The 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is the first ever to be live streamed simultaneously as the television broadcast, and the results are staggering. The first 10 days of the 2016 Olympics have been streamed online more than the last two Olympics combined.
According to Nielsen, the first 10 days of competition at the 2016 Olympics produced more than 2 billion minutes (33 million hours) of online viewership. Those viewing numbers are more than the 1.46 billion minutes streamed of the entire 2012 Summer Olympics in London and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. This year’s Olympics more than likely surpassed the last two Olympics’ totals well before the new, as this year’s Olympics surpassed one billion minutes of online streaming after five days.
NBC first began live streaming the Olympics during the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. The hockey gold medal match between Sweden and Finland, on the final day of the Olympics, was the first match streamed simultaneously on television and online. In 2008, Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics, told the New York Times he took a picture of the gold medal event broadcasting on a television and streaming on a computer, simultaneously, because he knew NBC would be “on the verge of unleashing the Internet as a coverage platform” for the Olympics.
As the online viewership numbers for the first 10 days have realized Zenkel’s prophecy, television viewership for the games this year is markedly lower than in the past. This year’s Olympic’s marks the first time live prime time Olympic coverage has appeared on channels other than the primary broadcast network, as NBC is also broadcasting prime time coverage of the games on its cable networks NBCSN and Bravo. The average TV audience for the first 10 days of this year’s Olympics was 27.8 million viewers, down 17 percent from the 2012 London Olympics.
With NBC averaging more than 180 million minutes of online viewership per day, the last week of the Olympics could push it past three billion minutes (50 million hours) streamed.
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?