The vacancies at cable news companies are piling up as networks and journalists begin to eye streaming alternatives. Axios reports: Why it matters: Primetime cable slots and the Sunday shows are no longer the most opportunistic placements for major TV talent.

Driving the news: Long-time "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace is leaving the network after nearly two decades, he announced Sunday. He will be joining CNN as an anchor for its new streaming service, CNN+. Wallace will anchor a new weekday show and will contribute to the network's daily live programming, per CNN. It was his decision not to renew his contract with the network, which expired this year, CNN's Brian Stelter reported.

The big picture: Wallace marks the latest in a string of cable news host departures and shakeups in the past few weeks and months. There are now several holes cable bosses will need to fill in coming weeks. [...] Major networks are investing heavily to lure talent to streaming alternatives in light of the decline of linear television. CNN hired NBC News veteran Kasie Hunt as an anchor and analyst for CNN+, reportedly for a salary of over $1 million. It's hiring hundreds of new roles for the streaming service, set to launch next quarter. NBC News has already hired the majority of the 200+ new jobs it announced over the summer for its new streaming service and digital team, a top executive confirmed to Axios last month. One of its linear TV anchors, Joshua Johnson, moved full-time to host a primetime streaming show for NBC News Now. Fox News launched a new weather-focused streaming service in October. A Fox executive said last week the company is prepared to migrate Fox News to a streaming platform when the time is right. CBS News changed the name of its streaming service recently from CBSN to "CBS News" to represent a new streamlined vision for streaming. "TV networks won't stop seriously investing in linear news programs until sports move out of the cable bundle, and that won't be for another few years," adds Axios.

Universal Control, a feature unveiled at Apple's WWDC event earlier this year, won't be available until spring 2022. Originally planned for a fall release, the feature aims to let users control multiple Macs and iPads with a single mouse and keyboard or trackpad. 9to5Mac reports: Now Apple has changed the launch date for Universal Control from sometime before the winter solstice to "available this spring" as updated on its website. Apple first showed off Universal Control during an on-stage demo at WWDC 21 and it ended up proving to be too ambitious to ship this year. Here's how it describes the feature: "A single keyboard and mouse or trackpad now work seamlessly between your Mac and iPad -- they'll even connect to more than one Mac or iPad. Move your cursor from your Mac to your iPad, type on your Mac and watch the words show up on your iPad, or even drag and drop content from one Mac to another." The good news is that Apple SharePlay is now available on Mac. According to Engadget, SharePlay "allows up to 32 people to enjoy the same TV shows, movies, music and livestreams and more in sync with each other on FaceTime calls." This feature was slated to arrive in the fall just like Universal Control.

"Bitcoin mining is a process of competitively wasting electricity to guess a winning number every 10 minutes or so," writes author David Gerard in Foreign Policy magazine.

And he's got an equally negative take on Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's experiment in making Bitcoin an official national currency alongside the U.S. dollar. "When a con artist's grift starts to fall apart, he knows to move onto the next one fast..." More than 91 percent of Salvadorans want dollars, not bitcoins. The official Chivo payment system was unreliable at launch in September — the kiss of death for a new system. Users joined for the $30 signup bonus, spent it or cashed it out, then didn't use Chivo again. The system completely failed to check new users' photos, relying solely on their national identity card number and date of birth; massive identity fraud to steal signup bonuses ensued. Bitcoin's ridiculously volatile price was appreciated only by aspiring day traders. Large street protests against compulsory Bitcoin implementation continued through October. The government stopped promoting Chivo on radio, TV, and social media. Chivo buses and vans were seen with plastic taped over the company's logo.

Bukele's financial problems remain. El Salvador can't print its own dollars, so Bukele urgently needs to fund his heavy deficit spending. The International Monetary Fund has not lent the country the $1 billion Bukele asked for, and has indicated its strong concerns about the Bitcoin scheme... At the Latin American Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference on Nov. 20, Bukele came onstage to an animation of beaming down from a flying saucer and outlined his plans for Bitcoin City: a new charter city to be built from scratch, centered on bitcoin mining — and powered by a volcano. Bitcoin City would be paid for with the issuance of $1 billion in "volcano bonds," starting in mid-2022.

The 10-year volcano bonds would pay 6.5 percent annual interest. $500 million of the bond revenue would be used to buy bitcoins... Holding $100,000 in volcano bonds for five years would qualify investors for Salvadoran citizenship... Holders of El Salvador's existing sovereign debt were unimpressed. The volcano bonds would be a strictly worse investment than buying the country's existing bonds and hedging them with bitcoins. The existing bonds dropped from 75 cents on the dollar to a record low of 63.4 cents after the volcano bond announcement...

[T]he volcano bonds are Bukele's way to get Bitcoin holders' money into the Salvadoran economy and count it as dollars. Bukele will brazen all of this out as long as he can, periodically throwing new plans on the table as a distraction. If he can maintain power, then the Bitcoin users will discover that he's taken their money. If he can't maintain power, then his successor will have no love for his failed Bitcoin schemes. Either scenario ends with a lot of disappointed Bitcoin users — because a national economy really can't run on a volatile and manipulated speculative commodity that's unusable as a currency.

Both the Bitcoin users and Bukele seem to think the other is a sucker who they'll take for everything they've got. It's possible that both will lose.
The article also points out that with El Salvador's high electricity rates, one of their power plant recently spent $4,672 in electricity to mine $269 in bitcoin.

Masayuki Uemura was the lead architect for the Famicom (aka the Nintendo Entertainment System) and the Super Famicon (aka the SNES). The mark he left on the gaming industry and popular culture is indelible. According to Oricon News, Uemura passed away on December 6. He was 78. Kotaku: Ritsumeikan University, where Uemura became the director of game studies after retiring from Nintendo in 2004, announced his passing earlier today. Originally, Uemura worked at Sharp, selling photocell tech to various companies, including his future employer Nintendo. Once joinging the company, he worked with Gunpei Yokoi to integrate the photocell technology into electronic light gun games. He would go on to work on plug-and-play consoles like Nintendo's Color TV-Game.

But everything changed in 1981 with a single phone call. "President Yamauchi told me to make a video game system, one that could play games on cartridges," Uemura told Matt Alt in an interview published last year on Kotaku. "He always liked to call me after he'd had a few drinks, so I didn't think much of it. I just said, "Sure thing, boss," and hung up. It wasn't until the next morning when he came up to me, sober, and said, "That thing we talked about -- you're on it?" that it hit me: He was serious."

Roku and Google have agreed to a multi-year extension for both YouTube and YouTube TV apps to be distributed on Roku. From a report: Roku's deal with Google to distribute YouTube was set to expire this month. Without a deal, YouTube would've been removed from Roku's channel store, creating a big competitive disadvantage, especially during the holiday season. "Roku and Google have agreed to a multi-year extension for both YouTube and YouTube TV," a Roku spokesperson said. "This agreement represents a positive development for our shared customers, making both YouTube and YouTube TV available for all streamers on the Roku platform."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Mystery Science Theatre 3000 will be coming back in 2022 with thirteen new episodes, plus 12 additional shorts and 12 monthly live events. "And this time, we're doing it without a network," explains the web page for their successful comeback campaign on Kickstarter. "Season 13 will be released exclusively in MST3K's new online virtual theatre, THE GIZMOPLEX."

36,581 backers pledged $6,519,019 to fund their own dedicated MST3K venue online, and most contributors to their 2021 Kickstarter campaign received 2022 passes to the online theatre as a thank-you. Now through December, fans who want to buy or gift a 2022 pass can get them discounted to $95. (Normally'll they cost $120.)

Starting on March 4, 2022, assorted MST3K zanies and their puppet robots will be watching (and heckling) 12 carefully-chosen weird movies, including one 1970 Gamera movie that they haven't gotten to yet, a 1968 Italian movie about a professional wrestler called The Batwoman, and Jack Palance's 1979 film, HG Wells' The Shape of Things to Come. And series creator Joel Hodgson will return when they all watch the 2014 movie The Christmas Dragon. The Den of Geek site has all the details on the 13 movies (gleaned from last week's traditional "Turkey Day marathon" of fan-favorite episodes — this year broadcast on YouTube, Twitch, and various web pages and streaming apps).

But in addition there's also a live touring show that will take them all across America. Next week fans can catch shows in the midwestern U.S. — specifically Youngstown Ohio, Nashville Indiana, Madison Wisconsin, and Chicago — before the crew moves on to Salt Lake City, Reno, and Seattle. Then it's on to California — San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego — and then dozens of other major cities in the U.S. (Portland! Denver! Austin! Atlanta! Durham! Worcester! New York City!)

"We know that many of you are understandably concerned about COVID and the Delta variant. We are too," explains a special announcement on the tour's web site, promising the tour "will adhere to the same standards as touring Broadway shows in effect at the time of your performance... [E]very theater on the tour will have its own policies."
In 2008 the show's creator Joel Hodgson answered questions from Slashdot readers.

A U.K.-based company Engineered Arts has developed a humanoid robot that can display human-like expressions with ease. Interesting Engineering reports: In a short video released on YouTube, the company shows off its most advanced humanoid, dubbed Ameca, which is initially a platform for testing robotic technologies. As is seen in the video [...], the humanoid appears to have woken up in a robotic laboratory while an actual human is busy working in the background. The robot moves its arms, shows a flurry of expressions in a matter of seconds, and even expresses amazement at how its hands and fingers move fluidly before looking at the camera quite surprised. The teaser is a sufficient demonstration of what the robot can do when it comes to the upper half of the body.

Its lower half though is quite non-functional at the moment. For a humanoid robot, Ameca still can't walk, the Engineered Arts website says. Even though the company has carried out research on this, it hasn't transferred the learnings to the robot yet. [...] Engineered Arts uses a modular architecture for its building its robots. So, upgrades to both, software and hardware components can be made without having to purchase a new robot altogether. So, sooner or later, Ameca will walk too.

Ameca is powered by Engineered Arts' Tritium operating system that allows companies engaged in the development of robotics to test their technologies. Whether it is artificial intelligence or machine learning technology that companies or startups are developing, they can test and even demonstrate their tech in front of a live audience using Ameca. According to its website, Engineered Arts can even rent out Ameca for expos or live TV discussions.

From a report: In May 2020, when the pandemic raged, the comedian and TV writer Marlena Rodriguez got an invite to a new app called Clubhouse that offered the homebound online masses a way to spend some of their suddenly abundant time. In the ensuing months, Rodriguez jousted in a chat room with the celebrity Ashton Kutcher, gained more than 13,000 followers, and started a party room on Fridays that frequently swelled to over 1,000 people. She wrote a play, "Once Upon a Clubhouse," and hired actors to perform it on the app. "I was in love," she said. Today, "I question why I'm even still on Clubhouse," Rodriguez said. Her Friday-night room has dwindled to about 30 people.

More than any other startup, Clubhouse epitomizes the venture-capital-backed euphoria that swept the tech industry since lockdowns shut millions of people inside and pushed them online for connection, entertainment, and information. Marc Andreessen has called the app "the Athenian agora come to life," referring to the hub of democracy in ancient Greece. It has raised more than $100m from his firm and other top VCs, garnering a $4bn valuation. But with vaccinations rising and more people returning to normal life, Clubhouse has been hit particularly hard. Daily downloads of the app have plunged more than 90% since a peak in June, while daily average users are down almost 80% since February, Apptopia data indicated. Insider interviews with creators, advertisers, VCs, and others in the tech industry show a platform struggling to build an audience and keep it. Moneymaking opportunities are also slim, which makes the app a tough sell for creators and users as there are many other options online and off.

While making the press rounds for his upcoming film, House of Gucci, iconic director Sir Ridley Scott revealed that both Blade Runner and Alien live-action television series are in the early stages of development. From a report: Speaking to the BBC news radio series, Today, Scott explained that his team has already written an initial pilot script for the former show, which would most likely air as a 10-episode run. Although the Alien series was first announced nearly a year ago as an FX on Hulu exclusive from showrunner Noah Hawley (Fargo and Legion), little has been heard of the project since then. Scott didn't tell much, but confirmed that the Alien series is still "being written for pilot," adding that Hawley and his crew "have to also write out the history, if it's eight hours or 10 hours, the bible of what happens in those 10 hours." A CGI anime set in the world of Agent K and Deckard in the year 2032, Blade Runner: Black Lotus, is currently airing on Adult Swim.

An anonymous reader writes: Haven't seen discussion on movie and TV shows recommendations on Slashdot of late. Could the fellow readers share some movies and TV shows and documentaries from this year that they really liked watching?

Softening the blow of a monthly price hike, Disney is offering subscribers to Hulu's live TV service access to Disney+ and ESPN+ at no extra charge. From a report: Beginning on December 21, the Hulu + Live TV package will cost $5 more each month. It will go up to $70 with the ad-supported tier of Hulu's on-demand service and $76 with the ad-free Hulu. Notifications to subscribers have just gone out this morning. The new bundle builds on success the company has had with its combined offering of Disney+, ESPN+ and on-demand Hulu. That trio was announced in mid-2019, just before the record-setting launch of Disney+ and has helped ESPN+ and Hulu to continue consistent growth.

A service's guts, the engineering behind the app itself, are the foundation of any streamer's success, and Netflix has spent the last 10 years building out an expansive server network called Open Connect in order to avoid many modern streaming headaches. From a report: It's the thing that's allowed Netflix to serve up a far more reliable experience than its competitors and not falter when some 111 million users tuned in to Squid Game during its earliest weeks on the service. "One of the reasons why Netflix is the leader in this market and has the number of subs they do [...] is something that pretty much everybody outside of the technical part of this industry underestimates, and that is Open Connect," Dan Rayburn, a media streaming expert and principal analyst with Frost & Sullivan, tells The Verge. "How many times has Netflix had a problem with their streaming service over the last 10 years?"

Certainly not as many as HBO Max, that's for sure. Open Connect was created because Netflix "knew that we needed to build some level of infrastructure technology that would sustain the anticipated traffic that we knew success would look like," Gina Haspilaire, Netflix's vice president of Open Connect, tells me. "We felt we were going to be successful, and we knew that the internet at the time was not built to sustain the level of traffic that would be required globally." Nobody wants to sit down to watch a movie only to have their app crash or buffer for an eternity. What Netflix had the foresight to understand was that if it was going to maintain a certain level of quality, it would have to build a distribution system itself.

Open Connect is Netflix's in-house content distribution network specifically built to deliver its TV shows and movies. Started in 2012, the program involves Netflix giving internet service providers physical appliances that allow them to localize traffic. These appliances store copies of Netflix content to create less strain on networks by eliminating the number of channels that content has to pass through to reach the user trying to play it. Most major streaming services rely on third-party content delivery networks (CDNs) to pass along their videos, which is why Netflix's server network is so unique. Without a system like Open Connect or a third-party CDN in place, a request for content by an ISP has to "go through a peering point and maybe transit four or five other networks until it gets to the origin, or the place that holds the content," Will Law, chief architect of media engineering at Akamai, a major content delivery network, tells The Verge. Not only does that slow down delivery, but it's expensive since ISPs may have to pay to access that content. To avoid the traffic and fees, Netflix ships copies of its content to its own servers ahead of time. That also helps to prevent Netflix traffic from choking network demand during peak hours of streaming.

An anonymous reader shares a report: "The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us." That's Netflix executive Ted Sarandos in 2013, shortly before his company made its jump into original content with House of Cards. And not just original content -- glossy big-budget content made by a famous director, featuring (at the time) a famous actor. HBO-style content. Even if you don't follow the media business closely, you probably know what happened after that: With House of Cards, Netflix proved, quite quickly, that it could make shows as good as the stuff the fabled pay TV network makes. And then Netflix started making a lot more stuff, and consumers liked that, too. And now Netflix is the company that every other media company wants to emulate -- and it's the chief reason every big media company is trying to decide whether it needs to buy or sell to every other big media company.

But it didn't have to go that way. In 2005, two years before Netflix got into the streaming business, some HBO executives were pushing the company to do the same thing. They wanted HBO to use the internet to sell subscriptions directly to consumers instead of wholesaling their product to the big cable TV distributors. A year later, after passing on that idea, HBO considered another move that would have rewritten media history: Some of its executives wanted HBO to buy Netflix, which at the time was a DVD rent-by-mail business worth around $1 billion. Netflix is now worth some $300 billion.

Microsoft has created a new Media Player app for Windows 11, and it's beginning to test the app with Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel today. The redesigned Media Player app will support both audio and video, and it includes a design that better matches Windows 11's UI improvements. From a report: "At the heart of Media Player is a full-featured music library that allows you to quickly browse and play music, as well as create and manage playlists," explains Dave Grochocki, a senior program manager lead for Microsoft's Windows inbox apps team. "The update to the new Media Player will replace the Groove Music app."

The playback view in this new Media Player app includes album art or artist imagery, which will appear both in full-screen modes and the mini player option. Media Player will also support video, which is usually handled in Windows 10 and Windows 11 in a separate Films & TV app. "All your content in the music and video folders on your PC will appear automatically in your library, but you can also tell Media Player where to look for additional content in app settings," says Grochocki.

The TV maker released its latest earnings report on Tuesday and revealed that over the last three months, its Platform Plus segment that includes advertising and viewer data had a gross profit of $57.3 million. That's more than twice the amount of profit it made selling devices like TVs, which was $25.6 million, despite those device sales pulling in considerably more revenue. The Verge reports: When Vizio filed to go public, it described the difference between the two divisions. While Devices is easy to understand -- 4K TVs, soundbars, etc. -- Platform Plus is a little more complicated. It counts money made from selling ad placements on its TV homescreens, deals for the buttons on remotes, ads that run on streaming channels, its cut from subscriptions, and viewer data that it tracks and sells as part of the InScape program.

The company says shipments of its TVs fell to 1.4 million in 2021 compared to 2.1 million in 2020, a drop of 36 percent. CEO William Wang told investors on the call that he sees "pretty healthy inventory" going into the holiday season, so anyone planning to pick up a value-priced TV or soundbar should have some decent options available. That spike in Platform Plus revenue, which shot up 136 percent compared to last year, did a lot to help Vizio make up the difference as profits from TVs dipped compared to last year. Supply chain and logistics problems affecting many companies hit Vizio hard, too, but execs also said the company is working with its third-party partners to help find warehouse and trucking employees.

Where the numbers keep growing is in its number of active SmartCast accounts, which are now over 14 million, and how much money it makes from each user on average. That number has nearly doubled from last year, going from $10.44 to $19.89. On the call with investors and analysts, Vizio execs said 77 percent of that money comes directly from advertising, like the kind that runs on its WatchFree Plus package of streaming channels, a group that recently expanded with content targeting. The next biggest contributor is the money it makes selling Inscape data about what people are watching.

Last month 49-year-old Glen de Vries travelled with William Shatner into space with two other crewmembers on Blue Origin's sub-orbital capsule.

Today NBC News announced de Vries "was one of two men killed Thursday in a plane crash in New Jersey, officials said." Glen de Vries, 49, of New York City, and Thomas P. Fischer, 54, of Hopatcong, New Jersey, died following the small aircraft crash shortly before 3 p.m. in Hampton Township, according to New Jersey State Police...

De Vries co-founded software company Medidata Solutions, which specializes in management of electronic data from clinical trials. He also served as a trustee for Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "We will truly miss Glen, but his dreams — which we share — live on: we will pursue progress in life sciences & healthcare as passionately as he did," Medidat said in a statement.
Newsweek reports that upon his return to earth, de Vries told a Pittsburgh TV station that space travel "is something we need to make accessible in an equitable way, to as many people on the planet as possible." In a tweet on Friday, Blue Origin wrote, "We are devastated to hear of the sudden passing of Glen de Vries."

"He brought so much life and energy to the entire Blue Origin team and to his fellow crewmates," the tweet continued. "His passion for aviation, his charitable work, and his dedication to his craft will long be revered and admired."

A new version of a lawsuit accusing Subway of deceiving the public about its tuna products said lab testing shows they contain animal proteins such as chicken, pork and cattle, and not the advertised "100% tuna." From a report: Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin filed a third version of their proposed class action this week in the federal court in San Francisco, near their homes in Alameda County. Subway said in a statement it will seek to dismiss the "reckless and improper" lawsuit. The chain said the plaintiffs have "filed three meritless complaints, changing their story each time," and that its "high-quality, wild-caught, 100% tuna" was regulated strictly in the United States and around the world. Since the case began in January, Subway has run TV ads and launched a website defending its tuna. It also revamped its menu but not its tuna, saying an upgrade wasn't needed. The original complaint claimed that Subway tuna salads, sandwiches and wraps were "bereft" of tuna, while an amended complaint said they were not 100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin tuna. Further reading, from last year: Irish Court Says Subway Bread Is Too Sugary to Be Called 'Bread'.

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has again raised the stakes as to which city in the U.S. will become the country's crypto hub. From a report: Suarez announced today on CoinDesk TV that the city would be staking (i.e. locking up cryptocurrencies to earn yield) a large portion of its native cryptocurrency, MiamiCoin, to earn yield in Bitcoin. What's more, he said Miami will be "the first city in America to give a Bitcoin yield as a dividend directly to its residents." Previously, only holders of MiamiCoin could earn any kind of crypto return, be it STX, the native cryptocurrency for the Stacks protocol on which MiamiCoin is built, or Bitcoin. Now, according to today's announcement, residents will be given a Bitcoin wallet and receive free BTC regardless of whether they hold MiamiCoin or not.

This week, following successful tests on Android smartphones and tablets, Netflix has announced that it will bring AV1 to TVs. 9to5Google reports: In a blog post this week, Netflix confirms it will start using the AV1 codec on some TVs. AV1, which has been available since 2018, allows for the more efficient encoding and decoding of data for streaming, leading to higher quality for the end user and better use of bandwidth for providers. However, the codec relies on hardware support. To ensure that TVs using AV1 streams will provide a good experience, Netflix says it analyzes the steam to ensure the device is spec-compliant for AV1 decoding.

For the time being, Netflix isn't specifically announcing which devices will support AV1 outside of the Netflix app on Sony's PS4 Pro console. On other TVs, support is only specified as working on "a number of AV1 capable TVs." In theory, this should include a considerable number of Android TV models.

First it was called Freedive, then it was dubbed IMDb TV. Now, less than three years after launching its free ad-supported video-streaming service, Amazon is looking to rename it, The Information reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the situation. From a report: Amazon executives believe the existing name is too hard for people to pronounce, which hurts its popularity, said people familiar with the situation. Several alternatives have been tossed around in internal discussions, including Zon -- short for Amazon -- as well as Free TV and Free Streaming TV. The Zon idea was shot down but otherwise Amazon is yet to make a decision about the new name, the people said.