 |
|
|
|||||
Some live sports and studio shows from ESPN will start appearing on Disney+ this year. Disney CEO Bob Iger told investors on an earnings call that this follows an encouraging start for Hulu programming on the company's namesake streaming service. "By the end of this calendar year, we will be adding an ESPN tile to Disney+, giving all US subscribers access to select live games and studio programming within the Disney+ app," Iger said. "We see this as a first step to bringing ESPN to Disney+ viewers, as we ready the launch of our enhanced standalone ESPN streaming service in the fall of 2025." Iger also noted that ESPN+ subscribers will also be able to access content from that service through the new Disney+ tile, so Disney bundle subscribers will more or less have everything in one app. Iger didn't reveal exactly what sports Disney would make available to everyone on Disney+, but made it clear that it would only bring a modest amount of programming over from ESPN. The company is also working with Fox Sports and Warner Bros. Discovery on another sports streaming service that's slated to arrive later this year and will include games from the NFL, MLB, NHL and NBA. Meanwhile, Disney+ just had its first profitable quarter in its four and a half years of existence. The service had been expected to lose $100 million in the first three months of 2024, but it actually posted a $47 million profit surely aided by Taylor Swift's Eras Tour concert film debuting on the platform in March. However, Disney's streaming business as a whole (which also includes Hulu and ESPN+) lost $18 million during the quarter. That's still a vast improvement over the $659 million that side of the business lost a year earlier as Disney edges toward overall profitability in streaming.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/disney-will-start-showing-some-live-sports-from-espn-this-year-173524610.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Designers, photographers and other creators may want to check out this deal from Adobe. From now through May 13, first-time subscribers can save 40 percent on the monthly cost of the Creative Cloud All Apps plan for a full year. That brings the price down from a hefty $60 per month to a slightly more palatable $36. To get the deal, you'll need to agree to a 12-month subscription commitment. After the year is up, the plan will automatically renew at the regular price, unless you cancel. If you want to pay for the whole year at once, it'll run you $396, which is also 40 percent of the standard $660. Creative Cloud All Apps includes online access to Adobe stalwarts like Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, Illustrator, and InDesign, plus about 20 additional apps including Firefly, the text-to-image generative AI tool and the social-content-focused Adobe Express. The plan also comes with 100GB of cloud storage, tutorials, Adobe Fonts and 1,000 credits per month to use towards generative AI creation in Firefly and others. Adobe doesn't often run discounts on their service, so this is a rare opportunity to catch a break on the tools that, for some creative pursuits, are tough to replace. The $36 monthly price tag is likely the closest most of us will get to the enviable student and teacher pricing of $20 per month. Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/adobes-full-creative-cloud-suite-is-40-percent-off-in-a-rare-deal-170847284.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
We all think were pretty good at identifying images made by AI. Its the weird alien text in the background. Its the bizarre inaccuracies that seem to break the laws of physics. Most of all, its those gruesome hands and fingers. However, the technology is constantly evolving and it wont be too long until we wont be able to tell whats real or not. Industry leader OpenAI is trying to get ahead of the problem by creating a toolset that detects images created by its own DALL-E 3 generator. The results are a mixed bag. OpenAI The company says it can accurately detect pictures whipped up by DALL-3 98 percent of the time, which is great. There are, though, some fairly big caveats. First of all, the image has to be created by DALL-E and, well, its not the only image generator on the block. The internet overfloweth with them. According to data provided by OpenAI, the system only managed to successfully classify five to ten percent of images made by other AI models. Also, it runs into trouble if the image has been modified in any way. This didnt seem to be a huge deal in the case of minor modifications, like cropping, compression and changes in saturation. In these cases, the success rate was lower but still within acceptable range at around 95 to 97 percent. Adjusting the hue, however, dropped the success rate down to 82 percent. OpenAI Now heres where things get really sticky. The toolset struggled when used to classify images that underwent more extensive changes. OpenAI didnt even publish the success rate in these cases, stating simply that "other modifications, however, can reduce performance. This is a bummer because, well, its an election year and the vast majority of AI-generated images are going to be modified after the fact so as to better enrage people. In other words, the tool will likely recognize an image of Joe Biden asleep in the Oval Office surrounded by baggies of white powder, but not after the creator slaps on a bunch of angry text and Photoshops in a crying bald eagle or whatever. At least OpenAI is being transparent regarding the limitations of its detection technology. Its also giving external testers access to the aforementioned tools to help fix these issues, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company, along with bestie Microsoft, has poured $2 million into something called the Societal Resilience Fund, which hopes to expand AI education and literacy. Unfortunately, the idea of AI mucking up an election is not some faraway concept. Its happening right now. There have already been AI-generated election ads and disingenuous images used this cycle, and theres likely much more to come as we slowly, slowly, slowly (slowly) crawl toward November.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/openai-says-it-can-detect-images-made-by-its-own-software-mostly-170012976.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Apple refreshed its iPads in a major way today with new launches in both the iPad Pro and iPad Air lineups. Both have significant hardware updates, but somehow the iPad Pro now weighs less than all of its Air equivalents. The 11-inch iPad Pro is 0.98 pounds (444 grams for the Wi-Fi model and 446 grams with cellular), while the same size version of the iPad Air is 1.02 pounds (462 grams with no difference between the Wi-Fi and cellular models). The weight difference is more evident in the 13-inch tablets the iPad Air comes in that size for the first time. The 13-inch iPad Pro starts at 1.28 pounds (or 579 grams) for the Wi-Fi model, with the cellular version coming in three grams heavier. Meanwhile, though the Wi-Fi and LTE variants of the 13-inch iPad Air are only one gram apart, they both weigh 1.36 pounds, which is noticeably heavier than the iPad Pro. Apple says the latest iPad Pro is the thinnest product it has made, with a switch to dual OLED panels helping make the tablet more slender than ever. On the flip side, that makes the name of the iPad Air a little janky at this point. Sure, it's just a name and it doesn't matter that much. But at 1.03 pounds, the original Air was nearly half a pound lighter than the iPad 4. The latest model is essentially the same weight, but it's now heavier and chonkier than the iPad Pro, making Apple's premium tablets literally lighter than Air. Follow all of the news live from Apple's 'Let Loose' event right here.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-m4-ipad-pro-is-literally-lighter-than-air-164942372.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Another Apple event is in the books and, as expected, the Let Loose showcase was all about iPad. We now have our first Apple device powered by an M4 chip in the iPad Pro, with the company surprisingly choosing to debut it there rather than in a Mac. There's also an upgraded iPad Air that's available in two sizes: 11 inches and 13 inches. There are some accessory updates too, which isn't a big shock given that an Apple Pencil was prominent in the event's teaser image. So, without further ado, here's a rundown of everything Apple announced at its blessedly brief Let Loose event. iPad Pro It had been expected for a while that any updated iPad Pro would have an M3 chip, but Apple decided to upend the expectations of many by instead slotting the brand new M4 into its highest-end tablet. Apple says the new device delivers 50 percent faster performance than the M2 iPad Pro. Rendering performance is said to be four times faster than on the M2 Pro as well. For the first time on an iPad, Apple is bringing support for dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing and hardware-accelerated mesh shading to the Pro with the M4. There are some power efficiencies here too. Apple says the M4 can deliver the same performance as an M2 using half the power. So, if you're using the tablet for tasks that aren't too strenuous, it stands to reason that the battery should last for longer. The other major upgrade for the iPad Pro is new display tech called Tandem OLED. As the name suggests, it uses two OLED panels layered on top of each other. That means this tablet should have richer colors and deeper blacks on what Apple is calling the Ultra Retina XDR display. Apple says the brightness levels max out at 1000 nits for standard and HDR, and 1600 nits for HDR. Despite the dual layer, the OLED panels are still thinner than an LCD display. To that end, Apple says the iPad Pro is now somehow thinner than an iPod nano (RIP, you beautiful thing), making it the company's most slender product ever. There's a nano-textured glass option for the first time on an iPad Pro too, but only if you opt for at least 1TB of storage. One other notable change is that the Ultra Wide 12MP front-facing camera is now on the landscape edge. The Magic Keyboard users out there may be pleased about that tweak. The new iPad Pro starts at $999 for the 11-inch model and $1,299 for the 13-inch, each with 256GB of storage. Add $200 to each of you want 5G cellular connectivity via eSIM. We've already had a hands-on with the iPad Pro and, at first glance, the display seems like the show stealer. M4 We have to chat a bit about what's powering the iPad Pro: the all-new M4 chipset. The Pro is the first Apple product to use the M4, even before any Mac. The M4 has a new CPU with four performance cores and six efficiency cores. There's a 10-core GPU as well. Notably, the chipset's neural engine is focused on machine learning and AI. Apple says the neural engine is capable of 38 trillion operations per second it's 60 times faster than the first neural engine that debuted in the A11 chip. AI features that the M4 will power on the iPad Pro will include real-time Live Captions, the ability to isolate subjects and remove backgrounds in videos in Final Cut Pro and automatic musical notation in StaffPad. Odds are high that we'll start seeing Macs with the M4 pop up later this year, which might put folks off from buying the M3 MacBook Air Apple started selling just a couple of months ago (though the company says the MBA is now the best-selling 13-inch and 15-inch laptop on the planet). The main reason for Apple skipping a silicon generation with the iPad Pro is likely to start a transition into AI hardware ahead of its Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Expect the company to talk much more about what it plans to do with AI across all its products next month. iPad Air Apple The iPad Air was well overdue for an update after being stuck with an aging M1 chipset for over two years. The latest model (or models) boast an M2 chipset. Still recent enough to make it a notable upgrade from the previous Air while keeping the more powerful iPad Pro distinct. As I mentioned, the iPad Air now comes in two sizes, the existing 11-inch form factor and the new, larger 13-inch variant. That makes the Air the most cost-effective large screen iPad as things stand. Oh, and the front-facing camera is also positioned on the longer edge of the Air now. Thanks, Apple. The company has doubled the base storage from the previous generation to 128GB. The 11-inch model starts at $599 and the new 13-inch Air is $799. For 5G cellular connectivity, you'll need to pay $150 extra. As with pretty much everything else Apple showed off today, the new iPad Air will drop next Wednesday. We've also had some hands-on time with the new iPad Air. With the combination of the price and the various hardware updates, Apple could be onto another winner here. Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard Apple There's a new Apple Pencil around town and it has some nifty tricks up its sleeve, including haptic feedback. The Apple Pencil Pro supports a newsqueeze gesture too. If you rotate the barrel, you can change the orientation of brush and pen tools, just as you would with a pen and paper. Find My support for the first time in an Apple Pencil is very welcome, considering how easy it is too lose the dang thing if you don't store it securely on the side of your iPad. The Apple Pencil Pro costs $129. Preorders are open today and it ships on May 15. Apple Meanwhile, there's a new Magic Keyboard that's only compatible with the iPad Pro. This one is made from aluminum to give it a more premium feel and perhaps help users believe that the iPad Pro is the laptop replacement Apple has long envisioned its tablets being. The latest version has a larger trackpad with haptic feedback, while there's a row of function keys, la a more traditional keyboard. The new Magic Keyboard also ships next week. If you want one for the 11-inch iPad Pro, it'll run you $300, while the larger variant is $350. Follow all of the news live from Apple's 'Let Loose' event right here.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/everything-announced-at-apples-let-loose-ipad-event-161005007.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Sites : [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] next »