Foxtel’s Binge: everything you need to know about the new Aussie streaming service

Having seen great success with its Kayo Sports streaming service, Foxtel is taking another big swipe at the Australian streaming video market with Binge, a new platform that will offer a huge library of supposedly binge-worthy shows and movies.

Set to bring Aussies over 10,000 hours of “unturnoffable” on demand content, Binge will carry an enormous back catalogue of ad-free shows and movies from the likes of WarnerMedia (that includes HBO and its upcoming HBO Max Originals), NBC Universal, FX, BBC and Sony.

Content

In a recent presentation to Australian media, Foxtel representatives went to great lengths to stress the overwhelming number of quality shows Binge will offer its subscribers, including cult series like Game of Thrones, Chernobyl, The Sopranos, The Walking Dead, Seinfeld, Modern Family and The Wire, through to newer shows like Succession, Westworld, Big Little Lies, The Plot Against America, The Outsider, Breeders and Mrs. America.

Along with scripted shows and movies, Binge will also offer a wide selection of documentary and reality-based content, from David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet, to Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

While there are a number of currently airing shows confirmed for the platform, Binge’s representatives weren’t able to confirm whether new episodes will arrive on the service as they air on a weekly basis (like they do on Foxtel Now), or if subscribers will have to wait for completed seasons to binge through. 

Additionally, Binge will offer over 800 movies at launch, incorporating a number of binge-able film collections such as the Fast & Furious, Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible and DC Universe movie sagas in their entirety. 

Outside of big franchises, the new Foxtel service will also carry filmmaker-specific collections from a number of famous directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan.

During the Binge announcement, it was also revealed that users will have access to certain live Foxtel channels within the service, however, the service’s focus will be on boxset-style binge-watching.

Streaming quality, pricing and device compatibility

After an initial 14-day free trial, Binge users will be given the option of subscribing to one of three tiers. Binge’s entry-level plan offers a single SD stream for AU$10 a month.

This is followed by a second plan which provides two simultaneous HD streams at AU$14, and a third and final tier which allows users to stream on four devices simultaneously in HD.

Unfortunately, a Binge representative confirmed that there are no plans for a 4K streaming tier at this stage. According to a Binge spokesperson, the platform’s video compression will allow for HD streams at a reasonable economical 3-4 Mbps.

In terms of compatible devices, users will be able to stream via an official Binge app for televisions, laptops, iOS and Android devices, along with the ability to watch via web browser, Chromecast and Telstra TV.

At launch, there will not be a Binge app ready for game consoles, however, a Binge spokesperson confirmed the possibility of an app for PlayStation 4 in the future.

Users will be able to sign up for the new Binge streaming service from Monday, May 25. 

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Fitbit is exploring an algorithm to detect coronavirus infection before symptoms show up

The Charge 4 and Versa 2 already do a lot to keep you healthy, but as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps around the world, Fitbit wants them to do even more using the data your devices are already collecting.

Starting this week, users will find a new COVID-19 Study in the Fitbit app, which will help Fitbit determine if it can build an algorithm to detect COVID-19 before symptoms start. Fitbit is encouraging people who “currently have, or have had, symptoms consistent with COVID-19 or the flu” to participate, but the study is open to everyone.

fitbit covid study Fitibit

The Fitbit COVID-19 Study will help the company develop an algorithm that could alert users that they have COVID-19 before symptoms show.

The study, which can be found in the Assessments & Reports section of the Discover tab, consists of a brief series of questions pertaining to your experiences with COVID-19, including symptoms and testing, along with basic medical information. Fitbit says the questions and the data you consent to share will help “find a way to quickly defeat COVD-19 with data from your Fitbit device.”

The survey doesn’t inquire about which Fitbit device you own, but presumably, devices with heart-rate and relative Sp02 sensors will be the most useful. Recent studies have already drawn comparisons between elevated resting heart rate and influenza-like illness rates, and Fitbit’s Sleep Score, which measures blood-oxygen levels and can be a possible indicator of hypoxia, a condition caused by the coronavirus that lowers the oxygen levels in your blood due to damage to the walls of the air sacs in their lungs.

By collecting data from people who opt into the study, Fitbit could be better able to track heart-rate BPM and blood-oxygen levels to detect patterns leading up to the development of symptoms. For example, if resting heart rate declines night-over-night leading up to a positive test, your Fitbit app could alert you to get tested sooner or self-quarantine as a precaution.

The COVID-19 study is open to all Fitbit users over the age of 21 due to the consent required. You can withdraw your contribution to the study at any time after participating.

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Best Buy’s Memorial Day sale 2020: deals on TVs, laptops, appliances, and more

Memorial Day 2020 is almost here, and Best Buy is kicking things off with incredible deals throughout its site. Best Buy’s Memorial Day sale includes price cuts on best-selling TVs, laptops, appliances, smartwatches and so much more. 

Our top Best Buy Memorial Day sale picks include the all-new Apple Watch 5 on sale for $299, the Insignia 50-inch 4K Smart Fire TV on sale for $289.99, a $100 discount on the HP Envy x360 2-in-1 Touch-Screen laptop, and the popular Powerbeats Pro earbuds on sale for $199.99.

If you’re looking for smart home and appliance deals, Best Buy has the powerful Dyson V8 Animal on sale for $299.99, the Insignia 6qt Pressure Cooker on sale for only $39.99,  a $50 price cut on the iRobot Roomba e5 robot vacuum and the Google Nest security camera on sale for $149.99.

Shop more of Best Buy’s top Memorial Day deals below, and if you’re interested in more bargains, check out our roundup of the best Memorial Day sales that are happening right now.

Best Buy Memorial Day sale picks:

Shop more of the best Memorial Day sales below that are happening online.

The best Memorial Day sales:

Shop more of the best Memorial Day sales 2020: deals from Home Depot, Best Buy, and more.

You can also learn more about the upcoming Amazon Prime Day 2020 sale event.

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Fake online reviews under investigation by competition authority

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched an investigation into fake and misleading reviews on several major websites.

It said it would examine whether online shops were “doing enough” to protect customers as they turn to online shopping during lockdown.

The authority warned it would “not hesitate” to take action if sites are disobeying the law.

That could include taking major retailers to court.

“During lockdown, we’re more dependent than ever on online shopping, so it’s really important that the online reviews we read are genuine opinions,” said CMA chief executive Andrea Coscelli.

“If someone is persuaded to buy something after reading a fake or misleading review, they could end up wasting their money on a product or service that wasn’t what they wanted.”

Some reviewers are offered money or other incentives in exchange for positive comments.

But fake and misleading reviews are illegal under consumer protection law – which bans traders from pretending to be consumers of their own products, for example. The CMA holds websites responsible for adhering to the rules.

Last year the CMA estimated that estimated that online reviews potentially influence £23bn ($28bn) of UK customer spending every year.

The new investigation will cover areas such as:

  • suspicious reviews, where one person has reviewed “an unlikely range” of products
  • if businesses are manipulating reviews – eg by combining good reviews for several products together
  • paid-for reviews, and how they are handled by websites.

The CMA declined to name the specific websites it was investigating, but highlighted previous discussions with Facebook, eBay and Instagram on the topic.

It said Instagram had committed to tackling the market for fake reviews on its platform.

The CMA had also found the buying and selling of fake reviews in Facebook groups and on eBay.

The regulator said it was “not currently alleging that any website has acted illegally” – but would name and shame websites later if it had to take enforcement action against them.

Last year, the consumer group Which? said that in the space of a single month, it had found 55,000 posts offering free products to those who wrote good reviews on Amazon.

“It is good to see the regulator turning its attention to review sites,” a spokesman for Which? said.

It said online platforms needed to take responsibility for the problem.

“We are providing further evidence to the CMA that we hope will prove useful in the next phase of its investigation – and we expect the regulator to take appropriate action against platforms found to be falling short in their responsibilities to protect consumers.”

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For Pac-Man’s 40th birthday, Nvidia uses AI to make new levels

Pac-Man turns 40 today, and even though the days of quarter-munching arcade machines in hazy bars are long behind us, the legendary game’s still helping to push the industry forward. On Friday, Nvidia announced that its researchers have trained an AI to create working Pac-Man games without teaching it about the game’s rules or giving it access to an underlying game engine. Nvidia’s “GameGAN” simply watched 50,000 Pac-Man games to learn the ropes.

That’s an impressive feat in its own right, but Nvidia hopes the “generative adversarial network” (GAN) technology underpinning the project can be used in the future to help developers create games faster and train autonomous robots.

“This is the first research to emulate a game engine using GAN-based neural networks,” Nvidia researcher Seung-Wook Kim said in a press release. “We wanted to see whether the AI could learn the rules of an environment just by looking at the screenplay of an agent moving through the game. And it did.”

GameGAN works by using two competing neural networks, running on four of Nvidia’s GV100 “Volta” GPUs. A discriminator network plays the actual game, while a generator network creates new frames of the game in real-time, responding to the discriminator’s actions. After 50,000 matches, Nvidia says GameGAN is now smart enough to create fully functional Pac-Man games on the fly, to the point that the company plans to release a playable version of its AI-generated Pac-Man matches later this year.

Nvidia hopes this is just the beginning. In a press briefing, Nvidia’s Rev Lebaredian and Sanja Fidler said that generative adversarial networks like GameGAN could eventually  make it easier for developers to create games. The concept could be used to automatically create basic games like Pac-Man or a version of the Marbles RTX demo Nvidia showed off at GTC 2020, Lebaredian said. You could theoretically even train the AI to create some sort of original “mash-up” game using behaviors and models from a handful of different games.

But there seems to be even more promise in tools that work at a deeper level of the software. Without the need to teach GameGAN fundamental rules or even provide it with a game engine, Nvidia envisions the technology being used to prototype level designs and character models quickly in the future. “No matter the game, the GAN can learn its rules simply by ingesting screen recordings and agent keystrokes from past gameplay,” Nvidia’s release says. “Game developers could use such a tool to automatically design new level layouts for existing games, using screenplay from the original levels as training data.”

gta v Rockstar

Grand Theft Auto V’s NPCs on city streets.

Lebaredian pointed to the living world of Grand Theft Auto V as an example, saying that GameGAN could be used to help develop hordes of roaming NPCs and determine how they interact with their environment. The technology could help developers try out new environments quickly in a later iteration as well, Nvidia’s announcement says.

“Since the model can disentangle the background from the moving characters, it’s possible to recast the game to take place in an outdoor hedge maze, or swap out Pac-Man for your favorite emoji. Developers could use this capability to experiment with new character ideas or game themes.”

Amazon India hires temporary workers to meet demand surge

Two months after India relaxed its Covid-19 related lockdown restrictions, Amazon India is facing a sharp surge in online shopping. This has necessitated the additional hiring of 50,000 temporary workers in their fulfilment centres and for delivery. 

In a blog post, Amazon’s senior executive Akhil Saxena says that the company wants to continue helping customers across India get everything they need so that they continue to practice social distancing. Indian eCommerce companies faced major disruptions in the early days as India locked itself down from March 25 to curb the spread of Covid-19. 

The temporary hires would function out of Amazon India’s fulfilment centres as part of their delivery network, the company said while reiterating its commitment to India’s workforce, which in recent times have faced job cuts due to the pandemic-related lockdown that largely kept people indoors. 

The move of hiring temporary workers during such a time would also help keeping as many as possible working during tis pandemic while providing a safe work environment for them, Saxena, who is the company’s vice president for customer fulfilment operations in APAC, MENA and Latin America said. 

The temporary hires will work in Amazon’s fulfilment centres and as part of its delivery network, the company said, making the announcement at a time when various other companies in the country have been forced to cut jobs as they try to tide over the health crisis.

On Thursday, Amazon India had also announced the launch of its food delivery operations in select parts of Bengaluru in what is perceived as a direct competition to the likes of Zomato and Swiggy. The announcement came at a time when the food delivery business was seeing large scale layoffs including 1600 employees by Zomato.

A spokesperson for Amazon India said the decision was based on customer feedback seeking delivery of prepared meals on Amazon in addition to shopping for all other essentials. “This is particularly relevant in the present times as they stay home safe. We also recognise that local businesses need all the help they can get, the spokesperson said. 

The service would be initially available in the four localities of Mahadevapura, Marathalli, Whitefield and Bellandur covering 100 restaurants that include franchises such as Chai Point, Chaayos, Faasos, Mad Over Donuts and Box8. Orders in these postal codes can be placed through the Amazon app and will only be visible to customers in these areas. 

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UK government bought hundreds of Zoom accounts despite security risk

The popularity of Zoom has hit a new high in the UK government, which has been warned over its use of the service following a number of high-profile security incidents.

The video conferencing service has seen a huge rise in users over the past few months due to global lockdowns put in place by coronavirus, but with this boom has come increased scrutiny.

This included warnings from the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) over Zoom’s level of safety, including cyberattacks and possible data privacy issues.

Zoom security

“Zoom is being used for unclassified communications in Government under unprecedented circumstances,” a Government spokesperson told The Mirror.

“Other services are in place for more sensitive communications, and the availability of these services is being increased to meet the demand of more staff having to work remotely.”

However an FOI request by the Parliament Street think tank has found that a total of 731 Zoom licences have been ordered by the main Government departments since the beginning of the outbreak. 

This includes 550 Zoom accounts purchased by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), 150 from the Cabinet Office, 15 from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), eight from the Home Office and five from the Treasury.

These six key departments were also found to have heavily invested in new devices to enable employees to work from home, with 41,300 new laptops, tablet computers, and mobile phones acquired in order to help staff remotely.

This figure included 27,589 new laptops, 4,011 tablet computers and 9,700 mobile phones, with the MoD again investing the most, purchasing 13,500 new laptops (and 9,467 new Microsoft Office 365 accounts), 3,263 new tablets and 2,200 new mobile phones.

This spending spree was not seen across all areas of the government though, as the Department for Transport and the FCO both revealed that they had not purchased any new devices in response to the Coronavirus outbreak.

“The Covid-19 crisis has seen millions of new users sign up to Zoom to host meetings and provide important updates to employees working remotely,” noted Paul Farrington, EMEA, Chief Technology Officer, Veracode.

“However, in recent weeks a series of security missteps and bugs have been discovered, which raise fresh questions about the cyber risks and privacy issues associated with online conference systems. 

“With this in mind, it’s critical that key government departments are cautious if using the platform for sensitive meetings, around national security, and public health. With cyber attacks on the rise, it’s also crucial that users ensure they have downloaded the latest versions of these applications, to prevent hackers from gaining access and stealing data.”

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