GoKawiil
Tech News
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.
Pearl Abyss has launched a free 20-minute playable demo of Crimson Desert that runs entirely through Twitch's cloud streaming, requiring no download or installation. The demo works on any device with a web browser, though notably not on current game consoles. It coincides with the rollout of Crimson Desert Enhanced, a major free update released last week.
YouTube TV has finished folding ESPN Unlimited directly into its platform, meaning eligible subscribers no longer need to open a separate ESPN app to stream its content. The rollout, promised as part of last year's carriage deal after ESPN briefly left YouTube TV, covers events like the US Open, college football, WWE, La Liga and out-of-market NHL games, plus ESPN Originals and the 30 for 30 library.
Google has hiked the U.S. price of its TV Streamer 4K from $99.99 to $149.99, citing rising component costs, with the change already reflected on the Google Store and Best Buy. Certain Nest Cam and doorbell models are also getting price increases effective August 31, though the new Google Home Speaker is unaffected for now. Amazon and Walmart are still selling remaining stock at the older $99.99 price, but supplies are limited.
Dyson has released the CameraJet, an electric toothbrush priced at $499 that embeds a tiny camera in the brush head to livestream footage of your mouth to a paired smartphone over Wi-Fi. An AI system called Gap Optical Targeting analyzes 28 images per second from that camera to spot gaps between teeth and fires a targeted mouthwash spray to clean them within milliseconds, effectively flossing while you brush.
ZDNET has published a roundup of discounts on streaming hardware ahead of Labor Day 2026, highlighting a Fire TV Stick priced at $20 alongside other markdowns on streaming devices. The list is compiled from vendor and retailer listings plus independent testing and customer feedback rather than a single retailer's sale event.
Apache Iggy, an open-source message streaming platform written in Rust, has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a full Apache Software Foundation Top-Level Project after a unanimous vote on August 19, 2026. The project began in March 2023 as founder Piotr Gankiewicz's personal effort to learn Rust and study messaging internals, later evolving into a thread-per-core system using io_uring and Viewstamped Replication for consensus, achieving single-digit millisecond P99 latencies.
Streaming profiles for deceased jazz musicians including Sonny Criss, Jean Carne, Red Nichols and Jimmie Noone have been flooded with new, AI-generated songs falsely credited to them. The tracks, uploaded under a publisher called 'Ami bacuk' and a fabricated artist name, feature generic anime-style cover art and cannot be traced to existing recordings or identified by music-ID tools.