A little over a year ago, the idea of a live streaming internet TV service wasn’t exactly unheard of, but it was still fairly novel — now it’s become positively commonplace. Hulu is confirmed to be working on a live TV package for 2017, and now it seems that YouTube is looking to join the club as well.
Google’s video goliath is reportedly working on a paid subscription service called Unplugged that would offer a number of cable channels, similar to current offerings like Dish’s Sling TV and Sony’s PlayStation Vue, Bloomberg reports. The report claims this is one of the company’s top priorities, with YouTube’s underlying architecture already having been overhauled in order to support it.
Discussions have already taken place between YouTube and media companies including NBCUniversal, Viacom, Twenty-First Century Fox, and CBS, but Bloomberg’s sources say no deals have been reached so far. While Hulu’s planned service is expected to cost $40 per month, YouTube would like to price its service starting at $35. However the content companies it will bargain with will have some say on the eventual price. Assuming there are no licensing issues — by no means a given, considering the troubles Apple has reportedly encountered — Unplugged is expected to debut alongside Hulu’s service in 2017.
The anonymous sources said that YouTube is considering selling its service similarly to Sling TV, which offers a standard base package of channels, with add-on channel bundles available for $5 per month each. This is a more granular approach than the tiered model used by cable companies and Sling TV’s current rival, PlayStation Vue.
YouTube has reportedly been pursuing online TV since 2012, or perhaps even earlier, but the sources say that these plans have increased in urgency in recent months. It’s not clear, however, whether this is due to existing services gaining traction, or the plans for new services announced by other companies.
While YouTube isn’t exactly starving for cash — it’s currently the largest ad-supported video provider on the web — Unplugged would make for a second source of subscription-based revenue. Last year the service introduced YouTube Red, which provides ad-free access to videos, offline and background playback, and music streaming, all included in one subscription.
With Hulu’s service aiming for 2017, not to mention possible competing services from Apple and Amazon, the internet TV landscape is about to get a lot more complicated. Fortunately for us, this also means more chances that one company will knock it out of the park — it’s just currently anyone’s guess who that might be.
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?