckis, which will mash up live-action actors with animated ones, in the same vein as Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Raised By Wolves is a new sci-fi series from Ridley Scott that was originally slated for TNT, but will now air on HBO Max. Elizabeth Banks, Issa Rae, and Mindy Kaling are all producing half-hour comedies for HBO Max, while over 80 new shorts starring the Looney Tunes characters will ultimately make their way to the service. Five new seasons of Sesame Street will join the 50 previous years’ worth of educational programming on the service.
In terms of existing content, over 1,800 films from the Warner Bros. library will be available on HBO Max at launch, including the entire The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, as well as every DC Comics-related film released over the past 40 years. This includes Joker, Todd Phillips’ record-busting supervillain drama, which will be exclusive to HBO Max. Classic films like Casablanca, Citizen Kane, and 2001: A Space Odyssey will help bolster HBO’s 10,000-hour strong launch library.
Additionally, WarnerMedia paid over $500 million for the exclusive streaming rights to South Park, which should be on HBO Max at launch. New episodes of South Park will arrive on HBO Max just one day after airing on Comedy Central. Rick & Morty, the cult-favorite sci-fi comedy, will also be streamable on HBO Max, although it will still be available on Hulu as well.
HBO Max will also delve into nonfiction programs with a series from CNN about the infamous Heaven’s Gate cult, a documentary about Anthony Bourdain, and five stand-up comedy specials from Conan O’Brien.
Finally, AT&T confirmed that HBO Max will host the (almost) complete existing HBO catalog. Game of Thrones? The Sopranos? Watchmen? Yup, they’ll all be there.
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?