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The American Academy of Sleep Medicine warns against choosing Netflix over sleep

Following CEO Reed Hastings' proclamation of Netflix competing with sleep, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) outlined the dangers of sleep deprivations and tips on how to responsibly binge-watch TV shows.

Wanting people to binge TV shows is one thing, but trying to combat sleep is a bit more precarious. A month after Netflix CEO Reed Hastings stated his company is “competing with sleep,” in an earnings call, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) explained ways to binge watch Netflix without damaging your health.

In a statement released on Tuesday, the 42-year-old association dedicated to sleep medicine explained how inconsistent sleep due to binge-watching could increase the likelihood of “workplace accident or drowsy driving crash.” Netflix and sleep may forever remain proverbial enemies, but AASM wants the two to at least coexist, for our sake. “Responsible binge-watching is the way to balance your personal entertainment with your health and well-being,” AASM President Dr. Ronald Chervin said in a statement.

Binge-watching has evolved from being a pejorative for the anti-social to a way of life. According to a recent report, 70 percent of Americans binge on at least five episodes of a program at a time. Those are just average Americans, not the ones trying to make history. Last year, a 25-year-old man binge-watched 94 hours of TV episodes to break the Guinness World Record for longest television binge-watching marathon.

Knowing how daunting a task it could be for people to watch less TV, the AASM has some helpful tips to curbing the binge. Here are AASM’s top tips to stream without harming yourself:

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?