Games Industry Biz reports: “Netflix games have been downloaded more than 210 million times. According to a new report from mobilegamer.biz and data from Appmagic, Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto franchise continues to dominate the charts, with GTA: San Andreas, Vice City, and GTA 3 racking up 25.2m, 7.8m, and 3.6m downloads, respectively.”
MSN reports: “Amazon.com Inc.’s Audible will begin inviting a select group of US-based audiobook narrators to train artificial intelligence on their voices, the clones of which can then be used to make audiobook recordings. The effort, which kicks off this week, is designed to add more audiobooks to the service, quickly and cheaply — and to welcome traditional narrators into the evolving world of audiobook automation which, to date, many have regarded warily.”
VGC reports: “The company today announced plans to deliver a nine-minute PS5 “technical presentation” hosted by lead system architext Mark Cerny. The stream will begin on September 10 at 8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm BST and will be broadcast in English on the PlayStation YouTube channel. The presentation “will focus on PS5 and innovations in gaming technology”, according to Sony.”
The Guardian reports: “Apple is slated to unveil its latest iPhone and a slew of other new hardware on Monday during its biggest product launch event of the year. The event, held at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, features the tagline “It’s Glowtime” with the company’s logo surrounded by a colorful aura. New colors for the iPhone and other Apple products are rumored to be coming.”
Music Business Worldwide reports: “SoundCloud has unveiled ‘Ascending,’ its new global artist development program which aims to identify and promote breakthrough artists globally. After a year of testing, the program is now fully operational, with American musician Laila! chosen as the featured artist for September. The program is designed to provide emerging artists with the tools they need before they break into mainstream, SoundCloud said Thursday (September 5).”
Phone Arena reports: “Looking to prevent YouTube users from getting tricked into believing that AI-generated content is real, Google and YouTube are developing tools that would allow content creators to quickly get alerted when their faces and voices are being used by AI. Amjad Hanif, Vice President of Creator Products at YouTube, just wrote about the new tools that YouTube will be using to protect its creators.”
Variety reports: “Oscar-nominated film and television studio XTR has acquired Late Night Labs, an AI film and animation studio that describes itself as artists-led. With the acquisition of Late Night Labs and its proprietary AI technology, XTR is launching and creating a holding company, Asteria Film Co., which will focus on producing animation, fiction and non-fiction film and television, as well as house XTR’s streaming platform and Fast channel Documentary+.”
Music Ally reports: “Roblox has been one of the more active companies in the gaming/metaverse space when it comes to working with the music industry. However, thus far most of that work has been individual partnerships: artists and labels launching experiences on Roblox, rather than platform-wide music features.”
Broadband TV News reports: “Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, has released a beta version of a new beta app. It can be found on several app stores including those of Android TVs, LG, Amazon Fire TV and Google TV. Additional platforms will be added later. Users will be able to browse video uploaded to X and create their own live streams.”
Music Ally reports: “The most reliable way to make money out of discovering music is to get paid to do it professionally – DSP playlist editor, label A&R etc. But down the years there have been regular efforts to gamify or reward music discovery for fans too, including financial incentives. The latest example is an app named Equa.ls.”
