With less than a week remaining ahead of the season 2 premiere of Westworld, series creators and showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have committed to a new project.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the husband-and-wife duo signed on with Amazon Studios to produce a series adapted from William Gibson’s 2014 sci-fi noir novel The Peripheral. THR referred to the bidding process as “a competitive situation” (between Amazon and other suitors, presumably), that led to a direct script-to-series offer, which means if Amazon likes the script, they can skip the typical pilot process and move right into full production.
The Peripheral follows Flynne Fisher and her brother, Burton, who live in a near-future version of our world where technology has … shaped things differently (for the worse, of course, as is tradition). Flynne covers for her brother in his job as a cybersecurity guard before quickly realizing something is off, and that the connection between her old reality and her new reality isn’t quite what she expected. The novel is Gibson’s most recent work. The author is known for his “speculative science fiction” stories, including the popular Sprawl trilogy, and is often credited as one of the pioneers behind the cyberpunk subgenre.
Under their Kilter Films banner, Joy and Nolan (brother of acclaimed director Christopher Nolan) will act as showrunners and executive producers on the series, which is a collaborative effort between Amazon Studios and Warner Bros. Television. Novelist Scott B. Smith (The Ruins) has been tabbed to write the screenplay, with Vincenzo Natali (Westworld) on board to direct.
Amazon head honcho Jeff Bezos has been very forthcoming about his desire for an Amazon show with the massive popularity and global appeal of HBO’s Game of Thrones, and The Peripheral could fit the bill (as could the upcoming Lord of the Rings series, which cost the Seattle-based company quite a bit). Season2 of Westworld premieres Sunday, April 22, but if you don’t have the patience to wait, check out our rumor roundup for all the news and info you can handle. Warning: There are lots of spoilers.
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?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.