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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

Wonder Dynamics made a strong opening play in AI-enhanced visual effects, providing tools animators and filmmakers actually find useful — and earning the startup a prompt acquisition by Autodesk. Their latest tool further automates the animation process, letting you put in practically any video and get a fully editable 3D scene, characters and all. The

If you’ve ever struggled to explain a scene from your favorite Netflix series or movie to a friend because you couldn’t find the clip online, the streamer just came up with a solution.  Netflix launched on Monday a new clipping feature called “Moments” on its iOS app, letting you quickly save your favorite scenes. Now,

A new startup setting out to combat the scourge of deepfakes and spoofed evidence in the age of AI is showing off its wares on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 this week. ForceField is building a set of “patent-pending” APIs dubbed MARQ, the first of which is designed to authenticate content. For

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Erin and Sara Foster, two of the venture industry’s most famous sisters, sit down alongside business partner Phil Schwarz at Disrupt 2024 to talk about their VC firm Oversubscribed Ventures, consumer investing, culture curation, and what it means to be a creator in the modern age. Subscribe for more on YouTube: https://tcrn.ch/youtube Follow TechCrunch on

Oversubscribed Ventures co-founder Sara Foster (above right) made a confession onstage on Monday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. “I don’t even have ChatGPT on my phone,” she said. It’s an unexpected comment from an investor, given that ChatGPT is arguably the most influential product to launch this decade. But what makes the Foster sisters different from

The popularity of an Instagram video can affect its actual video quality: According to Adam Mosseri (the Meta executive who leads Instagram and Threads), videos that are more popular get shown in higher quality, while less popular videos get shown in lower quality. In a video (via The Verge), Mosseri said Instagram tries to show

In the decades following its 1958 release, Brenda Lee’s rockabilly-tinged “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” has attained status as an all-time holiday classic. Sixty-six years later, it’s getting a Spanish language rework courtesy of “responsible” AI. Universal on Friday announced the release of “Noche Buena y Navidad,” which utilized SoundLabs AI’s MicDrop technology to reconstruct

With the current unemployment crisis in Hollywood, many TV and film crew members are concerned about finding their next job. This is particularly the case for freelancers, who often face unstable work and irregular pay. Shobizzy is the latest professional networking app for the entertainment industry that aims to address this challenge. And, as more

Instagram and Threads accounts that track the private jets of celebrities – including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Kylie Jenner – were suspended on Monday, according to the owner of many such accounts, Florida college student, Jack Sweeney. Links to Instagram/Threads accounts tracking the flights of former President Donald