GoKawiil
Tech News
The 2026 Emmy Awards will take place on Monday, September 14, at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, honoring the year's best in television. Details on how audiences can watch the ceremony live have been outlined ahead of the event.
Valve has set official pricing for its Steam Frame headset, which plays flat and VR games locally or via streaming from a PC: $1,059 for the 256GB model and $1,299 for the 1TB version. Every unit ships with a copy of Half-Life: Alyx, now natively ported to run on the device. Buyers must first join a waitlist by September 17, with a lottery determining who gets early purchase access starting September 18.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has introduced the Streaming Integrity Initiative, a set of five commitments aimed at reducing fraudulent streaming activity. Sony Music Group, Universal Music Group and Merlin are among the first distributors to back the effort, which focuses on verifying identities, vetting content, detecting bad actors and sharing intelligence across platforms. IFPI is now calling on additional distributors to join the initiative.
Roku streaming devices include an auto power saving setting that puts the device into low power mode and attempts to turn off the connected TV after 20 minutes of inactivity. Users experiencing unexpected shutdowns can wake the device via the TV, remote, mobile app, or casting tools, or disable the setting entirely to prevent it from happening again.
Subscribing to eight leading ad-free streaming services now costs about $151 monthly, up from roughly $90 four years ago, according to new pricing data. Apple TV+ has raised prices 200% since its 2019 launch, while Netflix's Premium tier is up 125% since 2013, and price hikes accelerated further with an 11.8% jump over the past year alone.
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.