An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt, written by Mike Masnick: If you're a fan of chaos, well, the TikTok ban situation is providing plenty of chaos to follow. Ever since the US government made it clear it was seriously going to move forward with the obviously unconstitutional and counterproductive plan to force ByteDance to divest from TikTok or have the app effectively banned from the U.S., various rich people have been stepping up with promises to buy the app. There was former Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin with plans to buy it. Then there was "mean TV investor, who wants you to forget his sketchy history" Kevin O'Leary with his own TikTok buyout plans. I'm sure there have been other rich dudes as well, though strikingly few stories of actual companies interested in purchasing TikTok.

But now there's another billionaire to add to the pile: billionaire real estate/property mogul Frank McCourt (who has had some scandals in his own history) has had an interesting second act over the last few years as a big believer in decentralized social media. He created and funded Project Liberty, which has become deeply involved in a number of efforts to create infrastructure for decentralized social media, including its own Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSTP).

Over the past few years, I've had a few conversations with people involved in Project Liberty and related projects. Their hearts are in the right place in wanting to rethink the internet in a manner that empowers users over big companies, even if I don't always agree with their approach (he also frequently seems to surround himself with all sorts of tech haters, who have somewhat unrealistic visions of the world). Either way, McCourt and Project Liberty have now announced a plan to bid on TikTok. They plan to merge it into his decentralization plans. "Frank McCourt, Founder of Project Liberty and Executive Chairman of McCourt Global, today announced that Project Liberty is organizing a bid to acquire the popular social media platform TikTok in the U.S., with the goal of placing people and data empowerment at the center of the platform's design and purpose," reads a press release from Project Liberty.

"Working in consultation with Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking and capital markets business of Guggenheim Partners, and Kirkland & Ellis, one of the world's largest law firms, as well as world-renowned technologists, academics, community leaders, parents and engaged citizens, this bid for TikTok offers an innovative, alternative vision for the platform's infrastructure -- one that allows people to reclaim agency over their digital identities and data by proposing to migrate the platform to a new digital open-source protocol. In launching the bid, McCourt and his partners are seizing this opportunity to return control and value back into the hands of individuals and provide Americans with a meaningful voice, choice, and stake in the future of the web."

Google is opening up API access to its Google Home smart home platform, allowing app developers to access over 600 million connected devices and tap into the Google Home automation engine. In addition, Google announced that it'll be turning Google TVs into Google Home hubs and Matter controllers. The Verge reports: The Home APIs can access any Matter device or Works with Google Home device, and allows developers to build their own experiences using Google Home devices and automations into their apps on both iOS and Android. This is a significant move for Google in opening up its smart home platform, following shutting down its Works with Nest program back in 2019. [...] The Home APIs are already available to Google's early access partners, and Google is opening up a waitlist for any developer to sign up today. "We are opening up access on a rolling basis so they can begin building and testing within their apps," Anish Kattukaran, head of product at Google Home and Nest, told The Verge. "The first apps using the home APIs will be able to publish to the Play and App stores in the fall."

The access is not just limited to smart home developers. In the blog post, Matt Van Der Staay, engineering director at Google Home, said the Home APIs could be used to connect smart home devices to fitness or delivery apps. "You can build a complex app to manage any aspect of a smart home, or simply integrate with a smart device to solve pain points -- like turning on the lights automatically before the food delivery driver arrives." The APIs allow access to most devices connected to Google Home and to the Google Home structure, letting apps control and manage devices such as Matter light bulbs or the Nest Learning Thermostat. They also leverage Google Home's automation signals, such as motion from sensors, an appliance's mode changing, or Google's Home and Away mode, which uses various signals to determine if a home is occupied. [...]

What's also interesting here is that developers will be able to use the APIs to access and control any device that works with the new smart home standard Matter and even let people set up Matter devices directly in their app. This should make it easier for them to implement Matter into their apps, as it will add devices to the Google Home fabric, so they won't have to develop their own. In addition, Google announced that it's vastly expanding its Matter infrastructure by turning Google TVs into Google Home hubs and Matter controllers. Any app using the APIs would need a Google hub in a customer's home in order to control Matter devices locally. Later this year, Chromecast with Google TV, select panel TVs with Google TV running Android 14 or higher, and some LG TVs will be upgraded to become Google Home hubs.

Additionally, Kattukaran said Google will upgrade all of its existing home hubs -- which include Nest Hub (second-gen), Nest Hub Max, and Google Wifi -- with a new ability called Home runtime. "With this update, all hubs for Google Home will be able to directly route commands from any app built with Home APIs (such as the Google Home app) to a customer's Matter device locally, when the phone is on the same Wi-Fi network as the hub," said Kattukaran. This means you should see "significant latency improvements using local control via a hub for Google Home," he added.

Later this month, Comcast will launch a three-way bundle with Peacock, Netflix and Apple TV+. It will "come at a vastly reduced price to anything in the market today," said. Comcast chief Brian Roberts. Variety reports: The goal is to "add value to consumers" and at the same time "take some of the dollars out of" other companies' streaming businesses, he added, while reinforcing Comcast's broadband service offerings. Comcast's impending launch of the StreamSaver bundle come as other media companies have been assembling similar offerings. [...] Like the other streaming bundling strategies, Comcast's forthcoming Peacock, Netflix and Apple TV+ package is an effort to reduce cancelation rates (aka "churn") and provide a more efficient means of subscriber acquisition -- coming as the traditional cable TV business continues to deteriorate. Last week, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced a three-way bundle comprising of Max, Disney+ and Hulu.

Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson confirmed the company is considering putting ads in traditional AAA games, which players purchase for around $70 apiece. During EA's latest earnings call, Wilson said, "Advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us," and that teams are looking at how to thoughtfully implement ads within game experiences.

In-game advertising is not new, with the first recorded instance dating back to 1978. As the gaming industry is expected to grow to $583 billion by 2030, in-game ads are seen as a natural progression. However, player reception depends on the placement and unobtrusiveness of the ads. EA has faced backlash in the past for poorly placed ads, such as full-screen promotions for a TV show in UFC 4, which disrupted gameplay. The company has been experimenting with dynamic ads since 2006, with titles like Need for Speed Carbon and Battlefield 2142 among the first to feature them.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max are teaming up for a new bundle this summer, Netflix is focused on the WWE and celebrity boxing, Disney Plus is getting ESPN, and Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Max could get a price hike. A familiar refrain emerged around all this news: streaming is becoming cable TV all over again and getting crummier in the process.

And it's true! When streaming first emerged, it was a beautiful alternative to piracy, which was very convenient and very illegal, and cable, which was festooned with ads and weighed down by channels you were paying for and didn't want. Streaming gave you a world of content on demand for a fraction of the cost of cable. But that experience was never sustainable. Content costs money to make, and companies are apparently obligated to "increase revenue" and "make profit." This means Netflix spending billions of dollars a year on content isn't necessarily sustainable unless it's adding new users and monetizing them through some combination of ads and increasing subscription fees for stuff that used to be free, like sharing an account or streaming in 4K.

Apple has apologized for its tone-deaf "Crush!" ad that sparked a furious backlash with artists, musicians and other creators. AdAge reports that Apple said the video "missed the mark" and has scrapped plans to run the cutesy-turned-cringey commercial on TV. From a report: It's clear that Apple intended for the ad to serve as a metaphor for all the myriad creative tools one has when they throw down $1,000 or more for a new iPad Pro. Run during Tuesday's event, the video shows a series of musical instruments and other tools for human expression, including a guitar, drums, trumpet, amplifiers, record player, TV and much more. "All I Ever Need Is You" by Sonny & Cher soundtracks the clip.

Soon, it's revealed that the objects are all sitting on an industrial crusher, which descends upon the scattered creative instruments, exploding in plumes of satisfyingly colorful smoke. But when the crusher pulls back up, we see that everything was transformed into a shiny new iPad Pro.

Amazon Prime Video subscribers will see new types of advertisements this broadcast year. Amazon announced today that it's adding new ad formats to its video streaming service, hoping to encourage people to interact with the ads and shop on Amazon. From a report: In January, Prime Video streams included commercials unless subscribers paid $3 extra per month. That has meant that watching stuff on Prime Video ad-free costs $12 per month or, if you're also a Prime subscriber, $18 per month. Amazon has heightened focus on streaming ads this year. Those who opted for Prime Video with commercials will soon see shoppable carousel ads, interactive pause ads, and interactive brand trivia ads, as Amazon calls them.

Amazon said that advertisers could buy these new displays to be shown "across the vast majority of content on Prime Video, wherever it's streamed." All the new ad formats allow a viewer to place advertised products in their Amazon cart. With carousel ads, subscribers will be pushed to shop "a sliding lineup of" products during ad breaks during shows and movies, Amazon said, adding: "The ad automatically pauses so that customers can browse, and automatically resumes play when ad interaction has stopped."

Disney CEO Bob Iger says the company is shrinking the MCU with a new mission to drop the number of Marvel TV series to two a year and the film output to no more than three movies per year. The comment follows Iger conceding last year that Marvel had diluted audience's focus by making too many TV shows. From a report: Iger said this is part of Disney's overall strategy to reduce output and focus on quality, a strategy "that's particularly true with Marvel."

"We're slowly going to decrease volume and go to probably about two TV series a year instead of what had become four and reduce our film output from maybe four a year to two, or a maximum of three," the Disney CEO said during the company's quarterly earnings call Tuesday. "And we're working hard on what that path is." Iger says Marvel has "a couple of good films in '25 and then we're heading to more 'Avengers,' which we're extremely excited about," adding: "Overall, I feel great about the slate. It's something that I've committed to spending more and more time on. The team is one that I have tremendous confidence in and the IP that we're mining, including all the sequels that we're doing, is second to none."

"It all started with the fans," says 72-year-old actor Mark Hamill, in a montage of fans and actors in a newly-released video commemorating this year's Star Wars day.

Or, as Tom's Guide writes, "It's such a nice feeling to be a part of a huge community since fans are the ones who created this special day (by using "may the force be with you" as a pun for the date we all look forward to every year)." Lucasfilm and its owner Disney approved of this occasion, and now, we hold both official and unofficial celebrations to honor the beloved franchise... There are plenty of Star Wars Day deals to shop, movies, and TV shows that you can be a part of this year... [The new animated series] Star Wars: Tales of the Empire will explore the dark side of the galaxy by focusing on two warriors navigating the Galactic Empire... Stream Tales of the Empire on Disney Plus starting May 4.
But there's more. Friday the official Star Wars site wrote that this Star Wars Day "is a big one for gamers." This weekend will see the release of a free Zynga game by Nintendo called Star Wars: Hunters on iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch, while the game Brawlhalla will add Darth Maul as a playable character for the next three weeks. There's also an upgrade to "vehicular soccer" game Rocket League which enables the unlocking of Star Wars-themed items like Anakin's Podracer Decal and the Darth Maul Decal.

There's also discounts on games like EA's Star Wars Triple Bundle, Star Wars Battlefront II, and LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, as well as discounts on games with Star Wars-themed content like Minecraft and The Sims 4. And the franchise has even "returned to Fortnite, "bringing a new collection of Star Wars content to the popular game, including LEGO® Fortnite, Battle Royale, Rocket Racing, and Fortnite Festival." There's more discounts on Star Wars-themed merchandise at Amazon and Macy's, as well as on books from Abrams Book and Chronicle books. In fact, there's special offers from a whole alphabet's worth of major brands including American Tourister luggage, Box Lunch, Corkcircle, Dark Horse... and even Hallmark, Target, and Walmart.

But ultimately the day is a celebration of the movies that fans have loved for 47 years, writes Tom's Guide: Lucasfilm announced that on May 4th you can experience the entire Skywalker saga in movie theaters. This includes all nine episodic films in chronological order.
The site also points out that two new Star Wars series will be premiering later this year. Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is an eight-episode seriues "focuses on four children who go on an adventure while making their way home across a dangerous galaxy. Accompanying them is a force user (who will be played by Jude Law)." And Star Wars: The Acolyte (set in a new time period, the Jedi glory days before the Skywalker saga) begins streaming on Disney Plus June 4. (Fans will get a preview of The Acolyte at 25th-anniversary screenings of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace happening now.)

And the site even makes one last geeky suggestion for those who don't feel like going out this year: The official Star Wars website has released some unique and fun recipes you can make when May 4th rolls around. This includes a Chandrilan Squigs recipe inspired by Mon Mothma and even a Bad Batch of cookies you can decorate to your liking.

Sony Pictures Entertainment and Apollo Global Management have made a bid to acquire Paramount for $26 billion and take it private. Variety reports: Sony and private-equity giant Apollo submitted a letter with the non-binding offer Wednesday to Paramount Global, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The bid, which would include the assumption of debt and could be negotiated, would be a premium over the company's current $22 billion enterprise value. Shares of Paramount Global jumped 13% on news of the offer from Apollo and Sony Entertainment, closing at $13.86 per share Thursday.

It's not clear how Paramount's board will proceed on the Sony-Apollo proposal, having rejected previous overtures from the private-equity firm. The company has an exclusive negotiating window with Skydance that ends Friday (May 3), but discussions among the parties could extend beyond that. If it happens, the combination of Sony Pictures with Paramount Pictures would likely result in mass layoffs -- and knock the number of major Hollywood studios from five to four, after Disney took over 20th Century. Sony Corp., which acquired Columbia Pictures in 1990 for $3.5 billion, is the largest studio operator in the industry that does not have a broad-scale direct-to-consumer streaming play.

Under the proposed bid with Apollo, Sony would be the majority owner of the combined company. Sony Corp. would merge Sony Pictures Entertainment into a joint venture with Paramount Global. Sony and Apollo would both contribute cash to finance the deal. What's unclear is what would happen to the 28 local TV stations CBS owns; FCC rules bar foreign entities (i.e. Tokyo-based Sony) from having majority ownership control of broadcast TV stations, so Sony would need to carve out a separate U.S. ownership structure for the station group.

In the Skydance scenario, Redstone would sell her stake in National Amusements, which holds 77% of the voting shares in Paramount Global, to Skydance, whereupon Skydance would merge with Paramount Global in an all-stock deal that would value Skydance at roughly $5 billion. Paramount Global would remain a publicly traded company. Redstone would receive up to $2 billion from the Skydance-NAI transaction; in addition, Skydance would pay a premium for Paramount Global shares and pay $3 billion to the company to help pay down debt. Ellison would serve as CEO of the merged Paramount-Skydance, while Jeff Shell, the former NBCUniversal CEO who is chairman of sports and media at RedBird and works under founder and managing partner Gerry Cardinale, would take on a key management role.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Streamable: Roku wants to take the term "ad-supported" to another level. The company held its quarterly earnings conference call on Thursday, and revealed that 81.6 million households used a Roku device or smart TV to stream video in the first three months of the year. As part of the report, company CEO Anthony Wood laid out ideas for how the company would increase revenues in 2024. Unsurprisingly, advertising will be an important centerpiece of that strategy, and Wood provided some details on what Roku users can expect from their ad experience going forward.

The idea of bringing more ads to the Roku home screen is nothing new, but that's what Wood focused on in his discussion with analysts about how to boost revenue on the Roku platform. The company has already begun putting more static ads on the screen, but now it appears that Roku is considering how to get video ads embedded into the home page as well. Wood said that he believes that a video-enabled ad unit on the Roku home screen will be "very popular with advertisers," considering that Roku devices have the reach to put ads in front of 120 million pairs of eyes every day. He also said that the company is "testing other types of video ad units, looking at other experiences" that it can bring to the Roku home screen.

As another way to boost ad revenues, Wood suggested that the company's home screen experiences could be leveraged to deliver more ads. He pointed to the NBA Zone, which Roku launched at the beginning of April as an example. Roku can use these themed content hubs to deliver ads more tailored to fans of that particular content, harnessing the power of popular sports to pull more ad revenue. Customers concerned that Roku will just gunk up their home screen with ads are likely wondering if the company has made any moves toward actually making the user experience on the platform better. The good news is that Roku has also introduced a recommended content row, that will compile picks from across various streaming services and use AI to point customers toward new shows and movies they might like. "There's lots of ways we're working on enhancing the home screen to make it more valuable to viewers but also increase the monetization," Wood said.

Some Android-powered TVs can expose the contents of users' email inboxes if an attacker has physical access to the TV. Google initially told the office of Senator Ron Wyden that the issue, which is a quirk of how software is installed on these TVs, was expected behavior, but after being contacted by 404 Media, Google now says it is addressing the issue. From the report: The attack is an edge case but one that still highlights how the use of Google accounts, even on products that aren't necessarily designed for browsing user data, can expose information in unusual ways, including TVs in businesses or ones that have been resold or given away.

"My office is mid-way through a review of the privacy practices of streaming TV technology providers. As part of that inquiry, my staff discovered an alarming video in which a YouTuber demonstrated how with 15 minutes of unsupervised access to an Android TV set top box, a criminal could get access to private emails of the Gmail user who set up the TV," Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Quantum dots are already moving in the premium display category, particularly through QD-OLED TVs and monitors. The next step could be QDEL, short for "quantum dot electroluminescent," also known as NanoLED, screens. Not to be confused with the QLED (quantum light emitting diode) tech already available in TVs, QDEL displays don't have a backlight. Instead, the quantum dots are the light source. The expected result is displays with wider color spaces than today's QD-OLEDs (quantum dot OLEDs) that are also brighter, more affordable, and resistant to burn-in. It seems like QDEL is being eyed as one of the most potentially influential developments for consumer displays over the next two years. If you're into high-end display tech, QDEL should be on your radar.

You may know QDEL as NanoLED because that's what Nanosys, a quantum dot supplier developing the technology, calls it. QDEL has gone by other names, such as QLED -- before Samsung claimed that acronym for LCD-LED TVs that use quantum dots. You may also see QDEL referred to as QD-EL, QD-LED, or EL-QD. As the alphabet soup suggests, there are still some things to finalize with this tech. This article will mostly use the term QDEL, with occasional references to NanoLED. If none of those names sound familiar, it's probably because you can't buy any QDEL products yet. Suppliers suggest that could change in the next few years; Nanosys is targeting 2026 for commercial availability. [...]

Today's OLED screens use OLED material as their light source, with QD-OLED specifically applying quantum dots to convert the light into color. In QLED, the light source is a white backlight; QDEL displays apply electricity directly to quantum dots, which then generate light. QDEL uses a layer of quantum dots sandwiched between an anode and cathode to facilitates the flow of electricity into the quantum dots. QDEL displays have pixels made of a red quantum dot subpixel, green quantum dot subpixel, and -- differing from today's QLED and QD-OLED displays -- blue quantum dot subpixel. QDEL displays use the same quantum dot cores that QD-OLED and QLED products use, [Jeff Yurek, Nanosys' VP of marketing] told me, adding, "The functionalization of the outer layer of the [quantum dots] needs to be changed to make it compatible with each display architecture, but the cores that do the heavy lifting are pretty much the same across all of these."

Because QDEL pixels make their own light and can therefore turn off completely, QDEL displays can deliver the same deep blacks and rich contrast that made OLED popular. But with the use of direct-view quantum dots, stakeholders are claiming the potential for wider color gamuts than we've seen in consumer displays before. With fewer layers and parts, there are also implications for QDEL product pricing, longevity, and even thinness. [...] The fact that quantum dots are already being successfully applied to LCD-LED and OLED screens is encouraging for future QDEL products. QDEL stakeholders claim that the tech could bring efficiencies like lower power consumption and higher brightness than OLED. (Research using a prototype device has recorded quantum dot light-emitting diodes reaching 614,000 nits. Of course, those aren't the type of results you should expect to see in a real-life consumer product.) There's also hope that QDEL could eventually last longer than OLED, especially since QDEL doesn't rely on organic materials that can cause burn-in.

North Korean animators have been secretly working on major international TV shows, including an Amazon superhero series and an upcoming HBO Max children's anime, according to a report by cybersecurity researchers. The findings, detailed in a report by the Stimson Center think tank's 38 North Project and Google-owned security firm Mandiant, provide a glimpse into how North Korea can use skilled IT workers to raise funds for its heavily sanctioned regime.

Researcher Nick Roy discovered a misconfigured cloud server on a North Korean IP address in December, containing thousands of animation files, including cells, videos, and notes discussing ongoing projects. Some images appeared to be from Amazon's "Invincible" and HBO Max's "Iyanu: Child of Wonder." The server, which mysteriously stopped being used at the end of February, likely allowed work to be sent to and from North Korean animators, according to Martyn Williams, a senior fellow on the 38 North Project. U.S. sanctions prohibit companies from working with North Korean entities, but the researchers say it is unlikely that the companies involved were aware of the animators' origins. The report suggests the contracting arrangement was several steps removed from the major producers.

Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which has been called the "mother of all meme stocks" after it made its stock market debut in late March, announced that its Truth Social platform is moving to launch a live TV streaming platform. Following the news, shares of DJT closed more than 14% lower Tuesday. They ended trading Monday down by more than 18%. CNBC reports: The stock's price has dropped by a whopping 67.7% since Trump Media began trading as a public company on March 26, erasing more than $5 billion in market capitalization. Trump Media's majority shareholder is former President Donald Trump, who holds nearly 60% of its stock.

Earlier Tuesday, Trump Media in a press release said it "has finished the research and development phase of its new live TV streaming platform and will begin scaling up its own content delivery network." The company said it will roll out streaming content in three phases, the first of which will introduce Truth Social's content delivery network for streaming live TV to the app for Android, iOS and web. Phase two will release stand-alone Truth Social streaming apps for phones, tablets and other devices, while phase three will release such apps for home television, Trump Media said. "The streaming content is expected to focus on live TV including news networks, religious channels, family-friendly content including films and documentaries; and other content that has been cancelled, is at risk of cancellation, or is being suppressed on other platforms and services," Trump Media said in its release.

"We're excited to move forward with the next big phase for Truth Social," added CEO Devin Nunes in a statement. "With our streaming content, we aim to provide a permanent home for high-quality news and entertainment that face discrimination by other channels and content delivery service. There is a lot of great content that simply can't find an audience for unjust reasons, and we want to let these creators know they'll soon have a guaranteed platform where they won't be cancelled."

Film data researcher Stepehen, writing on his blog: This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays. The most common source for adapted screenplays was real-life events, accounting for almost a fifth of movies made between 2000 and 2023. (Typically, in these cases, the filmmakers will have paid for the rights to a nonfiction book or two that covered those events, but we will classify that as 'based on real-life events' in this analysis.) Other sources include fictional books/articles (8.9%), previous movies (11.8%), stage productions (including plays, musicals, and dance performances) (1.5%), and TV/Web shows (0.9%). In the chart below, 'Other' includes myths, legends, poems, songs, games, toys, and more.

How has this changed over the years? Forty years ago, about the same proportion of movies being made were original screenplays as they are today. That's quite surprising -- both because I assume that many people expected it to be lower in recent years, but also because little stays the same in the film industry over such a long period of time. But when we look at a time series by year, we can see that it hadn't plateaued. During the late 1990s and 2000s, original screenplays declined markedly and only rose again in the 2010s.

After nearly 11 years as CNN's space correspondent, Miles O'Brien found himself in 2003 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida covering the launch of the space shuttle Columbia: As part of the post-launch routine, NASA began sharing several replays of the launch from various cameras trained on the vehicle. And that was when we saw it. Producer Dave Santucci called me into our live truck, and said, "You got to look at this." It was kind of a grainy image of what looked like a puff of smoke, as if someone dropped a bag of flour on the ground and it broke open. We played it over and over again, and it did not look good at all. The giant orange fuel tank was filled with super cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen, so it was enveloped in insulating foam. A big piece of the foam had broken away near a strut called the "bipod," striking the leading edge of the orbiter's left wing. It was made of reinforced carbon to protect the aluminum structure of the spacecraft from the searing heat of re-entry from space.

I reached out to some of my sources inside the shuttle program. Everyone had seen it, of course, but the people I spoke with cautioned me not to worry. The foam was very light, and it had fallen off on earlier missions and nothing of concern had happened as a result... I wish I hadn't taken my eye off the ball. Space was my beat, and I was uniquely positioned to put this concerning event into the public domain. Like NASA's leadership, I went through a process of convincing myself that it was going to be okay. But I had this sinking feeling. It didn't feel right. A spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere at 17,500 miles an hour — much faster than a rifle bullet — is enveloped in a glowing inferno of plasma...

[As it returned to earth 16 days later] the communication between the ground and the orbiter became non-routine. Producers in the control room realized the gravity of the situation, and we cut to a commercial break to get me off the couch. As I was making my way across the newsroom, I started heaving. I knew in an instant that they were all gone. There was no survivable scenario. I was sickened. It was like a body blow. Somehow I got my act together and started talking. I felt like it was my responsibility to mention the foam strike, to get the information out there to the public. About an hour after Columbia had disintegrated, I shared with a huge global audience what I knew... "That bipod is the place where they think a little piece of foam fell off and hit the leading edge of that wing."

During the mission, I could have easily done a story about the foam strike, spreading the word that some NASA engineers believed there may be some reason for concern. What if I had done that? It might have made a difference.
"A rescue mission would not have been impossible," the article concludes, "and I feel certain that if NASA managers saw that gaping hole in Columbia's wing, they would've tried.

"We will never know for sure, but I do know how so many of us on the ground failed to do our jobs during that mission. It still haunts me."


CNN broadcasts the last two episodes of its four-part series Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight tonight at 9 p.m. EST (time-delayed on the west coast until 9 p.m.PST). CNN's web site offers a "preview" of its live TV offerings here.

The news episodes (along with past episodes) will also be available on-demand starting Monday — "for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected TV and mobile apps." It's also available for purchase on Amazon Prime.

Despite investing billions in new streaming services, media giants have failed to dethrone old favorites, according to Nielsen data. The 21-year-old legal drama "NCIS" tops the list, with viewers streaming 11.4 million episodes per week. Netflix dominates the top 10, with eight shows owing most of their viewership to the platform. Reruns from CBS and other networks make up the majority of the list, with "Stranger Things" being the only original series.

"Nine of the 10 most-watched streaming programs are reruns. In addition to the three from CBS, there is one from YouTube (CoComelon), one from Canada (Heartland), one from Australia (Bluey) and Suits. The only original series to crack the list is Stranger Things," Bloomberg writes. However: "While reruns dominate the top 10, that is not the case overall. Most of the 100 most popular titles of the last three years are original series," it added.

CNN revisits 2003's disastrous landing of the Space Shuttle Columbia tonight with two "immersive" specials co-produced by BBC and Mindhouse Productions "featuring exclusive interviews and revealing never-before-broadcast footage," according to an announcement — with two more specials airing next week.

You can watch a trailer here. Across four episodes, the story of the ticking-clock of Columbia's final mission is told in dramatic detail, beginning months before the troubled launch, unfolding across the sixteen days in orbit, and concluding with the investigation into the tragic loss of the seven astronauts' lives. Weaving together intimate footage shot by the astronauts themselves inside the orbiter, exclusive first-hand testimony from family members of the Shuttle's crew, key players at NASA — some of whom have never spoken before — and journalists who covered the story on the ground, the series paints an intimate portrait of the women and men onboard and uncovers in forensic detail the trail of events and missed opportunities that ultimately led to disaster.
CNN says the first two episodes will livestream tonight at 9 p.m. EST (time-delayed on the west coast until 9 p.m.PST) — and then be available on-demand starting Monday — "for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected TV and mobile apps." CNN's web site offers a "preview" of its live TV offerings here.

They're promising "the inside story of one America's most iconic institutions, uncovering how financial pressures and a culture of complacency may have contributed to the events of February 1, 2003. The series also reflects on the legacy of the Space Shuttle era, serving as a timely exploration of the challenges and inherent dangers that remain relevant to space travel today."

On its web site CNN has also published two companion articles — one by Rice history professor Douglas Brinkley arguing that NASA "was America's crown jewel. After the Columbia disaster it was never quite the same." Because other shuttle missions had returned safely with "shredded" surface tiles — and because the stalwart Columbia had brought astronauts home from 27 previous flights — many NASA officials were lulled into complacency. They went so far as to assure the pilot and commander via email that "there is no concern ... We have seen the same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry."

NASA officials also decided against enlisting spy satellite photography to examine the shuttle damage more thoroughly. If they had, it's possible that the astronauts could have repaired the spaceplane or at least abandoned it for refuge on the International Space Station...

As the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) noted in its final report, "the NASA organizational culture had as much to do with this accident as the foam." All of NASA's launches were suspended for two years. While the shuttles eventually flew again, post-Columbia, the program was stunted and curtailed.
The article notes that since then SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the United Launch Alliance (Lockheed Martin and Boeing) "are thriving today in the space industry," along with Virgin Galactic and Axiom Space. "NASA, far from feeling threatened, has encouraged many of the private companies with massive contracts. The agency already had a long history of dealing with sub-contractors, using its pocketbook to steer aerospace development; that tradition has adjusted seamlessly to the current space economy."

In the other article CNN Space & Science writer Jackie Wattles notes that when America later retired its Space Shuttle program in 2011, "no U.S. astronaut would travel to space on an American-made rocket for nearly a decade."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: A new patent recently filed by TV and streaming device manufacturer Roku hints toward a possible future where televisions could display ads when you pause a movie or game. For Roku, the time in which the TV is on but users aren't doing anything is valuable. The company has started leasing out ad space in its popular Roku City screensaver -- which appears when your TV is idle -- to companies like McDonald's and movies like Barbie. As tech newsletter Lowpass points out, Roku finds this idle time and its screensaver so valuable that it forbids app developers from overriding the screensaver with their own. But, if you plug in an Xbox or DVD player into the HDMI port on a Roku TV, you bypass the company's screensaver and other ads. And so, Roku has been figuring out a way to not let that happen.

As reported by Lowpass on April 4, Roku recently filed a patent for a technology that would let it inject ads into third-party content -- like an Xbox game or Netflix movie -- using an HDMI connection. The patent describes a situation where you are playing a video game and hit pause to go check your phone or grab some food. At this point, Roku would identify that you have paused the content and display a relevant ad until you unpaused the game. Roku's tech isn't designed to randomly inject ads as you are playing a game or watching a movie, it knows that would be going too far and anger people. Instead, the patent suggests several ways that Roku could spot when your TV is paused, like comparing frames, to make sure the user has actually paused the content. Roku might also use the HDMI's audio feed to search for extended moments of silence. The company also proposes using HDMI CEC -- a protocol designed to help devices communicate better -- to figure out when you pause and unpause content. Similarly, Roku's patent explains that it will use various methods to detect what people are playing or watching and try to display relevant ads. So if it sees you have an Xbox plugged in, it might try to serve you ads that it thinks an Xbox owner would be interested in.