There (probably) won’t be any hairy beasts in Apple’s first reality series Planet of the Apps, but there will be Goop and a Black-Eyed Pea. Gwyneth Paltrow, will.i.am, and investor Gary Vaynerchuk have joined the upcoming show to serve as mentors and advisers, reports Deadline.
The oh-so-cleverly titled series centers on app developers looking to gain notice from venture capitalists. The 100 participants, who will be hand-picked after a thorough selection process, will get the benefit of the three business-minded mentors’ experience and expertise as the show progresses. The number will be whittled down over the course of the season as they all angle for a feature position in the App Store, among other benefits.
“Developing and launching a business based on your own original idea can be exhilarating, but intimidating,” Paltrow said. “This is a great opportunity to be part of a series that lets us use our experiences to help app developers break through and create viable businesses that will impact peoples’ lives.”
will.i.am also highlighted how partaking in the show could benefit developers. “As tech drives modern pop culture now more than ever, we are giving a platform for the next generation of culture makers to shine,” he said.
Contestants will have to have created something impressive in order to gain a spot on the show. The producers are looking for developers who can “shape the future, solve real problems, and inspire change within our daily lives.” It is a tall order, but given the amount of cool apps out there, we doubt they’ll have problems finding qualified participants.
In addition to serving as mentors, both Paltrow and will.i.am will executive produce alongside Ben Silverman, Howard Owens, Craig Armstrong, Rick Ringbakk, and Charles Watcher. The latter three will double as showrunners. The series is co-produced by Propagate and Apple.
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?