Items tagged with Streaming
Facebook is launching a new live gaming app called Facebook Gaming: Watch, Play, and Connect. The app marks Facebook's most significant move into the video game segment coming at a time when people are stuck indoors due to the coronavirus and looking for ways to relax. The app is offered at no cost and is designed for creating and watching live gameplay allowing Facebook to battle directly against Twitch, YouTube, and Mixer. The Facebook Gaming app was supposed to launch in June, but Facebook launched early to take advantage of the hordes of people around the country, and the world, who are stuck at home. The person in charge of the Facebook app is Fidji Simo, who reports directly to Mark Zuckerberg....
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One way to pass the time while you are hunkered down in your abode is to kick back and fire up a playlist of your favorite jams. Or get up and shake your rump—dancing is good exercise, after all. Either way, Amazon is making it cheap and easy to do by offering its Amazon Music Unlimited streaming service free for three months. This is quite different that what comes bundled with your Amazon Prime membership (assuming you have one). One of many perks of Prime is the standard Amazon Music subscription. It's a nice add-on, but also limited—it 'only' serves up around two million songs. That sounds like a lot, but it is not nearly as fleshed out as services like Apple Music and Spotify....
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Depending on where you live in the world, you may find yourself in the midst of a stay-at-home order. Even if one does not exist in your area, health professionals are strongly urging the public at large to practice social distancing in order to stop the spread of the Coronavirus. If you find yourself going stir crazy during these wild times we live in, one thing you can do is tune into SiriusXM and listen to premium content at no charge. Howard Stern, one of the streaming service's biggest draws, announced the freebie offer during one of his recent broadcasts. SiriusXM then issued a press release, confirming that users in North America can access its more than 300 channels at no charge starting...
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There are a bunch of movie streaming services out there for people to choose from to watch movies and TV shows on the go and at home. Google is gearing up to get into the streaming movie segment in a much bigger way with ad-supported free movies. The tip on the free movies comes from an APK teardown. As it stands now, Google Play Movies & TV allows customers to purchase or rent individual movies and TV episodes. The APK teardown found code that reads, "Hundreds of movies, just a few a few ads." Other parts of the code says "Introducing" and "Watch free with ads." The code was found in version 4.18.37 of the Android application. It's unclear how much of the Google library might be available...
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Roku has released its earnings report for the last quarter of 2019, and the company did very well, exceeding expectations. The earnings report says that the company brought in $1.1 billion in revenue for the full year of 2019. The company also says that it reinforced its position as America's number one TV streaming platform (measured by hours streamed). Roku notes that 2019 was a big year for TV streaming with a "massive" shift of the TV ecosystem that gained momentum. In the earnings report, the company said that it believes that investing incremental gross profit in 2020 to extend its strategic advantage positions it for the decade ahead is key. Highlights from the earnings report include...
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Although being a geek was not always chic, geek culture has been celebrated in cinema and on television for decades in one form or another. In some ways, it is a genre unto itself. The appreciation of science, fantasy, and intellectual concepts have given birth to a wide range of both celebrated and cringe worthy flicks and TV episodes, from Weird Science and Revenge of the Nerds, to Star Trek and Star Wars. The list is long, and expands exponentially when you relax the criteria of what fits the mold of geek entertainment. Do Ghostbusters and Breaking Bad qualify? I would argue they do, in their own way, though I am less interested in coming up with a concrete definition of geek entertainment...
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Streaming video is big business today with sites like Netflix and Hulu offering huge amounts of content that people can stream anywhere they have an internet connection. As many subscribers as Netflix and others have, two of the biggest streaming sites were illegal. Two programmers in Las Vegas recently admitted to running a pair of the largest illegal TV and movie streaming services in the country, according to federal authorities. One of the platforms reportedly had more paying subscribers than Netflix or any other legitimate streaming platform. FBI investigators arrested Darryl Polo and Luis Villarino in relation to the investigation, and both of the developers have pled guilty to copyright...
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There are a bunch of streaming services out there, with some recent additions bringing more competition to the fold. Plex, a popular service for helping users wrangle their own media, is now rubbing elbows with them in a bigger way than before. The company just launched an ad-supported streaming service with thousands of movies, TV shows, documentaries, and more. The service is free, as it is funded entirely by ads. Not to worry, though, Plex will not be interrupting your own content with ads. Plex rightfully says that would be a "terrible idea for many, many reasons," so unless you happen to have a catalog of commercials for some reason, you will only see them when viewing the free streaming...
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Twitch launched a closed beta for Twitch Studio a few months ago. The beta was a new streaming app, and Twitch says that "tons" of streamers that signed up to try it. After taking all the feedback from the streamers who tried Twitch Studio beta, the beta is now open to everyone who wants to try it out. Twitch Studio Beta is available for anyone on Windows 7 or newer operating system. To talk streamers into trying the open beta for the new Studio, Twitch is running down some of the best features of the beta software. The setup is guided, making it easy to detect your mic, webcam, monitor resolution, bitrate, and more to help the stream look and sound great. The beta offers customizable templates...
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The NVIDIA SHIELD TV is widely regarded as the best media streaming device on the market. In addition to offering high-performance, access to a massive repository of 4K streaming services and apps, and leading-edge features that some competitors have only just recently caught up with, the SHIELD TV gives users access to GeForce NOW and game streaming capabilities from a GeForce-enabled PC. There is a growing library of native AAA Android games too, along with a myriad of casual games as well. And that's not to mention the huge community of enthusiasts that use the SHIELD TV to emulate a multitude of consoles and retro arcade machines from yesteryear. Whether using it right out of the box or side-loading...
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The number of “cord cutters” has accelerated over the last decade. Many people are cutting their ties to cable companies TV programming packages, and instead looking for online entertainment solutions. In that regard, consumers have been turning to streaming devices like Google Chromecast, Roku and NVIDIA Shield TV. However, HDMI wireless transmitters and receivers are another viable option for cord cutters. Wireless transmit/receive video products like these can be used for much more than streaming your favorite shows, including everything from gaming to office presentations and live drone footage. The Nyrius Aries Pro is one of the latest offerings in the market for...
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Google has been bragging about Stadia for months now, and as the launch nears, new details about the gaming service have surfaced. One fresh bit of information is likely to be disappointing to potential subscribers: Google has announced that at launch, the Stadia controller will only work wirelessly with the Chromecast Ultra. That means you can play with no wires when the Chromecast Ultra is hooked to your TV, but if you want to play on other devices, you will need to connect a cable to the Stadia controller to use it. The Stadia controller is the only first-party hardware that the service offers at this time, and it features Stadia-specific shortcut keys and integrated WiFi. Google has stated...
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Console gaming fans are looking forward to the next year or so as the PS5 game console is set to land in the holiday season of 2020. The Google Stadia game streaming platform is set to launch next month, and in a recent interview, the head engineer for the Google streaming platform talked about performance. VP of engineering Madj Bakar believes that Stadia will be faster and more responsive than local gaming hardware. The catch to that statement made by Bakar is that he says Stadia will be faster than local gaming systems in "a year or two." Bakar says that Google is on the verge of being better than local hardware due to advancements in modeling and machine learning. He says that the Stadia...
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Today at TwitchCon, NVIDIA announced some interesting new tech that can be quite beneficial to the livestreaming community. The company has been leveraging the RT and Tensor cores in its current generation of Turing-based GeForce RTX graphics cards to enable features like real-time ray tracing, but that same hardware will be used to power the company’s new RTX Broadcast Engine. The RTX Broadcast Engine will leverage the onboard Tensor cores to enable a wide variety of effects in real-time including style filters, augmented reality, and greenscreens. In the case of RTX Greenscreen, NVIDIA is using artificial intelligence to scrub the background in the livestream, leaving just your face and...
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