“When Disney+’s ad tier launches, in December, it will cost U.S. customers $7.99 a month, the current price of the service’s ad-free tier. The price of the no-ads version will be hiked to $10.99.”
This is balanced out by the company’s plan to keep the rate of content spending for all its platforms at around $30 billion for the next few years and its measured revision of subscriber goals. “It now looks like Disney+ is tracking towards tightened and trimmed sub guidance, while the ad-supported tier + price increases + content rationalization = a much improved long-term profit outlook,” Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall wrote in an Aug. 11 note.
This release introduces support for the open source Cycles renderer. This is introduced as an opt-in feature preview intended for early testing and feedback as breaking changes can be expected while we continue to improve Cycles integration in future releases. As such, the use of Cycles is disabled by default but can be enabled via an environment variable. Additionally we’ve added support for viewing parameter history in the Light Editor, automatic render-time translation of UsdPreviewSurface shaders and UsdLuxLights for Arnold and made the usual small fixes and improvements.
“…a bunch of high quality practice material for compositors looking to build their reels. Contains all plates, roto, CG elements, matte paintings, and everything required to start compositing.”
“The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed that Amazon will spend roughly NZ$650 million — $465 million in U.S. dollars — for just the first season of the show.”
“Amazon’s spending will trigger a tax rebate of NZ$160 million ($114 million U.S). This is somewhat controversial in New Zealand as the government could end up on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars to help subsidize Amazon’s elves-and-hobbits drama series. Stuff reported that the country’s treasury has labeled the show a “significant fiscal risk” given there is no capped upside to how much Amazon — and therefore the government — might spend. ”
