The streaming wars are heating up: corporate content giants like Netflix, Amazon, and Disney are all playing their positions, strengthening their value propositions. The sheer number of upcoming streaming services available — HBO Max, Disney+, Peacock, etc. — and the bundling that’s beginning to happen (think: Verizon subscribers getting Disney+) are making it feel, more than ever, like…
Ubisoft is delaying almost every game it has announced
October 24, 2019
Ubisoft is delaying several major games on its upcoming slate. Watch Dogs: Legion had been set for March 6th and Gods & Monsters had a release date of February 25th, while Rainbow Six Quarantine had also been earmarked for the first quarter of 2020. Those games…
Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek is the latest Twitch megastar to abandon the Amazon-owned streaming service in favor of Microsoft’s Mixer platform.
Grzesiek, a former professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player, made his announcement on Twitter today. His first…
Google achieves state-of-the-art NLP performance with an enormous language model and data set
October 24, 2019
Transfer learning, or a technique that entails pretraining an AI model on a data-rich task before fine-tuning it on another task, has been successfully applied in domains from robotics to object classification. But it holds particular promise in the subfield of natural language processing (NLP), where it’s given rise to a diversity of benchmark-besting approaches. To advance it further…
Former Xbox executive Mike Ybarra is Blizzard's new GM
October 24, 2019
Former Xbox executive Mike Ybarra has revealed his next role: he’s joining Blizzard as executive vice-president and general manager. He’ll step into the job just after Blizzcon, which takes place next weekend.
I’m very happy to announce I’m…
Yesterday we saw Selena Gomez debut a new song and music video that was shot on the iPhone 11 Pro. Now we’ve some more examples of just how well Apple’s latest iPhones can capture video and stills without external gear like gimbals, lenses, or special lighting. The…
Consumer Intelligence Research Partners says its data suggests that around 20% of US iPhone buyers in Q3 opted to buy one of the three iPhone 11 models despite availability being limited to the final week in the quarter.
The market intelligence firm says more budget-conscious consumers had two different approaches to balancing features against price…
First, and most obviously, to buy the…
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare multiplayer impressions — A romp through a battlefield playground
October 24, 2019
While the single-player campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is intense, ponderous, and serious, the tone of multiplayer combat the opposite. It’s a romp through a battlefield playground, where players shriek for joy whenever they get a kill.
I’ve played the full…
Where to watch the Apple TV app: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, smart TVs, and more
October 24, 2019
The Apple TV app is Apple’s attempt to unify content from multiple channels and providers into a single experience with an Up Next queue of shows in progress, recommendations about what to watch next, and access to your purchases from the iTunes video and movie…
Google Stadia’s first game-dev studio opens in Montreal
October 24, 2019
Google is launching its cloud-gaming service Stadia on November 19. The company is positioning this as the first giant leap into a console-less future. But one thing that will help Stadia succeed is marquee, exclusive content. So hopefully Google is starting to make some of its own games. Well, today, the company revealed that it is opening a studio in Montreal to do exactly that. That team…
