Amazon is giving you free access to Disney+ if you pay for its music streaming service, perhaps in hopes of luring you away from Spotify and Apple Music. If you're in the US and Canada, you'll get six free months of Disney+ with a new Amazon Music Unlimited subscription, which will set you back at least $8 a month as a Prime member or $10 as a non-Prime user. You'll still get three free months of Disney+ as a current Music Unlimited subscriber, but you can't get the free months if you already have an existing Disney+ subscription. 

While it's unfortunate that you won't be able to take advantage of the promo if you already have Disney+, it's a great way to try the video streaming service. Disney+ doesn't have a trial period anymore, and its current offerings include Marvel's The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, as well as Loki, which had the most watched premiere episode on the platform.

The first and the last time Amazon reported growth metrics for Music Unlimited back in January 2020, it said the service has reached over 55 million subscribers worldwide. It's unclear how much the service has grown since then, but it still probably has a long way to go before it can catch up to Spotify, which recently reported having 158 million paying subscribers. It might be nearer to Apple Music in size: Apple revealed that its Music streaming service had 60 million paying subscribers back in mid-2019, but it hasn't reported new numbers since then.

To redeem the promo, you can head over to its official page and pay for an Amazon Music Unlimited subscription from there.

Nier fans won't have to wait much longer to play the franchise's first mobile entry. First teased in 2020, Square Enix announced today via IGN it will release Nier Reincarnation on July 28th. The outlet also shared a new trailer for the game that hints at some of the major story beats that will play out.

Styled as an action RPG, Reincarnation sees a character named the Girl in White wake up in a place called the Cage. A ghost named Mama is there to help the girl and narrate the story as it unfolds. As with past Nier titles, it looks like the gameplay in Reincarnation will sometimes shift between different perspectives. While developed by Applibot, a Japanese developer best known for mobile games like Grimoire A, Reincarnation features contributions from those most closely associated with the series, including Yoko Taro and Keiichi Okabe. You can hear one of the new songs Okabe composed for the game in the trailer IGN shared.

Reincarnation will be free to download when it comes out on Android and iOS. If you pre-register for the game, you'll get a welcome package that comes with its in-game Gems currency. Square Enix told IGN it would increase the number of Gems it gives out for every 100,000 players that pre-register.

Like the rest of the tech industry, YouTube was forced to transition from live to virtual events earlier this year when it shuttered its studio spaces for creators and musicians. Just four months later, with the pandemic subsiding, the Google-owned video platform is now embracing live entertainment like never before. YouTube has partnered with Hollywood Park, a near 300-acre mega development in Inglewood, California, to host a massive live venue. 

The "YouTube Theater" will be a three-story, 6,000 seater arena for performances that range from traditional concerts to the type of events you'd associate with its namesake. Think eSports and creator and community shows for the site's dedicated contingent of gamers and vloggers. Maybe the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers — whose 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium is in the same complex — will also drop in. Naturally, all those gigs, meetups and tourneys will feed back into the company's main platform, creating fodder for livestreamed and on-demand content that users will be able to watch on YouTube proper. 

YouTube

The Hollywood Park project has already corralled an eclectic bunch of pop stars to perform at the YouTube Theater with the help of Live Nation. Pitbull, Black Pumas, Devo, Trippie Redd and Marina and the Diamonds will all grace the venue through this year and the next.  

Formerly a historic racetrack frequented by Hollywood royalty, the site is being converted into a massive mixed-use development, home to almost 3,000 apartments, a sports stadium, a 300-room hotel and an 890,000-square-foot retail area. Construction on the theater is scheduled to be completed this summer.

Of course, it wouldn't be a YouTube event without some social interaction. In that vein, the venue will feature a massive exterior screen that guests can mirror themselves on and view clips through. Google could also use it to highlight the same products it sells at its newly opened debut retail store in New York City. 

YouTube isn't the first video service to broach live events, though the scale here may be unmatched by its closest rivals. Take Netflix: The world's biggest streamer owns New York's iconic Paris movie theater and has previously organized live comedy events. Disney and the rest of Hollywood, meanwhile, regularly turn up to Comic-Con to promote their biggest blockbusters. YouTube's heavyweight creators — who run the gamut from pranksters to serial toy openers to beauty and makeup experts — will likely be chomping at the bit for a chance to take to the theater's 6,100 square-foot stage. 

Apple has revealed when you'll get to watch Foundation, its adaptation of Issac Asimov’s series of sci-fi novels. The show will debut on Apple TV+ on September 24th, with additional installments of the first ten-episode season dropping each week.

The company also revealed another teaser trailer for Foundation, which stars Jared Harris as the leader of a group of exiles who predicts the end of the Galactic Empire. The group embarks on a journey to restore civilization by establishing The Foundation. Lee Pace also stars in the show, whose showrunner is David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight, Man of Steel).

Apple is reducing the free TV+ trial it offers to customers who buy its devices from a year to three months. It's hoping the slate of shows andmovies will be enough to entice people to stick around as paid subscribers.

The company is lining up a number of major shows for the remainder of this year, as 9to5 Mac notes. Along with Foundation, The Morning Show and Ted Lasso will return for their second seasons in the coming months. Invasion, another large-scale sci-fi series is dropping in October.

It can be quite infuriating to find out that you can't access some episodes and movies you thought you were able to download on your device after settling in for a long flight. Now Netflix has launched a new feature that can prevent the scenario from happening. Starting today, the streaming giant will let you begin watching shows and movies even if they never finished downloading while you were connected to the internet, as long as you're on an Android phone or tablet.

Netflix originally introduced the ability to download content way back in 2016 to give you a way to watch whatever you want even if you don't have constant access to an internet connection. It's an incredibly useful feature, especially if you commute regularly and live in places where mobile internet isn't reliable. 

The company has rolled out a number of other improvements to the downloads experience since then, including the ability to automatically delete stored episodes you've already seen and replace it with the next one in the series. Earlier this year, the service also introduced a new feature that automatically saves shows and movies its algorithm thinks you'll like.

With partial downloads, Netflix will prompt you to download the rest of the title you've already started watching once you get back online. You'll also be able to find the show or movie in the "download" or the "continue watching" tabs. While the capability is only available for Android users right now, Netflix will start testing it for iOS in the coming months.

When Halo Infinite comes out later this year, it will allow you to do something you’ve not been to do in any previous game in the series: push enemies off the edge of the Halo ring itself. The tidbit of information came from the latest community Q&A Infinite developer 343 Industries held this week (via IGN). A fan asked the team if it’s possible to knock enemies off the game’s new Zeta Halo setting. “The answer is yes,” said Gameplay Director Troy Mashburn, who went on to share how he did exactly that while playing the game recently.

He says he was driving Halo’s iconic Scorpion tank when he encountered a Wraith. “Out of pure luck,” he pushed the Covenant tank over the edge, allowing him to watch it slowly tilt back and fall into the abyss. “So absolutely, you can push things off the edge. It’s going to be difficult, but if you manage to time it just right, you’re going to see it,” Mashburn said.

The fact you’ll be able to do that in Infinite reflects a return to a more sandbox-style design philosophy on part of 343 Industries. The team says they were inspired by levels like The Silent Cartographer from Halo: Combat Evolved to design the game in a way that you could approach an objective with all the tools at your disposal. 

To that end, the world of Halo Infinite will be more immersive, with the game featuring a full day and night cycle that will affect how things play out. At night, for instance, you’ll see more shield Jackals and you may even catch Grunts sleeping on the job. Following the game’s fall release, 343 plans to even add snowstorms and thunderstorms. There will also be multiple biomes for players to explore. 

The studio ended up prioritizing some of those features ahead of ones players have come to expect from the series. Dual-wielding, for instance, won't be in the game at launch. "We can't do everything," Lead Sandbox Designer Quinn Delhoyo said. 

Facebook has taken the wraps off a project called Learning from Videos. It uses artificial intelligence to understand and learn audio, textual, and visual representations in public user videos on the social network.

Learning from Videos has a number of aims, such as improving Facebook AI systems related to content recommendations and policy enforcement. The project is in its early stages, but it's already bearing fruit. Facebook says it has already harnessed the tech to enhance Instagram Reels recommendations, such as surfacing videos of people doing the same dance to the same music. The system is showing improved results in speech recognition errors as well, which could bolster auto-captioning features and make it easier to detect hate speech in videos.

Facebook says the project will help AI researchers avoid having to rely on labeled data and it's part of efforts to build systems that learn in a similar way to humans. As such, Learning from Videos will "enable entirely new experiences." The company didn't go into much detail about those except for a possible feature that would allow AI to find digital memories, including ones captured by augmented reality glasses. You could, for instance, ask such a system to show you "every time we sang to grandma," and it could surface those clips. Facebook, notably, is working on its own smart glasses.

The company says the project is looking at videos in hundreds of languages and from almost every country. This aspect of the project will make AI systems more accurate and allow them to "adapt to our fast moving world and recognize the nuances and visual cues across different cultures and regions."

Facebook says that it's keeping privacy in mind when it comes to Learning from Videos. "We’re building and maintaining a strong privacy foundation that uses automated solutions to enforce privacy at scale," it wrote in a blog post. "By embedding this work at the infrastructure level, we can consistently apply privacy requirements across our systems and support efforts like AI. This includes implementing technical safeguards throughout the data lifecycle."

Understanding what's happening in videos can be an immensely difficult task for AI systems. They can include hurdles like background noise that makes it difficult to understand speech and language switching. Yet less than a year after starting the Learning from Videos project, Facebook is taking what the system has learned and putting it to practical use in other areas.

As of today, Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time is available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S (with free upgrades from PS4 and Xbox One), as well as Nintendo Switch. Although Activision Blizzard said the game would arrive on PC later this year, you actually won't have to wait long at all for that.

According to a launch trailer for the new console versions, Crash 4 will land on Blizzard's Battle.net launcher on March 26th. The game costs $40 on PC, the same price as on Switch. It's more expensive on PS5 and Series X/S ($60), but you can expect native 4K and 60 FPS gameplay on PS5 and Xbox Series X, and upscaled 4K/60 FPS on Series S. The PS5 version also offers haptic feedback through the DualSense controller.

Meanwhile, King recently revealed the release date for the Crash Bandicoot: On the Run! mobile game. It's coming to iOS and Android on March 25th.

The infectious and delightful soundtrack to PlayStation 5 exclusive Astro’s Playroom is now available to listen to outside of the game. As Polygon notes, you can stream it on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music and Tidal (if you’re fancy like that). For those who prefer to own their media, it’s $11 on Apple Music and Amazon Music. 

Not only is Astro’s Playroom one of the PS5’s best games at the moment and a compelling tech demo, it’s also available to download for free. Penned by composer Kenneth C.M. Young, the 20-song soundtrack includes standouts like “I’m Your GPU” and “CPU Plaza.” And if you’re curious how Young ended up creating a love letter to the PS5’s hardware, the composer wrote a post on the PlayStation blog on exactly that topic.

The ideal way to watch Tenet, according to director Christopher Nolan (and many others), is in a cinema. "This is a film whose image and sound really needs to be enjoyed in your theaters on the big screen," he said last year amid the throes of a pandemic. That inspired YouTuber Bob Wulff, who runs the WulffDen channel, to stuff the time-bending blockbuster onto Game Boy Advance Video cartridges.

Wulff freely admits this is "quite possibly the worst way to view Tenet." He split the movie across five cartridges because it's two and a half hours long. According to Wulff, "30 minutes is the maximum time you can have for a Game Boy Advance Video [cartridge] and still have it in somewhat of a watchable state." He even made custom labels.

There are tradeoffs, of course. Wullf had to crush the video down to six frames per second with a resolution of 192x128 and a whopping 8 KB/s bitrate. The software Wulff used also speeds up video by a third by default. The result is not exactly the pristine IMAX cinema experience Nolan would have hoped for. Many viewers already found it hard to hear much of the dialogue in Tenet due to the questionable sound mix, so can you imagine trying to watch the film with a GBA speaker?

Most Game Boy Advance Video cartridges had a few episodes of a show like Pokémon or SpongeBob SquarePants, but there were a few full-length movies such as Shrekand Shark Tale. With the 20th anniversary of the GBA fast approaching, it seems like the perfect time to order some GBA Video cartridges, a device to flash them with and ruin your favorite movie by watching it in a terrible format.