An average of 8 million people downloaded each of the 12 episodes that comprised the first season of Serial, a non-fiction whodunnit podcast which started as a spin-off of the popular radio program This American Life.
Today, The Verge is reporting that the program has parlayed all of that success into an exclusive streaming deal with Pandora. While the series’ second season has yet to set a start date, Season One will hit Pandora on Nov. 24, 2015. When Season Two does begin, new episodes will be available every Thursday at 6 A.M.
While 8 million per episode is a colossal number of downloads for a podcast, Pandora claims 78 million monthly listeners, and will undoubtedly give the show access to a much broader audience. Serial Editorial Advisor and This American Life Host Ira Glass described the deal thusly “for people already listening to Serial and This American Life, nothing will change. But we believe lots of people who’d like our shows simply haven’t heard them, or haven’t started listening to podcasts.” Glass also cited the fact that only 17 percent of Americans listen to podcasts monthly, meaning that the show was drawing from a well of around 46 million potential listeners, far fewer than Pandora’s user base alone.
When Serial becomes available on the service, it will mark the first time that Pandora has ever distributed a podcast, so it will be interesting to see whether there are any hiccups in its delivery. The streaming music giant reportedly plans to break up each podcast into smaller, 5-minute chunks but episodes will be formatted so that they play without interruption, unless the user indicates otherwise.
Chronicling the true story of a Baltimore murder, Serial has grown into a genuine phenomenon. So if you’re like some of our staff and have grown tired of your friends’ and family’s strong-armed, how-is-it-possible-that-you-don’t-listen-to-this-show appeals, it just got a whole lot easier for you to give in and get hooked.
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?