Some Roku smart TV owners are seeing banner ads appear over live content, according to a thread on the r/cordcutters subreddit. Ars Technica reports: [A photo posted by the Reddit user] shows a Sharp TV running Roku software and displaying an ad for a bed over a live sports broadcast, plus a prompt to 'press OK to get offer.' These ads don't seem to appear on Roku's own hardware, like the Roku Ultra, Express, Streambar, or Streaming Stick. Rather, they show up on certain smart TVs running the Roku TV platform -- and it might just be certain brands, like Sharp. Some owners of TCL Roku TVs commented that they had not seen the ads. Fortunately, users in the thread reported that the feature can be disabled in privacy settings. But it's possible that doing so may disable other Roku features.

Netflix has raised its monthly subscription price by $1 to $2 per month in the United States depending on the plan, the company said on Friday, to help pay for new programming to compete in the crowded streaming TV market. From a report: The standard plan, which allows for two simultaneous streams, now costs $15.49 per month, up from $13.99, in the United States. Prices also went up in Canada, where the standard plan climbed to C$16.49 from C$14.99. The price increases, the first in those markets since October 2020, took effect immediately for new customers. Existing members will see the new prices in the coming weeks when they receive their monthly bills.

Last night, Netflix's "The Power of the Dog" became the streamer's first-ever movie to take home a Golden Globe for best motion picture (drama). The movie also won for best director (Jane Campion) and best supporting actor (Kodi Smit-McPhee). As TechCrunch points out, "NBC announced in May 2021 it wouldn't broadcast the awards show this year after an investigation by The L.A. Times revealed the lack of diversity within the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the organization that hosts the annual event, as well as evidence of some members receiving gifts that amounted to bribes. [...] Instead, the event's winners were live-tweeted in an often bizarre fashion." From the report: In addition to being an overall quieter year as the HFPA tries to reform its organization following the controversies, the winning networks also aren't touting their victories as they would normally, despite some seeing some notable firsts and upsets. In prior years, HBO would be happily promoting its sweep over rivals. The network led the night with six wins, including four for HBO and two for HBO Max. Several of these were for its TV series "Succession," which won for best TV drama, TV drama actor (Jeremy Strong) and supporting actress (Sarah Snook.) HBO Max's comedy "Hacks" also notably beat out Emmy winner "Ted Lasso" (Apple TV+) as best comedy, and saw its lead, Jean Smart, win for best actress in a comedy. And Kate Winslet won best TV actress in a limited series for HBO's "Mare of Easttown."

Meanwhile, though Netflix led the year by nominations -- including for best dramatic film "The Power of the Dog" and drama series "Squid Game" -- it had said it wouldn't participate in the event until the HFPA institutes changes. That decision means it's also now not bragging about a couple of notable firsts that resulted from last night's awards. [...] In addition, Netflix's runaway hit TV series "Squid Game" received three nominations this year, leading to the first-ever win for South Korea, as South Korean actor O Yeong-su won for his role in the series, beating out "Succession's" Kieran Culkin (HBO) and "The Morning Show's" Billy Crudup (Apple TV+). Netflix also won for "tick, tick... BOOM!" when Andrew Garfield took the trophy for best actor in a motion picture (musical or comedy), though the tweet had forgotten to credit the project by name.

Apple TV+ took home one win last night, as "Ted Lasso's" Jason Sudeikis won best actor in a TV series (comedy). Hulu also got one Globe, as "Dopesick's" Michael Keaton won best actor in a TV limited series or motion picture made for television, while Amazon Prime Video's "The Underground Railroad" won the category. Amazon Prime Video's "Being the Ricardos" was highlighted with Nicole Kidman's win as best actress in a motion picture. In another milestone, the first trans actress to win a Golden Globe, FX's "Pose" star Michaela Jae Rodriguez, took home the trophy for best actress in a drama. 20th Century Studio/Disney's "West Side Story" won best picture (musical or comedy) and its stars, Rachel Zegler and Ariana DeBose, won best actress and supporting actress, respectively. Disney's "Encanto," which streamed on Disney+ just a month after hitting theaters, won best animated picture. Warner Bros.' "Dune" got the trophy for best score (Hans Zimmer), and Will Smith was named best actor in a motion picture (drama) for "King Richard." The best non-English language picture award went to the Japanese film "Drive My Car." You can view the full list of winners here.

"Until recently," writes the NY Times' Jay Caspian Kang, "my daughter and I were somehow able to avoid the king of toy videos: Ryan Kaji." There's no one way to describe what Kaji, who is now 10 years old, has done across his multiple YouTube channels, cable television shows and live appearances: In one video, he is giving you a tour of the Legoland Hotel; in another, he splashes around in his pool to introduce a science video about tsunamis. But for years, what he has mostly done is play with toys: Thomas the Tank Engine, "Paw Patrol" figures, McDonald's play kitchens. A new toy and a new video for almost every day of the week, adding up to an avalanche of content that can overwhelm your child's brain, click after click. Kaji has been playing with toys on camera since Barack Obama was in the White House.

Here are a few of the companies that are now paying him handsomely for his services: Amazon, Walmart, Nickelodeon, Skechers. Ryan also has 10 separate YouTube channels, which together make up "Ryan's World" [31.2M subscribers], a content behemoth whose branded merchandise took in more than $250 million last year. Even conservative estimates suggest that the Kaji family take exceeds $25 million annually.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article — and for summarizing one of its most startling details. "Not too surprisingly, Ryan's mother and father paused their teaching and engineering careers to focus on Ryan's empire after seeing the reaction to Ryan's breakout 2016 video, which now has 2+ billion YouTube views."

The Times' reporter quips that the videos capture glimpses from "the only world in which children do not stare at screens" — then wonders if that's even true, sharing their observation from the filming of a special toy-themed TV show with Ryan.

"I overheard a crew member say to him, 'If you finish this scene, you can play Minecraft.' "

The Register reports on a unique response to CES: Six right-to-repair advocates assembled on Friday morning to present Repair.org's second annual Worst in Show Awards, a selection of the "the least private, least secure, least repairable, and least sustainable gadgets at CES."

In a presentation streamed on YouTube, author and activist Cory Doctorow presided over the condemnation session. He said that he has been attending the Consumer Electronics Show for decades and vendors will gladly enumerate the supposed benefits of their products. "But what none of those people will ever do is tell you how it will fail," said Doctorow. "And that's kind of our job here today, to talk about the hidden or maybe not so hidden and completely foreseeable failure modes of these gadgets."

Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit, gave the new Mercedes EQS EV the award for the worst product in terms of repairability. Showing a slide of the warning screen the car presents to its driver, he said, "You cannot open the hood of the car. It is locked, warning of accident, warning of injury if you open the hood. Mercedes' perspective is, 'Hey, this is an electric car. There's nothing the owner needs to do under the hood of this car."

Wiens said this is not the first time Mercedes has gone down this road, noting that a few years ago the company removed the dipstick from its C-class vehicles, arguing that only an authorized technician should change the oil.

"So this is everything that is wrong with the future," he said.
Some other higlights (via the Register)... Nathan Proctor, national campaign director for public interest non-profit USPIRG, gave the "worst in class for the environment" award to Samsung's new NFT Aggregation Platform, which he described as "a way to buy, sell and display your NFT artwork from your huge ginormous OLED Samsung TV."

Proctor added "If you don't know what an NFT is, I am honestly jealous of your life," calling it "sort of like a Beanie Baby craze for crypto tech bros — if Beanie Babies required massive continual energy consumption on a warming planet to remain corporeal."

And the Community Choice poll for Worst in Show went to John Deere — presumably for fighting right-to-repair laws in every single state legislature — while the tractor companywas also recognized by Paul Roberts, founder of securerepairs.org, for its industry-lagging bad outreach to the security community.

Right now, NASA is providing live coverage for the conclusion of the James Webb Space Telescope's major spacecraft deployments. NASA offered this description of the event earlier this week: Beginning no earlier than 9 a.m. EST, NASA will air live coverage of the final hours of Webb's major deployments. After the live broadcast concludes, at approximately 1:30 p.m. [EST], NASA will hold a media briefing. Both the broadcast and media briefing will air live on NASA TV, the NASA app, and the agency's website.

As the final step in the observatory's major deployments, the Webb team plans to unfold the second of two primary mirror wings. When this step is complete, Webb will have finished its unprecedented process of unfolding in space to prepare for science operations....
SlashGear reports: Consisting of 18 hexagonal, gold-plated segments, the mirror is one of the telescope's most visually striking components. The primary mirror needs to be large as this is directly related to how much light the telescope can detect, which makes it more accurate (via NASA). James Webb's mirror is 6.5 meters (21ft) across, which is the largest ever launched into space. Compared to the 2.4-meter (7.8ft) mirror used on James Webb's predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, this big mirror will help the telescope to see out further into space.

Engineers couldn't just build a 6.5-meter (21ft) mirror like Hubble's, though, because it would be too large and too heavy to launch. Instead, they built the James Webb mirror in segments made from beryllium, which is both lightweight and strong. These segments fold in on themselves to fit into the rocket, and now it is time for them to unfold into their final configuration.
"Once fully operational, Webb will explore every phase of cosmic history," NASA announced, "from within the solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe, and everything in between. Webb will reveal new and unexpected discoveries and help humanity understand the origins of the universe and our place in it."

SlashGear adds that "Having left Earth's atmosphere and traveled over 250,000 miles away from our planet, it is now more than 70% of its way to its final orbit around the sun..."

Amazon Prime Video's adaptation of the Fallout franchise of video games is entering production this year, and its two lead writers have been named, according to reports in Deadline and Variety. Ars Technica reports: It was previously known that Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (who worked together on HBO's Westworld) would be executive producers, and Variety and Deadline both report that Nolan will direct the first episode of the show. But Nolan and Joy will not be the primary creative leads on the series. Rather, Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner have been attached as showrunners. Robertson-Dworet wrote the screenplays for the superhero movie Captain Marvel and the 2018 Tomb Raider film adaptation. She is also writing a future Star Trek film planned for release in 2023. Wagner is best known as one of the main writers on the sketch comedy series Portlandia and for work on modern sitcoms like The Office, Silicon Valley, and Baskets. Robertson-Dworet brings the science fiction and action/adventure credentials, and Wagner brings the comedy, covering two foundations of the Fallout franchise's narrative style.

For those unfamiliar, Fallout is a long-running video game franchise set in a post-apocalyptic alternate future where a cold war between China and the United States turns hot, leaving the world in a brutal nuclear winter with mutated creatures and violent bandits. Despite the grim setting, the series is known for its sense of humor as much as its darkness, with pop culture references, a 1950s aesthetic, heavy influences from pulp science fiction, and biting satire of American capitalism. The series originated as a slow-paced, top-down role-playing game on the PC in the 1990s, but the intellectual property was later bought by game publisher Bethesda Softworks.

Amazon is touting a major milestone for Fire TV, claiming it has sold more than 150 million of the streaming devices worldwide. And it announced deals with Ford Motor Co and Stellantis to bring Fire TV to the automakers' in-car entertainment systems. From a report: For comparison, Roku reported 56.4 million active streaming accounts across its family of devices as of the end of the third quarter of 2021 -- although that's a different metric than total devices sold. At the end of 2020, Amazon last reported having more than 50 million active Fire TV accounts. Amazon touted momentum for its connected-TV push, calling out the introduction last fall of the first Amazon-built TVs -- the Amazon Omni and 4-Series -- and a new, more powerful version of the Fire TV Stick 4K Max. According to the ecommerce giant, Fire TV Stick ranked as the top selling product on Amazon on Black Friday among all Amazon products, and customers purchased a record number of Fire TV smart TVs on Amazon.com the week of Black Friday, including models from Insignia, Toshiba, and Pioneer and the Amazon Fire TV Omni and 4-Series.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Cold War couldn't stop gaming from thriving in the Eastern Bloc. From the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a generation of young people living behind the Iron Curtain designed and released their own video games and arcade cabinets. Now, you can play English translations of some of these lost classics of early gaming. One is a text adventure where a Soviet military officer hunts and kills Rambo. The translated games all come from Slovakia and are a collaboration between the Slovak Game Developers Association and the Slovak Design Museum.

According to Stanislav Hrda, one of the programmers who created the games on offer, making video games was something only kids did. "The games were not sold in shops and the authors were not entitled to remuneration," he said in the post explaining the project. "Therefore, practically no one could engage in video game programming as a business activity, and adult programmers worked at most in state institutions on large mainframe computers. Thus, video game programmers became mainly teenagers." The computing power was limited and the teenagers' technological knowhow almost non-existent so many of these early games were text adventures. "These could also be programmed in the simpler Basic language that every home computer had built in," Hrda said. "Text-based games offered the opportunity to imprint one's fantasies into a world of characters, locations, descriptions of reality or fantasy at will. That is why hundreds of such video games were created in the 1980s in Czechoslovakia. The authors from the ranks of teenagers portrayed their friends, but also heroes from films that were distributed on VHS tapes or from the pop-cultural world of the West from the occasionally available comics, films, TV series and books."

Hrda loved American action movies and programmed the video game Satochin, a text adventure where a Soviet officer hunts John Rambo. "The game was very hard to win," Hrda told Ars Technica. "Whenever you made a small mistake, you would die. So before you win, you are killed ten times by Rambo." [...] The project has localized ten games for Western audiences, including Satochin, with plans to tackle more over the next few years. "The games translated over the next 2-3 years after the end of the project will represent almost the complete video game production from the period of 8-bit computers in Slovakia, with an emphasis on text adventure games," the site said. English versions are available here and can be played in the Fuse emulator. The Slovak versions can be played online through the project's website.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Whether it's cigarettes or alcohol, many governments have legislated that companies must warn consumers of the negative effects of their products. This is often achieved on packaging or required in advertising. France is now intending to bring such measures to the automotive industry, forcing carmakers to supplement ads with messages about greener transport alternatives, as reported by CTV News. Coming into force on March 1st, the legislation is the product of years of lobbying from French environmental groups. The law requires the mention of one of three statements in any given advert. Roughly translated, these are "For short journeys, walk or cycle," as well as "think about carpooling" and "Take public transport daily."

These messages must be included in all advertising, whether in print, online, or broadcast on radio or TV. The messages must be clearly visible on screen, or in the case of radio ads, be spoken aloud after the ad proper is finished. A hashtag, #SeDeplacerMoinsPolluer, is also required to be displayed in certain contexts, which translates to "Move without pollution." Fines for non-compliance can range up to $56,450. It's part of a wider push to cut down on transport emissions in France, with private cars making up a full 15 percent of the country's greenhouse gas output. The country has already pledged to end the sale of gas and diesel-powered cars by 2040, while the city of Paris has banned older, more polluting vehicles from the city center.

All 2021 and 2022 LG smart TVs will be equipped with a health education and telehealth app from the senior-focused health platform Independa, the company announced today. The platform will allow users to set up and have telehealth appointments through their TV. From a report: While telehealth visits via apps on smartphones and computers have become normal for many patients during the pandemic, using a TV-sized screen to see a doctor can be helpful for people with eyesight issues, says Kian Saneii, Independa's founder and CEO. It also makes it easier for doctors to ask people to stand up or show more of their body during the visit. "You can't hold your phone out far enough to show the right thing," he says. "Versus on the TV, you can walk around, you can bend your arm -- the actual engagement becomes more effective." Users have to set up separate accounts with the on-demand doctor and dentist services on the Independa platform, and they're prompted to do so through a QR code. Some people might be able to have their visit covered by insurance, but right now, most patients will pay a flat fee -- $75 for a dentist's call and around $55 for a doctor, Saneii says. That could be a barrier to some users. On-demand telehealth programs also often don't connect back to patients' medical records, which could make it difficult to pass information from those visits back to their regular doctors. Further reading: Samsung is Putting NFTs in Its Smart TVs.

Sony is setting some pretty grand expectations with its 2022 TV lineup -- led by the introduction of the world's first consumer QD-OLED TV. From a report: The company's current and well-regarded OLED sets use panels from LG Display that are tuned with Sony's own processing. But the new flagship Bravia XR A95K TV will include a QD-OLED (quantum dot organic light emitting diode) panel manufactured by none other than Samsung Display. It'll come in 65-inch and 55-inch sizes, with both coming in at 4K resolution. It was rumored that Samsung Electronics might announce a QD-OLED 4K TV at CES 2022, but that hasn't panned out so far. So it's Sony that gets the prime spotlight instead. Samsung Display has been developing QD-OLED for a number of years, and the display technology could become something of a middle step between standard OLED and the MicroLED displays that only Samsung is selling right now -- for ungodly sums of money. QD-OLED is designed to combine the best traits of OLED (perfect blacks, infinite contrast, etc.) with benefits of quantum dot LED TVs like improved brightness and more vivid color reproduction at higher brightness levels. It's not a major new approach like Micro LED, but more of a progression from where things have stood for a few years.

The new version of Samsung's Eco Remote features "RF harvesting capabilities that let the remote preserve its charge by 'collecting routers' radio waves and converting them to energy,'" reports The Verge. It can also be charged with solar energy. From the report: Aside from the new RF harvesting option, the Eco Remote can be charged from both outdoor and indoor light or (for the fastest results) over USB-C. Samsung says it's introducing a white model of the remote this year, which the company says is meant to better complement its "lifestyle" TVs like The Frame, Serif, and Sero. As with the original remote, the intention here is to ditch AAA batteries. Samsung has previously estimated that switching to solar-powered remotes could avoid 99 million discarded batteries over the course of seven years. It has also explored other ways of self-charging the internal battery such as "harnessing the kinetic energy that's created when the remote is shaken" and "using the vibrational energy that's created when the microphone picks up sounds." But this time around it settled on adding RF harvesting as another way to keep the clicker functioning whenever you need it.

The top eight US media groups plan to spend at least $115bn on new movies and television shows next year in pursuit of a video streaming business that loses money for most of them. From a report: The huge investment outlays come amid concerns that it will be harder to attract new customers in 2022 after the pandemic-fuelled growth in 2020 and 2021. Yet the alternative is to be left out of the streaming land rush. "There is no turning back," said media analyst Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson. "The only way to compete is spending more and more money on premium content." The Financial Times calculated the planned expenditures based on company disclosures and analyst reports. One entertainment executive called them "mind-boggling." Most of the companies -- a list that includes Walt Disney, Comcast, WarnerMedia and Amazon -- are set to rack up losses on their streaming units. Including sports rights, the aggregate spending estimate rises to about $140bn. Disney's investment in streaming content is likely to grow 35-40 per cent in 2022, according to estimates by Morgan Stanley. The company's spending on all new movies and TV shows is expected to reach $23bn, though the number rises to $33bn including sports rights -- up 32 per cent from its total content spending in 2021 and 65 per cent from 2020.

What are some books that you read this year that you enjoyed reading? Doesn't have to be those that released this year -- though if possible, mention any recently published books.

Further reading: Ask Slashdot: What's a 2021 Movie or TV Show That You Enjoyed Watching?

LG is having a busy CES 2022 and the show hasn't even started. The company already revealed two bizarre OLED concepts and a pair of odd TVs, but today it made its most significant announcement yet by debuting OLED EX, the next generation of its OLED display technology. From a report: OLED EX (the EX stands for Evolution and eXperience, unfortunately) promises to boost maximum brightness, enhance picture quality, and allow for smaller display bezels. The underlying technology -- millions of individual self-lit pixels -- hasn't changed, but the use of an isotope called deuterium combined with algorithmic image processing can increase brightness by up to 30% over conventional OLED displays, LG claims. As boring as that may sound, the science behind it is actually pretty fascinating. LG found a way to extract deuterium, a rather scarce isotope (there is one deuterium atom in 6,000 hydrogen atoms) that's twice as heavy as hydrogen from water, then applied it to its TV's OLED elements. LG says stabilized deuterium compounds let the display emit brighter light while improving efficiency over time. Moving to the second change, LG is using a "personalized" machine learning algorithm that predicts the usage of each light-emitting diode (on up to 8K TVs) based on your viewing habits, then "precisely controls the display's energy input to more accurately express the details and colors of the video content being played."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The HDMI standards are a mess. HDMI 2.1, in particular, is a uniquely frustrating mess, with haphazard support among TV manufacturers, cable makers, and devices that make setting up, say 120Hz gaming on a PS5 or Xbox Series X a uniquely harrowing experience. Fortunately, the HDMI Forum is swooping in ahead of CES with its latest revision to the HDMI specification stack, HDMI 2.1a, which is here to make everything better and simpler... I'm kidding, of course. It's gonna make things more complicated. It's a new HDMI standard, what on earth did you expect?

Let's start with the good: HDMI 2.1a is an upcoming revision to the HDMI 2.1 stack and adds a major new feature, Source-Based Tone Mapping, or SBTM. SBTM is a new HDR feature that offloads some of the HDR tone mapping to the content source (like your computer or set-top box) alongside the tone mapping that your TV or monitor is doing. SBTM isn't a new HDR standard -- it's not here to replace HDR10 or Dolby Vision. Instead, it's intended to help existing HDR setups work better by letting the content source better optimize the content it passes to the display or by removing the need to have the user manually calibrate their screens for HDR by having the source device configure content for the specific display. Other use cases could be for when there's a mix of content types, like for streamers (who could have an HDR game playing alongside a window of black and white text), displaying each area of content.

The ransomware attack that crippled the IT systems and live streams of Cox radio and TV stations earlier this year was the work of Iranian hackers, The Record has learned. From the report: The attack has been attributed to a threat actor tracked under the codename of DEV-0270, a group linked to several intrusions against US companies this year that have ended in the deployment of ransomware. While the intrusion at the Cox Media Group came to light on June 3, when the attackers deployed their ransomware and encrypted some internal servers, the group had actually breached and been lurking inside the company's internal network for weeks since mid-May. The attack did not impact all Cox Media Group radio and TV stations but managed to cripple the ability of some stations to broadcast live streams on their sites. The Cox Media Group initially tried to play down the attack. Local reporters who shared details about the ransomware incident on Twitter were admonished and told to delete tweets. The company did, however, formally confirm the attack in October, four months later, but without mentioning any details about the Iranian hackers.

Luke Plunkett writes via Kotaku: Justin Kan, a co-founder of Twitch and the dude Justin.TV was named for, last week decided to launch a site called Fractal. It was to be a 'marketplace' where in-game items could be bought and sold as NFTs. Later, in Fractal's Discord server, a link appeared advertising a drop of 3,333 NFTs. You may have guessed what happened next. As Twitch reporter Zach Bussey has detailed, the message, which appeared legit since it was coming from inside the house, had actually been posted by someone gaining access to Fractal's Discord bot, pointing towards 'Fractai', not Fractal. The scammers managed to "sell" 3,294 NFTs before the plug was pulled. There were of course no actual NFTs being sold at all, just money being straight up stolen -- over $150,000 -- though you'd be forgiven for wondering what the difference is.

In response, the Fractal team issued a statement acknowledging the breach, along with a promise they are "going to make this right." [...] ractal say they are "planning to fully compensate these 373 victims," before adding the extraordinary warning, "We must use our best judgement as there's no 'undo button' in crypto," making the entire post read like a textbook example of showcasing why this is such a shitty space. Meanwhile, Kan issued a short video statement of his own, alongside warnings that this Discord scam had been perpetrated on other NFT communities as well.

"YouTube TV's battle with Disney is over almost as soon as it began," reports Engadget. "The two have struck a deal that restores access to ESPN, FX and other Disney channels on YouTube's streaming service..." As is often the case with disputes like this, each side blamed the other. Disney claimed YouTube TV "declined to reach a fair deal," while YouTube maintained that it was advocating on "behalf" of viewers...

It's not just that channels like ESPN remain a major draw for live TV services â" it's that Disney could easily have siphoned some of those customers to its equivalent Hulu offering. YouTube may have decided that any increased costs (and possible rate hikes) were less painful than losing viewership.
The base subscription rate is returning to $65 per month, but Reuters reports YouTube TV promised that "all impacted members" would still receive a one-off $15 discount.