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Tech News
WIRED published its monthly streaming guide, highlighting shows that intersect with technology, science, politics and culture rather than simply the most popular titles. Featured picks include The Office spinoff The Paper, now in its second season, and a new Lego-themed take on The Mandalorian following the underwhelming box office run of The Mandalorian and Grogu.
Sony's Crunchyroll has teamed up with Fox One to offer a combined subscription bundle for US customers, available through Prime Video for a limited time. The bundle, priced at $23 per month, gives subscribers access to Crunchyroll's ad-free anime library alongside Fox's news, sports and entertainment channels at a 23% discount versus buying both separately.
Tubi has introduced TubiFone, a toll-free hotline (1-833-605-TUBI) that suggests movies based on a caller's mood, as part of its new 'Find Any Feeling for Free' campaign. Callers select an emotional category and a recorded voice reads out five film recommendations with brief descriptions and cast details.
Dual-band routers transmit Wi-Fi simultaneously on two frequencies, 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz, to spread device traffic across separate channels instead of one shared lane. The 2.4GHz band covers longer distances and passes through walls better but runs slower and gets crowded, while the 5.0GHz band delivers faster speeds and more capacity at the cost of range. Most modern routers automatically assign devices to whichever band suits them, though some networks still show separate SSIDs for each frequency.
A Reddit user analyzed their extended Spotify streaming history for a 2,000-song playlist and found a 72-track sequence played in the exact same order on two consecutive days. The repetition occurred even with the 'Fewer Repeats' setting enabled and without changing devices or playlists. Other users report similar patterns, including one case where 27 of 30 upcoming tracks matched a prior queue.
Roku has debuted a free, ad-supported channel called Fairground AI Creator TV, streaming round-the-clock content billed as 'AI Cinema' from over 100 contributors, some recruited from social media. While some creators like Frank Houbre wrote scripts and mythology before using AI tools for animation, voices and music, critics including the Guardian, The Verge and Futurism have panned the results as low-quality and unsettling.
The creators of the original Dataflow Model paper—Tyler Akidau, Rafael Fernández-Moctezuma, Reuven Lax and Daniel Mills—revisited their influential streaming framework eleven years after publication, on the occasion of its VLDB Test of Time award. They conclude that its core ideas, such as prioritizing event time and abandoning the wait for complete data, held up well, but admit that windowing, triggers, and a stream-first worldview were overengineered or misguided compared to database-style approaches like SQL and materialized views.
The RIAA reported that US recorded music revenue hit $6 billion in the first half of 2026, a 6.9% increase over the prior year. Physical formats led the growth, with CD sales jumping 58.6% and vinyl climbing 17.7%, while streaming still dominated overall revenue at $4.9 billion, up 4.7%.
Roku has added Fairground, a free ad-supported streaming channel featuring films made with AI tools alongside human writers, directors and editors. The company sources content through a creator portal and a recent contest that rewarded submissions in categories like true crime and world-building with prize money and revenue sharing.
The open-source audio editor Audacity has released version 4.0, bringing a redesigned user interface alongside improvements to its editing tools. The software remains free, cross-platform on desktop, and supports common formats like WAV, AIFF, FLAC and MP3, along with over 100 sound effects and features such as auto-ducking for podcast mixing.
Microsoft will begin limiting Xbox Cloud Gaming to monthly hour caps in November: 15 hours for Game Pass Ultimate, 10 for Premium, and 5 for Essential subscribers, after which users must purchase extra playtime. The company says only about 4% of Game Pass subscribers will be affected, and it will also let non-subscribers buy cloud hours to stream eligible owned games.
Polars has shipped the first release candidate for version 2.0, with the final release expected in coming weeks. The major version bump primarily changes the default execution engine for LazyFrame queries from the in-memory engine to the streaming engine, alongside other default setting changes and removal of legacy design constraints.