USA’s Mr. Robot was one of the surprise hits of 2015, leaving cord-cutters and binge watchers wondering when they would get their hands on the techno-thriller. Monday brought an end to such speculation, however, as Amazon announced that season 1 is now available to Prime members in the U.S. to stream and/or download at no additional cost.
For the uninitiated, here’s a quick synopsis of the show:
“Mr. Robot stars Rami Malek (The Pacific) as Elliot, a young computer programmer who works as a cyber-security engineer by day and as a vigilante hacker by night. Elliot finds himself at a crossroads when the mysterious leader of an underground hacker group played by Christian Slater recruits him to destroy the firm he is paid to protect. Compelled by his personal beliefs, Elliot struggles to resist the chance to take down the multinational CEOs he believes are running (and ruining) the world.”
The series has been lauded by viewers and critics alike for its realistic portrayal of cyberwarfare, and it recently won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series — Drama. Slater also took home the hardware for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television (God that’s a mouthful).
In short: This is one of the better shows on television, and Amazon will be its exclusive streaming home in the U.K., Germany, Austria, Japan, and here in the United States. That’s a major coup in its ongoing battle with Netflix and, while Ted Sarandos and company are certainly a major force, the streaming game is far from a one-horse race.
Season 1 consists of 10 episodes, each of which can be downloaded to iPhones, Android phones/tablets, and Fire devices for offline viewing. Season two of Mr. Robot is set to debut July 13, 2016.
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?