Items tagged with fox
Satellite TV provider DirecTV is in contract disputes with several local affiliates that has paying subscribers caught in the crossfire. Existing agreements to carry local TV stations in some areas expired in the wee hours of morning after ringing in 2017, and without new agreements or contract extensions in place, the AT&T-owned service flipped the switch on some local channels. Contract agreements between television stations and service providers happen all the time. Usually these take place entirely behind the scenes without the customer ever knowing it, though when there is a failure on...
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If there's one movie that arguably comes up more often than any other in the tech industry, it's Minority Report, the flick from 2002 starring Tom Cruise in a sci-fi future where police are able to arrest criminals before they actually commit the crime in question. It's filled with technological wonders, including lots of touch and gesture-based computing, making it a prime candidate for comparisons to today's developments in touch screens and virtual controls. And if you thought that might stop any time soon, think again -- the 13-year-old movie is reportedly making a comeback as a TV show.Several...
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The topic of immigration in the US is a hot one at the moment, with people on either side of the fence (no pun) vehemently arguing their beliefs. Clearly, this isn't a topic appropriate for a site like HotHardware, but leave it to none other than Fox News for giving us something to glean from it all. In a recent broadcast of Fox & Friends, a logo emblazoned with the words "Defending the Homeland" can be seen on a display in the background, as well as on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. It's not at all uncommon for news networks to create logos for big reports, but it's not typical to...
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Amazon is expanding its original content programming with a slew of new pilots while also nabbing an impressive smattering of existing popular programs that Amazon Prime users can stream. Thanks to a deal with Twentieth Century Fox, the latter group includes all past episodes of “The Americans”, as well as “How I Met Your Mother”, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, “The League”, “Louie”, and “Archer”. There are five pilots for kids, including one called “Maker Shack Agency” that sounds like something we...
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Fox News is trying to bring TV news further into the digital age, where news runs 24/7 and updates are up-to-the-second, with its ambitious “Fox News Deck”. Comprised of a small sea of 55-inch touchscreen machines (called “BATS”, for “big area touchscreens”) and a 38-foot video wall, the whole brightly-lit setup looks like the deck of a spaceship. The set is for Shepard Smith’s new show “Shepard Smith Reporting”, which will air at 3pm eastern and run into the evening. Conceived by Roger Ailes, the Fox News Deck allows workers at the BATS to...
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Those commercials for the Dish Network Hopper, the monster whole-home DVR service that lets users record up to 6 channels simultaneously and store up to 2,000 hours of content, make the whole thing seem too good to be true. In reality, it’s not, but the major networks certainly feel like it should be. Multiple networks have sued Dish Network over one feature in particular: AutoHop, which allows users to automatically skip commercials in recorded content. It may seem a semantic designation to carp about an auto-skip feature when users have always been able to simply fast forward through ads...
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If you aren't familiar with Aereo, here's the highlight: it's a service that allows users to stream live over-the-air TV networks through the Internet, anywhere in the world. As of right now, the service is limited to the New England area, but it plans to spread as fast as possible. It's also wrapped up in all sorts of legal trouble, as the TV networks (CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX) want the whole thing shut down. Evidently, there's lost revenue when networks aren't watched through conventional means (pay-TV or antennas), and instead of learning to adapt to the Internet, they're just trying to blockade...
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Dish Network has a new “PrimeTime Anytime” feature that’s part of a whole-home DVR service called “Hopper”. The service lets you access Fox, NBC, CBS, and ABC primetime content from the last eight days on demand and record up to six programs simultaneously with a storage capacity of up to 2,000 hours of content. However, one little bonus feature called AutoHop has a team of broadcasters hopping mad. Simply put, AutoHop automatically skip commercials on recorded content, unlike typical DVR programming that requires the user to fast forward with the remote control. Apparently,...
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Strangely, it feels like DRM is getting a second wind. When Apple announced that the iTunes Music Store would go DRM-free, the world took notice. A few years later, DRM is creeping back, and we suspect this wave will be harder to stop. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group, SanDisk and Western Digital have all aligned on one thing: DRM, or piracy protection. The working title of the group is Project Phenix, and it's described as an initiative that will give consumers an easier and faster way to organize, store and move their high definition digital movies...
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If you’re a DirecTV customer, you may have suddenly noticed little messages from DirecTV about Fox while scrolling through the Guide. Apparently, the two are fighting over retransmission fees, with DirecTV threatening to drop Fox programs as early as November 1. The back-and-forth has gotten a little ugly; both Fox and DirecTV have set up websites outlining their respective positions on the issue. DirecTV has www.ourpromisetoyou.com, where it asks if we would like to pay 40% more for the Fox channels we already get, because that’s what DirecTV says Fox wants to force us to do. Fox set...
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Most of the major television networks—CBS, ABC, and NBC, as well as Hulu.com—have blocked Google TV's from accessing their online offerings, on the grounds that allowing users to watch videos at CBS.com damages the website's ability to earn revenue. The networks' stance almost guarantees that the question of what is and isn't blockable will end up in court—but irate Google TV owners and hackers in general aren't waiting for a legal decision. According to a recent blog post on the subject, the Google TV block isn't based on a browser string or on the technical capabilities of the...
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One of the most public disputes between a media company and a cable company has finally come to a close. For the past 14 days, News Corp. and Cablevision have been battling over license fees. The main problem was the distribution of Fox, a network which hosts many Sunday NFL games, and this week, the MLB World Series. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Fox is obviously a major channel, and a great many of Cablevision's subscribers were missing out on content for 14 whole days. Rarely do these disputes lead to channels being pulled, but Fox actually went black on Cablevision systems for 14...
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Fans of James Cameron's Avatar were undoubtedly thrilled with the movie's appearance on DVD and Blu-ray last week, but cat lovers who purchased the HD version of the film have been heared yowling discontentedly in the bushes. In a deeply ironic twist, the story of the nature-loving, free-spirited Na'vi is only available to humans whose Blu-ray players have been updated to support the latest DRM schemes. You won't find that mentioned in much of the official discussion of the problem—Fox likened the problem to the need for a software update, "the same way computer programs such as browsers, Microsoft...
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In an attempt to arrest MySpace's ever-faster decline into irrelevance, News Corp. is transforming the social network into an online gaming destination.The company, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, had to do something, after all, once MySpace lost major ground to Facebook in June, posting smaller U.S. numbers than the latter — Comscore reported MySpace had 68 million compared with Facebook's 74 million uniques (just from the U.S. Internet audience, the gap is even wider when looking at worldwide figures).News Corp owns the Fox empire — the cable news network and the film and television studio...
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