Netflix announced Thursday that it will begin deactivating long-dormant accounts, helping customers who no longer use the service cancel their subscriptions.
The announcement came from Director of Product Innovation Eddy Wu, who said “the last thing we want is people paying for something they’re not using.”
It’s an unusual move for a subscription-based service, which normally relies on long-time subscribers.
How does this initiative affect you? Netflix lists two situations in which they’ll flag an account for removal: If someone signed up for their account a year ago but haven’t watched anything, or accounts that haven’t watched anything for more than two years.
So odds are, your Netflix account won’t be affected. According to Wu, the dormant accounts add up to “less than half of one percent of our overall member base.”
But if you are one of these rare subscribers who never use Netflix but want to keep your account active, you can still do so. Netflix will send dormant members an email or in-app notification asking if they still want to keep their account active. Simply reply yes and your account won’t be closed.
If you do close your account but decide to return later, Netflix will save your preferences and account information for up to 10 months.
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?