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| RadioNZ - 37 minutes ago (RadioNZ) Thousands attended the opening day of the Auckland Lantern Festival at Manukau Sports Bowl on Thursday. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
|  | | PC World - 4:25AM (PC World)YouTube TV users may soon need to get their fix of Tracker, Matlock, Elsbeth, and other CBS shows elsewhere thanks to yet another carriage dispute.
Subscribers to YouTube TV just got a warning that CBS, CBS Sports Network, Comedy Central, MTV, and other Paramount-owned stations will go dark after February 13—today—if the two sides fail to strike a deal before the deadline.
“We’ve been working hard to reach a fair agreement with Paramount that allows us to keep their channels, including CBS and CBS Sports, on YouTube TV without passing on additional costs to our subscribers,” YouTube said in a blog post. “Unfortunately, despite our good faith negotiations, we haven’t been successful yet.”
In a dueling blog post, Paramount argued that it had “made a series of offers to YouTube TV that are good for their customers,” and that YouTube was “attempting to pressure Paramount to agree to unfavorable and one-sided terms.”
In other words, it’s another game of chicken between two media conglomerates over a carriage deal, and YouTube TV customers—who, don’t forget, just endured a price hike—are stuck in the crossfire.
Among the stations that could go dark on YouTube TV include the CBS affiliates for 10 major metro areas, including New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, and Dallas-Fort Worth.
YouTube TV users could also see two dozen Paramount channels go dark, including Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, CBS Sports Network, CMT, and VH1.
Besides losing those stations, YouTube TV users could be blocked from streaming any recordings of Paramount content in their DVR libraries.
YouTube TV says it may offer users an $8 credit if it can’t reach a deal with Paramount for “an extended period of time.” That $8 credit would cover a month’s worth of Paramount+, which offers streams of local CBS stations as well as all the soon-to-be-blocked Paramount stations.
These types of disputes are nothing new, of course, and they tend to roll around whenever a carriage agreement between a TV network and a cable and/or streaming provider is about to expire.
Just four years ago, YouTube TV and Comcast mixed it up over NBCUniversal stations, with the latter coming close to yanking NBC and other TV channels from YouTube TV’s lineup. In that case, the two sides struck a deal with days to spare.
It’s certainly possible that the latest YouTube TV-Paramount dispute will end with a similar last-minute reprieve, but watching the game of high-stakes poker isn’t much fun for YouTube TV subscribers, who are now paying $83 a month for the service’s base plan. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 3:05AM (PC World)Intel’s new Core Ultra 200 processors offer a huge leap forward in performance on top of all-day battery life. They’re a huge improvement over their predecessors. But these new “Arrow Lake” chips leave out an absolute necessity of today’s PCs: an NPU, the engine which powers AI performance across the board.
We knew this going into my review of Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285H inside of an MSI laptop. But it might be time for Intel — and maybe AMD, too — to take a step back and consider what consumers really want: a “good,” one-size-fits-all mainstream PC. And a clear way to identify them!
Every time I review a chip or another product, I try to unearth the “story” behind it. We all do. Our recent Nvidia GeForce 5090 review contained numerous charts and graphs, but the card can be boiled down to a pretty basic statement: AI-generated frames are the future.
The story that Intel wants to tell with the Core Ultra 200H series is a simple one: everyone, this is the mainstream processor you’ll look for in buying your next laptop. In some benchmarks, it doubles the performance of its predecessor, Lunar Lake. It offers the same great battery life.
What the Core 200H doesn’t offer is a great NPU. Instead, its AI performance is just 13 TOPS, well below the performance requirements of Microsoft’s Copilot+ program.
That means that Intel really can’t pitch a Core 200H laptop to anyone who wants to buy into Microsoft’s Copilot+ vision, now or in the future. It’s an unforced error, and an obvious one. Intel, and to some extent other PC chipmakers, are losing track of what a “mainstream” PC processor should be: a single chip family that offers a good CPU, GPU, and NPU for complete performance.
AI is the future, like it or not
I know many of you aren’t sold on the need for AI on a local PC, and that’s fine. But all we’ve heard from everyone, from Microsoft to Intel to AMD and Qualcomm and OpenAI and Google and Meta and — you get the idea — is that AI is inextricably wound into the fabric of consumer computing. Whether it’s used or not, a Copilot+ class NPU simply has to be there.
Recall may be controversial, but there are many more applications that can tap local AI.Mark Hachman / IDG
And AI is valuable. Microsoft rather annoyingly doesn’t even try to bring some of its AI features to non-Copilot+ PCs. But I honestly will put down the laptop I’m using and switch to a Snapdragon-powered PC just so I can access Microsoft’s advanced editing features in Photos, such as upscaling a blurry little screenshot. I might not go out and specifically buy a laptop just to access those features, but you can be damn sure I’ll use them when they’re available.
If you’re unimpressed by what Microsoft offers, including Recall, I get it. But as we’ve seen, major developments in AI can take place overnight. Don’t expect them all to come from Microsoft.
Intel is too fragmented
Intel could have designed in a modern NPU to the Core 200H and solved the problem. Instead, the company offers multiple products, and asks consumers to pick and choose between them.
Intel’s older Meteor Lake architecture, the Core Ultra 100, offers solid performance, good battery life, and an anemic NPU — sound familiar? Intel’s Core 200V family, aka Lunar Lake, is the Snapdragon killer, with a robust NPU and fantastic battery life. To that we now have the Core 200H, which uses an entirely different architecture but shares a virtually identical product name. All of these are still available from retailers. Sometime in the near future Intel will ship the Intel Core HX, a processor for high-performance gaming laptops that will also be based on Intel’s Arrow Lake architecture. (Expect that chip to be sharply scrutinized, as it’s the mobile version of the desktop Arrow Lake chip that received some harsh criticism. )
MSI’s latest Prestige AI notebook, the launch vehicle for Intel’s Arrow Lake-H or Core Ultra 200H chip.Mark Hachman / IDG
In some ways, Intel’s marketing efforts are a shambles. Wind back the clock three or four years ago, and we all pretty much understood that a “U” series chip was for thin-and-light PCs, and the more powerful H- and HX-series were where you’d find gaming-class processors. But they were all essentially the same thing. Now, consumers really have to read the fine print to understand what they’re buying.
Hey, I despise using Macs, but everyone understands that better-best branding that Apple uses. M1, M2, M3, M4. Ultra. Pro. Max. How hard is that?
AMD and Qualcomm, pay attention
What Apple understands is the concept of “mainstream.” The thing you buy when an aunt says, “I just want a good PC.”
The only one among the PC chip vendors who seems to get this is AMD, which launched the Ryzen AI 300 family with just two models last year, the AI 9 HX 370 and the AI 9 365. Yes, the model numbers are overdone, but there’s no question which chips to buy if you want a Ryzen notebook. Unlike Intel, the Ryzen AI 300 family all ships with the things you want: a killer CPU, a great GPU, and 50 TOPS worth of NPU power, too. Perfect.
I’m as excited about the Ryzen AI Max as anyone. But it will be a niche product.AMD
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors also combine excellent CPU, GPU, and NPU performance in a single chip — but their marketing department seems somehow compelled to follow Intel’s lead. Right now, Qualcomm claims about 10 percent of the PC market at $800 and above, and that’s great. Such a small share doesn’t demand slicing the Snapdragon brand into X Elite, X Plus, and whatever other brands it’s using.
That’s the only thing I worry a bit about with AMD. In addition to AMD’s existing AI 300 parts, the company plans to add the mobile Ryzen 9955HX3D products and the upcoming Ryzen AI Max. All of them distract people away from that central question: “What should I buy?”
Look, this is not hard. Yes, people buy sports cars. But they also buy an overwhelming number of Toyota Corollas, too. Some chipmaker simply needs to step up and clearly say “this is the chip you — and I mean everyone — needs to buy.” And it needs to be a complete offering, with an NPU. So who’s it gonna be?
Further reading: Rising to the TOPS: How will NPUs and Windows AI grow in 2025? Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | Stuff.co.nz - 13 Feb (Stuff.co.nz) Sports fans across the United States rally to student’s defence after he was denied prize money from a basketball shooting contest as his foot was on a line. Read...Newslink ©2025 to Stuff.co.nz |  |
|  | | RadioNZ - 13 Feb (RadioNZ) They are among more than 500 handcrafted silk lanterns that will illuminate Manukau Sports Bowl from today. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
|  | | Stuff.co.nz - 11 Feb (Stuff.co.nz) The online bookie ran promotions showing NRL star Valentine Holmes with a bag of white powder and featuring pornographic imagery and slogans. Read...Newslink ©2025 to Stuff.co.nz |  |
|  | | PC World - 11 Feb (PC World)All season long, the Philadelphia Eagles were hounded by the doubters. One running back can’t win a Super Bowl, they said. Jalen Hurts doesn’t pass enough, they said. The Chiefs have it locked up, they said.
By the same token, there were plenty of side-eyes when Fox announced that Tubi, its ad-supported streaming service, would be offering a free stream—in 4K, no less—of the one of the world’s biggest sporting events. Did the little streamer have what it takes to deliver the Super Bowl in 4K without fumbling the ball?
Well, it turns out the Eagles did have what it takes and, from all accounts, so did Tubi.
While previous streams of the Super Bowl were plagued by buffering, stuttering, and those dreaded spinning beach balls, Tubi’s 4K (if upscaled) delivery of the big game went off more or less without a hitch.
Cord-cutters on Reddit, who are all too happy to pounce when they encounter poor streaming performance, found Tubi’s Super Bowl stream to be a “pleasant surprise,” with commenters praising the “clarity,” “good sound quality” (although that meant you could better hear Tom Brady be “as dull as he could be”), and the “awesome, great 4K picture.”
Not everyone gave Tubi’s Super Bowl stream a high-five, of course (“Tubi is trash,” one viewer grumbled), but for the most part, complaints over the stream were few and far between. Even more surprising, Tubi’s Super Bowl presentation reportedly had the shortest streaming delay of any of its competitors.
According to a survey by streaming provider Phenix (by way of Advanced Television), Tubi’s Super Bowl stream only lagged 26 seconds behind the real-time action. Coming in a distant second was the NFL+ stream with a 51-second lag, while Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV, DirecTV, and Sling were all behind by more than a minute. The worst was Fubo, which stumbled badly with a 78-second lag, the survey said.
Of course, the crown jewel of lag-free sports viewing comes via an over-the-air antenna, which is the way my family watched the big game. Then again, we’re Plex DVR users, which meant we actually did experience a delay given that the Plex software has to buffer the stream. Maybe we would have been better off going with Tubi.
Tubi’s Super Bowl night stood in stark contrast to how other streamers have fared in previous years.
During last year’s Super Bowl, Paramount had some explaining to do following widespread complaints about its game time stream.
Paramount blamed the glitches on “an error due to a technical issue with one of our partners.” Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | Stuff.co.nz - 10 Feb (Stuff.co.nz) The controversial practice had long been a contentious issue in one of the largest sports events contested by New Zealand secondary schools. Read...Newslink ©2025 to Stuff.co.nz |  |
|  | | BBCWorld - 8 Feb (BBCWorld)In his third week back in office, Trump took action on issues from transgender competitors in women`s sports to Gaza. Read...Newslink ©2025 to BBCWorld |  |
|  | | BBCWorld - 7 Feb (BBCWorld)Developer Sports Interactive says the 2025 edition was `too far away from the standards` fans deserve. Read...Newslink ©2025 to BBCWorld |  |
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