schwit1 shares a report from The Hollywood Reporter: Douglas Rain, the veteran Canadian stage actor who provided the soft and gentle voice of the rogue HAL 9000 computer for Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel, has died. He was 90. The first drafts of the 2001 script had HAL being voiced by a woman and was called Athena; afterward, it was decided that the computer should sound more like a man. Nigel Davenport, Martin Balsam and others were tried out -- and ruled out -- before and during filming of the 1968 sci-fi thriller.

"Well, we had some difficulty deciding exactly what HAL should sound like, and Marty just sounded a little bit too colloquially American, whereas Rain had the kind of bland mid-Atlantic accent we felt was right for the part,' Kubrick told Newsday film critic Joseph Gelmis in an interview for the 1970 book The Film Director as Superstar. Kubrick told Rain that he had made the computer "too emotional and too human." So, in late 1967, the actor flew to New York City and spent a day and a half -- about 9 1/2 hours in all -- to voice HAL. As reported on the blog 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Rain "did the recordings with his bare feet resting on a pillow, in order to maintain the required relaxed tone."

Netflix says it plans to begin testing lower-priced subscription in some markets in a bid to see if it will help the company boost the number of subscribers, CEO Reed Hastings told Bloomberg. The company has not identified the markets where it will be testing the lower-priced subscription, and has not clarified how soon it intends to conduct these tests. The company will likely consider Asian markets where it is having a tough time gaining the market share against local services that are much aggressively priced.

Cord-cutting promised us that we won't have to pay the ludicrously large cable bills. But it turns out, as long as you do not just want to watch a very limited set of movies and TV shows, you will have to subscribe to any number of these services: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Go, Hulu, and Disney+ (and more.) For some living outside the US, the situation has become even more dire as they browse through as many as three dozen services. This, in addition to making watching TV expensive, is also creating a number of other confusions. No wonder piracy is on rise again.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Disney's new streaming service will be called Disney+ and launch in late 2019, CEO Bob Iger announced on the company's earnings call Thursday. The service will also feature new, original shows and movies, including original Marvel and Star Wars series. Marvel fan favorite character Loki, played by Tom Hiddleston, will get an original series on the Disney+ service. A prequel series to Star Wars movie "Rogue One" about the character Cassian Andor, portrayed by Diego Luna, will also call the service home.

Other original shows and movies include a rebooted version of The High School Musical franchise. It will also be a hub for animated content, including the next season of "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" and an new original animated series based on Pixar's "Monsters Inc." Exclusive movies include "Noel," a Christmas movie about Santa's daughter played by Anna Kendrick, and "Togo," a movie about the 1925 Nome Serum Run starring William DaFoe. Disney launched a placeholder website for Disney+ that shows off logos of brands like Pixar, National Geographic and Marvel. Last year, Disney announced that it would remove all its movies from Netflix in 2019 to entice consumers to use their own streaming offering. It also purchased Fox for $71.3 billion to bolster its library of content.

20th Century Fox is using AI to predict what films people will want to see. According to a recently published paper, researchers from the company are using machine learning to examine trailer footage and compare the objects and events it identifies with data generated for other trailers. "The idea is that movies with similar sets of labels will attract similar sets of people," The Verge reports. From the report: As the researchers explain in the paper, this is exactly the sort of data movie studios love. (They already produce lots of similar data using traditional methods like interviews and questionnaires.) "Understanding detailed audience composition is important for movie studios that invest in stories of uncertain commercial," they write. In other words, if they know who watches what, they will know what movies to make.

To create their "experimental movie attendance prediction and recommendation system" (named Merlin), 20th Century Fox partnered with Google to use the company's servers and open-source AI framework TensorFlow. In an accompanying blog post, the search giant explains Merlin's analysis of Logan. First, Merlin scans the trailer, labeling objects like "facial hair," "car," and "forest" (taking into account how long these objects appear on-screen and when they show up the trailer). By comparing this information with analyses of other trailers, Merlin can try to predict what films might interest the people who saw Logan.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Telecompaper: AT&T has blocked its HBO and Cinemax channels for Dish and Sling TV customers over a carriage dispute. This is the first channel blackout for HBO in its 40 years of operation. Pay-TV provider Dish and OTT services Sling TV said AT&T is making "untenable demands designed specifically to harm customers, particularly those in rural areas, as well as damage competing pay-TV providers" and that at the time of the merger, no guidelines were set in place to ensure AT&T "played fair" for HBO and Cinemax subscribers, regardless of their pay-TV provider.

Dish said AT&T is demanding it pay for a guaranteed number of subscribers, regardless of how many people actually want to subscribe to HBO. The company noted that during the arbitration process, AT&T will have to restore its channels to Dish customers. The company and Sling TV will credit customers on their bill for the time they do not receive either HBO or Cinemax. Dish added that it is also offering customers a free preview of HDNET Movies. An HBO spokesperson said in a statement: "During our forty-plus years of operation, HBO has always been able to reach agreement with our valued distributors and our services have never been taken down or made unavailable to subscribers due to an inability to conclude a deal. Unfortunately, Dish is making it extremely difficult, responding to our good faith attempts with unreasonable terms. Past behavior shows that removing services from their customers is becoming all too common a negotiating tactic for them. We hope the situation with Dish changes soon but, in the meantime, our valued customers should take advantage of the other ways to access an HBO subscription so they can continue to enjoy our acclaimed programming."

According to new research, the average cost households pay for cable is now up to $107 a month -- that's a 50% increase since 2010 when cable bills were $71.24 a month. When compared to last year, it's only a 1% increase, "thanks in large part to increasing fees for things like regional sports licensing and taxes," reports Streaming Observer. From the report: Leichtman Research Group's data was gathered through a telephone survey of 1,152 households from throughout the United States. The research found that 78% of American households still subscribe to a paid TV subscription. That percentage is down from 86% in 2013, 87% in 2008, and 81% in 2004, but 78% is still a pretty high figure given how high cable costs continue to rise each year and how affordable streaming video services are in comparison.

The FilmStruck indie, arthouse and classic film subscription-streaming service will shut down next month, Turner and Warner Bros. Digital Networks announced this week. The New Yorker's film critic Richard Brody writes: The site isn't accepting any new subscribers, and it's a good bet that it won't be adding films, either. In the year and a half that I've been offering recommendations here of movies to stream, FilmStruck titles have featured prominently. One could keep busy, happy, and cinematically sustained for a long time on the sole basis of FilmStruck movies, and all the more so with the inclusion of movies from Turner Classic Movies. (The movie diet wouldn't be an entirely balanced one: the site does poorly with such domains as American independent filmmaking, African cinema, and the past forty years of film history. Its over-all flaw is its reliance on recognized classics: the programming of the site is more responsive than it is proactive, and it might have been improved by more personalized, idiosyncratic selections that would have made it more like a permanent online film festival.)

The site instead offered various modes of promotional outreach. Some, such as essays, and some home-produced videos, were significant works in themselves, but the site over all diluted its offerings with a home page of diversions and distractions that felt like a tawdry sampling of multiplex ballyhoo raising an unwelcome racket amid the art-house tranquillity. That conspicuously commercial waiting room to the classic-cinema library suggests the culture clash at the heart of the enterprise, the one that arises from its odd original fusion of Criterion with TCM, which was then a part of Time Warner -- and which foreshadowed its doom. That air of doom arises from more than the inherent conflicts of the high-culture outpost and the mass-market colossus. Slate's arts and culture critic Joanna Scutts writes: FilmStruck did not care who you were: It set out to teach you something new, not just to feed you more helpings of what you already know you like. It employed a team of smart women and brought in directors like Barry Jenkins to record short, passionate introductions to films they loved. Its personality shone through tightly curated collections, from a timely gathering of all the previous incarnations of A Star Is Born, to a larger batch of Japanese horror titles, to deep dives into a particular director or cinematographer. It offered up inventive double-feature pairings and led you through its extensive archives in ways that were creative, cheeky, thought-provoking, and unpretentious. It made it clear that a passion for art-house and classic film was not exclusive to old white men. That kind of personality, that kind of discoverability, that kind of curation, can't be replicated by an algorithm. It takes time, money, and effort. It takes thought and education. It takes human beings.

A new report from The Information says that Apple's upcoming TV service that is in the works to showcase its original TV shows will be available in more than 100 countries next year. The service will launch in the United States in the first half of 2019, with a global expansion to follow later in the year. MacRumors reports: According to The Information, Apple's original content will be made available for free to Apple device owners, a rumor we heard earlier this month from CNBC. While Apple's content will be available at no cost, Apple will encourage users to sign up for television subscriptions from other cable networks such as HBO or STARZ. Apple has reportedly started negotiating with content providers about what it will pay to carry TV shows and movies, but programming is not expected to be the same in each country. It is also not quite clear how Apple content will be positioned alongside content from third-party services.

According to a press release posted today, Netflix is planning to raise $2 billion to help fund new content, including "content acquisitions, production and development, capital expenditures, investments, working capital and potential acquisitions and strategic transactions." TechCrunch reports: The funds will be raised in the form of senior unsecured notes, denominated in U.S. dollars and euros, it said. This debt offering is the sixth time in under four years that Netflix is raising $1 billion or more through bonds, noted Variety, which was among the first to report the news. As of September 30, Netflix's long-term debt had reached $8.34 billion, up 71% from $4.89 billion in the year ago quarter, it said during its last earnings, Variety's report also noted. Netflix recently explained during its Q3 2018 earnings that it needs to continue to invest in original programming in order to remain competitive. "Content companies such as WarnerMedia and Disney/Fox are moving to self-distribute their own content; tech firms like Apple, Amazon and others are investing in premium content to enhance their distribution platforms," the letter also stated. "Amid these massive competitors on both sides, plus traditional media firms, our job is to make Netflix stand out so that when consumers have free time, they choose to spend it with our service," it had said.

With the latest Windows 10 build 18262, Microsoft is allowing you to remove apps such as Mail, Calendar, Movies & TV, and the Groove Music app. Ars Technica reports: The ability to remove these apps doesn't really mean much in terms of disk space or convenience, as none of them are very big. The move may be of more interest to corporate deployments; an organization that has standardized on Outlook, for example, might want to remove the Mail and Calendar apps to reduce user confusion.

Elsewhere, the new build also updates Task Manager; an optional column in the Details tab will show which applications handle mixed DPI systems and what API level they use for that support. Microsoft is also planning, but has not yet enabled, a new Windows troubleshooter. This will examine diagnostic data and automatically perform any fixes or reconfigurations that appear to be necessary.

Improvements in CGI mean neither age nor death need stop some performers from working. From a report: From Carrie Fisher in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to Paul Walker in the Fast & Furious movies, dead and magically "de-aged" actors are appearing more frequently on movie screens. Sometimes they even appear on stage: next year, an Amy Winehouse hologram will be going on tour to raise money for a charity established in the late singer's memory. Some actors and movie studios are buckling down and preparing for an inevitable future when using scanning technology to preserve 3-D digital replicas of performers is routine. Just because your star is inconveniently dead doesn't mean your generation-spanning blockbuster franchise can't continue to rake in the dough. Get the tech right and you can cash in on superstars and iconic characters forever.

[...] For celebrities, these scans are a chance to make money for their families post mortem, extend their legacy -- and even, in some strange way, preserve their youth. Visual-effects company Digital Domain -- which has worked on major pictures like Avengers: Infinity War and Ready Player One -- has also taken on individual celebrities as clients, though it hasn't publicized the service. "We haven't, you know, taken out any ads in newspapers to 'Save your likeness,'" says Darren Hendler, director of the firm's Digital Humans Group. The suite of services that the company offers actors includes a range of different scans to capture their famous faces from every conceivable angle -- making it simpler to re-create them in the future. Using hundreds of custom LED lights arranged in a sphere, numerous images can be recorded in seconds capturing what the person's face looks like lit from every angle -- and right down to the pores.

Sony announced Monday that it's using blockchain technology for digital rights management (DRM), "starting with written educational materials under the Sony Global Education arm of the business," reports Engadget. "This new blockchain system is built on Sony's pre-existing DRM tools, which keep track of the distribution of copyrighted materials, but will have advantages that come with blockchain's inherent security." From the report: Because of the nature of blockchain, which tracks digital transactions in records that are particularly difficult to forge or otherwise tamper with, its application as a DRM tool makes sense and may also help creators keep tabs on their content. Currently, it's up to creators themselves (or the companies they create for) to monitor their contents' rights management. Sony's system could take over the heavy lifting of DRM. The way blockchain works allows Sony to track its content from creation through sharing. This means that users of the blockchain DRM tool will be able to see -- and verify -- who created a piece of work and when. Sony Global Education is the current focus of the DRM tool, but going forward, the company hints that the rest of its media -- including entertainment like music, movies, and virtual reality content -- may be protected the same way.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last spring, long before Get Out's eventual Oscar win, the movie was released on home video with a commentary track from its writer-director. A decade ago, in the pre-streaming era, this wouldn't have been news: Back then, seemingly every movie got a commentary track, even Good Luck Chuck. Then the DVD market began to decline, and the commentary track went from a being standard-issue add-on to relative rarity. Even recent Best Picture nominees like Mad Max: Fury Road, The Wolf of Wall Street, 12 Years a Slave, and Spotlight were released sans tracks -- bad news for anyone looking for behind-the-scenes intel on Mark Ruffalo's little-Ceasar haircut.

In the last few years, though, several high-profile films -- everything from Star Wars: The Last Jedi to Lady Bird to Get Out -- have been released with commentary tracks. That means you can spend your umpteenth viewing of Peele's film listening to him talk about how he modeled the opening credits on those of The Shining, or how the film's title was inspired by a routine from Eddie Murphy Delirious. For casual movie watchers, such details may not be too thrilling. But for film nerds who absorb behind-the-scenes trivia and how-we-made-it logistics, tracks like the one for Get Out remain the cheapest movie-making education available.

Bill Gates is not giving up on saving the world, but he is helping launch a new social recommendation engine. Likewise, as the iOS and Android app is known, is designed to be a place to get trusted recommendations on everything from restaurants to books, movies and TV shows. From a report: It won't cure polio or fix the U.S. education system, but Likewise could fill a niche helping people keep track of the books and TV shows their friends recommend as well as to discover new places. The free app, which launches today, began as the brainchild of Larry Cohen, a longtime Gates aide who serves as CEO of Gates Ventures. The Microsoft co-founder is funding the Bellevue, Wash.-based company, which has been working for nearly a year and has about 20 employees. "It's not the next Office, but there's a real need here," Cohen told Axios. Cohen is chairman of Likewise, with his onetime Microsoft colleague Ian Morris serving as CEO.

bestweasel writes: The Hollywood Reporter highlights an academic paper which finds that half of the criticism aimed at director Rian Johnson over Star Wars: The Last Jedi was politically motivated. From the report: [Researcher Morten Bay's paper] titled Weaponizing The Haters: The Last Jedi and the strategic politicization of pop culture through social media manipulation, examines the online response to the movie that has come to be considered controversial amongst the larger fanbase of the franchise. Bay suggests that reputation may not be earned, and instead "finds evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments." He continues, "The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society. Persuading voters of this narrative remains a strategic goal for the U.S. alt-right movement, as well as the Russian Federation."

The paper analyzes in depth the negative online reaction, which is split into three different camps: those with a political agenda, trolls and what Bay calls "real fantagonists," which he defines as genuine Star Wars fans disappointed in the movie. His findings are fascinating; "Overall, 50.9% of those tweeting negatively [about the movie] was likely politically motivated or not even human," he writes, noting that only 21.9% of tweets analyzed about the movie had been negative in the first place. "A number of these users appear to be Russian trolls," Bay writes of the negative tweets. In response to a tweet announcing the release of the paper, Last Jedi director Rian Johnson shared the tweet, adding, "Looking forward to reading it, but what the top-line describes is consistent with my experience online."

Netflix is about to let you decide how your favorite show will end, Bloomberg reported Monday. From the report: The streaming service is developing a slate of specials that will let viewers choose the next storyline in a TV episode or movie, according to people familiar with the matter. The company expects to release the first of these projects before the end of this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are still private.

Viewers will get to choose their own storylines in one episode of the upcoming season of "Black Mirror," the Emmy-winning science-fiction anthology series. The show is famous for exploring the social implications of technology, including an episode where humans jockey to receive higher ratings from their peers. The fifth season of the show is expected to be released in December.

The foray into choose-your-own-adventure programming represents a big bet on a nascent form of entertainment known as interactive TV. As Netflix expands around the world, it's looking for new ways to lure customers. By blending elements of video games with traditional television, the company could create a formula that can be applied to any number of series.

Alaska Airlines is trailing virtual reality onboard 10 flights between Boston and Seattle and Boston and San Diego. The headsets are provided by French in-flight entertainment company SkyLights and will only be offered to first-class passengers. PCMag.com reports: The trial kicked off on Sunday, Sept. 23 and runs through Thursday, Sept. 27. Forget trying to pay attention to that small seatback monitor as jet engines and crying babies blare in the background. "Wearing the headset is comparable to having a personal movie screen in front of you," the airline said. "When paired with noise-cancelling headphones, it's easy to feel like you're at the movie theater instead of flying." Passengers participating in the trial can choose from a selection of 2D and 3D movies. [...] There's also several "360-degree immersive experiences that let guests explore different worlds by just slowly moving their head around," Alaska Airlines said.

A social media post from Anders G da Silva, who accused Apple of deleting movies he had purchased from iTunes, went viral earlier this month. There is more to that story, of course. In a statement to CNET, Apple explained that da Silva had purchased movies while living in Australia, with his iTunes region set to "Australia." Then he moved to Canada, and found that the movies were no longer available for download -- due, no doubt, to licensing restrictions, including restrictions on Apple itself. While his local copies of the movies were not deleted, they were deleted from his cloud library. Apple said the company had shared a workaround with da Silva to make it easier for him to download his movies again. Public Knowledge posted a story Tuesday to weigh in on the subject, especially since today is International Day Against DRM. From the post: To that rare breed of person who carefully reads terms of service and keeps multiple, meticulous backups of important files, da Silva should have expected that his ability to access movies he thought he'd purchased might be cut off because he'd moved from one Commonwealth country to another. Just keep playing your original file! But DRM makes this an unreasonable demand. First, files with DRM are subject to break at any time. DRM systems are frequently updated, and often rely on phoning home to some server to verify that they can still be played. Some technological or business change may have turned the most carefully backed-up and preserved digital file into just a blob of unreadable encrypted bits.

Second, even if they are still playable, files with DRM are not very portable, and they might not fit in with modern workflows. To stay with the Apple and iTunes example, the old-fashioned way to watch a movie purchased from the iTunes Store would be to download it in the iTunes desktop app, and then watch it there, sync it to a portable device, or keep iTunes running as a "server" in your home where it can be streamed to devices such as the Apple TV. But this is just not how things are done anymore. To watch an iTunes movie on an Apple TV, you stream or download it from Apple's servers. To watch an iTunes movie on an iPhone, same thing. (And because this is the closed-off ecosystem of DRM'd iTunes movies, if you want to watch your movie on a Roku or an Android phone, you're just out of luck.)

[...] My takeaway is that, if a seller of DRM'd digital media uses words like "purchase" and "buy," they have at a minimum an obligation to continue to provide additional downloads of that media, in perpetuity. Fine print aside, without that, people simply aren't getting what they think they're getting for their money, and words like "rent" and "borrow" are more appropriate. Of course, there is good reason to think that even then people are not likely to fully understand that "buying" something in the digital world is not the same as buying something in the physical world, and more ambitious measures may be required to ensure that people can still own personal property in the digital marketplace. See the excellent work of Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz on this point. But the bare minimum of "owning" a movie would seem to be the continued ability to actually watch it.

A California court may soon sentence a man who posted the entirety of Deadpool on his Facebook page to six months in prison. Gizmodo reports: A week after Deadpool was released in theaters, millions of people watched the film on a viral Facebook post by the account Tre-Von M. King. The FBI found that the account belonged to Trevon Franklin, a 22-year-old in Fresno, California. Franklin had downloaded the movie from file-sharing platform Putlocker.is, then uploaded the movie to his Facebook page, where it garnered 6,386,456 views, according to court documents. He was indicted and arrested in June 2017. In May, Franklin made a plea agreement with the government. Franklin pled guilty in exchange for authorities agreeing to recommend a reduced sentenced. Last week, the government filed its sentencing recommendation. As TorrentFreak originally reported, authorities suggested a prison sentence of six months. The government argues that the sentencing "is both necessary and sufficient to address the nature of circumstances of the offense and to reflect the seriousness of the offense, to promote respect for the law, and to provide just punishment for the offense."

This is because Franklin publicly disregarded the law in a number of posts. In one such post he wrote: "I got the ultimate way out of this, yall might be surprised on how I won't go to jail but just become more famous." In another he wrote, "I'm just sitting back smoking out my bong laughing at these mfs who think they know what they talking I haven't sold shit to anyone, or made copies."