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Some of this has been in the Batgirl thread but let's give it a thread of its own. WB has a history of surviving being bought by/merged with other companies: Here's the difference between their two streaming services, as described by CEO David Zaslav: https://www.avclub.com/hbo-max-discovery-plus-genredom-male-skew-merger-1849375117 Recently, lots of things have been removed from HBO Max, even things owned by WB and not available to stream anywhere else. These range from things as recent as the Zemeckis version of The Witches, to things as old as early episodes of Sesame Street: https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/hbo-max-removes-warner-bros-films-streaming-exclusive-1235332258/ https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/hbo-max-originals-removed-1235344286/ https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/hbo-max-removes-sesame-street-episodes-1235345685/ Additionally, things associated with promoting the removed series elsewhere online are being deleted, such as YouTube clips, soundtrack albums, and even tweets mentioning the programmes' titles. Tweet by the creator of OK KO: Lots of people asked: "Why do this? Surely it costs WB almost nothing to host streaming copies of things that it owns?" Apparently not, because of residuals that go towards the animators' union: Owen Dennis, the creator of the removed series Infinity Train (who has now changed his Twitter bio to "Creator of #InfinityTrain, a show that got pulled from @HBOMax and can now only be pirated") wrote this Substack newsletter about the situation: https://owendennis.substack.com/p/so-uh-whats-going-on-with-infinity These film and TV series removals, and the finances of the merged companies, raise some wider questions about the shift away from physical media and towards streaming, such as: 1. The ethics of using piracy to preserve media that would otherwise be lost (Owen Dennis's post above includes a section with his opinion on this). 2. The temporary nature of things available only via streaming. We had a thread in Discussion about what digital collections mean for game ownership, but I don't think we've had a similar one about film & TV: 3. Will it really turn out to be a sound financial decision for the whole film and TV industry to try and follow Netflix? Yes, Netflix's subscriber numbers and share price were increasing until recently, which has led to Amazon, Disney, Paramount, Hulu etc focusing on making CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT to attract subscribers. But is that amount of film and TV production sustainable with the current funding system based around monthly subscriptions? Especially now there are so many competing services, and people will start cycling their subscriptions between multiple different services every few months.

https://www.wired.com/story/twitch-streamers-crypto-gambling-boom/ TL:DR - Twitch Partners (streamers with thousands of subscribers and viewers) are spending more and more time livestreaming crypto gambling on the site, for huge backhanders from said gambling companies. They are often gambling with house money, rather than their own. In addition, there are rumours that the games are rigged to have bigger/more regular pay outs. I don't even know where to start with how grim and illegal this shit is. Maybe this belongs more in Off Topic, wasn't sure.

I got an email this morning saying I'd been accepted into the Nvidia Geforce now streaming beta. I didn't have long to try it out before work this morning but here's my initial feedback. I installed and launched the app. It ran a network test and connected me to a data centre in the EU. It warned me I might experince stuttering. On looking into this it had determined my network speed to be 44meg. The minimum is 18 and recommended is 50. I generally sync at 54. Hopefully this will improve. The latency and packet loss measurements were fine. I looked through the list of game (Quite extensive) and chose Guild Wars 2. It started up and I logged in. The graphics had defaulted to 1080 and seemed less defined than native. Looking close it's obviously compression and to be expected. I started moving around and to my surprise it felt fine. I could notice a tiny amount of latency but I'm pretty sure that it's only because I've played the game so much. I ran to a nearby public event and started killing things. During the event I noticed a wifi symbol pop up a couple of times warning of latency but it never effected my game. It felt fine and if I ever needed to I could happily play the game in this state. I upped the graphics settings to 4k to match my monitor and it obviously couldn't keep up. Next I tried Warframe. It actually logged me into steam for this. I started a quick solo mission and it was fine. The controls didn't feel quite the same but again this is a game I've put hundreds of hours into. Also I don't think it would stop me from enjoying myself. It was different but felt fine. I didn't try 4k on this one since the Guild Wars test showed issues. There's an option in the GFNow app to launch steam or battlenet directly. I tried this from my work PC. It launched steam and showed me which games were geforce now available. However doing it this was seemed to imply I was streaming them from my home PC so I'm not sure what's going on there. I also tried launching Rage (Most of the game on the list are ones I don't own but I own Rage on the Bethesda launcher). In this case it launched the steam page and expected me to buy a copy. I'm going to try more this weekend and see how it goes. There's lots of games available that I own and want to try. Including stuff like Tekken 7 and PubG My current internet speeds are 54 down and 12 up. Is anyone else in the beta?

I don't know if you folks are aware of Shudder but it has just launched in the UK. It is a streaming service just like Netflix but dedicated solely to the horror genre. I've been using the service for about a week now and love it, I just thought I would post this here as a heads-up to anyone who might be interested but not aware of it, you can sign up for a seven day trial, perfect for some halloween viewing at the very least. https://www.shudder.com/ How Shudder choose what they stream - http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/other/shudder/44558/shudder-colin-geddes-and-sam-zimmerman-interview