Amazon Fire Sticks are enabling “billions of dollars” worth of streaming piracy, according to a report today from Enders Analysis, a media, entertainment, and telecommunications research firm. Technologies from other media conglomerates, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, are also enabling what the report’s authors deem an “industrial scale of theft."

The report, "Video piracy: Big tech is clearly unwilling to address the problem," focuses on the European market but highlights the global growth of piracy of streaming services as they increasingly acquire rights to live programs, like sporting events.

Per the BBC, the report points to the availability of multiple, simultaneous illegal streams for big events that draw tens of thousands of pirate viewers.

Read full article

Comments

© Amazon

With streaming providers frequently raising prices, subscribers often feel like they’re paying more for the same service—or a lesser version, depending on what’s available to watch that month. In a unique move, Disney is introducing a small, potential financial benefit to Disney+ and Hulu subscribers in the form of some third-party discounts, freebies, trials, and contests.

As of today, Disney+ subscribers can log into Disney’s Disney+ Perks website with their streaming credentials to get access to a revolving selection of discounts and freebies. When I logged in today, I was met with options for several free trials, including a six-month one to DoorDash’s premium subscription offering, a three-month trial to Clear+, and a two-month trial to Duolingo’s premium subscription.

Disney+ subscribers can also get discounts, including to Adidas’ online marketplaces and “select” Disney Resorts Collection hotels (if you stay at least two nights, with most availability occurring between June 29 and July 31). There are also some free virtual rewards for Disney-owned games and the ability to enter sweepstakes, like for going to the premiere of the movie Freakier Friday.

Read full article

Comments

© Star Wars/YouTube

Discord is further distancing itself from its ad-free beginnings by offering users a new virtual currency for clicking on in-platform advertisements.

Acoording to a blog post this week by Peter Sellis, Discord’s SVP of product, a “small group” of Discord users around the globe can now earn "Orbs" through Play Quests, which Discord announced in March 2024 and let users earn in-game rewards by getting people to watch a stream of them playing a sponsored game. With enough Orbs, Discord users can purchase items in Discord's shop, including customization options for their profiles and credits for Nitro, a subscription add-on that offers features like 500MB uploads and HD resolution streaming.

The goal is to fuel Discord’s advertising business by making clicking on ads more appealing. Advertisers also benefit by associating their ads with the ability to get desirable rewards.

Read full article

Comments

© Discord

Do you miss the feel of tactile buttons on your kitchen appliances or lament car manufacturers' insistence on touchscreens? Have you ever found yourself clumsily fumbling with the door handles of a vehicle or distracted by the bright blue light beaming from your vacuum or Wi-Fi router?

If so, you're not alone. The way technology gadgets are designed largely relies on things like blue, often LED, lights, flat resistive or capacitive touch input, and software. Some, like Amber Case, founder of the Calm Tech Institute, believe that these design choices distract from devices' purpose and functionality and are calling for a new approach to product design.

"Calm Tech Institute is kind of a consumer advocacy body that's collecting stories and research from neuroscientists that says, look at how the mind wants texture, and look at how it wants physical buttons, and there's a part of your mind that needs [those]," Case told Ars Technica. "When we don't have it and we replace it with glass, we're not only losing something about human experience, but we're actually causing the mind stress.”

Read full article

Comments

© reMarkable

VMware's business model under Broadcom is "legally and ethically flawed," a group of cloud service provider (CSP) customers and partners alleged in a report released today.

The report (PDF) comes from the European Cloud Competition Observatory (ECCO), which describes itself as "independent monitoring body" composed of members of the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade association, "with the support—acting as observers—of European customer organizations." ECCO says its goals include "highlighting ongoing or new unfair software licensing practices from any software vendors in the cloud sector," and it has previously written similar reports about Broadcom and Microsoft.

In its announcement of the report, ECCO said that CISPE members have met with Broadcom once about the changes it has made to VMware's business model, which is now built around subscriptions of bundled products, but didn't see any changes.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty

Subscribers to Adobe’s multi-app subscription plan, Creative Cloud All Apps, will be charged more starting on June 17 to accommodate for new generative AI features.

Adobe’s announcement, spotted by MakeUseOf, says the change will affect North American subscribers to the Creative Cloud All Apps plan, which Adobe is renaming Creative Cloud Pro. Starting on June 17, Adobe will automatically renew Creative Cloud All Apps subscribers into the Creative Cloud Pro subscription, which will be $70 per month for individuals who commit to an annual plan, up from $60 for Creative Cloud All Apps. Annual plans for students and teachers plans are moving from $35/month to $40/month, and annual teams pricing will go from $90/month to $100/month. Monthly (non-annual) subscriptions are also increasing, from $90 to $105.

Further, in an apparent attempt to push generative AI users to more expensive subscriptions, as of June 17, Adobe will give new single-app subscribers just 25 generative AI credits instead of the current 500.

Read full article

Comments

© Adobe

Netflix is joining its streaming rivals in testing the amount and types of advertisements its subscribers are willing to endure for lower prices.

Today, at its second annual upfront to advertisers, the streaming leader announced that it has created interactive mid-roll ads and pause ads that incorporate generative AI. Subscribers can expect to start seeing the new types of ads in 2026, Media Play News reported.

“[Netflix] members pay as much attention to midroll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves,” Amy Reinhard, president of advertising at Netflix, said, according to the publication.

Read full article

Comments

© Netflix

The CEO of the company that purchased VPNSecure in 2023 and claimed to not know that the VPN service provider had previously sold lifetime subscriptions has some regrets.

Earlier this week, Ars Technica reported on VPNSecure canceling thousands of lifetime subscriptions, starting in March. In an email to customers, VPNSecure said that it couldn't afford to maintain the subscriptions and that the current owners, InfiniteQuant Ltd, weren't told about the subscriptions when they bought VPNSecure. The sudden deactivation of accounts resulted in customer backlash online, including, as of this writing, 24 pages of one-star reviews on Trustpilot.

“… maybe, honestly, we should have just walked away from this 'opportunity,’” Romain Brabant, the CEO of InfiniteQuant Ltd, told Ars Technica when asked if he would have handled things differently in hindsight.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty

Warner Bros. Discovery's (WBD) streaming service Max will be called HBO Max starting this summer, bringing back a name that WBD curiously ditched a couple of years ago.

In May 2020, the company then known as WarnerMedia Group launched its flagship streaming service, HBO Max. The successor to the HBO Now subscription-based streaming service that launched in 2014, and not to be confused with the now-defunct HBO Go (which was a video-on-demand streaming service accessible to those with subscriptions to the HBO cable channel), HBO Max offered “the entire HBO service,” per WarnerMedia’s announcement. HBO Max also combined content from other titles WarnerMedia owned, including titles from DC Comics and Cartoon Network. But the main draw continued to be the ability to stream HBO’s prestigious library via a Netflix-like streaming subscription.

When WarnerMedia acquired Discovery in 2022 and became WBD, it sought to combine the libraries of HBO Max and the Discovery+ streaming service. WBD landed on Max as the name for the combined app. The name seemed to suggest access to a maximum amount of streaming content with maximum appeal. However, it questionably distanced itself from the legacy of high-budget, award-winning TV shows and recent popular movies that the HBO brand had been building since 1972.

Read full article

Comments

VPNSecure’s lifetime plan didn’t survive after new ownership took over. Now customers are hopping mad.

The new owners of VPN provider VPNSecure have drawn ire after canceling lifetime subscriptions. The owners told customers that they didn’t know about the lifetime subscriptions when they bought VPNSecure, and they cannot honor the purchases.

In March, complaints started appearing online about lifetime subscriptions to VPNSecure no longer working.

The first public response Ars Technica found came on April 28, when lifetime subscription holders reported receiving an email from the VPN provider saying:

Read full article

Comments

© Getty

Fitness tracker company Whoop has upset some long-time customers by ending an upgrade system that promised free hardware upgrades to anyone who had a subscription with the company for at least six months.

Whoop makes fitness tracker bracelets that let users access things like sleep tracking, menstrual tracking, and electrocardiograms (ECGs) via a subscription companion app. Since the first Whoop wearable came out in 2015, the Boston-based company’s business has been built on subscriptions. Whoop has traditionally lured customers in by giving its hardware away for “free” to Whoop app subscribers. Further, customers who subscribed to the Whoop app for at least six months got access to free hardware upgrades.

“Instead of purchasing new hardware every time an updated model is produced, WHOOP members receive the next-generation device for free after having been a member for six months or more,” said a webpage on Whoop’s website that is no longer active but was accessible as recently as March 28, as reported by The Verge and confirmed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Read full article

Comments

© Whoop

Schools across the US are warning parents about an Internet trend that has students purposefully trying to damage their school-issued Chromebooks so that they start smoking or catch fire.

Various school districts, including some in Colorado, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Washington, have sent letters to parents warning about the trend that’s largely taken off on TikTok.

Per reports from school districts and videos that Ars Technica has reviewed online, the so-called Chromebook Challenge includes students sticking things into Chromebook ports to short-circuit the system. Students are using various easily accessible items to do this, including writing utensils, paper clips, gum wrappers, and pushpins.

Read full article

Comments

© lemondinos/TikTok

VMware’s new owner is pushing legacy license-holders to buy costly software support subscriptions. Broadcom says it may audit VMware users to make sure they’re not skirting the rules.

Broadcom has been sending cease-and-desist letters to owners of VMware perpetual licenses with expired support contracts, Ars Technica has confirmed.

Following its November 2023 acquisition of VMware, Broadcom ended VMware perpetual license sales. Users with perpetual licenses can still use the software they bought, but they are unable to renew support services unless they had a pre-existing contract enabling them to do so. The controversial move aims to push VMware users to buy subscriptions to VMware product bundles, with associated costs that have increased by 300 percent or, in some cases, more.

Some customers have opted to continue using VMware unsupported, often as they research alternatives, such as VMware rivals or devirtualization.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty

An update to Roku OS has resulted in colors looking washed out in HDR content viewed on Roku apps, like Disney+.

Complaints started surfacing on Roku's community forum a week ago. On May 1, a company representative posted that Roku was “investigating the Disney Plus HDR content that was washed out after the recent update.” However, based on user feedback, it seems that HDR on additional Roku apps, including Apple TV+ and Netflix, are also affected. Roku’s representative has been asking users to share their experiences so that Roku can dig deeper into the problem.

One user, going by "Squinky" on the forum, reported having a TCL TV with the problem and shared the following photo comparison:

Read full article

Comments

© Roku

Backblaze is dismissing allegations from a short seller that it engaged in “sham accounting” that could put the cloud storage and backup solution provider and its customers' backups in jeopardy.

On April 24, Morpheus Research posted a lengthy report accusing the San Mateo, California-based firm of practicing “sham accounting and brazen insider dumping.” The claims largely stem from a pair of lawsuits filed against Backblaze by former employees Huey Hall [PDF] and James Kisner [PDF] in October. Per LinkedIn profiles, Hall was Backblaze’s head of finance from March 2020 to February 2024, and Kisner was Backblaze’s VP of investor relations and financial planning from May 2021 to November 2023.

As Morpheus wrote, the lawsuits accuse Backblaze’s founders of participating in “an aggressive trading plan to sell 10,000 shares a day, along with other potential sales from early employee holders, against ‘all external capital markets advice.’” The plan allegedly started in April 2022, after the IPO lockup period expired and despite advisor warnings, including one from a capital markets consultant that such a trading plan likely breached Backblaze’s fiduciary duties.

Read full article

Comments

© Backblaze

If I knew how much I’d end up loving my Logitech mice, I would’ve taken better care of them from the start. The MX Master 3S and Lift are my favorite mice for productivity, but their rubber coating can get grimy quickly. My white MX Master 3S looks especially shameful atop my desk, so I’ve been considering purchasing a replacement for a while.

Overturning my plans, though, Logitech recently raised prices across 51 percent of its portfolio, as detailed by YouTube channel Cameron Doughterty Tech. The firm has raised prices by as much as 25 percent.

The MX Master 3S I just mentioned is now $120, which is $20 more than before. That 20 percent increase makes it even harder to justify a new mouse, which I already considered a luxury purchase.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty

FRDM+ provides access to an impressive library of automotive videos for $20 a month.

Roku, owner of one of the most popular connected TV operating systems in the country, walks a fine line when it comes to advertising. Roku's OS lives on low-priced smart TVs, streaming sticks, and projectors. To make up the losses from cheaply priced hardware, Roku is dependent on selling advertisements throughout its OS, including screensavers and its home screen.

That business model has pushed Roku to experiment with new ways of showing ads that test users’ tolerance. The company claims that it doesn't want ads on its platform to be considered intrusive, but there are reasons to be skeptical about Roku's pledge.

Non-“interruptive” ads

In an interview with The Verge this week, Jordan Rost, Roku’s head of ad marketing, emphasized that Roku tries to only deliver ads that don't interrupt viewers.

Read full article

Comments

© Roku