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YouTube is testing a different approach to ads on smart TVs, as well as its apps on connected devices like Apple TV and game consoles. The platform is experimenting with having longer ad breaks but fewer of them on those devices, which it refers to as connected TV or CTV experiences.

The idea is to show you ads in a way that's better aligned with each platform where you watch YouTube. On mobile, you might be more inclined to watch content like Shorts in more bitesize chunks, so shorter, rapid-fire ad breaks may make more sense. However, YouTube notes that nearly two-thirds of CTV watch time in the US lasts at least 21 minutes — around the length of a sitcom episode on broadcast TV.

The service cites research indicating that 79 percent of viewers would prefer that YouTube bunch ads together rather than spreading them out over the duration of a longer video. As such, YouTube believes that minimizing disruption is the way to go, and having longer, fewer ad breaks is one idea it's trying.

It sounds a bit like the UK TV industry's approach to advertising versus how US networks handle things. You might have time to make a cup of tea during a Coronation Street ad break in Blighty, but good luck doing that between segments of a Grey's Anatomy episode Stateside.

It's unclear exactly how YouTube plans to divvy things up, such as if it will have one four-minute break per hour instead of four one-minute ad slots. The service also didn't say whether it will show more ads overall if it moves forward with this plan.

YouTube

In addition, YouTube is looking into ways of being more transparent about the total length of ad breaks rather than showing the time remaining for each individual spot. Romana Pawar, YouTube Ads director of product management, wrote that the platform will soon publicly test an ad experience along those lines — you'll see just how long you have to wait before you can skip the remaining ads.

YouTube has been tinkering with CTV ad formats for quite some time. Earlier this year, it announced unskippable 30-second ads for its TV apps. You can probably expect the service to keep experimenting with how it presents ads across platforms. Alternatively, you can free yourself from having to put up with (seemingly less frequent) interruptions by stumping up for YouTube Premium's ad-free experience.

Google Workspace users are getting a new feature to prevent colleagues from messing with their documents. Users will now have the ability to lock their Google Drive files, which should help reduce unwanted commentary and changes when sharing with multiple team members. While this isn't the most revolutionary feature, it could certainly come in handy — especially for companies that use and share a lot of publicly viewable documents.

Locking a document puts it in read-only mode, meaning viewers can't edit, comment or leave suggestions on it. The document will remain in this read-only mode until unlocked by its owner. In a blog post, Google stated that this new feature will "streamline the process of restricting files in Drive.”

Previously, you could lock down a document or file when sharing it, or through a Google Drive API call. The new lock feature simplifies things: Right-click on the file you'd like to lock, scroll to file information from the popup menu, and select lock.

The file-locking feature has already been rolled out to some Rapid Release domains and will continue over the next 15 days. Folks on Scheduled Release domains can expect to start seeing the feature on September 20th, with a similar 15-day rollout period.

Roku looks to be seriously tightening its pursestrings. The company’s laying off a full ten percent of its workforce, over 300 employees, in addition to a conducting a number of other cost-cutting measures, as reported by Variety. These job cuts are just the beginning, as Roku’s also removing streaming content, consolidating office space and reducing outside service expenses. The goal here is a major reduction in the year-over-year operating expense growth rate.

The company hasn’t announced which content it would be removing from its various streaming platforms and whether or not these cuts would be culled from third-party providers or from in-house projects like the recently-released Weird Al biopic. Roku’s so serious about these cuts that it’s willing to pony up $65 million for impairment charges after deleting this content, according to an SEC filing. Additionally, the company’s planning on forking over $45 million to $65 million to supply outgoing employees with severance benefits and up to $200 million for abandoning office space. 

The stock market, as usual, loved the layoffs and related austerity measures, with Roku’s stock rising nine percent in the wake of this news, before settling down to a more modest increase of around four percent. As of this writing, the stock price is still fluctuating.

This is Roku’s third round of job cuts in less than a year. Back in November, it laid off 200 staffers, with 200 more let go in March of this year. That’s a grand total of 700 pink slips, representing around 25 percent of the total workforce. As expected, the company also announced that it's holding off on new hires for the time being.

After this round of restructuring and affiliated impairment charges, Roku hopes for an increase in Q3 net revenue to $835 to $875 million, with adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) in the negative $20 million range, up from negative $40 million. However, even Roku admits these figures are uncertain, noting in a Q2 letter to shareholders that the “macro environment continued to create uncertainty,” given the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

The person behind an AI-generated song that went viral earlier this year has submitted the track for Grammy Awards consideration. The Recording Academy has stated that such works aren't eligible for certain gongs. However, Ghostwriter, the pseudonymous person behind "Heart on My Sleeve," has submitted the track in the best rap song and song of the year categories, according to Variety. Both of those are songwriting honors. The Academy has suggested it's open to rewarding tracks that are mostly written by a human, even if the actual recording is largely AI-generated.

Ghostwriter composed the song's lyrics rather than leaving them up to, say, ChatGPT. But rather than sing or rap those words, they employed a generative AI model to mimic the vocals of Drake and The Weeknd, which helped the song to pick up buzz. The artists' label Universal Music Group wasn't happy about that and it filed copyright claims to remove "Heart on My Sleeve" from streaming services. Before that, though, the track racked up hundreds of thousands of listens on Spotify and more than 15 million on TikTok.

Over the last few months, Ghostwriter and their team have been making overtures to industry bigwigs such as Academy higher ups, according to The New York Times. As it turns out, Ghostwriter may actually have a shot at picking up a Grammy. “As far as the creative side, it’s absolutely eligible because it was written by a human,” Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. told the Times.

It seems there's one major roadblock as things stand, though. For a song to be eligible for a Grammy, it needs to have "general distribution" across the US through the likes of brick-and-mortar stores, online retailers and streaming services. Ghostwriter is reportedly aware of this restriction, but it's unclear how they plan to address that.

In any case, this may well be a canary in the coal mine for rewarding the use of generative AI in art. Many creatives are concerned over the issue. Some have accused the operators of generative AI systems of using copyrighted work to train their language learning models, while a major sticking point in the ongoing actors' strike is whether performers will be compensated fairly for the use of their digital likenesses. Whether the output of generative AI models can be considered truly original work is a contentious topic as well.

YouTube is launching an in-app platform for bite-sized games, adding to the ways you can interact with content on the popular video service. Sadly, this is no full-fledged cloud-gaming experience — think of it more like Miniclip living inside the social video site.

This is an experimental offering and, as such, only available to select participants or beta testers. How to know if you’ve been chosen? Open up YouTube and look for a “Playables” tab alongside content on the home feed. For the lucky few, games work on both the desktop website and mobile devices.

There’s no list of published titles at this time, but 9to5Google reports that there’s a game called Stack Bounce available that involves a ball smashing through rings via well-timed clicks. If the title sounds familiar, that’s because Stack Bounce was already offered on Google’s GameSnacks service.

Also, moving a 3D ball around is a far cry from the kinds of games Google Stadia was offering when it shuttered, though the company notes that the system will save game progress, which is accessible via the “History” tab. In other words, more complicated experiences could be forthcoming, as there isn’t much progress to save when moving a bouncing ball through rings. For now, though, it's a repository for minigames. 

YouTube isn’t the only video-streaming service dipping its toes into cloud gaming. Netflix has made a pretty significant push into the space in the last couple of years, most recently expanding services to select smart TVs and personal computers. Even TikTok is experimenting with simple in-app games, in addition to live trivia contests with cash prizes. Google’s Stadia cloud streaming service went belly up back in January.

The European Union has confirmed the first six tech "gatekeepers" that will need to abide by strict new rules under the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA). The names of these companies should be pretty familiar: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft. The European Commission (EC), which is the EU's executive branch, noted that after assessing whether certain companies met thresholds related to revenue, valuation and user numbers, Samsung hasn't been designated as a gatekeeper as yet.

The EC stipulates that digital platforms can be designated as gatekeepers "if they provide an important gateway between businesses and consumers in relation to core platform services." The gatekeepers now have until March 2024 to make sure their applicable services comply with the DMA regulations. Between the six companies, the EC has designated 22 core platform services that the law applies to:

• Alphabet: Google ads, Google Search, Android, YouTube, Chrome, Google Maps, Google Play and Google Shopping

• Amazon: Amazon Marketplace and Amazon ads

• Apple: iOS, App Store and Safari

• ByteDance: TikTok

• Meta: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Meta Marketplace and Meta ads

• Microsoft: LinkedIn and Windows

The DMA stipulates that gatekeepers can't favor their own services over rivals' offerings and can't keep users locked into their own ecosystems. They have to let third-party entities interoperate with their services in certain situations too.

Microsoft and Apple have argued that, despite meeting the thresholds the EC laid out, Bing, Edge, Microsoft Advertising and iMessage don't qualify as gateways and shouldn't have to comply with the DMA. The EC has opened a market investigation in each case to review the companies' claims. 

Meanwhile, the EC notes that iPadOS doesn't meet the thresholds, but it has opened a market investigation to determine whether it should be designated as a core platform service. Gmail, Outlook.com and Samsung Internet Browser did meet the thresholds, but their respective owners (Alphabet, Microsoft and Samsung) successfully convinced the EC that none of these services qualify as gateways for core platform services. 

The rules are likely to have a major impact on Apple in particular. The company has tried to keep a firewall around the iOS ecosystem despite jailbreakers' efforts to sideload apps onto iPhones over the years. Reports previously indicated that Apple is set to allow third-party app stores and sideloading in iOS 17 — we could find out more about that next week when the company holds its fall iPhone event. Microsoft (specifically Xbox) and Epic Games are among the companies that are preparing their own mobile app stores for when the wall around the iOS garden crumbles.

Apple has also so far rebuffed Google's (slightly embarrassing) efforts to convince it to support the RCS messaging standard. The former very much understands the value of iMessage and blue text bubbles. However, if the EC designates iMessage as a gateway, Apple could be forced to play nicely with RCS and other messaging services.

To that end, Apple told Reuters that it's concerned about the privacy and security risks that may emerge as a result of DMA compliance. "Our focus will be on how we mitigate these impacts and continue to deliver the very best products and services to our European customers," the company said.

If a gatekeeper fails to abide by the DMA rules, there may be serious consequences. The EC can fine an infringing gatekeeper as much as 10 percent of its global turnover. That can rise to 20 percent if the gatekeeper continues to break the rules. The EC has also given itself the power to force a gatekeeper to sell a business and to block it from buying related services in cases of systematic DMA violations.

The latest Apple AirPods Pro are back on sale for $199 at Amazon and Walmart. This is a deal we've seen for much of the past several months, but it's still $50 less than the cost of buying from Apple directly. Typically, this is as low as we see the wireless earphones drop at major retailers.

We gave the AirPods Pro a review score of 88 last September, and we currently list them as the "best for iOS" pick in our wireless earbuds buying guide. They continue to be the best true wireless model Apple sells, with a slightly bassy sound that plays well with most kinds of audio, effective active noise cancellation (ANC) and a top-notch transparency mode that blends outside noise with your music. Like all AirPods, they also come with a host of Apple-friendly features: fast pairing, automatic switching between active Apple devices, Find My tracking, spatial audio, audio sharing with other AirPods and Beats users, hands-free Siri and so on.

The six-hour battery life could be longer, there are better options for call quality and many of the other picks in our buying guide come with a richer feature set. There's no way to manually adjust the EQ or ANC strength, for instance. If you want a pair for working out, the Beats Fit Pro offer many of the same Apple-centric perks in a more gym-friendly design. Nevertheless, if you solely use Apple devices, there's still plenty to like here.

There is a caveat, though: Bloomberg reports that Apple will likely update the AirPods Pro with a new USB-C charging case as part of its iPhone event on September 12. (The current AirPods Pro case uses Lightning.) The new iPhones should switch to USB-C too, so if you'd prefer the updated port, it's worth waiting. That said, no other changes to the actual AirPods Pro hardware are expected, and the USB-C model may cost more than this discounted price to start. The earphones will receive new features later this year, but those'll be software-based, with iOS 17 adding a new "Adaptive Audio" mode and faster device switching, among other upgrades.

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By some estimates, it takes around 235 hours to see and do absolutely everything in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Some folks have already managed that and are eager for more, but unlike with Breath of the Wild, you shouldn’t expect Nintendo to release a major expansion this time around.

“There are no plans for additional content,” Tears of the Kingdom producer Eiji Aonuma told Famitsu. The reason for that, as Automaton notes, is because the developers reckon they already shoved all of their major gameplay ideas into the base game. Given the massive breadth and scope of Tears of the Kingdom and the wealth of possibilities it offers players to solve puzzles, take down enemies and torture Koroks, the team might be forgiven for taking that view.

And so, it’s onto the next game, whatever that may be. Tears of the Kingdom director Hidemaro Fujibayashi said his team is pondering what its “next fun experience” may be, but he’s uncertain at this point what that will look like.

In any case, don’t bank on a return to 2D Zelda games or the format of any pre-Breath of the Wild title. "The series continued to evolve after Ocarina of Time, but I think it's also fair to say now that we've arrived at Breath of the Wild and the new type of more open play and freedom that it affords," Aonuma told Game Informer in May. "Yeah, I think it's correct to say that it has created a new kind of format for the series to proceed from."

It'll be a disappointment to some that there won't be any Tears of the Kingdom DLC. Still, you might want to start thinking about blocking out a couple hundred hours on your 2028 or 2029 calendar so you can fully experience the next big Zelda game ASAP.

China has widened a ban on the use of iPhones and other imported devices by government officials, according to The Wall Street Journal. State employees were reportedly told in chat groups and meetings not to bring foreign-branded device into the office or use them for work, according to "people familiar with the matter." The aim is reportedly to reduce reliance on foreign technology and improve cybersecurity.

If you're experiencing deja vu, it's because Beijing has previously blacklisted Apple and other foreign products for government departments, most recently in 2019. Back then, the government was planning to phase out western gear over a three year period in favor of local alternatives. The aim at the time was to keep data within its borders and ensure tech was "secure" and "controllable," all as part of the 2017 China Internet Security Law. 

Apple has managed to stay above the fray, likely because Foxconn and other suppliers in the nation employee millions of people. It also has followed China's laws, removing thousands of illegal apps like VPNs. However, it's also more vulnerable than other companies. On top of the manufacturing dependence, the country accounts for around 19 percent of Apple's total revenue. 

Following bans by the US against Huawei and other Chinese companies, Beijing followed suit with a similar embargo on chip-maker Micron. The story had a further plot twist earlier this week, when Chinese electronics company Huawei released the Mate 60 Pro smartphone using 7-nanometer homegrown chips found by a teardown to be more advanced than expected. China also unveiled a $40 billion fund for its chip industry, following continued trade sanctions with the US. 

Tesla is another US company vulnerable to changes in China's policies. The nation reportedly accounted for a large chunk of its sales in its first quarter, and it's the only foreign automaker to gain market share in the first half of 2023. China recently restricted the use of Tesla vehicle by military staff and employees of state-owned companies, according to an earlier WSJ report.

Apple is set to release the iPhone 15 in less than a week, reportedly with thinner bezels, a titanium frame, USB-C charging and more. Apple has not responded to this story, but Engadget has reached out to the company for comment. 

After introducing the generative AI capabilities it was developing for Slack at World Tour NYC earlier this year, Salesforce has revealed as part of its Dreamforce announcements that it's now gearing up to pilot the new features this winter. Slack AI, as the capabilities are collectively called, is built natively into the platform to make it easy to access. One of its abilities is to instantly generate channel highlights that can immediately tell users the most important part of conversations, which they can then use for reports or to simply read what they might have missed. 

Slack AI can also generate summaries for threads in just one click for people who just want to get the gist of specific conversations and not the channel a whole. As shown in the image above, AI-generated summaries don't just come with highlights, but also lists of what next steps users can take based on concerns, comments and suggestions posted by people in the conversation. In addition, Slack AI can produce elaborate answers when people search for information on the platform. At the moment, searching on Slack can only bring up messages, files and channels with the keyword, but Slack AI can wrap all those information up in a package with a summary that makes them easier to parse. 

Salesforce's latest announcements come nearly a month after it started rolling out a new look for its business-focused messaging app. The redesigned interface is meant to help users focus more by removing clutter that may be distracting to some people. Slack's new sidebar, for instance, collapses all of a user's workspaces into a single tile and adds buttons for Home, DMs and Activity, as well as buttons for Search and Create. The dedicated DM tab lists a user's private chats and allows them to preview the most recent message for each conversation without opening it. Users can also toggle on an option to only see unread messages if they want to get rid of more clutter. 

The company is expected to reveal more about Slack AI and other new products at its Dreamforce event, which will take place from September 12 to September 14 and will be available to stream on Salesforce+.