In 1955, Harry Olson and Herbert Belar created the world’s first electronic synthesizer. Little could they have known then how much their invention would change the way people make music. From a song like Blue Monday from New Order to Midnight City from M83, so many era-defining tracks from the past few decades wouldn’t have been possible to record without synths in all their various forms. In honor of that legacy, Moog Music is launching a new documentary series. Dubbed Giants, it will tell the story of some of the people who helped shape both synths and electronic music as an art form.

You can watch the first episode starting today on Moog Music’s YouTube channel. It features Herb Deutsch, the co-creator of the Moog modular synth, talking about, among other things, how he and Bob Moog met. The footage of Deutsch talking is broken up with archival images and clips. It’s all pretty standard stuff, but if you’re a music nerd, you’ll want to check out the video.

In future installments of Giants, Moog has promised to feature individuals like Daniel Miller, the founder of legendary British music label Mute Records, and Bernie Krause, who alongside Paul Beaver, helped introduce people like George Harrison to electronic music. If you want to keep up with Giants, Moog suggests signing up for its newsletter.

Call of Duty fans who've been worried what Microsoft's pending $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard means for the future of that franchise on PlayStation can breathe easy. That series and other popular Activision Blizzard games won't be exclusive to Xbox — even after Sony's existing agreements with the publisher expire. 

"Microsoft will continue to make Call of Duty and other popular Activision Blizzard titles available on PlayStation through the term of any existing agreement with Activision," Microsoft president Brad Smith wrote in a blog post. "And we have committed to Sony that we will also make them available on PlayStation beyond the existing agreement and into the future so that Sony fans can continue to enjoy the games they love. We are also interested in taking similar steps to support Nintendo’s successful platform. We believe this is the right thing for the industry, for gamers and for our business."

According to Bloomberg, Sony struck a deal with Activision Blizzard before the blockbuster merger was announced to bring the next two mainline Call of Duty games and a sequel to Warzone to PlayStation. Until now, it was unclear whether subsequent Call of Duty games would be released on PlayStation or if Microsoft planned to keep them on Xbox and PC only.

Smith made the announcement while revealing a set of Open App Store Principles that Microsoft is establishing for Windows and future gaming marketplaces it's building for games. He wrote that the company is bringing in the policies as it seeks regulatory approval for the Activision Blizzard deal and as governments "move forward with new laws to promote competition in app markets and beyond. We want regulators and the public to know that as a company, Microsoft is committed to adapting to these new laws, and with these principles, we’re moving to do so."

Developing...

Most Twitter users can only create videos up to 140 seconds in length, but even so, some people apparently still don't have time for that. Luckily, Twitter has announced that it's testing playback speeds varying from .25x to 2x on Android or the web, similar to what you can do on YouTube, Netflix and other platforms.

Folks like myself (in France, on Android) with access to the feature will see a gear at the top of a video, next to the closed caption option. Selecting that allowed me to choose from a fairly granular range of speeds with sound pitch adjusted so you don't get the "Chipmunks" effect. It could be useful to folks with short attention spans or if you need to slow down a video to hear a word, to name a couple of potential use cases.

Variable playback speeds will work for "tweet videos, amplify videos, voice tweets, videos in DMs and video live replays, depending on their platform," Twitter spokesperson Joseph Nunez told The Verge. Twitter plans to expand the feature to iOS down the road. It's now in testing for select users, but there's no word on when Twitter might roll it out more widely. 

Earlier today, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, who allegedly attempted to launder more than 25,000 Bitcoins that were stolen as part of the 2016 hack of Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. What was unclear to us at the time was that an even greater crime had played out across Morgan's social media pages: her rap career. 

Spotted by NBC reporter Kevin Collier, Morgan — who performed under the alias Razzlekhan — seemingly spent all of the time she was not allegedly shifting around $3.6 billion in cryptocurrency shooting rap videos, leaving precious little bandwidth to actually learn how to write or perform music in a pleasing way. On her YouTube page, can find Morgan’s rap videos sprinkled in between unboxing clips and a review of 13 different kinds of aluminum-free deodorant. Morgan, the self-proclaimed “Crocodile of Wall Street,” states that she experiences synesthesia, which results in "art" that "often resembles something between an acid trip and a delightful nightmare." 

We implore you to form your own opinion:

"Cutthroat Country," embedded above, provides an overview of Morgan's many talents as a rapper. Her delivery is tuneless, the bars are cringe and the accompanying music video isn't much better. But the best part is that Morgan seemingly implicates herself in the exact money laundering scheme she stands accused of carrying out. "Spearfish your password / all your funds transferred," she says in the 2:36 mark of the song.

But her magnum opus is perhaps "Versace Bedouin," a "rap anthem of misfits and weirdos":

"Always be a GOAT, not a god damn sheep," she raps at the start of song. "Spirit of a revolutionary, power of a dictator / love to be contrary, but I'm fly like a gator," she says later. What's striking about both videos are the low-budget production values on display. Morgan and her husband allegedly laundered billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, and yet it looks like they shot the clips on a shoestring budget. 

We could say more about the videos, but we think YouTube user Gudi said it best. “The Man couldn’t allow this much talent to roam the streets. RIP.” Morgan and Lichtenstein face money laundering and conspiracy charges. If convicted, they face up to a maximum of 25 years in prison.

It can be a pain to time music with a video you're editing — you may spend ages trimming and slicing tracks to create an arrangement that matches your footage. Adobe thinks your computer can do the heavy lifting, though. It just updated Premiere Pro with a Remix feature that uses AI to re-time music to fit your video's duration. This probably won't be completely satisfying if you're exacting about your soundtracks, but it could save valuable hours if you were just looking for well-timed background audio.

The Premiere Pro update is also far more useful for transcriptions. Speech-to-text conversion is now available offline through downloadable language packs, leading to transcriptions up to three times faster on M1- and Core i9-based systems. English is included by default.

Adobe is providing some of its customary hardware optimizations. Windows users can now export 10-bit HDR videos up to 10 times faster with Intel- or NVIDIA-based graphics. Block Dissolve and Linear Wipe effects now use GPU acceleration, too. And if you own one of the latest 14- or 16-inch MacBook Pros, Premiere Pro now properly adapts to the display notch. These won't necessarily affect your workflows in the way Remix might, but they'll be appreciated if they help you finish projects that much sooner.

Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects mastermind behind Blade Runner, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey and numerous others, died on Monday at age 79. His daughter Amy Trumbull announced the news on Facebook, writing that her father’s death followed a “two-year battle” with cancer, a brain tumor and stroke.

Trumbull was born on April 8, 1942 in Los Angeles, the son of a mechanical engineer and artist. His father worked on the special effects for films including The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars: A New Hope. The younger Trumbull worked as an illustrator and airbrush artist in Hollywood for many years. His career really took off after he cold-called Stanley Kubrick, a conversation which led to a job working on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One of his most significant contributions to 2001 was creating the film’s Star Gate, a ground-breaking scene where astronaut Dave Bowman hurtles through an illuminated tunnel transcending space and time. In order to meet Kubrick’s high aesthetic standards for the shot, Trumbull essentially designed a way to turn the film camera inside-out. Trumbull’s ad hoc technique “was completely breaking the concept of what a camera is supposed to do,” he said during a lecture at TIFF.

Trumbull earned visual effects Oscar nominations for his work on Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner. He also received the President's Award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1996.

Later in his career, Trumbull voiced distaste over the impact of computers on visual effects, decrying the cheapening and flattening impact of the new era of CGI. “Today, the motion picture visual effects industry has almost entirely given way to computer graphics. We’re able to do things that were absolutely inconceivable in the old days like water effects, fire, explosions, smoke. But, almost everything in the visual effects industry today is created on computers. There’s a certain commoditization that has resulted that I’m not comfortable with myself. I like miniatures and physical effects and what I call organic effects,” said Trumbull in a 2018 interview for The Hollywood Reporter.

He spent the last years of his life working on a new super-immersive film format he dubbed MAGI, which he believed would improve the experience of watching a film in theaters. But Trumbull struggled to draw the interest of today’s film industry. “What interests me is being able to create profound personal experiences for audiences,” Trumbull toldMIT Technology Review in 2016. “Whatever it is, I want you to feel like what’s happening on the screen is actually happening in real-time, to you, in this theater.”

Disney+ dipped its toes into the world of livestreaming for the first time in the US with a broadcast of this year's Oscar nominations, offering a glimpse of a possible direction for the platform. "We performed a test for livestreaming capabilities on Disney+ in the US with this morning’s Academy Award nominations," a Disney+ spokesperson told Engadget in a statement. "We are pleased with the results and will continue to test as part of our ongoing and iterative approach to deliver the best user experiences to consumers.”

The nominations were broadcast on multiple platforms, including Hulu, Good Morning America, ABC News Live and the Oscars website. Given Disney+ was not the only option for awards aficionados to watch the nominations, it was a smart way for Disney to test the platform's livestreaming capacity without placing too much strain on the infrastructure. Notably, Disney owns ABC, the network that broadcasts the Academy Awards ceremony each year.

Disney+ does offer some livestreaming options in other countries, including sports in India and WWE events in Indonesia. Of course, Disney has other platforms with livestreaming options in the US, including Hulu + Live TV and ESPN+. So, it's not impossible to imagine Disney+ streaming live sports, the Oscars ceremony or other events in the future — something that could help it stand out from rivals like Netflix, which has largely steered clear of livestreaming.

From musicians pulling their music to a high-profile podcaster pausing their exclusive show, Spotify is under attack from all sides. Furore over Joe Rogan’s podcast and Spotify’s subsequent misinformation policies and actions has come both internally and externally. Much of the backlash is warranted as Spotify hasn’t been up front about the content of Rogan’s podcast, or misinformation in general. And the lack of transparency is why the company’s current issues are much bigger than one massively popular creator.

By now, you’ve likely heard something about the Joe Rogan saga. The popular podcast host has been controversial for years, but criticism ramped up after a December 31 episode featuring physician and biochemist Dr. Robert Malone. While speaking to Rogan, Dr. Malone made a number of unfounded claims about COVID-19 vaccines, including that “mass formation psychosis” led many in the US to take the jab. After the episode was posted, hundreds of doctors, nurses, scientists and educators sent a letter to Spotify urging it to create a clear misinformation policy and take "responsibility to mitigate the spread” of such content.

When the group posted the letter online, Engadget reached out to Spotify to ask if the company already had a misinformation policy, how it takes action against misinformation and if it was considering any action against the Malone episode of JRE. The company didn’t respond. Two weeks later, CEO Daniel Ek penned a statement on the matter and posted the company’s “platform rules” on a Sunday afternoon. It’s unclear if Ek was already planning to publish the platform-wide policy or if it was in response to a report two days earlier of internal explanations to employees as to why certain episodes of Rogan’s podcast hadn’t been removed.

During the company’s Q4 2021 earnings call last week, Ek took responsibility for not publishing the content policy sooner. "We should've done it earlier and that's on me," he admitted. To employees during a company meeting the same day, the CEO explained that Spotify is not a publisher, so it doesn’t have creative control over Rogan’s show in advance. He said that since JRE is licensed content, it doesn’t have oversight like it does for podcasts from The Ringer or Gimlet – production companies Spotify owns. “We don’t approve his guests in advance, and just like any other creator, we get his content when he publishes, and then we review it, and if it violates our policies, we take the appropriate enforcement actions,” Ek said.

Genaro Molina via Getty Images

Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote this weekend that Spotify’s “failure to take any meaningful responsibility, other than adding a few disclaimers, is all too reminiscent of the way Facebook, for years, has dodged accountability for spreading so many harmful lies.” And part of shirking responsibility comes in the form of Spotify’s argument of a platform versus a publisher.

Spotify is a publisher, no matter what it says to the contrary. Paying a reported $100 million to lock down JRE as an exclusive brings more responsibility for its content than a show from "any other creator.” Ek argued during that same speech to employees that “exclusivity does not equal endorsement” and that the solution is to secure “an even broader set of exclusives that represent even more voices.” These two statements point to Spotify trying to build a foundation when the house is nearly finished.

A treasure trove of exclusives has helped make Spotify the number one podcast app in the US, according to Ek. Over the last few years, the company has purchased podcast production studios like Gimlet, Parcast and The Ringer, making shows exclusive to its service along the way. It has amassed a wealth of talent, including the most popular podcast globally on Spotify in Joe Rogan’s show. Sure sounds like the behavior of a publisher.

One of Spotify’s most important podcast acquisitions was Anchor, an all-in-one production suite that made creating and publishing shows a breeze. The company has since leveraged its powerful ad setup for shows on the service and Anchor has regularly introduced new features to make recording even easier. It’s literally a place where anyone can publish a podcast and it has helped Spotify add over a million shows to its library. In late 2020, Spotify said Anchor accounted for 70 percent of its podcasts, around 1.3 million at the time.

Billy Steele/Engadget

However, Anchor’s own platform policy hasn’t been updated since July 2021. There’s no mention of COVID-19 misinformation, except for one item that bans any content that “conflicts with the Terms, as determined by Spotify, collectively (‘Objectionable Content’).” Right now, that would include Spotify’s recently published policy. However, until recently, those guidelines weren’t public, and Anchor wasn’t clearly displaying Spotify’s policy. Now it’s doing so via a clickable pop-up when you upload a show.

“Spotify's Platform Rules apply to all content on Spotify, including Anchor,” a Spotify spokesperson told Engadget. “We began highlighting our Platform Rules in our creator and publisher tools on February 2nd to raise awareness around what’s acceptable and help creators understand their accountability for the content they post on our platform.”

The lack of transparent guidelines is Spotify’s biggest problem. The issue goes beyond Joe Rogan and covers the entire platform. When asked for comment about removing Neil Young’s music from the service (at his request), the company said it had “detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.” Those policies were not made public until four days later. What’s more, when Engadget asked for information about the “over 20,000” podcasts that had been pulled, Spotify didn’t respond.

Right now, we only know about a fewspecific instances of content actions. So what happens when a creator who’s not being paid a vault of money espouses similar opinions to the ones Joe Rogan or his guests share on JRE? You know, the ones the company has already said “didn’t meet the threshold for removal.” On last week’s earnings call, Ek was adamant that Spotify doesn’t “change our policies based on one creator nor do we change it based on any media cycle, or calls from anyone else.” However, a Media Matters analysis of Rogan’s show going back to July 2020 highlights numerous times the podcast host has run afoul of the “long-standing” rules on violence or hatred toward marginalized communities and COVID-19 misinformation.

Spotify is saying more about the situation to employees than it is to the public, and none of it is sensitive info or trade secrets. By addressing a major controversy in private, which is ultimately reported by the media, the company further erodes what trust it has left. The company hasn’t publicly confirmed that it removed over 70 pre-Spotify-deal episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast for racist language, including use of the n-word, late last week at Rogan’s request. But, again, Ek acknowledged the move to employees internally. Why not just let an unnamed spokesperson confirm the details when asked? Especially given Rogan himself addressed the content of those episodes in an apology video. The company also needs to open up about podcast removals and disclose what its review procedure is.

Genaro Molina via Getty Images

Spotify created a content policy, so it’s clearly considering how to police its platform. But what’s in place now is only a partial solution in need of immediate expansion, explanation and revision before more damage is done. It’s vague at a time where some specifics would go a long way. This is not about advocating for the company to “silence” Joe Rogan over his COVID views or anyone else who has been wrong on a podcast. It’s clear the company isn’t going to do so under the terms of its current deal with the host anyway. But a blanket warning label and mostly rationalizing its actions in private isn’t enough.

Of course, Spotify isn’t the first big tech company to hide behind the “platform” label, especially when it comes to taking responsibility for content. Facebook is perhaps the biggest example, as it has argued it’s a technology platform rather than a publisher. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the company does bear some responsibility for what’s on the site but its actions have been tepid at best. Facebook has also argued that it’s a publisher when taking such a stance is beneficial in court. Twitter has made the same case, most notably when questioned on how it enforced a “hacked materials” policy regarding a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. “Is Twitter a publisher? No, we are not. We distribute information,” then-CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress. Section 230, the law that currently protects platforms from legal action for things users post, enables companies to make the argument. And that’s a big reason why Congress is looking to reform it.

Ek wrote in his most recent message to staff that “canceling voices is a slippery slope,” and that's true. The issue is the chief executive’s mission to find “a balance,” whether that’s with a wider variety of viewpoints or by equally weighting “creator expression with user safety.” Unless that balance comes with more transparency and oversight, more volume isn’t going to solve anything. 

This year’s Academy Awards nominations have been revealed, and Apple TV+ execs will surely be pleased. The service’s films received six Oscar nods overall, up from two last year. Most significantly, Apple has broken through in the Best Picture category. CODA is the first Apple Original movie to receive a nomination for the top prize.

It’s the first film with a principally deaf cast to be nominated for Best Picture. It’s been 35 years since a deaf performer was nominated, and Troy Kotsur is now the first male actor to ever receive a nod, as he’s up for Best Supporting Actor.

Writer and director Sian Heder is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay — CODA is a remake of a French film called La Famille Bélier. Apple paid a Sundance record of $25 million to acquire the rights to the film, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Drama and the Audience Award at last year’s festival.

The other Apple movie that received nominations this year was Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. It earned nods for Best Actor for Denzel Washington, Best Cinematography and Best Production Design.

Elsewhere, Netflix continued the run of awards success it has had over the last few years with a whopping 35 nominations across the board. Star-studded climate change satire Don’t Look Up and Western The Power of the Dog are both nominated for Best Picture. The latter leads the pack overall with 12 nominations. Jane Campion, who received writing and directing nods, is the first woman to land two Best Director nominations. Other nominated Netflix films include The Lost Daughter, The Hand of God, Tick, Tick… Boom and the fantastic The Mitchells vs. The Machines.

Elsewhere, Dune has 10 nominations and Best Picture frontrunner Belfast received seven. Amazon’s Being the Ricardos landed three acting nods, while No Time To Die, which marks Daniel Craig's final outing as James Bond, was nominated for Original Song, Sound and Visual Effects. Meanwhile, Japanese drama Drive My Car broke through in the Best Picture and directing races for four nominations in total.

The 94th Academy Awards ceremony will take place on March 27th.

The co-producer of The Matrix Resurrections, in a new lawsuit, is blaming the film’s lackluster box office numbers on a same-day streaming release. According to The Wall Street Journal, Village Roadshow Entertainment Group filed a lawsuit today against Warner Bros., the owner of streaming platform HBO Max. The suit alleges that both the same-day release of The Matrix Resurrections and pushing up the film’s release date was a breach of contract. The suit also claims that moving the movie’s release date from 2022 to 2021 was a bid by Warner Bros. to drive up subscriptions to HBO Max.

Last year’s decision by Warner Bros. to release an entire slate of new films concurrently on HBO Max and in theaters raised many eyebrows. In addition to The Matrix, the 16 other films in Warner Bros’ simultaneous release strategy included Dune, Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat, King Arthur, and others. The experiment likely doomed their box office fates, as The Wrapnoted. Only two of the 17 films made more than $100 million in domestic box office sales.

The Matrix Resurrections, which was released in December, normally a peak time for box office earnings, has grossed over $37.2 million in domestic box office sales, according to BoxOfficeMojo. This is a noticeable decline compared to a number of other blockbusters with theater-only releases from last winter, such as Spider-Man:No Way Home, which has made more than $748 million in the domestic box office and the James Bond film No Time To Die, which has earned more than $160 million in the domestic box office.

Village Roadshow also alleges that Warner Bros. is attempting to keep the company out of future movie and TV deals. “WB has also been devising various schemes to deprive Village Roadshow of its continuing rights to co-own and co-invest in the derivative works from the films it co-owns,” the suit alleged.

The Matrix lawsuit is the latest conflict between Hollywood studios and the media companies that own the streaming platforms. Black Widow actress Scarlett Johansson last year sued Disney over the film’s simultaneous release strategy, which she claimed harmed its box office prospects and her own earnings. Johansson subsequently received an undisclosed settlement from Disney last fall.