Cricket match streaming has been the prime driver of new users for streaming platforms in India.
By securing numerous cricket rights, Disney and Reliance have left rival services with limited content options to attract fans.
“The 2023-27 IPL broadcasting now sit under the JV – Viacom 18 has digital streaming rights (won for US$2.9bn) while Star has TV broadcasting rights for US$2.8bn.
Combined with about 8% of the TV market that Viacom18 assumes in India, the merged operations — which will feature some 120 TV channels — will command about 49% of the broadcasting market.
In a statement Wednesday, Disney and Reliance said they will reach 750 million users in India with the merged entity.
Elon Musk’s crusade against the extremism research organization the Center for Countering Digital Hate will have its day in court on Thursday.
After Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the CCDH published reports detailing rising hate speech on X and how unbanned accounts, including neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, stood to make the company millions in ad revenue.
Unlike the CCDH lawsuit, X is suing Media Matters for America in Texas, which doesn’t have California’s anti-SLAPP protections.
A loss in court for the CCDH would likely have an immediate chilling effect on researchers who track hate speech and misinformation on social media.
“This ridiculous lawsuit is a textbook example of a wealthy, unaccountable company weaponizing the courts to silence researchers, simply for studying the spread of hate speech, misinformation and extremism online,” Ahmed said.
Anamorph, a new filmmaking and technology company, announced its launch today.
Plus, there are certain scenes pinned to the same timeslot in each version, including the scene where Eno discusses generative art.
“We just let the generative platform run wild with Eno’s entire music catalog and all the footage and no rules.
“The platform selects and sequences edited scene files, but it also builds its own pure generative scenes and transitions, creating video and original 5.1 audio elements dynamically.
He also stresses, “This is a generative system, not generative AI.
Want to weave various Stability AI-generated video clips into a movie?
Morph Studio, which has its own text-to-video model, just introduced an AI filmmaking platform.
Undergirding the creation process is Morph’s partnership with Stability AI, though eventually, Morph plans to introduce an array of generative video models for users to choose from.
AI has introduced a new workflow to film production,” Morph’s co-founder Xu Huaizhe said in an interview with TechCrunch.
Meme generatingXu’s commitment to creating a community around videos was evident in Morph’s inaugural product endeavor: a place for sharing AI-generated memes.
YouTube Create, Google’s standalone mobile app aimed at creators, which helps them produce both Shorts and longer videos, is expanding to a broader set of markets after last fall’s launch into beta testing.
The idea behind Create is to offer video creators an easy-to-use suite of free tools for making videos on the go.
With Create, users can upload clips, split and trim videos, use effects, and access royalty-free music to complement their videos.
By offering a suite of tools just for YouTube creators, the company hopes to capture more of the market that prefers to use standalone tools for editing videos.
Starting today, the Create app is available in new markets including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turky.
WhatsApp announced today that it is rolling out a “search by date” function for individual and group chats on Android devices.
Users can only search for a chat on a particular date instead of specifying a date range.
To use the feature, users have to go a one-on-one or group chat details by tapping on the contact or the group name.
To search by date, they have to tap on the search button and then tap the calendar icon.
Users can already search through conversations by media type such as links, media, and docs through the conversation detail page.
Reliance, its portfolio Viacom18 and Disney are merging their media businesses in India, creating the largest media entity in the South Asian market.
Reliance will control and own 16.34% of the joint venture, which it has valued at $8.5 billion.
Reliance, which is India’s most valuable firm, said it sees an opportunity to expand and streamline its presence in the Indian fast-growing market by merging its media assets with Disney India.
Reliance, which owns more than 60% in Viacom18, plans to invest $1.4 billion into the joint venture for its growth strategy.
The “strategic” merger of Reliance and Disney India also unites two leading Indian streamers, JioCinema and Disney+Hotstar.
Saining Xie, a computer science professor at NYU, began the research project that spawned the diffusion transformer in June 2022.
Diffusion models typically have a “backbone,” or engine of sorts, called a U-Net.
In other words, larger and larger transformer models can be trained with significant but not unattainable increases in compute.
The current process of training diffusion transformers potentially introduces some inefficiencies and performance loss, but Xie believes this can be addressed over the long horizon.
“I’m interested in integrating the domains of content understanding and creation within the framework of diffusion transformers.
TikTok is losing even more songs over its quarrel with Universal Music Group (UMG), as the social media network is starting to remove songs published by UMG, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Tuesday.
As a result, TikTok had to remove songs owned or distributed by UMG by January 31.
Now, the company has to remove songs that contain compositions controlled by Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG).
The company says UMG and UMPG’s catalogue represents anywhere from 20-30% of popular songs on TikTok.
Artists and songwriters will also be losing out on royalties earned from their music on TikTok.
The Displace wireless TV, that sticks to walls, plans new models and new AI featuresAt CES 2023 a startup hardware company called Displace launched the 55-inch ‘Display Flex’, a “wireless” $3,000 4K OLED TV which sticks to walls without a traditional mounting.
To begin with, the new ‘Display Mini’ will be a smaller 27 inch TV and designed for a kitchen or bathroom space.
The Displace devices will also have a Thermal camera built-in that has potential health applications (like reading your body heat maps to detect inflammation etc.
While most consumers are fine with a traditional TV setup, it’s businesses that need to be able to mount a TV on a wall, or even a window, as Displace is capable of doing.
And should that fail, the screen will gradually lower itself using a zipline – like a spider walking down a web – from the wall.
