Disney to complete takeover of Hulu with $8.6bn deal

NEW YORK - The Walt Disney Company announced it will buy Comcast's $8.6-billion stake in Hulu, completing its takeover of the streaming service.

The acquisition will "further Disney's streaming objectives," the company said in a press release, and comes as it strives to boost subscriber numbers at its Disney+ streaming service.

The deal values Hulu at $27.5-billion in total, according to Disney, which said the transaction will be concluded by December 1.

The California-based entertainment giant already sells Hulu as part of bundled offerings with its Disney+ and ESPN+ platforms.

An ad-subsidized bundle of the three services is priced at $15 monthly in the United States, with an ad-free version costing $25 per month.

The company will release its latest quarterly earnings next week, providing a look at how its cable and streaming services are doing in the fiercely competitive market.

Disney in August reported that Disney+ lost more than 10 million subscribers in the recently ended quarter, in large part in the Indian market.

Disney+ finished the second three months of this year with 146.1 million subscribers, compared with just shy of 158 million in the prior quarter, the group said.

Disney rival Netflix last month said subscriber numbers grew nearly 11 percent to 247 million as it cracked down on password sharing and refined an ad-supported tier.The leading streaming service increased prices on some of its plans, perhaps creating an opportunity for competitors such as Disney.Disney to complete takeover of Hulu with $8.6bn deal

Read More........ → November 04, 2023

US President-elect Joe Biden gets COVID vaccine live on TV

Newly elected President of United States Joe Biden has received the first dose of Pfizer’s COVID-vaccine. The scene of Biden’s receiving was broadcasted live on television. 

At the time, newly elected President Joe Biden made sure all Americans had enough vaccines. At the same time, he urged everyone to get vaccinated, saying he was getting the vaccine to show the Americans “it is safe to take”.'

“I’m doing this to demonstrate that people should be prepared when it’s available to take the vaccine,” Joe Biden said from Newark, Delaware, where he vaccinated live on TV. “There’s nothing to worry about.” – reports BBC.

He said the Trump administration “deserves some credit” for launching the country's vaccine program.

Earlier in the day, Jill Biden, wife of Joe Biden, received her first dose, said the US President-elect.

Biden’s running mate, Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff are expected to receive their first shots next week.

The Biden team has set a goal of 100 million Covid-19 vaccinations in the US during the administration’s first 100 days in the White House.

Meanwhile, the data of worldometer on Tuesday morning (22-12-2020) showed, a total of 77,716,246 people has been diagnosed with the virus worldwide as the death toll rises to 1,708,924. The relief news that 54,591,959 patients already recovered from the infection of the virus.

The United States is at the top of the world in terms of deaths and infections by Covid-19. A total of 326,772 people died in the country due to the pandemic while 18,473,716 have been infected so far. On the other hand, a total of 10,802,496 people have recovered from the virus, according to the website.Source: BBC, Al Jazeera, New York Times Source: https://www.daily-bangladesh.com/

Read More........ → December 22, 2020

BBC experiments with ‘holographic’ TV

By Chris Forrester: The BBC has showcased an experimental ‘holographic’ TV device that “brings to life” some of its archive footage, ranging from the iconic BBC ident globes to giant dinosaurs. Cyrus Saihan is Head of Digital Partnerships at the BBC and explains more on this exciting project in a posting on the BBC’s Internet Blog site: “Although the famous Princess Leia hologram from Star Wars was set a “long, long time ago”, this type of audience experience might not be that far away. Holographic experiences, like Ultra-High Definition or virtual reality, offer audiences a level of detail and realism that only a short while ago seemed virtually impossible but that are now becoming a reality.” “For our experiment, we used existing technologies and simple techniques to explore ‘holographic’ content. The device that we made also gives us an extremely low-fi and low-cost way to assess how the ‘floating’ images of augmented and mixed reality devices, which aren’t readily available for audience testing, might be used to view BBC content in the future.” He added that the BBC has been involved theoretically in holographic technology since the 1970’s, it has more recently been focusing on 360-degree transmission and Virtual Reality output. “To make our ‘holographic’ TV, we took a 46” TV that we had in the office and then asked a local plastics cutter to make a simple acrylic pyramid shape based on some sketches that we had done,” said Saihan. “By placing [an] acrylic pyramid on our flat screen TV, we were able to try out a modern-day version of an old Victorian theatre technique and create the illusion of floating ‘holographic’ like images.” “For this theatre trick to work [AKA ‘Pepper’s Ghost’], the video footage needed to be of a certain type, so we looked through the BBC public service and BBC Worldwide archives for iconic footage that matched these criteria and then worked with UK based visual effects and hologram specialist company MDH Hologram, who tweaked and formatted our archive footage to bring it to life.” “There are limitations with our experimental device: as mentioned above, only certain types of footage will work, you need a fairly low level of light in the room to get the maximum impact and the viewing angles are narrow. The physics of the light reflecting off the pyramid and the TV’s screen size also means that there will always be a practical limit to the size of a display such as this,” explained Saihan. “However, this wasn’t an exercise to test how well this specific prototype performed, it was intended to give us a good approximation as to what BBC content would look like on a ‘holographic’ TV, get an insight into what audiences thought of it and give us a cheap way to explore floating images in the real world. Our experiment was fairly simplistic, but the new technologies on the horizon have the potential to completely change the way that audiences experience media content in the future. You can imagine a world where instead of watching a film star being interviewed on the sofa of a TV chat show, they feel as if they are sitting right next to you on your own sofa in your living room, or where instead of looking at a 2D image of Mount Everest, it appears as if the snow on the mountain top is falling around you. Source: http://advanced-television.com/

Read More........ → September 24, 2016