Items tagged with fox
The coronavirus (COVID-19) has really done a number on the United States, disrupting how we work, learn, and even shop. And even our areas of leisure haven't been spared, as MLB spring training, NBA, and NHL games have been canceled for obvious reasons -- thousands of people meandering in close quarters isn't a good idea these days. NASCAR has also had to cancel races due to the coronavirus, but the racing body has come up with a rather inventive solution. NASCAR, Fox Sports, and iRacing have announced the launch of the inaugural eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series. Rather than duking it out on a real-life track -- one left turn at a time -- drivers will be taking part in virtual races...
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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 both sides to hammer out a new contract and extend an existing one, the affected stations go dark and...
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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 entertainment outlets are reporting that Fox has greenlit the TV adaptation of Minority Report,...
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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 see one that looks remarkably similar to a video game title. Does it look familiar? How about now?...
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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 would have loved as children; it’s a pair of youngsters that “create gadgets to help other...
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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 pull in and organize news from across a variety of platforms--and they’ll be on camera the whole...
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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 in DVR-ed programs, but the networks disagree. However, Dish keeps winning the court cases. This week,...
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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 progress. The real issue is that Aereo doesn't pay transmission fees to the networks; it just takes...
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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, Fox, NBC, and CBS think that AutoHop isn’t so much a handy DVR feature as it is unlicensed...
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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 and TV shows – including new releases in up to full 1080p quality - across multiple devices....
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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 up www.keepmynets.com, where it states that “DirecTV will drop your favorite shows and games...
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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 Google TV in question. Instead, the block apparently checks the Flash version ID. If it sees a version...
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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 whole days while the two attempted to reach an agreement on pricing. Cablevision wanted a deal similar...
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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 Office, or iTunes do." That explanation hasn't sat well with customers who ponied up for the Blu-ray,...
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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 — but hasn't entered into the video gaming industry. News Corp digital chief Jonathan Miller said...
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Mozilla’s mobile Firefox browser, dubbed Fennec, just got one step closer to launch. Last week, Mozilla formally released the alpha version of the mobile browser for developers. At release, the alpha version is only available to Nokia N800 and N810 Internet Tablets, but it’s also available for Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs so developers and other users without these Tablets can still experiment and build add-ons. It’s important to note, however, that the desktop version of Fennec is not a supported product. Early screen shots of Fennec on Windows Mobile show that Fennec isn’t immune to the space constraint problems many other mobile browsers face in trying to cram navigation controls and content...
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Faced with concerns that users might switch over to IE8 or Google's new Chrome so they can browse porn, er, we mean privately, Mozilla has reversed course on Privacy Mode, which had been out for Firefox 3.1. The upcoming release will indeed support Privacy Mode, popularly known as "Porn Mode." Both IE8 in its current Beta 2 form and Chrome in its (barely) beta form support Privacy Mode.In a note from this week's weekly status meeting, Mozilla said: "Private Browsing Mode: Ehsan [Akhgari] went and implemented Connor's functional spec bug 248970 -- way to go! Now back on track for beta date."Cryptic, but it means that bug 248970 has been addressed, and that entry in Bugzilla, Mozilla's...
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Not satisfied with Firefox 3.0.1? Want to see if Firefox 3.1 is really faster than Chrome, as Mozilla claims (though it's arguable)? Well, last night Mozille released the second alpha for Firefox 3.1. Note the word "alpha.:" Beta is buggy enough, but Alpha starts to stretch the limits a little.Shiretoko Alpha 2 is an early developer milestone for the next version of Firefox that is being built on top of Mozilla's Gecko 1.9.1 layout engine, Shiretoko Alpha 2 is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox should not use Shiretoko Alpha 2.Yes, they are indeed warning...
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Firefox 3 has just barely gotten out the door and Mozilla is already readying the alpha release of the next version, 3.1. Of course, as a point-release, it will be a much less ambitious project than the leap from 2 -> 3. In Firefox 3.1 status meeting notes from 6/24, the ship date is now estimated to be Q4 of this year or Q1 09. First alpha is in July, while first beta is in August. The release date is close to what had previously been stated by Mozilla. They had earlier said, however, that it would be date-driven, and it looks like a little flexibility has been added to that. Earlier Mozilla had also said the features in FF 3.1 would consist of those that had missed FF 3 but were nearly complete....
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Despite running into a few glitches at the start of the record-setting attempt for the most software downloaded in 24 hours, approximately 8.3 million full copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded during the first 24 hours of its availability. The Mozilla folks are working with the blokes from Guinness World Records to determine if in fact a true world record has been set. As there is no previously established official record for the most software downloaded in a day, the record is likely to keep. We'll drink to that! At a highpoint during the download barrage, the Mozilla developers reported:"Mozilla.com web traffic is pushing well over 2 Gigabits a second of just pure HTTP traffic. That is in addition...
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Typical of Firefox releases, a number of sites have begun leaking downloads to Firefox 3 (final). Naturally people will rush to these downloads and start downloading, as most of us are impatient. We say: don't do it! Why not? Well, don't you want to see Mozilla set a Guinness Book of World Records record? Mozilla is running "Download Day" as we wrote about earlier. All right, honestly there is no prior record for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours, so they're going to set it anyway (as long as they have all the documentation they need).However, if they want to keep that record, at least until Firefox 4, they will need as many downloads from their servers as...
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We just received an RC3 for Firefox 3. Oh no! Sure it was a Mac-only change, but what does that do to the release date? Apparently, not much.The Mozilla Foundation has announced the release date for Firefox 3. It will be June 17th (yep, next Tuesday).At the same time, the Spread Firefox site trumpets that the number of pledges they have received from users who will download FF3 on the release day has surpassed 1 million. Are we going to download on the release day? Why not?This would be an official Guinness Book of World Records entry, so go over to Spread Firefox and check it out. And start your download engines....
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