For those of you who’ve spent the last week lamenting that season 1 of Westworld wasn’t released all at once for you to binge on at your leisure, we have some great news for you. While the aforementioned scenario won’t become a reality any time soon, Entertainment Weekly reports that episode 2 of Westworld (entitled Chestnut) is available to stream right now on HBO Now, HBO Go, and HBO OnDemand.
As fans of the show know, it airs on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET — so what gives? Well, no one’s quite sure at the moment, but the prevailing theory is that HBO is worried about going up against Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump, Round 2. The first presidential debate posted mammoth numbers, averaging more than 80 million viewers, and if the second clash nets anything close to that, the pool of potential viewers for Westworld will be much smaller. By contrast, Westworld pulled in just 3.3 million for the initial airing of its premiere.
On top of that, this week’s installment of Sunday Night Football — which always draws a huge audience — features a matchup between the Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants. New York, of course, represents a major media market, and football fans who aren’t watching the debate will likely be tuned in for the game.
Releasing the episode early makes a ton of sense for HBO. First off, it’s a nice gesture to fans who are champing at the bit to see the follow-up to the much-discussed premiere. Second, it means the show won’t need to rely on an airing that coincides with other major TV events. Third — we want to see what happens next!
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?