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Anthony Mackie cast as a drone pilot in Netflix's 'Outside the Wire'
After playing an Avenger in the MCU and a very adventurous gamer in Black Mirror season five, Anthony Mackie has another project lined up for Netflix. He'll star in the upcoming movie Outside the Wire, a sci-fi flick set in the future where he plays a drone pilot who ends up working for an android to locate a doomsday device. Mikael Håfström (1408, Escape Plan) Sounds tense -- not polar bear tense, but it'll have to do -- and it has another link to videogames. The script is written by Rowan Athale (Rise/Wasteland) and Rob Yescombe, who has credits from a number of games including The Division, Rime, Crysis 2 and 3, and Haze. We don't know what ideas, if any, could link any of those to this, but back in 2007 Yescombe told Gamasutra in an interview that: As a [futuristic private military operator] Mantel guy, it makes sense that you play it like a game, because you're absolved from responsibility. It's weird that our entertainment is founded on shooting people in the face! The truth is that I enjoy it as much as anyone else, but I find myself weird for liking it so much. That's less than a big political statement; it's much more about, 'What are we, as people who are entertained by this?' Update: In a tweet, Yescombe tells Engadget that as far as Haze and Outside the Wire go, "the two are wholly unrelated."
Netflix's ISP report card is much less interesting now that it's out
As promised, Netflix has released performance statistics for U.S. and Canadian ISPs, culled from the many HD streams it provides. Unfortunately there's not much enlightening information to be found, while Charter did rank at the top in overall average bitrate the other major cable ISPs like Comcast, Cox and Time Warner weren't far behind, with only the smaller DSL providers appearing to lag behind and Clearwire's 4G service at the absolute lowest (no mobile data here, these were averaged from HD streams and devices only.) The most interesting data at first glance is Verizon mired squarely in the middle, although it's hard to tell if its own DSL customers are actually dragging down the lightning performance one would expect to experience on FiOS. Also potentially impacting performance are the number of lower-speed capped packages in use, mostly on DSL lines. Ultimately, it's really difficult to pull any useful data from the charts provided but given time we may be able to observe any notable shifts in performance, if they occur. Go ahead and click through for the Canadian chart and a breakdown of the data presented and how it was accumulated. Update: We confirmed with Netflix that the Verizon stats are combined DSL and FiOS numbers, so we probably wouldn't cancel the order for that 40Mbps fiber for a cable connection just yet. There's absolutely no way to extrapolate any kind of potential personal viewer experience from these numbers the way they're compiled.
