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Star Trek's computer-animated 'Prodigy' airs on Nickelodeon in 2021
We finally have a name and logo for Nickelodeon's new animated Star Trek series.
Alex Garland's 'Devs' explores free will in the age of predictive computing
Alex Garland deconstructed the Turing test with Ex Machina and tormented our psyches with a horrifying alien invasion in Annihilation. Now he's tackling free will vs. a deterministic universe in Devs. And instead of trying to cram all that philosophy into a two-hour film (that might not even see theatrical release), Devs was crafted specifically for TV as an eight-episode, big budget miniseries on FX, where every installment was written and directed by Garland. It's not strictly science fiction either: He calls it a "science-based thriller."
Xbox One Digital TV Tuner coming to Europe in October
Xbox One owners in Europe will soon be able to view live TV broadcasts through their consoles with the Xbox One Digital TV Tuner, a USB peripheral that offers an alternative way to view channels normally accessed via cable or a satellite set-top box. The accessory supports Xbox One dashboard features while active, letting users view TV content in Snap Mode while using other Xbox One applications. The Xbox One Digital TV Tuner additionally enables live TV pausing, TV listings via OneGuide, and voice-controlled channel navigation using Kinect. The Xbox One Digital TV Tuner will be available in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain in late October for €29.99. [Image: Microsoft]
MPEG drafts twice-as-efficient H.265 video standard, sees use in phones as soon as 2013
All of that squabbling over H.264 may be rendered moot in the near future. The Motion Picture Experts Group (better known as MPEG) has just let us know that it was quietly drafting a new video standard while everyone was on summer vacation last month: H.265, also called High Efficiency Video Coding, promises to squeeze video sizes with double the efficiency of H.264. As you might imagine, this could lead either to a much smaller video footprint for bandwidth-starved mobile users or a hike to image quality with the same size as before. Imagine fast-loading HD streaming on 4G, or cable TV without all the excess compression, and you've got the idea. Ericsson Research visual technology lead Per Fröjdh anticipates H.265 coming as soon as 2013, when our smartphones and tablets are most likely to play it first. TV and other areas might have to wait, although Fröjdh is offering a consolation prize -- he's teasing a separate MPEG project that could give us glasses-free, compressed 3D video as a standard by 2014.
