Tag: discovery
Spotify debuts its TikTok-style music discovery feed
The vertical TikTok-style video feed has invaded a lot of the apps we use on a daily basis and now it’s officially coming to one more. After announcing a beta test last year, Spotify will begin rolling out a new design for the Home section of its mobile app with a “more visual, dynamic” look. The company says the visual feeds are “built for deeper discovery and more meaningful connections between artists and fans.”
Music, Podcasts and Audiobooks sections will also give you the ability to “scroll purposefully” through the new feeds where Spotify will offer audio and video clips for you to preview. If you find something you want to hear in its entirety, there are options to save, share, preview multiple songs (playlists or albums), read episode transcriptions and watch video podcasts. These visual feeds will also be in the Search interface, where you can scroll through clips arranged by genre. Additionally, Spotify says it will put the visual content inside of its curated playlists like Discover Weekly, Release Radar, New Music Friday and Rap Caviar. The company sees this as a way to offer previews for songs in those collections before you hit play. Unlike some of the early tests, Spotify hasn’t added a fourth button to the app’s navigation bar for these newly scrollable feeds.
For the Music tab, users in the US and Canada will see Spotify’s AI DJ just below the collection of eight personalized shortcuts. When you begin to scroll, the app will serve up audio and visual snippets of a song (you can watch muted if you prefer). From here, you can preview up to five different songs from an album or playlist by tapping on the cards — much like you would for Instagram Stories. Spotify will also give you some brief context as to why you’re seeing these recommendations.
For the Podcasts section, you’ll still see those eight shortcuts up top while the rest of the feed will preview selected shows for you. Each recommendation will have an audio sample and real-time transcription or a video clip if the show was recorded in that format. If you want to continue listening, you’ll have the option of picking up at the part you previewed or starting from the beginning. Spotify says the Audiobook feed will function much like the Podcast previews.
Spotify is also renaming its Enhance tool that debuted in 2021. Now called Smart Shuffle, the feature not only adds suggestions to playlists “that perfectly match the vibe,” it also mixes up the order. You can activate it by double tapping on the shuffle icon. When you’ve done so you’ll notice a shuffle icon with a star in the top left and any track that is added by suggestion will be highlighted in the list. You can quickly remove all of the app’s recommendations by tapping on the Smart Shuffle button once more, reverting the playlist back to your carefully constructed collection.
Lastly, the company is adding auto play for podcasts to its app. Just like it does for music, Spotify will give you the ability to automatically begin “another relevant episode” based on what you were listening to. Also like it does for music, the company is giving you the ability to turn auto play off, so when your podcast ends you can enjoy the silence.
Spotify says some of these new features will be available today, while others will debut in the coming months.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/spotify-debuts-its-tiktok-style-music-discovery-feed-183359654.html?src=rss
Creepy & Mysterious ENTITY ENCOUNTER & HUMAN SKELETON DISCOVERY on Oahu, Hawaii
Young Oahu, Hawaii teens encounter an entity that manifests in front of them. They later find a human skeleton in a cave, though not long after, the cave is mysteriously filed in and altered.
“My name is Christian. I’m from Hawaii. I figured you may find this interesting though and to be honest, I just want to share the experience with a group of like-minded individuals after keeping it to myself for so many years.
I’m 32 now this happened to me around the age of 16 (in 2007). I grew up in a small town on the island of Oahu squeezed between the ocean and a long cliff mountain. I lived across the street from where this occurred. In the forest, they butted up against the property of one of my best friend’s family. And three or four of my friends got a hold of some wood and built a deck under a huge Kiawe tree on that we put a really big camping tent on. We called it ‘the base.’ We had a bare mattress on a box spring in there; a coffee table and two old seats we took from an abandoned van we had found on the roadside.
This experience happened probably six months after we set it up. My friend and I were sitting in the tent as usual. I was sitting on the mattress and my buddy was playing a new song he’d been learning on the van seat, closest to the tent door. The other seat sat empty to his right in the corner of the tent. We were there for a while passing the guitar back and forth but as he was sitting there playing and showing me the chords up for this song, the sun was shining on the tent wall behind him and the shadows of the tree branches were gently swaying on the wall.This part is a bit hard to explain but as I was listening to the guitar this specific part of a branch shadow on the tent wall above the empty van seat caught my eye as it looked like there were two eyes on it swaying with the shadow. As soon as I looked directly at the two eyes, a face started to materialize and within probably five seconds there was a fully materialized kid sitting in the chair looking at me. I’d never felt or experienced anything like this before then or since. A chill ran down my body and I got that feeling like my entire skin caught on fire my eyes started welling up with tears and I couldn’t breathe.
The kid looked to be about 10 or 11 and wore a very distinct outfit. He was in a brown button-up vest and a white shirt underneath with a super pronounced sharp pointed collar. He had blonde hair combed neatly to the side and pale white skin. He locked eyes with me as I sat there frozen but trying as hard as I could breathe. While I basically started convulsing, my friend looked up and freaked out. He threw the guitar on the bed and grabbed my arm to pull me out of the tent. He was screaming, ‘Was that a ghost? What the heck was that?’ as we started running through the woods but I still couldn’t get any breath into me to respond. I felt like I was choking.
The woods were a tangled mess with tightly packed trees and big patches of head-high grass. We ran/tumbled straight through it instead of taking the tight little trail we normally use. We headed back to our friend’s property. When we finally broke out of the forest of the property, our other friend was actually there washing his mom’s Tacoma in the driveway. It wasn’t a surprise to him that we were coming out of there from the hangout spot but his first words to us as we ran towards him was, ‘Holy crap, what did you guys see?’ The friend I was with yelled, ‘Ghost!’ We ran right past him to the main driveway, jumped on our bikes, and without even saying anything, rode in opposite directions to our houses. This was in broad daylight probably two or three in the afternoon.
I rode straight back to my house jumped in bed and just cried. I couldn’t shake the feeling. I felt gross and completely creeped out. It’s still hard to explain the feeling it put me in as a teenager growing up in that area. And at the time we pride ourselves on being tough and strong and it was completely out of character for me but this experience completely shook me. I have no explanation for it to this day.
There’s more that may or may not be connected to this but a month later, four of us were exploring in the forest probably a quarter mile straight up towards the mountain from the base which was actually just a steep 200-foot overgrown rock cliff that ran the length of our town above the forest. We found a small cave. It was a ground level about knee-high and probably six feet wide. It looked like it went in a good way. We were all super surprised that we had never seen it before because we thought we knew every inch of this forest. Just to the right of the cave is a small pile of rocks that had crumbled down from the cliff and a piece of bone was laying between two of the rocks. I thought it was part of a bird’s skull since we very often found them and always brought them back to the base and had a pretty large collection at that point. I grabbed it, pulled it up from between the rocks and it turned out to be the front of a human skull. The back was broken off but it was the forehead, both eye sockets, nose, and teeth. As soon as we all realized what it was, it felt like I got hit with an electric shock. I dropped the skull and we were all losing our minds at the find. My heart felt like it was exploding out of my chest and I was shaking uncontrollably.
We all got down, looked into the cave afterward, and saw the rest of the skeleton inside. The rib cage was closest to the front of the opening and we can see other bones tucked farther back in. They looked old. The strange part of this was that less than a week later we went back to see the skeleton with some other friends and when we got to the spot, the cave was completely filled in with small rocks that fit together perfectly like a tight-fitting rock wall completely filling the cave opening without any mortar. And directly in front of it was a Ti plant that wasn’t there before but it didn’t look like it was planted recently. It looked like it had grown out of the ground right there.
Ti leaves are used to wrap around stones to be left in the forest as offerings to the spirits just as some context as to the plant that was there. This area was behind my friend’s property and was really only accessible through the property and we still have no explanation as to how anyone could have come within the week to wall up the cave and plant the Ti plant or have even known that we found the skeleton. Having that happen paired with us having the kid materialize in the tent with us is almost too strange and should not be connected somehow.”
Transcribed Source “New Photos Sent In, Channels I Watch, Truth Be Told”. The Facts By Howtohunt.com
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Star Trek: Discovery Will End After Season 5
Paramount has confirmed that Star Trek: Discovery—the first series in the franchise since Star Trek: Enterprise ended in 2005, and the herald of Star Trek’s revitalization as a streaming show universe—will come to an end after its fifth and final season.
Warner Bros. Discovery sues Paramount over ‘South Park’ streaming rights
If the Paramount+ South Park movie deal seemed odd when HBO Max scored an exclusive for the series, you’re not alone. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has sued Paramount Global for allegedly breaching parts of the $500 million contract that gave HBO Max streaming rights for South Park in 2019. WBD claims Paramount “blatantly intended” to steer users toward its service by not only offering new specials, but by shortchanging the HBO service on promised regular season content.
HBO Max was reportedly promised three new seasons with 10 episodes each. However, the provider says it only got eight episodes across the two delivered seasons, and that the next season’s six episodes also fall short. On top of this, Paramount supposedly used “verbal trickery” to rebrand content as movies or events to avoid sending video to its competitor.
In a statement to Engadget, Paramount claims the lawsuit is “without merit.” It also maintains that it’s still honoring the contract despite Warner supposedly failing to pay licensing fees for already-delivered South Park episodes. We’ve asked WBD for comment.
The lawsuit isn’t shocking. WBD, previously WarnerMedia, was determined to amass as much content as possible for HBO Max ahead of its 2020 launch, including Friends and Doctor Who. Whether or not Paramount violated its contract, the South Park content on Paramount+ diminishes HBO Max’s content advantage — you no longer have to use that service if you want to stream the recent adventures of Cartman and crew.
Paramount, meanwhile, has multiple reasons to contest the lawsuit. Paramount+ is thriving even as rivals like Netflix run into trouble, having topped 43 million users as of last spring. While it’s unclear how much of a role South Park is playing in that growth, the company may not want to give up streaming rights for one of its best-known shows (Paramount owns Comedy Central, remember) without a fight.
Discovery Of Massive Early Galaxies Defies Prior Understanding Of The Universe – Phys.Org
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Webb Telescope’s Discovery of Massive Early Galaxies Still Defies Prior Understanding of Universe
“These objects are way more massiveâ than anyone expected,” said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, who modeled light from these galaxies. “We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”
Using the first dataset released from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the international team of scientists discovered objects as mature as the Milky Way when the universe was only 3% of its current age, about 500-700 million years after the Big Bang…. In a paper published February 22 in Nature, the researchers show evidence that the six galaxies are far more massive than anyone expected and call into question what scientists previously understood about galaxy formation at the very beginning of the universe. “The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science,” said Leja. “We’ve been informally calling these objects ‘universe breakers’ — and they have been living up to their name so far.”
Leja explained that the galaxies the team discovered are so massive that they are in tension with 99% of models for cosmology. Accounting for such a high amount of mass would require either altering the models for cosmology or revising the scientific understanding of galaxy formation in the early universe — that galaxies started as small clouds of stars and dust that gradually grew larger over time. Either scenario requires a fundamental shift in our understanding of how the universe came to be, he added. “We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find,” Leja said. “It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”
“My first thought was we had made a mistake and we would just find it and move on with our lives,” Leja says in the statement. “But we have yet to find that mistake, despite a lot of trying.”
“While the data indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes. Regardless, the amount of mass we discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. Even if we cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change.”
Phys.org got a more detailed explantion from one of the paper’s co-authors:
It took our home galaxy the entire life of the universe for all its stars to assemble. For this young galaxy to achieve the same growth in just 700 million years, it would have had to grow around 20 times faster than the Milky Way, said Labbe, a researcher at Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology. For there to be such massive galaxies so soon after the Big Bang goes against the current cosmological model which represents science’s best understanding of how the universe works. According to theory, galaxies grow slowly from very small beginnings at early times,” Labbe said, adding that such galaxies were expected to be between 10 to 100 times smaller. But the size of these galaxies “really go off a cliff,” he said….
The newly discovered galaxies could indicate that things sped up far faster in the early universe than previously thought, allowing stars to form “much more efficiently,” said David Elbaz, an astrophysicist at the French Atomic Energy Commission not involved in the research. is could be linked to recent signs that the universe itself is expanding faster than we once believed, he added.
This subject sparks fierce debate among cosmologists, making this latest discovery “all the more exciting, because it is one more indication that the model is cracking,” Elbaz said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Warner Bros. Discovery to sue Paramount over ‘South Park’ streaming rights
HBO Max’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, is suing Paramount for allegedly failing to honor part of their $500 million deal over the streaming rights to South Park, Variety reports.
The Warner/HBO and Paramount deal was sealed in 2019, when it was determined the popular animated comedy would stream exclusively on HBO Max. In 2021, however, MTV (a Paramount subsidiary) made a separate deal — for $900 million — with show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone for at least five more seasons of the show for Comedy Central, and 14 original movies for Paramount+. Four of those “movies” have already run on Paramount+: South Park: Post Covid, South Park: Post Covid: The Return of Covid, South Park The Streaming Wars Part 1 and Part 2.
Now, Warner/HBO filed a suit on Friday that alleges that Paramount undermined their deal in attempts to bolster their own streaming service. “When Paramount decided to launch a new streaming platform of its own (“Paramount+”), its priorities changed drastically,” the suit alleges, “and [Paramount] embarked on a multi-year scheme to unfairly take advantage of Warner/HBO by breaching its contract and stealing its content.”
A Paramount Global spokesperson told Variety:
We believe these claims are without merit and look forward to demonstrating so through the legal process…We also note that Paramount continues to adhere to the parties’ contract by delivering new South Park episodes to HBO Max, despite the fact that Warner Bros. Discovery has failed and refused to pay license fees that it owes to Paramount for episodes that have already been delivered, and which HBO Max continues to stream.
South Park is currently airing on HBO Max for its 26th season, with Warner Bros. Discovery considering the show an “anchor” that’s “central to branding and marketing.”
Warner Bros. Discovery sues Paramount in South Park streaming fight
Warner Bros. Discovery is suing Paramount for allegedly “stealing” South Park content it claims it should have the exclusive streaming rights to, as reported earlier by Variety. In a lawsuit filed on Friday, HBO Max’s parent company claims Paramount worked with South Park’s creators and its MTV subsidiary to “divert as much of the new South Park content as possible” to Paramount Plus to attract viewers to the platform.
In 2019, Warner Bros. Discovery says it paid around $1.6 million for each of the over 300 episodes that South Park Digital Studios (SPDS) — a joint venture between Paramount and South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone — agreed to license. Warner Bros. Discovery claims Paramount, which also owns Comedy Central, South…
Daily Crunch: Falling short of analysts’ estimates, Warner Bros. Discovery posts $2.1B net loss for Q4 2022
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Daily Crunch: Falling short of analysts’ estimates, Warner Bros. Discovery posts $2.1B net loss for Q4 2022 by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch