This September, Star Trek: Discovery will air on CBS All Access, the first project to be developed specifically for the service. However, it’s not the only sci-fi property being used in this manner, as MGM has announced a new Stargate series to debut on its own streaming platform.
Stargate Origins was announced yesterday at San Diego Comic-Con and, as the name suggests, it’s set to explore events that set the rest of the franchise in motion. A short teaser trailer used to announce the project seems to depict the discovery of the titular portal in Giza, Egypt, during the 1920s.
The series will center on Catherine Langford, a character who will be very familiar to longtime fans of the franchise. Having witnessed her father uncover the Stargate when she was a child, she spent much of her life attempting to unravel its mysteries.
“We’ve been eager to revisit the Stargate franchise, and create an all-new story that honors the founding mythos and gives loyal fans more mystery and adventure,” said Kevin Conroy, MGM’s president of digital and new platforms. “We view Stargate Origins as a thank you to fans who have been keeping the spirit of the franchise alive for nearly 25 years.”
Stargate Origins will be the centerpiece of a brand new streaming service dubbed Stargate Command, according to a report from Comic Book Resources. The platform will offer up a mix of free and paid content, ranging from classic episodes of the various series that make up the franchise, to behind-the-scenes footage.
Stargate was a 1994 sci-fi movie starring Kurt Russell and James Spader that eventually spawned three live-action television spinoffs: Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe. The entire franchise has produced more than 380 episodes, so there’s plenty of content to warrant a franchise-specific streaming service.
Stargate Origins is being written by Mark Ilvedson and Justin Michael Terry, with Mercedes Bryce Morgan taking on directorial duties. There’s no exact date on when the series will air, or how many episodes have been commissioned for its first season, but it’s expected to debut via Stargate Command sometime this fall.
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?