Tag Archives: Arts & Entertainment

Warner signs AI music licensing deal with Udio

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Warner Music Group (WMG) settled a lawsuit with an AI company in exchange for a piece of the action. The label announced on Wednesday that it had resolved a 2024 lawsuit against AI music creation platform Udio. As part of the deal, Udio gets to license Warner's catalog for an upcoming music creation service. This follows a similar settlement between Universal Music Group and Udio, announced last month.

Udio's service will allow subscribers to create, listen to and discover AI-generated music trained on licensed work. You’ll be able to generate new songs, remixes and covers using favorite artists' voices or compositions. The boundaries between human creation and an algorithm's approximation of it are about to grow murkier. Not in terms of artistic quality, but it will be based on what proliferates online.

WMG is framing the deal as a win for artists, who will — if they choose to opt in — gain a new revenue stream. Ahead of the service’s launch, Udio will roll out "expanded protections and other measures designed to safeguard the rights of artists and songwriters."

So, the settlement does at least appear to reassert some control over artists’ work. What the normalization of robot-made music will do for society's collective tastes is another question.

A neon sign on a wall, reading, "You are what you listen to."
A neon sign on a wall, reading, "You are what you listen to."
Mohammad Metri / Unsplash

The settlement echoes a warning Spotify sounded to musicians and labels last month. "If the music industry doesn't lead in this moment, AI-powered innovation will happen elsewhere, without rights, consent or compensation," the company wrote. Spotify plans to launch "artist-first AI music products" in the future, a vague promise to be sure. However, given Udio's plans, it wouldn't be surprising to see the streaming service cooking up a similar licensed AI music-creation product.

"We're unwaveringly committed to the protection of the rights of our artists and songwriters, and Udio has taken meaningful steps to ensure that the music on its service will be authorized and licensed," Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl wrote in a press release. "This collaboration aligns with our broader efforts to responsibly unlock AI's potential - fueling new creative and commercial possibilities while continuing to deliver innovative experiences for fans."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/warner-signs-ai-music-licensing-deal-with-udio-213433325.html?src=rss

Stargate is coming back to TV, thanks to Prime Video

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Disney+ has Star Wars and Paramount+ has Star Trek, so it's about time Amazon gets its own sci-fi franchise with "star" in the title. Prime Video has just greenlit a TV revival of the iconic Stargate franchise, according to a report by Deadline. This will be the fourth major TV show in the series, following the first movie.

We don't know anything about the plot and where it fits into the decades-long mythology but we do know that the showrunner is Martin Gero. He's a veteran of the IP, having cut his teeth in the industry while working on Stargate: Atlantis back in the early 2000s. He also created the show Blindspot and was showrunner on the recent reboot of Quantum Leap, which was actually kind of nifty (RIP.)

Franchise creators Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich are on board as executive producers, as are Brad Wright and Joe Mallozzi. That last duo were behind most of the Stargate TV projects, including the most recent live action show Stargate Universe.

This makes a lot of sense for Prime Video. Amazon did recently buy MGM, after all, and the Stargate IP came along with that purchase. It's not the first time the platform will have dabbled with science fiction. Prime Video most famously saved The Expanse after it was originally cancelled by SyFy. There are three more books in that series that have yet to be adapted. Just saying.

For the uninitiated, the Stargate franchise involves the titular Stargates. These are transportation devices created by ancient aliens that act as galaxy-spanning wormholes. It all started with a movie from 1994.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/stargate-is-coming-back-to-tv-thanks-to-prime-video-200049713.html?src=rss

Amazon adds AI-generated video recaps for select Prime Video shows

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If the idea of a custom-made "previously on" video for every show you watch is attractive to you, Amazon is taking steps to make it happen. The company has announced that it'll now include AI-generated "Video Recaps" for select series on Prime Video so it's easier to hop back into a show after taking a break. The feature expands on text-based X-Ray Recaps the company started experimenting with in 2024, and the Kindle Recaps it already offers for some series sold through the Kindle Store.

Amazon's Video Recaps combine clips, synchronized narration, select dialogue, music and sound effects into a short video that refreshes you on the characters and plot of a show. You can access the recaps through a new Recaps button on a show's page. Clicking it will either pull up a text-based X-Ray Recap or a Video Recap, depending on what Amazon's generated. At least for now, if you're interested in seeing a Video Recap for yourself, Amazon says the feature is available in beta for Fallout, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Upload, Bosch and The Rig.

Recaps are essentially a repackaged version of the summarizing skill that companies have decided AI excels at. Amazon's Video Recaps are decidedly more complex than an email summary, but the basic premise is the same. Adding the feature to media apps and devices, as Amazon and Spotify have done, seems like low-hanging fruit that other companies will pursue. 

AI-generated recaps aren't without their detractors, though. Many indie authors were against Kindle Recaps because of their potential to misrepresent the plots and characters of books. The same possibility could theoretically exist for Video Recaps, as well.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/amazon-adds-ai-generated-video-recaps-for-select-prime-video-shows-190758346.html?src=rss

Hypixel Studios shows off new Hytale footage the day after it brought the game back to life

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Hypixel Studios just dropped a massive new gameplay video for the upcoming adventure Hytale, which features over 15 minutes of footage. This comes just a day after the company brought the game back to life by buying the rights back from Riot. In other words, this new footage is quite the flex.

It's worth noting that this isn't a AAA-style trailer. It's barely edited live footage from the game that was "recorded in a single morning and put together" by Hypixel co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme. The developer says there are no "bells and whistles" included with this footage, as it features "just the game as it is." The description goes on to call the video "raw and broken, but still beautiful."

Hypixel says that this footage uses the original legacy engine which dates back to 2018. It's also running on a four-year-old build. Collins-Laflamme wrote that it was important to "release raw footage today so we can break the curse once and for all."

As for that curse, Hytale was recently canceled by Riot Games after nearly a decade of development. Just a few months later, the company managed to purchase the rights and get the game back on track. It also rehired around 30 staffers. The developer says "there's a long road ahead, but early access is coming soon." We don't have a date on that early access build, but we sure do like the word "soon."

For the uninitiated, Hytale is a fun-looking adventure game that looks like an open world take on Minecraft. Today's footage highlights some of the game's action and RPG mechanics, with a harrowing look at nighttime gameplay.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/hypixel-studios-shows-off-new-hytale-footage-the-day-after-it-brought-the-game-back-to-life-173159607.html?src=rss

Cloudflare outage was not caused by a cyber attack

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Cloudflare wrongly suspected that the widespread outage that took numerous websites offline on November 18 was caused by a DDoS attack, the company’s CEO has admitted. In his blog post that breaks down what happened, however, Matthew Prince explained that after realizing their mistake, his team was able to fix the issue. “The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind,” he wrote. It was instead caused by a change to its database systems’ permissions, which led to an issue with a file used by its Bot Management system.

The company’s Bot Management system uses a machine learning model to score bots for every request they make when they crawl Cloudflare’s network. Its clients rely on those bot scores to decide whether to allow or to block specific bots from accessing their websites. One the uses of having bot scores is being able to block AI companies’ bots so they can’t use a website’s content to train their LLMs. In July, Cloudflare launched an experiment called “pay per crawl,” which allows website owners to let an AI bot crawl their pages if they get paid for access.

Prince said the model relies on a “feature” configuration file to make a prediction on whether a bot request was automated or not. The feature file is refreshed every few minutes, and a change in the underlying mechanism generating that file caused a change in its size that triggered the error. “As a result, HTTP 5xx error codes were returned by the core proxy system that handles traffic processing for our customers, for any traffic that depended on the bots module,” Prince wrote.

This recent event has been Cloudflare’s worst outage in years. The company said it hasn’t had an outage that has “caused the majority of core traffic to stop flowing through [its] network” since 2019. Prince apologized for the issue on behalf of his team.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/cloudflare-outage-was-not-caused-by-a-cyber-attack-053000551.html?src=rss

Megabonk has withdrawn from The Game Awards

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Nominees for The Game Awards were released yesterday, and there's a whole lot of indie excellence on display. However, one notable contender among them has decided to withdraw from contention. 

The fabulously titled Megabonk received a nod for the Best Debut Indie Game category. However, the project creator, who currently goes by vedinad, announced on X today that they were withdrawing. "I've made games in the past under different studio names, so Megabonk is not my debut game," the solo dev said. 

The category is kind of a weird one, since indie creators may have worked at other big or small studios. Even fully self-taught devs will have made and maybe even released several projects before having any kind of breakthrough success or popularity. But if vedinad feels the game doesn't fit the category, then it's still a gracious move to bow out. 

Megabonk follows in the recent lineage of Vampire Survivors, a popular bullet-hell roguelike that just arrived in virtual reality. The Megabonk riff takes the 2D concept into a low-poly 3D and adds some pretty wacky characters into the mix. Venidad said the title sold 1 million copies in just two weeks, making it one of the latest Steam indie sensations to have a big moment.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/megabonk-has-withdrawn-from-the-game-awards-212822746.html?src=rss

Hypixel Studios buys its IP from Riot, so Hytale is back in development

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Hypixel Studios has officially purchased the license to Hytale from Riot Games, according to a report by Game Developer. This means that development will continue just months after Riot shut everything down and cancelled the project.

The developer is also rehiring 30 staffers that were laid off as part of the cancellation. We write so often about layoffs in the industry, so it's always a distinct treat to cover the opposite.

Hypixel co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme calls this a "new and exciting chapter" for the game, which has been in development for nearly ten years. He says he is "grateful to Riot Games for making this possible."

Riot Games, which is owned by the conglomerate Tencent, purchased Hypixel Studios back in 2020 for an undisclosed sum. However, Hytale was riding high at that point. The game had attracted over 2.5 million signees for an upcoming beta and was supposed to be officially released in 2021.

Years passed, and still no Hytale. This eventually led to Riot canning the project entirely. "After years of pushing forward, adapting, and exploring every possible path, it became clear we couldn’t bring Hytale to life in a way that truly delivered on its promise," an official post on the Hypixel website once read.

The studio hasn't disclosed how it got funding for this move, but Collins-Laflamme said that the founders are "personally committed to funding for the next 10 years." Here's to hoping the game is actually playable by that point. To that end, the company does plan on announcing an early access release date in the near future.

"Hytale has had a long and challenging journey. It's taken longer than anyone hoped, and it's changed a lot along the way," the company wrote. "This is not going to be easy. This is not going to be fast. This is not going to be perfect. But it's going to be ours. Built together: one feature at a time, one bug fix at a time, one mod at a time."

For the uninitiated, Hytale is a nifty-looking adventure game that can be described as an open world riff on Minecraft. It certainly looks like Minecraft, but it has a much bigger emphasis on action and RPG mechanics.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/hypixel-studios-buys-its-ip-from-riot-so-hytale-is-back-in-development-185040959.html?src=rss

Project Hail Mary keeps us intrigued in a second trailer

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Amazon MGM has released another full-length trailer for Project Hail Mary and we are already at the theater seated. The three minute and four second trailer shows Ryan Gosling as Dr. Ryland Grace, a school teacher and former biologist who wakes up on a spacecraft with no idea who he is or why he's there. 

The first trailer gave us a look at Dr. Grace's first moments after waking up and an overview of his mission: find the one star in the universe that's not dying and save the world — no big deal. Today's trailer gives us a better idea of how he'll go about this and the alien he teams up with along the way. Check it out for yourself on Amazon MGM's YouTube channel here. 

Project Hail Mary is adapted from Andy Weir's novel of the same name. Weir also wrote The Martian, which was successfully turned into a 2015 film starring Matt Damon. This time around, Oscar-winning filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are directing with a screenplay by Drew Goddard — the latter also wrote the adaptation of The Martian so we're in good hands. The movie also stars Sandra Hüller as the head of the titular Project Hail Mary. 

You can see Project Hail Mary for yourself on March 20, 2026 in theaters and IMAX. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/project-hail-mary-keeps-us-intrigued-in-a-second-trailer-151108278.html?src=rss

The best gifts for coffee lovers in 2026

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When it comes to making a great cup at home, us coffee nerds are constantly learning and love to try new things. Whether the person you’re shopping for is a newly indoctrinated pour over lover or obsessive over every brewing parameter, we’ve compiled a list of the best gear for coffee geeks that you can get. Spanning brewing, grinding and, of course, drinking, we’ve got a range of options that can help the java geek in your life expand their at-home setup or just try something new. And for the person that already has it all, we’ve got something for them too.

Check out the rest of our gift ideas here.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/kitchen-tech/the-best-gifts-for-coffee-lovers-in-2026-184515579.html?src=rss

Cities: Skylines II dev parts ways with publisher Paradox

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Game publisher Paradox Interactive has split with Colossal Order, the studio behind Cities: Skylines II. Colossal Order, which also made the original Cities: Skylines back in 2015, will move on to something new after completing a few last updates. The intellectual property will remain with Paradox, which said today that work on Cities: Skylines II will be moved to Iceflake Studios. The Finland-based internal team will be responsible for all development, including future content updates and the long-awaited console version, starting in 2026.

The move comes after about two years of trying to salvage the citybuilding sequel and the reputations of all parties. While the game was initially expected to debut in October 2023 on PC and consoles, the launch was limited to PC, with higher minimum specs than previously announced and with a lot of bugs. The ongoing issues caused tension and toxicity between Colossal Order and the Cities: Skylines audience. Although the game has reached a more stable state, new content has been slow to arrive and there is still no sign of a console launch as the studio exits their project.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/cities-skylines-ii-dev-parts-ways-with-publisher-paradox-210229692.html?src=rss