It looks like the NBA is experimenting with micro-transactions, offering fourth-quarter game streams for only 99 cents. Over at The Verge, a basketball fan named Vasu Kulkarni shared a notification he received from the NBA app, offering a low-cost live stream at the end of the Miami-Oklahoma City Game.
Wow. @NBA experimenting with in app micro-transactions, offering 4th quarter of a game for $0.99. The future is here. pic.twitter.com/pu602ZAokn
— Vasu Kulkarni (@Vasu) March 24, 2018
The NBA has several different streaming options, from the pricey League Pass that offers every game all season long to the NBA Digital package that lets fans subscribe to certain teams or watch single games on a pay-per-view basis.
Presumably, this is some sort of marketing test tailored initially to a limited number of hardcore NBA fans. The NBA hasn’t responded to inquiries from The Verge about how widespread the pilot program is.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver has expressed his interest in micro-transaction-fueled streaming broadcasts in the past. At the Consumer Electronics Show two years ago, he outlined plans to entice casual viewers with streaming broadcasts. “I think you’re going to get to the point where somebody wants to watch the last five minutes of the game, and they go click, they’ll pay a set price for five minutes as opposed to what they would pay for two hours of the game,” he said.
The push notifications could target local teams or, as Silver suggested, a possible record-breaking performance unfolding in a pivotal game.
Silver has been an outspoken fan of social media engagement and has championed efforts to attract younger viewers who often regard TV broadcasts as outdated as AM radio. At a Code Commerce event in New York, he cited a Twitch stream of a video game as inspiration, but also noted, “I think to a lot of older consumers, used to looking at sports, it might might look incredibly cluttered.”
Streaming is the future of sports broadcasts, and sports fans have empathetically indicated they’re willing to pay for it. With most sporting events running upwards of three hours, breaking it into more consumable chunks is a natural progression. It’s also an easier decision to spend a buck or two on the last few minutes or innings of a close game rather than subscribing to a season-long package.
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?