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Apple TV+ Reportedly Loses $1 Billion on Streaming a Year
https://www.indiewire.com/news/business/apple-tv-reportedly-loses-1-billion-streaming-1235110323
But it supposedly also has 45 million subscribers, and with $124.3 million in revenue.
Per the company’s most recent earnings, the three months ending in January saw Apple bring in $124.3 billion in revenue, $26.3 billion of which came from Services, a record for the division. That’s just for one quarter. For the year, Services brought in more than $96 billion. It can afford to absorb a billion dollars in losses.https://spyglass.org/apple-tv-plus-strategy
It Wasn’t the Apple TV+ Spend, It Was the Apple TV+ Strategy
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VillageRoadShow production studio files for bankruptcy
Village Roadshow (prod company/financier: Wonka, the Matrix series, and Ocean’s 11) has filed for bankruptcy.
It’s a rough indicator of where we are in 2025 when one of the last independent production companies working with the studios goes under.
Here’s their balance sheet:
$400 M in library value of 100+ films (89 of which they co-own with Warner Bros.)
$500 M – $1bn total debt
$1.4 M in debt to WGA, whose members were told to stop working with Roadshow in December
$794 K owed to Bryan Cranston’s prod company
$250 K owed to Sony Pictures TV
$300 K/month overhead
The crowning expense that brought down this 36-year-old production company is the $18 M in (unpaid) legal fees from a lengthy and currently unresolved arbitration with their long-time partner Warner Bros, who they’ve had a co-financing arrangement since the late 90s.
Roadshow sued when WBD released their Matrix Resurrections (2021) film in theaters and on Max simultaneously, causing Roadshow to withhold their portion of the $190 M production costs.
Due to mounting financial pressures, Village Roadshow’s CEO, Steve Mosko, a veteran film and TV exec, left the company in January.
Now, this all falls on the shoulders of Jim Moore, CEO of Vine, an equity firm that owns Village Roadshow, as well as Luc Besson’s prod company EuropaCorp.
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Google Gemini Robotics
For safety considerations, Google mentions a “layered, holistic approach” that maintains traditional robot safety measures like collision avoidance and force limitations. The company describes developing a “Robot Constitution” framework inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and releasing a dataset unsurprisingly called “ASIMOV” to help researchers evaluate safety implications of robotic actions.
This new ASIMOV dataset represents Google’s attempt to create standardized ways to assess robot safety beyond physical harm prevention. The dataset appears designed to help researchers test how well AI models understand the potential consequences of actions a robot might take in various scenarios. According to Google’s announcement, the dataset will “help researchers to rigorously measure the safety implications of robotic actions in real-world scenarios.”
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Personalize Anything – For Free with Diffusion Transformer
https://fenghora.github.io/Personalize-Anything-Page
Customize any subject with advanced DiT without additional fine-tuning.
FEATURED POSTS
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Marigold – repurposing diffusion-based image generators for dense predictions
Marigold repurposes Stable Diffusion for dense prediction tasks such as monocular depth estimation and surface normal prediction, delivering a level of detail often missing even in top discriminative models.
Key aspects that make it great:
– Reuses the original VAE and only lightly fine-tunes the denoising UNet
– Trained on just tens of thousands of synthetic image–modality pairs
– Runs on a single consumer GPU (e.g., RTX 4090)
– Zero-shot generalization to real-world, in-the-wild imageshttps://mlhonk.substack.com/p/31-marigold
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09358
https://marigoldmonodepth.github.io/
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Zibra.AI – Real-Time Volumetric Effects in Virtual Production. Now free for Indies!
A New Era for Volumetrics
For a long time, volumetric visual effects were viable only in high-end offline VFX workflows. Large data footprints and poor real-time rendering performance limited their use: most teams simply avoided volumetrics altogether. It’s similar to the early days of online video: limited computational power and low network bandwidth made video content hard to share or stream. Today, of course, we can’t imagine the internet without it, and we believe volumetrics are on a similar path.
With advanced data compression and real-time, GPU-driven decompression, anyone can now bring CGI-class visual effects into Unreal Engine.
From now on, it’s completely free for individual creators!
What it means for you?
(more…)
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Photography basics: Production Rendering Resolution Charts
https://www.urtech.ca/2019/04/solved-complete-list-of-screen-resolution-names-sizes-and-aspect-ratios/
Resolution – Aspect Ratio 4:03 16:09 16:10 3:02 5:03 5:04 CGA 320 x 200 QVGA 320 x 240 VGA (SD, Standard Definition) 640 x 480 NTSC 720 x 480 WVGA 854 x 450 WVGA 800 x 480 PAL 768 x 576 SVGA 800 x 600 XGA 1024 x 768 not named 1152 x 768 HD 720 (720P, High Definition) 1280 x 720 WXGA 1280 x 800 WXGA 1280 x 768 SXGA 1280 x 1024 not named (768P, HD, High Definition) 1366 x 768 not named 1440 x 960 SXGA+ 1400 x 1050 WSXGA 1680 x 1050 UXGA (2MP) 1600 x 1200 HD1080 (1080P, Full HD) 1920 x 1080 WUXGA 1920 x 1200 2K 2048 x (any) QWXGA 2048 x 1152 QXGA (3MP) 2048 x 1536 WQXGA 2560 x 1600 QHD (Quad HD) 2560 x 1440 QSXGA (5MP) 2560 x 2048 4K UHD (4K, Ultra HD, Ultra-High Definition) 3840 x 2160 QUXGA+ 3840 x 2400 IMAX 3D 4096 x 3072 8K UHD (8K, 8K Ultra HD, UHDTV) 7680 x 4320 10K (10240×4320, 10K HD) 10240 x (any) 16K (Quad UHD, 16K UHD, 8640P) 15360 x 8640
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boldtron – 𝗗𝗘𝗣𝗜𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗪𝗔𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗚𝗨𝗡𝗦
See this Instagram post by @boldtron using ComfyUI + Krea
https://www.instagram.com/p/C5v-H0PNYYg/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet
