Vice CEO Shane Smith recently proclaimed that Vice will bring millennials back to TV and now the worldwide leader in sports is helping. Today, ESPN and Vice Media announced a partnership to produce original programming and distribute future content across multiple platforms.
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As part of the deal, Vice Sports will produce original series for ESPN to be distributed on the network’s TV, mobile, and digital platforms. The collaborative short-form series will focus on sporting events and popular athletes “outside the mainstream,” according to the press release. ESPN will also air episodes from Vice World Of Sports, which debuted in April on Vice’s TV network Viceland. The series will run on ESPN outlets following live airing.
On Viceland’s end, the new network will re-air films from ESPN’s critically acclaimed docu-series 30 for 30. Vice CEO Shane Smith, who has been looking to make “the next ESPN” for years, expressed his elation at the prospects of this new deal. “To be teaming up with ESPN, creating brand new sports shows for them, and then showing 30 for 30s on Viceland is perhaps one of the favorite moments in my professional life,” he said in a press release announcing the deal.
ESPN President John Skipper shared in Smith’s big-picture ambitions, boasting that the content produced from the partnership will be a “win for fans of ESPN, VICE, and storytelling in general.” “I applaud Shane for understanding that television is the smartest path to worldwide leadership,” Skipper added.
The deal comes at a transitional period for both media entities. ESPN lost more than seven million subscribers between 2013-2015 and has lost a good deal of top talent in the past year, including 30 for 30 producer Bill Simmons. Launched in late February, Viceland’s weekly viewership in its first three weeks was reported as a meager 60,400 viewers.
Both companies are no doubt hoping this latest venture will bear new fruit in the rapidly evolving medium.
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?