Wolves got their transfer business `wrong` in the summer, says technical director Matt Jackson - while under-fire executive chairman Jeff Shi empathises with protesting fans. Read...

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The government department can no longer take out any subscriptions to the news website after the department shared articles across a number of staff. Read...

If you want to know how Netflix’s plan to acquire Warner Bros. will affect you, I suggest not getting your answers from Netflix. Last weekend, the streaming giant emailed customers implying the deal was done (subject line: “Welcoming Warner Bros. to Netflix”) even though that’s far from being settled. Its press release and help page are only marginally more informative, provided you can sift through all the boilerplate proclamations and canned executive quotes. Ultimately this deal is about power. For Netflix, it’s a way to fulfill its goal of being a singular source for streaming, which in turn will help it raise prices, freeze out rivals, and tilt the distribution of movies and shows in its favor. Expect a lot of fighting between Netflix, rivals, and government regulators before that’s allowed to happen. Brand power Despite Netflix’s popularity, it does not control many established entertainment franchises. It has cultivated a handful, including Squid Game, Stranger Things, and Bridgerton, but none that truly rival those of Disney (Star Wars, Marvel), Paramount (Star Trek, Spongebob), or NBCUniversal (Despicable Me, Jurassic Park). Wikipedia’s list of the top-grossing media franchises only includes one from Netflix, and it’s Chronicles of Narnia, the rights to which it acquired in 2018. Buying Warner would give Netflix a stable of recognizable entertainment brands to build around, including DC properties such as Superman and Batman, kid-friendly franchises such as Minecraft and Looney Tunes, sci-fi staples such as The Matrix and Dune, and HBO hits such as Game of Thrones and The Sopranos. While Netflix says HBO Max will remain separate for now, its press release makes clear that the goal is to subsume Warner’s catalog and create new content around it. The broader content roster could potentially make Netflix better, but it will also help Netflix justify the price increases that have now become routine. It could also allow Netflix to expand other aspects of its business, such as video games and merchandising. (To that end, it’s taking over Warner’s gaming division as well.) Weakening rivals Ted Sarandos, who is now Netflix’s co-CEO, famously said in 2012 that the company’s goal was “to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” Lately, though, it’s trying to be more like cable—a singular source of streaming that caters to a wide swath of interests—before cable becomes Netflix though its own array of streaming services. At the risk of being cynical, Netflix’s biggest motivation to take over Warner might be to keep it away from its competitors in the traditional TV business. Paramount and Comcast had also been bidding on Warner, and Paramount has now launched a hostile takeover bid in hopes of convincing Warner shareholders that it’s offering a better deal. Much like Netflix, Paramount was also looking to absorb the entire HBO Max catalog into its own Paramount+ streaming service. In this scenario, Paramount+ would become a serious competitor instead of an also-ran, and Netflix would have less latitude to raise prices without subscribers defecting. Netflix doesn’t even have to seal the deal to achieve its goal. As CNBC reporter Alex Sherman pointed out, Netflix has agreed to a $5 billion breakup fee if its Warner acquisition fails, but that’s nothing for a company worth $450 billion, and it could take a couple years for Warner to be up for sale again. In the meantime Netflix could further entrench itself by keeping the competition weaker. Shifting the movie business Warner’s current plan is to release 12 to 14 movies into theaters per year, and while Netflix says theatrical releases will continue, it wants to get them onto its streaming service sooner. In an analyst call last week, Sarandos said theatrical release windows would “evolve to be much more consumer friendly, to be able to meet the audience where they are, quicker.” That doesn’t mean Netflix would abandon theatrical releases outright, but the goal will shift toward promoting Netflix properties rather than boosting theater revenue for its own sake. As the New York Times notes, Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters Singalong has been a huge hit in theaters, and its series finale of Stranger Things—screening on 500 theaters in lockstep with the streaming release—is already sold out in many places. Expect more event-driven spectacles, fewer straightforward screenings, and a greater willingness to let people stay at home. What it’s not about: Live sports Another notable aspect of the Netflix deal is what’s missing: The company is not buying Warner’s cable channels, including TNT and TBS, as Warner plans to spin those off into a separate company. TNT will get its own sports streaming service when that happens, and its live sports coverage will disappear from HBO Max. That means Netflix won’t be getting any live sports as part of the deal. By contrast, Paramount wants to add Warner’s entire cable business, and could use it to transform Paramount+ into a major source of sports streaming. Netflix might have other reasons for passing over Warner’s cable business, such as not wanting to negotiate carriage deals or take on as much debt from Warner’s previous merger disasters. For now, though, it’s maintaining a conservative approach to live sports, avoiding expensive full-season rights deals in favor of scattershot events, such as Christmas NFL games, the Paul-Tyson fight, and the first MLB game of the season next year. Netflix’s goal to become more like cable doesn’t yet extend to sports, and acquiring Warner won’t change that. What’s next While Netflix is projecting confidence, it’s a long way from owning Warner Bros. in earnest. Antitrust hearings are likely, Paramount’s hostile takeover bid has to play out, and the Justice Department feels like a wild card under the Trump administration. Even if everything goes smoothly, Netflix says it’ll take 12 to 18 months for the deal to close. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the one line in Netflix’s customer letter that we know for certain is true: “Nothing is changing today.” Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV insights. Read...

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YouTube TV is about to get skinny—that is, it’s set to add skinny bundles of live streaming TV channels next year, including a sports package with every ESPN network.  More than 10 of these “genre-specific” bundles are coming to YouTube TV next year, but for now, YouTube is only revealing a few details about the sports bundle, and nothing about the other upcoming channel packages or pricing information.  Aside from ESPN, ESPN Unlimited and the other ESPN channels, the YouTube TV Sports Plan will boast such networks as FS1 and the NBC Sports Network.   Subscribers will be able to choose add-ons such as NFL Sunday Ticket and RedZone, just as they can with the YouTube TV Base Plan, and YouTube TV functionality like unlimited DVR usage, multiview, key plays, and fantasy view will be on tap as well.  “TV should be easy, giving viewers greater control over what they want to watch. Our goal is to let you tailor your subscription with more options,” said YouTube TV subscriptions exec Christian Oestlien in a statement. “Whether you stick with our main YouTube TV plan with 100+ channels, focus on sports, combine sports and news, or select a plan centered on family and entertainment content, subscribers will be able to easily choose the plan that works best for them.”  More details about YouTube TV’s slimmed-down packages are coming “soon,” Oestlien promised, adding that “we have a lot in store for YouTube TV members next year.” But while YouTube TV hasn’t given any pricing details about its upcoming skinny bundles, they’re sure to be cheaper than the price of the YouTube TV base plan, which costs $82.99 a month.   YouTube TV’s move into the skinny bundle business comes as skinny and cheaper streaming bundles are rising in popularity. DirecTV, Fubo, and Sling all offer their own slimmed-down packages with various combinations of local TV channels, sports networks, news channels, and entertainment, allowing users to pick and choose which channel bundles they want to pay for.  Making an even bigger splash was the launch this past summer of ESPN Unlimited, which packs in all of ESPN’s sports networks in packages starting at $30 a month, while Fox unveiled its Fox One bundle of sports, news, and entertainment channels around the same time.  Another skinny sports bundled that never got off the ground was Venu Sports, a venture from Disney, Fox, and Warner Brothers that would have bundled ESPN, FS1, BTN, TNT, TBS, and other top sports networks.  Venu faced serious legal headwinds, including a lawsuit from Fubo and a federal injunction, leading the bundles backers to eventually kill the nascent sports bundle before it went on the air.  This story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best live TV streaming services. Read...

While it may be most common to use Microsoft Teams for work, the communication app is actually also available for personal use through Microsoft 365 subscriptions. However, private users have been missing some of the better features that are only available in the business version of Teams. Going forward, that’s going to change. Microsoft just announced in a post on the Teams Free Blog that Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, and Premium subscribers will now be able to record their meetings and calls in Microsoft Teams. The recordings will be stored for only 30 days in the cloud, but they can be downloaded locally to your PC if you want to save them permanently. Microsoft says these recordings can be useful for remote music teachers, for example, or creators who want to record podcast interviews. User feedback is said to have prompted Microsoft to roll out the recordings feature to personal Teams users, and the company is now asking for more suggestions on how to further improve Teams. Read...

Hardeep Singh hosted lavish parties at his mansion, and separately sold three stores and equipment in the weeks before his company, Big Daddy’s, went bust. Read...

The ability of AI services to generate images is well recognized and one of the most common uses of services like ChatGPT. It is also an area that has been surrounded by controversy – photographers, artists and filmmakers are upset that Open AI and other companies have “trained” their AI models on their copyrighted works. In this guide, I gather tips on what you can do and how to get better results. Create images from text The most obvious thing you can use ChatGPT to do with images is to generate something completely new. Just give prompts like “create a picture of two rabbits playing in a meadow” or “make a photorealistic picture of a woman sitting in front of a computer drinking coffee out of a cup that says PC for Everyone” and an image will pop up that you can download and use. In many cases the images ChatGPT generates are really good, or at least good enough to use, but sometimes they don’t match what you asked for, or have obvious errors. Today, errors like too many fingers or an extra hand in a group photo are not as common, but errors that cannot be ignored are still common. When this happens, you can either try to continue in the same chat and try to get ChatGPT to tweak the image until the result is better, or try again with a new or modified prompt. Which works best will vary and you will simply have to try it out. ChatGPT first generated the image on the left. When I asked it to change it so that she is holding the cup in her left hand, I got the image on the right – note that the gaze has been wrong.Bilder genererade av Chat GPT In my experience, the results of small adjustments rarely improve enough to be worth the effort and so-called prompt engineering, where you try out different formulations, is far from an exact science. Even an adjustment that is logically very small, like adding “one of the rabbits has a pink collar” or “she’s holding the cup in her left hand” to the examples above, can lead to totally different results – or be exactly as you hope. 5 tips for better photos with ChatGPT Skärmdump Describe what you are looking forHave a picture in your head of what you want? Describe it as if you were telling someone who can’t see what you see. “A girl with brown hair and pale skin sitting at a piano in an old house with old-fashioned furnishings” is better than “a girl sitting and playing the piano” if that’s exactly how you want the image. If you don’t have a clear picture yourself, ChatGPT has nothing to go on. Sure, it can produce interesting results from time to time to see what happens when the AI is given a freer rein, but if you’re after something in particular, you need to actually say what it is. Avoid overly detailed descriptionsA detailed description is important, but it can also be too much. If you write a whole A4 page with an extremely detailed description, there is a high probability that ChatGPT will lose the thread and produce something unusable. Include the essentials but let the AI fill in the rest. InPixell_Studio “Metadata”Do you want a wide image or a square one? Should it look like a photo or a painting? Should the colors be saturated or faded? How much of the image should the main subject take up? Should the light be warm or cold, sharp or soft? Tell ChatGPT how the picture should be made, not just what it should contain. Try it againDidn’t get it quite right? Ask ChatGPT to try again, or ask it to create some different suggestions. Change the prompt and see if it gives better results. Try a more detailed description – or vice versa, a simpler one, if your original prompt was already very detailed. Start from a sketchIf you can draw a simple sketch that shows the basic composition and content of the image you’re after, you can ask ChatGPT to turn it into a finished image in any style. How well this works varies widely. Common problems include illogical composition, facial expressions that don’t match the sketch, and most of all, people looking in the wrong direction. Editing and improving your own images In addition to generating brand new images, you can use ChatGPT to edit existing images. It’s important to note that this isn’t really editing in the usual sense of the word. Every time you ask it to make a change, it generates the whole image again, it’s just that the algorithm works in such a way that most of the new image will be identical to the original. Skärmdump Once ChatGPT has created an image, you can click on it to open the chatbot’s editing interface. There’s really only one tool here, plus buttons for undo and redo. Click on the edit tool and your mouse pointer will turn into a big circle when you hover it over the image. Click and drag to paint an area that marks the part of the image where you want ChatGPT to make the changes you then ask for. This could be things like removing a distracting object, changing the details of something (like changing the print on a jumper visible in the image) or adding something new. If you want to make more general changes, you can do so directly in the prompt without selecting anything. “Remove background” often works well in its simplicity, but other changes may need a bit more detailed descriptions. Anders Lundberg Sometimes ChatGPT gets itself to make more changes than requested. Then you can try to specifically tell it not to change anything else. For example: “Change the color of the umbrella to red. Do not make any other adjustments or changes to the image.” “Zoom, enhance” A very common trope in films is that a detail is needed from a blurry photo or still from a surveillance film, and all a “computer person” needs to do is zoom in on the image and click an Enhance button. Sometimes a high-resolution version showing the necessary details pops up instantly, but sometimes the story requires it to take time, and then the computer can keep thinking for a long time. Often part of the image is shown at a time and the tension is unbearable as pixel after pixel appears on the screen. This is science fiction, of course. Information that doesn’t exist can’t be ‘recreated’ no matter how advanced an algorithm or how powerful a computer. But with AI, it can be faked. Any feature that removes distracting objects or people and fills in the background uses machine learning of some kind, whether it’s called AI or not. Older techniques like Photoshop’s content-aware fill use simpler algorithms while some newer ones use the same algorithms that AI chatbots do when generating new images. I asked ChatGPT to enlarge and fill in the missing details in this photo.Anders Lundberg The result ChatGPT spat out – not too bad.Genererad av Chat GPT Enlarging an image works in a similar way, but instead of guessing what fits to fill in a larger gap, the algorithm guesses how many small gaps to fill in so that the image is sharper (shows more detail). Since some of the information is already there, the risk of the AI coming up with something completely wrong is much lower. If you can already see what a sign says in a low-resolution image and the AI just makes the text clearer, it hasn’t lied, although it can’t be said to have recreated lost information. The result will never be identical to what it would have been if the image had simply been taken at higher resolution or better sharpness, but in most cases that difference is an academic question – what matters is whether you can use the image at the size you want without it looking blurry. ChatGPT is particularly good at making people sharp.Anders Lundberg Another thing you can try is to ask ChatGPT to sharpen a blurred image, for example a photo where the camera focused wrong. This can work really well if the image is only slightly blurry, but if it’s very blurry it guesses wildly and then the person in the photo can look like someone else entirely. Apply a certain style to images ChatGPT has become known for being good at a particular kind of editing – turning a photo or other image into a picture with a particular style. You’ve probably seen examples of the trend to ask ChatGPT to make images in Studio Ghibli style, that is, with a cartoon style similar to films directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It’s very good at it, but be aware that the creators you make it mimic have in most cases been sharply critical of the move. Some have sued Open AI for copyright infringement. Less controversial is asking ChatGPT to change the image to a style that is not that of any individual artist, for example “turn this photo into a watercolour painting”, or asking for a style that belongs to a long-dead artist like Rembrandt. Foto: Anders Lundberg, målning genererad av Chat GPT You can also upload an existing image to have as a reference and ask ChatGPT to remake other uploaded images to match the style of that image. A trick you can try if this does not give satisfactory results is to upload the example in a new chat instead and ask ChatGPT to “generate a description of the image that could be used to ask ChatGPT to apply the same style to another image”. Paste the results into the chat where you have uploaded the image(s) you want to change the style of. Skärmdump Gallery In the top left column of ChatGPT, under New Chat and Search Chats, you will find the Gallery feature. It’s a repository for all the images you’ve generated with ChatGPT (technically only with the GPT-4o model, not images generated with the older Dall-e model). It makes it easier to find specific images you have generated, so that you can, for example, continue working or look up how you wrote the prompt at the time. Click on an image and then on Open in chat in the top right corner to go to the thread where the image was generated. Skärmdump Generate video with Sora In addition to image generation, Open AI has developed algorithms that can generate video, and is offered as a separate service called Sora, with its own website and app. Sora is not embedded in ChatGPT mainly because the service requires a more advanced user interface, and Open AI wants to keep ChatGPT’s simple interface. Sora is exciting and can create scarily realistic videos. Going through everything you might find useful about video generation would take up more space than I have in this guide. But you can start from the same basic tips as for image generation. My second tip is to try and play around with the service. But keep in mind that you can create a maximum of 15 10-second clips a day unless you have an expensive Pro subscription. Skärmdump Projects and GPTs Just like with text, you can use projects to keep all of your chats organised and add files and instructions to accompany any new chats in that project. This is ideal if, for example, you’re using ChatGPT to create image resources for a website or anything else where you want to stick to a consistent style. If you pay for a Plus subscription, you can also use the GPT feature to create customised versions of the chatbot, not to mention accessing GPTs created by other users, like the upscaling GPT I mentioned above. Read more about the benefits of projects and GPTs here. AI-generated images and copyright If you let ChatGPT or another AI service generate images for you, you have no copyright on them. It doesn’t matter how detailed your description was or how much you fiddled with the prompt. This means that others can copy ‘your’ images and use them, without asking you and without you being able to do anything about it. It is also illegal to claim that you own the copyright to an AI-generated image. However, if you take an AI-generated image and make major changes to it using a program such as Photoshop, it can become a “work of authorship”, which gives you the copyright to it. The same applies if you paint an image that the AI has generated – then it is your painting that you have the copyright to, not the generated original. The US Library of Congress has a good guide to AI and copyright, which also warns of the risk of an AI infringing someone else’s copyright. If you’re just using the images for personal use, there’s a low risk of you being sued, for example by Studio Ghibli if you’ve made a portrait of yourself “Ghibli-style”, but for those running a business, it’s more important to be careful. Read...