Fantasy sports is a multibillion-dollar industry, and it’s growing. Fantasy football, in particular, is a behemoth, and has changed the way many Americans watch their favorite sport. Gone are the days when people cared which team actually won the game. As long as the players on their fantasy teams rack up the stats, everything is just peachy.
In February, right before the Super Bowl, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said that his league was “aggressively pursuing” the streaming of a regular season game on the internet. It was the first time the league publicly entertained the idea of a web broadcast—before then, NFL executives were conspicuously mum about the subject.
Another major player in cable television is stepping up to offer its content online, no cable subscription needed. Showtime, the pay TV network home to shows like Homeland, The Affair, and Shameless, announced that its online-only offering, also called Showtime, will debut in early July.
It’s been a rough six months for Sony Pictures following the November 2014 hacking scandal, which resulted in a storm of bad press, inner turmoil, and the ousting of its chairwoman Amy Pascal. But the company’s stock, at least, appears to be rebounding, and as long as the studio distributes the hugely profitable James Bond franchise, things will still be okay, right?
This post has been updated with statements from Time Warner Cable and Mediacom.
Following the arrests of several high-ranking FIFA officials on corruption charges, the world awaited John Oliver’s response. Oliver, a UK comedian transplanted to the US and a huge fan of football, had previously launched a pithy diatribe against international soccer’s governing body on his HBO show Last Week Tonight before the World Cup last summer (video).
In what can only be described as a neighborhood of secret ocean lairs for James Bond supervillains just off the coast of Dubai, the real estate agency Kleindienst Group is constructing a series of lavish floating villas that it has nicknamed “floating seahorses.” The villas are a part of the company’s “Heart of Europe” development, a group of artificial islands modeled after European design and heritage.
It’s been a dark, dark week for international soccer, following the arrest of several high-ranking FIFA officials on corruption charges. But here’s some good news for soccer fans: FIFA 16—the upcoming installment in the world’s best-selling sports game franchise—will feature women for the first time ever. They will finally, as maker EA Sports says, be “in the game.”
It’s Netflix’s world, and we’re all just living in it.
Chinese smartphone maker Lenovo is finally giving the people what they want: The ability to play “Fruit Ninja” on your kitchen table.
Apple’s long-rumored internet television service got some major confirmation today. Speaking at Recode’s Code Conference today, Les Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, confirmed that such a service is in the works and said that CBS would likely be a part of it.
If you’ve just had it with taking the subway, or sitting in an office, or just generally being around other people, you may be in luck. Slovakian firm Nice Architects has built an egg-shaped “Ecocapsule” that runs entirely on solar and wind energy, allowing its dweller(s) to live both literally, and figuratively, off the grid.
It’s finally (reportedly) happening, people. Apple is going to fix its shift key, the bane of many’s existence.
HBO has long argued that the quality of its content, which includes shows like Game of Thrones, True Detective, and Veep, is unmatched by its rivals. To that end, it put a premium price on its new online streaming service, HBO Now: $15 per month, about double the price of Netflix.
Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable company in the United States, is buying Time Warner Cable, the second-largest, for $55 billion. Charter is also buying Bright House Networks, a small cable company largely based in Florida.
Robots can tweet about technology and do pretty much everything else (or will soon be able to), so why can’t they be lyrical wordsmiths? The answer, apparently, is that they now can.
Bikes, you might say, have gone bespoke.
What’s a TV network to do without its two most prestigious shows? Now that Mad Men is over (and Breaking Bad has been gone almost two years), AMC has holes to fill.
The Pink Floyd album aside, the “dark” side of the moon is not actually dark—it receives just as much sunlight as the hemisphere of the moon that we can see from Earth. It’s “dark,” because it’s mysterious, as it has never been explored by humans before.
Mad Men itself was great art, but it also inspired a ton of great writing. We will miss the recaps as much as the episodes (which, incidentally, says something about how television is experienced these days). The finale now having aired, it seemed an appropriate time to honor those who wrote most intelligently and beautifully about Don, his family, and his colleagues. We’ve chosen five finalists plus one winner for the first-ever and last-ever Glass Awards for Writing About Mad Men.
From its opening credits to the show’s final scene, Mad Men always demanded a close critical eye. You could enjoy the show casually, but much of the fun lay in dissecting every image, wondering what, if anything, it all meant.
Update (July 7): Harry Shearer will actually stay on The Simpsons, after negotiating a new four-year contract with Fox.
Yesterday, Skype removed the sign-in requirement for its futuristic, Star Trek-esque real-time translator, and made it available for the general public.
Canceling your cable TV subscription is a notoriously laborious process. You normally have to contact a customer service representative over the phone or via live chat, and they’ll do whatever they can to keep you as a customer.
