Charlotte Henry

The branding around HBO Max is all a bit confused. It might be getting even messier as MediaPost suggests that a Peacock-style ad-supported version is on the way.

Those HBO-centric TV shows, movies and other content, run no advertising. So “Game of Thrones” and “The Sopranos” can continue to run in their unedited pure form. Again, shows many advertisers might avoid. Still, advertising might appear before and after — not during a TV episode. However, in other content — such as those TV shows linked to longtime WarnerMedia Turner ad-supported networks — TNT, TBS, truTV, and CNN — they could continue to have advertising during a show, just like they did when airing on traditional, linear TV networks. Viewers would expect that. But when it comes to movies running on ad-free channels — such as TCM, the longtime, ad-free Turner classic movie channel, some paid messaging could also appear, according to reports. Overall, it’s not surprising advertising inventory will be similar to most slimmed-down premium TV platforms — around four minutes per hour of commercials, but perhaps only two minutes at other times

Amazon Music launched podcasts for customers in the U.S. UK., Germany and Japan on Wednesday. It will include a range of popular existing shows as well as originals, The Verge reported, and increases the pressure on Spotify.

The company issued an update today that brings more than 70,000 shows to the platform, including some major titles, like Serial and Pod Save America, as well as new exclusive deals like a show with DJ Khaled called The First One, where he’ll interview artists about their breakthrough hits and the stories behind them. Disgraceland, a popular show from iHeartMedia, will also become exclusive to the platform starting in February 2021. Podcasts can be listened to through the updated Amazon Music app, on the web, or on Amazon Echo devices. Echo devices will search Amazon Music by default and will remember where listeners left off, regardless of what platform they use to listen. The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon will be selling ads for its shows, although it’s unclear if that means DJ Khaled and other hosts will be reading ads and if paid subscribers will hear these ads, similarly to Spotify.

YouTube unveiled plans to begin rolling out a new product called ‘Shorts’ in a blog post on Tuesday. It is user-generated videos that last up to 15 seconds. Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before…

We’re excited to announce that we are building YouTube Shorts, a new short-form video experience right on YouTube for creators and artists who want to shoot short, catchy videos using nothing but their mobile phones. Over the next few days in India, we’re launching an early beta of Shorts with a handful of new creation tools to test this out. This is an early version of the product, but we’re releasing it now to bring you — our global community of users, creators and artists — on our journey with us as we build and improve Shorts. We’ll continue to add more features and expand to more countries in the coming months as we learn from you and listen to your feedback. Here are more details on what to expect.

Could there be life… around Venus?! That’s a question being asked by some UK scientists, who found evidence of phosphine, a gas associated with life, around the planet’s atmosphere, BBC News reported.

On Earth, phosphine is associated with life, with microbes living in the guts of animals like penguins, or in oxygen-poor environments such as swamps. For sure, you can make it industrially, but there are no factories on Venus; and there are certainly no penguins. So why is this gas there, 50km up from the planet’s surface? Prof Jane Greaves, from Cardiff University, UK and colleagues are asking just this question.
They’ve published a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy detailing their observations of phosphine at Venus, as well as the investigations they’ve made to try to show this molecule could have a natural, non-biological origin. But for the moment, they’re stumped… Given everything we know about Venus and the conditions that exist there, no-one has yet been able to describe an abiotic pathway to phosphine, not in the quantities that have been detected. This means a life source deserves consideration.

NVIDIA’s purchase of Arm throws about a lot of interesting questions. One is what, if anything, does it mean for Apple. Gizomodo took a look.

Nvidia, however, is the least controversial processor company that could buy Arm. While it also licenses Arm technology, Nvidia’s main schtick is GPUs. There’s a reason you don’t really hear about Nvidia with regard to smartphones. In fact, the only real outside hardware using its mobile chipset Tegra is the Nintendo Switch and the Magic Leap headset, which let’s be real, doesn’t really count as a win. That said, should the deal go through, Nvidia buying Arm could mean a lot of major improvements to the Tegra chipset and could theoretically, be a good thing for Nintendo down the line.

GQ has taken a look at Apple’s green revolution in a new feature. It poses the question – will there be a carbon neutral iPhone?

When Cook unveils the iPhone 12 to an empty arena in Cupertino, California, in the next few weeks, it is therefore sure to be its most eco-friendly smartphone ever. If history is a guide, this will largely go unmentioned compared to the usual cocktail of redesigned hardware, customer satisfaction scores and perhaps “one more thing” to send the tech press into a tizz. Make no mistake, for a company that sold a reported $142 billion worth of iPhones last year, this is the work that we ought to be scrutinising most carefully right now… [Lisa Jackson] says that it wasn’t only the scale of the task that drew her to the job, but also the belief that Apple didn’t merely want to tick boxes. “During my interviews no one said, ‘What do we have to do to get in front of all these environmental rules and regulations?’” she recalls. “They said, ‘What can we do to lead the world to a better place?’ And that was really impressive to me. I didn’t run across that practically ever.’”