The top eight US media groups plan to spend at least $115bn on new movies and television shows next year in pursuit of a video streaming business that loses money for most of them. From a report: The huge investment outlays come amid concerns that it will be harder to attract new customers in 2022 after the pandemic-fuelled growth in 2020 and 2021. Yet the alternative is to be left out of the streaming land rush. “There is no turning back,” said media analyst Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson. “The only way to compete is spending more and more money on premium content.” The Financial Times calculated the planned expenditures based on company disclosures and analyst reports. One entertainment executive called them “mind-boggling.” Most of the companies — a list that includes Walt Disney, Comcast, WarnerMedia and Amazon — are set to rack up losses on their streaming units. Including sports rights, the aggregate spending estimate rises to about $140bn. Disney’s investment in streaming content is likely to grow 35-40 per cent in 2022, according to estimates by Morgan Stanley. The company’s spending on all new movies and TV shows is expected to reach $23bn, though the number rises to $33bn including sports rights — up 32 per cent from its total content spending in 2021 and 65 per cent from 2020.

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Source: Slashdot – Streaming Wars Drive Media Groups To Spend More Than 0 Billion on New Content

An anonymous reader shares a report: Somehow CES 2022 is still happening in a little over a week, despite the single-largest surge in COVID-19 cases ever recorded in the United States. The electronics show will be far less enormous than usual, but not necessarily because organizers at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) wanted it to be that way. CTA president Gary Shapiro went as far as to post an extensive rant on LinkedIn (and in the Las Vegas Review-Journal) about why, exactly, CES is still happening. He says CES “will and must go on.” Let’s take a moment or two to read through Shapiro’s op-ed. We promise it’s worth the time. Here are some of our favorite ways in which the CTA president explains his reasoning:

1. If we do not cancel, we face the drumbeat of press and other critics who tell the story only through their lens of drama and big name companies. We suppose this applies to us (pretty meta of us). Anyway, it’s pretty telling that Shapiro’s leaning on “bad press” — not the ongoing public health crisis — as a reason to not cancel the show.

2. I will feel safer at CES with our vaccine and masking mandate than I do when I’m running every day errands, including food shopping! Sorry, what? CES is notorious for packing attendants in like sardines. What kind of grocery store is this man going to?

3. It may be messy. But innovation is messy. It is risky and uncomfortable. Well, sure, innovating isn’t a clean process, but CES isn’t actually fostering innovation. The innovation’s already done before these companies arrive on the showroom floor.

4. For those who are vaccinated and willing to take the minor risk of Omicron and a quarantine, CES may be worth it. I’m sorry, did this man just refer to COVID-19 (you know, the one that’s killed more than 2 million people) as a “minor risk”? CES also said today that it will end a day earlier.

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Source: Slashdot – CES’s Justification for Keeping the Show IRL is Absolutely Unhinged

fahrbot-bot writes: The world is full of beautiful equations, numbers and calculations. From counting beads as toddlers to managing finances as adults, we use math every day. But scientists often go beyond these quotidian forms of counting, to measure, weigh and tally far stranger things in the universe. From the number of bubbles in a typical glass of beer to the weight of all the coronavirus particles circulating in the world, LiveScience notes the 10 weird things scientists calculated in 2021.
Number of bubbles in a half-pint glass of beer: up to 2 million bubbles, about twice as many as Champagne. Weight of all SARS-CoV-2 particles: between 0.22 and 22 pounds (0.1 and 10 kilograms).Counted African elephants from space for the first time — Earth elephants (using satellites and AI) not Space Elephants.Acceleration of a finger snap: maximal rotational velocities of 7,800 deg/s and a maximal rotational acceleration of 1.6 million deg/s squared — in seven milliseconds, more than 20 times faster than the blink of an eye, which takes more than 150 milliseconds.Calculated pi to 62.8 trillion decimal places.Updated the “friendship paradox” equations.Theoretical number and mass of all Black Holes: about 1% of all ordinary matter (not dark matter) in the universe.How long would it take to walk around the moon? At 4 hours a day, it would take about 547 Earth days, or about 1.5 years.How many active satellites currently orbit the planet? As of September 2021, there were around 7,500 active satellites in low Earth orbit.The “absolute limit” on the human life span: probably 120 to 150 years.

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Source: Slashdot – Amazing / Strange Things Scientists Calculated in 2021

Starting today, eligible US residents can apply for help with their internet bills under the new Affordable Connectivity Program. The program launched today with $14.2 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law passed in November. From a report: Households can apply to take up to $30 a month off their internet service bill. For households on qualifying Tribal lands, the discount is up to $75 per month. The program could help to connect millions of people to the internet who haven’t had access to it at home, especially in communities that have historically faced more barriers to getting online. Almost a third of people living on Tribal lands lacked high-speed internet at home in 2017, according to a report by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). That’s compared to just 1.5 percent of city-dwellers without high-speed internet access. On top of limited infrastructure, cost is often another barrier. The United States has the second-highest broadband costs out of 35 countries studied by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And American Indian and Alaska Native people have the highest poverty rate of any race group in the US, according to the US Census Bureau.

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Source: Slashdot – A Program for Cheaper Internet for Low-Income Americans Launches Today