Best apps for Samsung Phonecast right now

If you want to use phone apps that aren’t built for VR, Samsung Phonecast allows you to take advantage of that virtual screen real-estate.

One of the drawbacks of the Gear VR is that not all apps are built to be immersive. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch your favorite videos on a gigantic virtual screen. Samsung Phonecast VR places you in a picnic with a view of a 200 inch screen that can play videos from popular services such as YouTube, Sling TV, and more.

The viewing experience is very similar to using the Netflix app on the Gear VR and is a great way to feel like you’re in a cinema while you’re in a much smaller space. Here are some of the best apps to use with Samsung Phonecast right now.

Read more at VRHeads!

PlayStation 4 Pro vs. Xbox One X: Which should you buy?

Welcome to 4K gaming, Sony and Microsoft.

Gamers have been politely discussing the merits of owning an Xbox verses owning a PlayStation for a long, long time. Some years, the scales tip one way, some years the scales tip the other way. The truth is there’s never been a “winner” in this particular conversation for very long, but if you have no loyalty toward one or the other it’s not uncommon to pick based on which is more popular or more capable at the time.

This year, the conversation lands squarely on the shoulders of the latest console heavyweights. Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro and Microsoft’s Xbox One X aren’t so much a new generation of console as they are more capable versions of the existing generation. These are the versions built to be a little more future-proof, and help set the stage for new gaming experiences.

Here’s how the two compare with one another.

See PlayStation 4 Pro at Amazon

See Xbox One X at Amazon

Way less interesting on the outside

There’s no nice way to put this, both the Xbox One X and the PlayStation 4 Pro look kind of bland.

Microsoft successfully shrunk the massive bland box that was the original Xbox One, and the result is a slightly less boring thing that will easily be mistaken for a generic DVR when it is not powered on. Sony took the slanted box look of the PlayStation 4 and made it bigger to hold more hardware, but it’s still just a slanted box with curved edges.

The PS4 Pro design has a little more character than the Xbox One X, but not enough to really matter. When you fire up both consoles you get either the iconic blue pulse of the PlayStation 4 or the glowing white pulse of the Xbox and that winds up being enough to make these things feel a little more alive. What’s more interesting is how similarly wide these machines are. The Xbox One X is just slightly wider than the PlayStation 4 Pro, but it makes up for it by being appreciably smaller going the other way. The slanted design of the PlayStation 4 series has always made the console feel longer than it needed to, but this design decision feels particularly exaggerated with the larger Pro model and the Xbox One X looks positively dainty by comparison.

I guess it’s not what’s on the outside that counts though. Here’s a quick look at how the specs compare.

A few other interesting things to note:

• Sony includes a headset in the box so you can use voice commands and chat right away. Microsoft does not.
• Xbox One X still fully supports TV passthrough=, complete with HDMI-in and IR out. PS4 Pro has none of these features.
• Both Xbox One and PS4 Pro have internal power supplies, so no more ugly bricks!

Way more interesting on the inside

Microsoft managed to make the smallest Xbox it has ever made, and at the same time made it noticeably more powerful than the larger PlayStation 4 Pro — at least on paper. As impressive as the gap between the six-teraflop performance cap on the Xbox One X is compared to the mere 4.5 teraflops on the PlayStation 4 Pro, there are a few things you need to know about how that translates to real-world performance in games.

By the time these consoles have fully matured it’s possible there will be obvious visual differences between an Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro version of the same game.

The original versions of a lot of Xbox One and PlayStation 4 games were barely capable of “full HD” 1080p gaming at 30fps. The target for a lot of Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro games is 4K gaming at 30fps, but that’s not the limit. There are a bunch of games on both PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X capable of 4K gaming at 60fps with HDR enabled. Currently, all of these 4K games are being labeled as “enhanced” because they support these more advanced gaming modes, but still play on regular Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles.

Here’s where things get interesting. Over time, developers are going to be able to do more with the Xbox One X. We’re already starting to see some enhanced games for the Xbox One X that look a little better than their PS4 Pro counterparts. Right now the differences are subtle, and only really apparent when the games are subjected to thorough analysis. By the time these consoles have fully matured and developers have started to really push the limits of the hardware, it’s possible there will be a clear visual difference between an Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro version of the same game.

One really important caveat to all of this performance talk is that it only matters when you’re playing on a 4K television. In fact, in some cases, it only matters if you’re playing on a 4K HDR television. That’s far from everyone, and if you’re playing on a 1080p television there’s a limit to how much of these improvements you’re actually going to see. The performance on either console will still be well above what you saw on the original Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but the potential performance gap we’re discussing here won’t be something you’ll experience until you make the jump to a 4K television.

Four HDR TVs under $700

Virtual Reality Gaming

This section was originally going to be a lot more interesting than it ended up being in real life. Sony’s PlayStation VR headset works best with the PlayStation 4 Pro, and so far in the VR world this headset has been remarkably successful with well over a million headsets sold in the first year of its existence. PlayStation VR games continue to roll out at a healthy pace, and have started to include big name developers like Bethesda and Capcom. It is the most popular VR platform by a fairly healthy margin, and continues to grow quickly.

Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality headsets are new to the Windows world, but will not be coming to the Xbox One X. Despite the Xbox team’s insistence that the console is capable of delivering the full Windows Mixed Reality experience, Microsoft has made it clear the Xbox won’t see a Mixed Reality headset until there can be a wireless option. Microsoft doesn’t want users to trip over wires in the living room, or have extra hardware going in between the Xbox and the television like you have with the PlayStation VR.

Bottom line? If you’re an Xbox fan eagerly awaiting VR, don’t expect it to happen anytime soon.

Which should you buy?

There’s a lot to consider when buying a game console, but for most folks, it comes down to a couple of things:

• What are my friends playing on right now?
• Where are the best games?
• How much does it cost?

While that first one is up to you to answer, the other two are really easy this go around. If you want the best single player games, you probably want a PlayStation 4 Pro. Not only are there more really good single-player games on the PlayStation right now, but with the addition of a PlayStation VR, there’s an entire category of fun local games that are not coming to the Xbox anytime soon. If you care about these kinds of games, the PlayStation 4 Pro is absolutely the console you want to go with. Xbox is more focused on multiplayer gaming right now, and that is also a good thing.

See at Amazon

As for the price tag, that $399 PlayStation 4 Pro price isn’t really that much smaller than the $499 Xbox One X price. It’s cheaper, sure, but there’s an argument to be made for this Xbox being $100 better than its PlayStation counterpart if you own a high-end 4K television. If you care about having the best graphics, the Xbox One X is going to be the best thing for you to buy long-term. Even if you don’t have a 4K television right now, a lot of you probably will make the upgrade before the next big update to the Xbox hardware.

See at Amazon

Why are we talking about game consoles on Android Central? Let us explain.

PlayStation 4

• PS4 vs. PS4 Slim vs. PS4 Pro: Which should you buy?
• PlayStation VR Review
• Playing PS4 games through your phone is awesome

Amazon

After half a season, ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ is worth paying for

Star Trek: Discovery launched in September to anticipation and questions, but more than that there was grumbling. After all, the show wasn’t easily accessible in the United States. In Canada, it aired on the Space channel, and in the rest of the world, it was available on Netflix. But in the US, you needed CBS All Access, a standalone subscription service, to watch the show. Predictably, there was outrage. For months leading up to the show, people (myself included) railed against CBS’s decision to sequester it in this way. But now, half a season in, one thing is crystal clear: The model might be frustrating, but the show is good enough to justify it. It’s time to accept that this is the reality of the situation and enjoy Star Trek: Discovery for what it is.

The bottom line is that Star Trek: Discovery is going to stay on CBS All Access for the foreseeable future. There were hopes that CBS would cave and put episodes on Netflix for the second season or move the show to broadcast. It’s safe to say that won’t happen. The show is a success right where it is; the network knows that Star Trek: Discovery isn’t for everyone. “Not everyone’s going to subscribe to every premium network,” according to Marc DeBevoise, the president and COO of CBS Interactive, in an interview with Engadget.

The service was originally designed for cord cutters who still wanted access to CBS and its vast library, but the vision has grown from there. All Access is being positioned as a fully premium service, rather than an add-on to broadcast. DeBevoise told Engadget, “We are looking to be the premium version of the number one broadcast network. So how do we thread the needle of delivering for a lot of people but also enabling ourselves to be viewed as the premium service? I mean, people would pay for some of those other premium networks out there.” In other words, how is this different than cord cutters who subscribe to HBO Now to watch Game of Thrones? The challenge here is launching a new streaming service, rather than relying on an existing one.

Discovery is a show that was created, developed, scripted and produced exclusively for this streaming network. And that’s evident in the way it tells its story. “It’s a more involved form of character-based storytelling,” said DeBevoise. “You can go much deeper in the characters. You can go much farther with each smaller storyline and really peel back the layers that are there.” Being able to produce the entire season at once, as streaming services do, allows for a different kind of story, which has become increasingly clear as the show progresses.

On Sunday, CBS aired the midseason finale of Star Trek: Discovery; the show will return on January 7th. Over the course of these first nine episodes, viewers have been treated to complex and intriguing characters, fresh reinventions of sci-fi tropes and a moral ambiguity that hasn’t been front and center in previous incarnations of the show. As a life-long Star Trek fan, I’m enamored and engaged with the franchise in a way I haven’t been in years.

That’s not to say the show is for everyone. There are clearly plenty of people who have valid issues with it, from continuity quibbles to the appearance of the Klingons. It’s not perfect, and I don’t think any type of media should be held to that standard. But it’s delivered incredible character development and relationships, and in an era when I’m constantly driven to distraction by the overwhelming amount of entertainment at my fingertips, it has me in a chair at 8:30 PM ET every Sunday. That’s not an easy feat, and frankly, no other show on television right now does that for me. And I’m clearly not the only person who feels that way.

In late October, CBS All Access announced that the show would be coming back for a second season, which was a surprise after only six episodes. It’s clear the service has faith in the show, but also that it’s meeting the goals that All Access has set out: The service is already halfway to its goal of four million subscribers by 2020. DeBevoise said, in unqualified terms, “[Star Trek: Discovery] is absolutely a success.”

It’s time to stop blaming Star Trek: Discovery for the way its content is being served. It’s certainly frustrating to see subscription-based services fragmenting, but the trend is going to continue, at least in the medium term. It’s time to stop derailing every conversation about the show, whether on Twitter, Facebook or comments sections, with complaints about CBS All Access. That’s not an endorsement of the model; it’s simply an acceptance of the fact that this is the reality we live in, and sometimes we aren’t going to get our content the way we want it.

Facebook may be losing the fight against fake news

Facebook has made quite a few headlines when it comes to fake news. In September, it was revealed that Russian groups may have spent $100,000 or more disseminating fake news posts on the social media platform during the 2016 election season. The company has issued a new set of media guidelines that it hopes will improve the News Feed’s algorithms and filter out fake news. However, now Facebook’s fact checkers are speaking out, and their perspective is a grim one. According to The Guardian, Facebook’s latest war on fake news has failed and the entire thing has become nothing more than a PR campaign.

Late last year, when it became clear that Facebook’s fake news problem had influenced the election, CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined steps the organization would take to combat the epidemic. One of these initiatives was to partner with Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) to check whether stories flagged as fake news were real or not.

Now, the fact checkers, who spoke with The Guardian anonymously, have raised concerns about Facebook’s refusal to release statistics on their work, even internally. The social network introduced a “disputed” warning banner for potential fake news, but one fact checker found that it was rare to actually see the tag applied. “Fact checkers said they had queries about how often the tags were placed on articles, what effect they had on the content and what sites were most often targeted — but said that Facebook had not provided information,” reports The Guardian.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about these issues when it comes to Facebook’s fact-checking efforts (or perhaps the lack thereof). Back in September, a report from Politico suggested that the data Facebook had gathered from this fake news “crackdown” could be valuable, but the organization hadn’t shared it. Now, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the reason for its refusal to disclose any data about its fight on fake news might be because Facebook is losing badly.

Source: The Guardian

Why your favorite indie game may not get a boxed edition

The Entertainment Software Rating Board is not a government entity. In fact, it was created in the 1990s specifically to keep Congress out of the video game industry, at a time when lawmakers were loudly condemning the infusion of digital violence in popular culture. The ESRB was modeled after the film industry’s MPAA, doling out ratings for video games in North America. Back in the Clinton era, there were no federal laws requiring publishers to display ratings on their games, and there still aren’t today.

The ESRB oversees the entirety of the video game ratings system, from AAA to independent developers and specialty shops like iam8bit, Special Reserve and Limited Run Games (which release physical editions of digital indie titles). This year, the ESRB announced a change to its rating policy that rocked the very foundation of Limited Run Games’ business model.

Before September, it was possible to launch a boxed version of an existing, digital-only game without paying for an additional ESRB rating. This policy allowed Limited Run to be a lean operation, avoiding ESRB fees and still releasing physical versions of weird digital games (all of which are already rated by the ESRB).

In September, the board announced a new tier for rating digital-to-physical games, allowing any title with a development budget of $1 million or less to be rated as a boxed product for $3,000, rather than the standard submission price of more than $10,000. With this change, all three console manufacturers made it a requirement for every game to pay this fee and carry an ESRB rating — even physical launches of digital titles.

“Obtaining ESRB assigned age and content ratings has always been voluntary,” an ESRB spokesperson tells Engadget. “That said, many US retailers, including most major chains, have policies to only stock or sell games that carry an ESRB rating, and console manufacturers have typically required games that are published on their systems to be rated by ESRB.”

In this case, “voluntary” is a complicated term. Developers aren’t legally required to slap an ESRB rating on their games, but without one, they’re shut out of the mainstream marketplace.

“There’s no nice way to put it; they basically have a monopoly,” Douglas Bogart, co-founder of Limited Run Games, says about the ESRB. “There’s no one above them. You have to follow their rules. Your business basically lives or dies by their whim, which is really scary, in my opinion.”

Limited Run Games specializes in producing physical copies of otherwise digital-only, independent console games, in small batches. These are collectors’ items for fans of cult hits, strange projects and underappreciated gems. The whole endeavor is meant to preserve the indie industry for posterity. With hundreds of new games coming out nearly every day, it’s easy to lose a tiny, digital-only title into the ether — unless its box is sitting on your shelf, snuggled between Halo and Zelda.

The new mandate is a hurdle for Limited Run, which attempts to cover production fees for all of the indie games they box up, taking a portion of the profits afterward. Since Limited Run sells the physical editions through their own storefront, they’ve historically not needed to secure additional ESRB ratings or pay any fees. Now, Limited Run and the developers they work with are required to pay at least $3,000 to the ESRB if they want to get physical.

“We can’t just sign any game we want any more solely based on whether we liked it or not,” Bogart says. “It needs to have a broader appeal so it can sell more units. Basically, this killed off small-run indie games. Video games have a high cost as it is and then adding that ESRB fee on top of it, pretty much makes it unfeasible.”

Some indie developers hit it big with a sub-$1 million game, and for them, the new tier is a great discount. However, for many small developers, $3,000 is an insurmountable barrier.

“That’s a whole month’s salary for some developers, or funding for their next game,” Bogart says. “Some of these people are literally living meal-to-meal.”

Limited Run co-founder Josh Fairhurst adds, “The physical release that we’re putting out could be the difference between them living another day as game developers or closing up shop and going back to something else. I think that what we’re doing in terms of making them money is really important.”

And then there’s the necessary Long Form rating process itself, which can add months to a boxed edition’s release schedule.

“It takes considerably longer now to get a game through the entire process to market, and it also hurts the developer on how much money they’re getting,” Bogart says. “It’s delayed a lot of our stuff, which, as a business, hurts.”

For AAA and mid-size publishers, the new, discounted rate for digital-to-physical games is a net positive — if they publish a game that cost less than $1 million to make, they get to save a few thousand dollars in rating fees. Small indies, however, are now on the hook for at least $3,000 if they want to release a physical product through a service like Limited Run, iam8bit or Special Reserve Games.

It’s not surprising the new rules favor large publishers over small ones, considering the ESRB’s reliance on the multi-billion-dollar AAA gaming market.

The Entertainment Software Association founded the ESRB in 1994, as Congress was holding hearings about violent and sexual content in games like Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, threatening to impose regulations on the entire industry. The ESA is the trade association behind the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, and its due-paying members include the most prominent names in games: Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Tencent and 31 other companies. Aside from a few well-established mid-tier publishers like Focus Home Interactive and Gearbox, the independent industry is not represented in ESA membership.

The ESA oversees the ESRB. All three major console manufacturers are on the board, and all three agreed to mandate the new digital-to-physical rating tier this September.

“They just made it harder for us smaller publishers,” Bogart says. “In some cases, you’re going to see the small publishers probably shrink and go back to digital-only, which is what we were trying to prevent.”

The ESRB has streamlined the rating process for indie developers over the years — in 2011, it rolled out a free, automatic rating system for digital games; it’s still free today. Plus, the ESRB and ESA have invested heavily in the International Age Rating Coalition, which offers free ratings from authorities across the globe. And for midsize or super-successful small studios, the new fee is a real value, implemented “to accommodate publishers of digital games with a small development budget who didn’t initially anticipate releasing their game in a physical form at retail,” as the ESRB puts it. Still, the mandate puts specialty publishers, who tend to work with smaller indie games, in a difficult situation.

Limited Run hasn’t had to cancel any projects because of the new rules — but Special Reserve Games has. Ruiner, a highly acclaimed cyberpunk game from independent Polish studio Reikon Games, was on track to get a physical edition this year, courtesy of Special Reserve. However, on Halloween, the company canceled the boxed version, citing the ESRB’s new mandate:

“In late August, the ESRB announced a new mandate for all physical releases across all consoles would soon be required, and shortly after we announced our intention to produce Ruiner, we received word that this mandate would be applied to it and future new game releases. The process of obtaining this rating comes with a fee that puts the production costs for new releases like Ruiner out of the acceptable range for us to produce physical discs for PS4. This decision was agonizing, and we have tried multiple ways to reach a compromise, but sadly, we have had to change our plans to produce our intended collector edition PS4 discs for Ruiner.”

Not every small-batch publisher has a problem with the ESRB’s new rules. Iam8bit, for example, tells Kotaku it supports the board’s decision, noting that ratings help parents decide which games are suitable for their kids, whether they’re shopping online or in the real world. This is the ESRB’s founding principle, after all — keeping ultra violent, sexual or otherwise “inappropriate” games out of young people’s hands.

Fairhurst just doesn’t see how this mission applies to his business at Limited Run.

“The thing that I think is crazy about this is the ESRB was created to give parents the knowledge that they need to make good purchasing decisions for their children, but there’s not parents wandering onto our site and, in the 10-minute window that we have a game available for sale, picking up the game for their kid’s birthday,” he says. “They’re not uninformed. They’re a very specific type of customer that knows what they’re buying.”

If the ESRB is going to impose a fee on digital-to-physical games, Bogart would like to see it based on the number of discs a publisher will actually produce. Limited Run generally only presses 2,000 or 3,000 copies of a single game, while AAA publishers will press — and sell — hundreds of thousands. For a major publisher, $3,000 or even $14,000 represents just a sliver of a game’s development costs. For Limited Run, the fee raises its costs 20 percent to 100 percent, Bogart says.

“Having to pay for a rating hurts us significantly more than the bigger publishers,” he says. “This might have been seen as a win for a lot of the bigger publishers, but for us that do smaller runs, they’re not taking into consideration how many copies we’re printing. And the fee itself is what hurts us.”

Technically, there are no laws forcing publishers, developers or small-batch distributors to have their games rated. Technically, ESRB ratings are part of a voluntary system. But, practically, the ESRB has the power to dramatically disrupt gaming’s small-batch industry.

“If the ESRB doesn’t let us get through the process of getting a game rated or it’s too expensive, that’s a release we have to cancel,” Bogart says. “That’s potential money we lost for the company and for the developer. If that keeps happening or we keep getting fees from the ESRB for whatever the violations are, they can take us out pretty quickly.”

Qualcomm rejects Broadcom’s buyout bid

Last week, wireless chip manufacturer Broadcom made a $130 billion bid to buy out rival Qualcomm. The unsolicited proposal was expected to be rejected by Qualcomm, and as of this morning, it has been. The company’s board of directors unanimously voted against Broadcom’s bid saying that it undervalued Qualcomm.

“It is the board’s unanimous belief that Broadcom’s proposal significantly undervalues Qualcomm relative to the company’s leadership position in mobile technology and our future growth prospects,” Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm’s chairman of the board, said in a statement. Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf added that the company’s technology — its 5G tech in particular — puts it in a position to generate additional value for stockholders beyond what Broadcom’s bid suggests, and Qualcomm’s director, Tom Horton said, “We are highly confident that the strategy Steve and his team are executing on provides far superior value to Qualcomm shareholders than the proposed offer.”

This is unlikely to be the end of the attempted takeover, however. Sources told Reuters that prior to Qualcomm’s official rejection, Broadcom was already considering a larger bid. It was also exploring the possibility of putting the decision in the shareholders’ hands by nominating individuals to Qualcomm’s board who would engage with negotiation talks. If shareholders are more open to the buyout than the current board is, they would then have the option of voting in new members who are more supportive of the deal.

Source: Qualcomm

Lyft’s international expansion begins this year in Toronto

Lyft started the year hoping to expand into 100 new cities. As of February, the ride-hailing company smashed through that goal and later added an additional 32 states to its coverage area. Today, Lyft announced it’d move into one more place before year’s end: Toronto. This marks the first time the company has expanded beyond our domestic borders. Exact timing for when the service goes live isn’t known at this point, according to the CBC.

Earlier this year, Uber opened an Advanced Technologies Group office in the city with a focus on self-driving vehicles. And Toronto overall is making a case for itself as a city of the future. Last month, Alphabet announced that it’d be making a $50 million investment in the city along the waterfront. That’ll create the Quayside neighborhood, where infrastructure is being built with autonomous vehicles in mind.

Does that mean Lyft and Uber will come to blows? Likely not. Uber can’t exactly afford another PR nightmare at the moment.

Via: CBC

Source: Lyft

Future HomePod Models Could Include Face ID Technology

A new rumor out of Apple’s supply chain over the weekend suggests future iterations of the HomePod could come with 3D-sensing cameras supporting Face ID, similar to the front-facing technology on the iPhone X. Specifically, Inventec Appliances president David Ho mentioned recently that the company sees a trend towards both facial and image recognition technology being incorporated into smart speakers, without specifying which speakers in particular (via Nikkei).

Ho made the comment following Inventec’s latest earnings conference, and analysts listening predict that he was likely referring to “the next generation of Apple’s HomePod.” Inventec Appliances is currently the sole supplier of both Apple’s AirPods and HomePod, but also makes Xiaomi smartphones, Fitbit devices, and Sonos speakers, among others. Given the company’s ties to Apple, analyst Jeff Pu predicts Ho’s comments could suggest a Face ID-enabled HomePod in 2019.

“We see trends that engineers are designing smart speakers that will not only come with voice recognition but also incorporate features such as facial and image recognition,” President David Ho told reporters after the company’s earnings conference.

Jeff Pu, an analyst at Yuanta Investment Consulting, said Apple could roll out HomePods with 3D-sensing cameras in 2019.

Ho said that facial recognition features “are set to make people’s lives more convenient and to make the product easier to use.” He further clarified his comments, however, citing hesitancy about whether smart speakers “with more AI features” would become popular.

HomePod is set to release in December, although Apple has yet to confirm a specific release date for the new device. The upcoming smart speaker was first revealed during WWDC in June, where Apple explained it would be a music-focused speaker with high quality sound, deep Siri integration, and spatial recognition for providing the best sound in any space. Even before it was officially announced, rumors of the device’s production were connected to Inventec Appliances.

Over a year before its unveiling at WWDC 2017, Apple’s “Siri Speaker” was rumored to include facial recognition of some kind as another leg up on competing Echo products from Amazon. At the time, sources with knowledge of Apple’s project said the device would be “self aware” and able to bring up different user profiles as people walk into a room, “such as the music and lighting they like.” The HomePod launching next month will lack any such features and instead be controlled mainly through voice-enabled user prompts with Siri.

Related Roundup: HomePodTags: nikkei.com, Face ID
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Amazon Working on Free Ad-Supported Version of Prime Video as Content War With Apple Intensifies

Amazon is developing a free, ad-supported version of its Prime Video streaming video service, according to Ad Age.

The free tier will complement Amazon’s ad-free, on-demand Prime Video service that is included with an annual $99 subscription to Amazon Prime, which provides free shipping, deals, and other perks to its online shoppers.

Amazon is reportedly in talks with TV networks, movie studios, and other media companies about programming for the service.

For the ad-supported service, Amazon wants to dive into back catalogs of TV and movie studios, looking to beef up its children’s programming, for example, one TV industry insider says. It is also going after lifestyle, travel, cooking and other shows that are a good fit for an e-commerce platform.

Amazon, which is reportedly already estimated to have spent almost $5 billion on content by the end of the year, is said to be doubling down on its content efforts as Apple and several other tech companies push into original programming.

Last week, for example, Apple reportedly outbid Netflix for a new TV show that will star Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. The series is said to revolve around the lives of morning talk show hosts, based on journalist Brian Stelter’s book Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV.

Apple’s push into original content is being led in part by former Sony executives Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, who joined the iPhone maker back in June. Van Amburg and Erlicht are known for their work on many popular TV shows, including Breaking Bad, The Crown, and Better Call Saul.

Of note, Amazon Prime Video is still not available for the Apple TV. Apple said the app will be released by the end of 2017.

Tags: Amazon, Amazon Prime Video
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Apple Watch Nike+ Series 3 Available With New Midnight Fog Band Starting Tomorrow

Nike today announced the Apple Watch Nike+ Series 3 will be available with a new “Midnight Fog” colored Sport Loop starting November 14.

Nike says the Space Gray aluminum casing coupled with the darkly shaded Sport Loop combine to give this particular model a so-called “stealthy color scheme” of “deep grays with iridescent accents.”

The new Midnight Fog edition will be offered in a Cellular + GPS configuration for the usual $399 on Nike.com and at Nike retail stores in the United States. It’s unclear if the model will be sold by Apple as well.

The new Apple Watch Nike+ Series 3 variation will be accompanied by Nike’s new Air VaporMax in a matching Midnight Fog color. The $190 shoes will be available November 27 in North America and November 24 elsewhere.

Apple Watch Nike+ comes with all the features of Apple Watch Series 3, including cellular, which lets you take calls, send messages, and stream Apple Music without needing to pair the watch to your iPhone.

Apple Watch Nike+ models have exclusive Nike watch faces designed specifically for Apple Watch, with digital and analog styles. You can launch the Nike+ Run Club app directly from the face by tapping the complication.

Related Roundups: Apple Watch, watchOS 4Tag: Nike+Buyer’s Guide: Apple Watch (Buy Now)
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