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Video streaming beats cable subscriptions for the first time

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As Apple pushes services, a subscription bundle could be in the future
ZDNet’s Larry Dignan tells TechRepublic’s Karen Roby about a potential ‘Apple Prime’ subscription bundle. Read more: https://zd.net/2UMIpNd

It had to happen eventually. People have been turning to cord-cutting for years to avoid paying higher cable and satellite TV bills. Now, according to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), there are more streaming subscribers than there are cable TV customers.

Streaming passed satellite TV in 2015, but there has always been far more more cable TV viewers than satellite TV customers. The handwriting was on the wall, however. Streaming service subscribers numbers were increasing by over 20 percent every year, while cable TV numbers were seeing single-digit declines annually.

Specifically, online video services, such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video, grew from 2017 to 2018 by 27 percent. All together, there were 613.3 million video streaming subscribers in 2018, while cable subscribers dropped to 556 million customers. This was a drop of two percent.

MPAA Streaming Video Growth-2014-2018

Streaming is becoming home video’s future. 


(Image: MPAA)

That said, cable remains more profitable than online streamers. Indeed, despite its decline in subscribers, cable TV companies saw their revenue increase. Cable TV reached $118 billion in total revenue. This was a gain of $6.2 billion in 2018.

The MPAA also found that most people are not cutting the cable cord. Instead, they’re subscribing to online streaming services and cable TV packages.

In Deloitte’s most recent Digital media trends survey, the research company found: “‘Streaming services versus traditional pay TV’ is not an either/or proposition for many: Consumers often want both. Forty-three percent of US households now subscribe to both pay TV and streaming video services. For live TV news, sports, and TV shows, most consumers still turn to traditional pay TV networks, although live TV streaming services are gaining traction.”

Deloitte also observed that streaming subscribers pay for an average of three services. Why? It’s all about content: “In 2018, 57 percent of paid streaming video users said they subscribed to access original content. This number is even higher among millennials, at 71 percent.”


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Overall, we love our television no matter how we get it. In 2018, by the MPAA’s numbers, home entertainment spending — cable, satellite, streaming, and DVD/Blu-ray — increased by $23.3 billion, 12 percent year over year. Streaming, as you’d expect, has the fastest growth, while physical media is on its way out. Between 2017 and 2018, physical media revenue dropped by 15 percent.

So, where do you spend your home entertainment dollar? Let us know in the comments. 

Me? I cut the cord years ago. I get my television from a combination of streaming services and over-the-air for my local TV networks.

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10 Apple Vision Pro Features Already Available With Meta Quest

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Apple’s headset features a number of high-definition cameras which record the room around you and relay that recording to the device’s impressive screen. As a result, you can see exactly what’s going on in the room, and this can serve as a background to what you’re doing. Once again, however, this innovative feature is already available on Quest headsets, where it is known as Passthrough — although it varies in quality. 

Older headsets, like the Quest 1 and Quest 2, use a greyscale Passthrough system, which appears in black and white. The Quest Pro has color Passthrough, though this is the same greyscale system as its predecessors use but with color added before it hits your eyes. As a result, it isn’t what you’d call an HD experience.

That said, the Quest 3 is putting a heavy emphasis on augmented reality and may have a higher-quality Passthrough feature. It may also include the depth sensor that was supposed to be built into the Quest Pro, which will be very useful for augmented reality experiences. Instead of trying to tell the headset where the floor, walls, or tabletops are, the depth sensor can just work it out. 

Either way, you can see your surroundings through a Quest headset. In addition, you can also select various environments to work in on the Quest if you hate the things you’re surrounded by in reality — just like you can with the Vision Pro.

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Features Of The Eurofighter Typhoon That Make It One Of The Best Fighter Jets Ever Built

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Like a lot of military technology, development of the Eurofighter Typhoon began around the Cold War. It was intended as a revolutionary aircraft that would defend Europe as a new time of uncertainty unfolded, as a joint venture between Spain, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

Equipped with a pair of Eurojet EJ200 afterburning turbofan engines and at a cost of $90 million each, the Eurofighter was also expected to keep pace with the developments such aircraft as the United States’ formidable Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, according to Aerocorner. Alas, its fielding was no easy ride: The collaborative nature of development proved difficult to manage, and certain futuristic elements of the aircraft made its development time-consuming and costly. It wasn’t until 2002 that it began serving the U.K., German, Spanish, and Italian militaries, before being purchased by Austria and Saudi Arabia as well.

The Eurofighter Typhoon boasts revolutionary technology to aid in both defensive and offensive endeavors.

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Elon Musk Says Tesla Is Open To Licensing Out Autopilot And Other EV Tech

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Now, Musk’s offer isn’t a philanthropic endeavor to redeem humanity from the environmental burden of gas-guzzling cars. Licensing only means the automaker that eventually bites will have to pay a fee for every car in which the Autopilot tech is used, just the same way Arm collects royalty for its chip design. But the bigger question is, who will embrace Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) tech?

In 2016, Musk claimed at a conference that “a Model S and Model X at this point can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person.” Multiple accidents happened in the years that followed, some allegedly due to issues with the Autopilot system in Tesla cars.

Interestingly, when Musk’s claims about Tesla Autopilot tech were brought forth in a lawsuit involving a fatal crash, Musk’s defense argued that those statements were possibly deepfakes. In January, another bombshell allegation dropped in which it was claimed that early promotional videos for the self-driving tech weren’t real, but staged. In light of these things, there’s a big question with no clear answer: given Tesla’s checkered track record with its in-house Autopilot tech, would any rival EV maker be willing to utilize the system in its own cars?

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