Watching an NFL football game is a serious time commitment. For every second of action on the field, we spend several more waiting for the next play to start or, worse, watching commercials. Things are looking up, though: Commissioner Roger Goodell has revealed that the league has started looking at ways to speed up the game and address other fan concerns.
Perhaps the most exciting change that Goodell announced is a reduction in the number of commercial breaks and in total ad time. That annoying commercial-kickoff sandwich, for example? Goodell told USA Today on Wednesday that he hates it, too.
“It drives me crazy,” the commissioner said. “We call those ‘double-ups.’ They actually occurred 27 percent of the time (on kickoffs last season). And that’s still too high for us.”
Cutting back on double-ups sounds good, and it’s just the starting point. The league also plans to go down to four commercial breaks per quarter instead of the pattern we’ve become used to — five breaks in the first quarter, and then six, five, and five in the subsequent quarters. However, before you get too excited, know that the commercial breaks will become 30 seconds longer, going from a minute and 50 seconds to 2 minutes and 20 seconds.
Based on the numbers Goodell provided, the new pattern only shaves about a minute and 10 seconds of commercial break time over the course of a game, but it may seem like a big improvement to viewers. The NFL’s research indicates that the number of breaks is more noticeable to fans than the actual length of them. It just gives us more time to make our nachos or post our reactions.
Also coming this fall with the new season will be tweaks to replays and the timing of the game. For example, the league plans to institute of a play clock after extra points and maybe even after touchdowns, as Goodell described in an email to NFL fans, according to Deadline. He also suggested that player celebration rules may get more lax, so keep your fingers crossed for more end zone antics. The league will vote on the issues at its annual meeting, which starts Sunday, meaning we’ll likely see more changes soon.
Goodell told USA Today that the changes weren’t related to last season’s ratings dip, but they may help all the same.
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?