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Cable television has long been viewed as a stagnant business, showing little promise for growth over the years. However, Comcast believes it has found a new growth opportunity. On Wednesday, the company announced that it’s spinning off NBCUniversal’s cable television networks — such as CNBC, E!, Golf Channel, MSNBC, Oxygen, SYFY, and USA Network —

Netflix is adding a new title to its gaming library: a daily word puzzle that is eerily similar to a lot of other mobile games that exist already.  Announced in October, the streaming giant teamed up with TED, the well-known nonprofit media organization, to launch TED Tumblewords, a new daily word puzzle game. In this

Chroma, a startup building a new type of audiovisual entertainment for mobile devices, has been sold. The company, which had financial backing from Twitter and Medium co-founder Biz Stone as well as Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp, is headed to London-based audio technology company Bronze, an AI music startup. Founded by record producer Lex Dromgoole, who’s

Generative AI has upended how we write things, or even if we write at all. Now a startup wants to be the main character in the next chapter of that story: AI that replaces the role of the publisher.  Spines is a self-publishing platform that claims that — thanks to being powered by artificial intelligence

Unions representing Hollywood actors and writers went on strike last year to secure protections against AI systems taking their jobs. But Ben Affleck says that actors and screenwriters shouldn’t worry about AI because it’s not capable of doing either job today, and likely won’t for a long time. “Movies will be one of the last

Beyoncé is headed to Netflix. The singer will perform live during the halftime show during the Houston Texans vs. Baltimore Ravens Christmas Day game, which is set to be streamed on Netflix as part of its newly minted three-year deal with the NFL.  “Your early Christmas wish has been granted as Beyoncé will perform during Netflix’s

The wide availability of tools to build generative AI has led to a Cambrian explosion of startups in the space. Plentiful capital hasn’t hurt, either — nor has the declining cost of the requisite technical infrastructure. In fact, one of the flashiest applications of generative AI, generative video, risks becoming oversaturated. Labs such as Genmo,

Blizzard Entertainment first released World of Warcraft in November 2004, so The New York Times celebrated the anniversary by outlining the many ways we can still see the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game’s influence’s 20 years later. For one thing, while multiplayer games and early social networks such as MySpace already existed, WoW provided a

Viewers have been talking about Friday evening’s boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul — but probably not for the reasons Netflix was hoping. Yes, the 27-year-old Paul (a YouTuber turned professional boxer) defeated the 58-year-old Tyson (a former heavyweight champion who came out of retirement for this match) in eight rounds, but the

Instyle reported yesterday that Meghan is an investor in the hair and wellness company Highbrow Hippie, founded by her colorist Kadi Lee, and Myka Harris. The company was announcing the launch of a new hair care line and Meghan told the outlet that she was “proud to invest in her as a friend and as

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has once again teased the company’s long-delayed HiFi or “super premium” tier, a higher-qualify subscription offering the streaming service first announced in 2021 and then failed to roll out. In the company’s third-quarter earnings call with investors on Wednesday, the exec suggested that such a product was still on the way,

There now exists an MP3 file in this world of Mark Zuckerberg earnestly singing the lyric “to the window, to the wall, ’til the sweat drop down my balls.” The Meta founder met his wife, Priscilla Chan, at a college party where the song “Get Low” by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz featuring

Reliance and Disney have completed their landmark Indian media merger, creating an $8.5 billion entertainment powerhouse in the country’s streaming and television markets. The deal, proposed in February, brings together Disney’s Star India with Reliance-controlled Viacom18 under a joint venture that will control about 85% of India’s streaming market and roughly half of television viewership

Spotify announced on Wednesday that it will start paying podcast hosts who make popular videos on its streaming platform, as the company looks to take on YouTube’s dominance in the video podcast space. The company announced a new “Partner Program” that lets creators monetizes their content beyond ad revenue. Although creators can already monetize their

Former CNN anchor Don Lemon said on Wednesday he is leaving Elon Musk’s X, a decision made less than a year after X announced that “The Don Lemon Show” would appear on the social media platform three times a week. That deal was canceled before it was ever signed, and Lemon sued Musk and X

Variety reports that Lena Dunham is working with Apple and production studio A24 to adapt Michael Lewis’ book “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon,” which chronicles the life of Sam Bankman-Fried and the implosion of his company, FTX. She is set to write the script, the outlet said. FTX, once one of

X, formerly Twitter, is no longer the “digital town square” it once promised to be. Following the results of the U.S. presidential election, floods of users unhappy with the app’s latest direction are moving over to a competing app, Bluesky. Bluesky’s decentralized social media platform has steadily grown from 9+ million users as of September

Apple’s pile of regulatory woes in the European Union has ticked up again: the iPhone maker is being accused of unlawfully discriminating against consumers by applying restrictions on how several of its media services can be accessed around the bloc. Consumer protection authorities in three EU Member States have been investigating the geoblocking measures (access

As part of an ongoing effort to embed virtual reality (VR) in education, Meta has launched a new partnership with a slew of universities in the U.S. and U.K., designed to provide feedback on a new product that Meta hopes will finally make VR just a little more mainstream. The new Meta for Education beta

The Beatles have been nominated for two Grammy awards this year, and no, we did not accidentally fall into a time warp back to the 1960s. The Beatles’ song “Now and Then,” refined with the use of AI and released last year, is up for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance. So, the

There’s a big opportunity for generative AI in the world of translation, and a startup called Panjaya is taking the concept to the next level: a hyperrealistic, gen AI-based dubbing tool for videos that re-creates a person’s original voice speaking the new language, with the video and the speaker’s physical movements automatically modifying to match

TikTok on Thursday debuted a new feature that will more closely connect its app, which already influences which songs top the charts, to the streaming services where users discover and play their favorite music. With the launch of a new “Share to TikTok” feature, music fans will be able to directly share tracks from both

Suno CEO Mikey Shulman found himself in an unlikely place for the founder of a generative AI music company: a songwriting class at Berklee College of Music. “It sounds like walking into the lion’s den,” Shulman said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “The approach of just walking in there and saying, ‘don’t worry, there’s no

The world’s richest man buys out one of the most popular social media platforms and uses it as a propaganda and disinformation machine in support of a presidential candidate. What could go wrong? An analysis from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that tracks misinformation, found that Elon Musk posted at least

Instead of scouring the internet for a summary of a TV show, which often risks unintentionally revealing major plot points, Prime Video’s latest feature aims to save viewers from encountering any spoilers. Amazon announced on Monday the launch of “X-Ray Recaps,” a generative AI-powered feature that creates concise summaries of entire seasons, single episodes, and

The CEO of AI search company Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, has offered to cross picket lines and provide services to mitigate the effect of a strike by New York Times tech workers. The NYT Tech Guild announced its strike Monday, after setting November 4 as its deadline months earlier. The workers represented provide software support and

The CEO of AI search company Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, has offered to cross a virtual picket line and provide services during a strike by New York Times tech workers. The NYT Tech Guild announced its strike Monday, having said for months that this was the deadline. “But the company has decided that our members aren’t

Automation skeptics ask: Why humanoids? There are many benefits and drawbacks of the robotics form factor, but Boston Dynamics’ latest electric Atlas video showcases one of the most under discussed factors: costumes. “Why build a humanoid robot?” the company rhetorically posits. “Because the world is designed for humans, including all the best Halloween costumes.” A

A mysterious new image generation model is beating models from Midjourney, Black Forest Labs, and OpenAI on the crowdsourced Artificial Analysis benchmark. The model, which goes by the name “red_panda,” is around 40 Elo points ahead of the next-best-ranking model, Black Forest Labs’ Flux1.1 Pro, on Artificial Analysis’ text-to-image leaderboard. Artificial Analysis uses Elo, a

Former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Wednesday to talk about the challenges that people who want to disrupt something are facing — both inside and outside of the tech world. “One of the biggest challenges that you will likely face when you try to