Month: November 2016

(credit: NFL)

Amazon apparently never stops thinking about possible perks it could add to its annual $99 Prime membership, and the next feature could be live sports. A report from The Wall Street Journal suggests Amazon is in talks with professional sport organizations including Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, and the National Football League to negotiate the rights to stream live games and events.

According to the report, Amazon is looking at creating a premium sports package that it could include in Amazon Prime memberships. If it comes to fruition, a sports package could draw a lot of new customers to Prime, which already offers free two-day shipping, Amazon Video streaming of TV shows and movies, music streaming with Prime Music, the Prime Reading library of free e-books, and more. It would also be a big way for Prime to stand out among other streaming services, particularly Netflix, which has steered clear of sports since most people don't want to watch a football game after it's over.

Not only does Amazon want to continue to beef up Prime, but it's also trying to compete with other companies making deals for sports content. Twitter signed a deal with the NFL to stream 10 Thursday Night Football games during the 2016 season, and Facebook live-streamed the National Women's Soccer League opener back in August. In a time where streaming services are incredibly popular, live sports is a major reason why people still pay for pricey cable packages. A good example is DirecTV, which saw a big subscriber bump when it began offering the premium NFL Sunday Ticket package.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Oh, Chipotle. In 2015 and early 2016, the Colorado-based restaurant chain made headlines for serving up several food-borne illness outbreaks that dramatically emptied its customer’s gastrointestinal tracts. Now, the chain is making headlines for dramatically filling customers up.

In a lawsuit (PDF), filed November 16 in the Superior Court of Los Angeles, three nutrition-conscious patrons claim they were tricked into eating high-calorie Chorizo burritos after seeing Chipotle advertisements that suggested the swaddled meals were merely 300 calories. One plaintiff, David Desmond, realized he had been duped when he felt “excessively full” after eating the burrito, according to the lawsuit. Along with the other two plaintiffs, Edward Gurevich and Young Hoon Kim, Desmond is seeking unspecified damages and a class action-status for the complaint.

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton)

According to HTC, the HTC 10 Evo—known as the HTC Bolt and sold exclusively by Sprint in the US—is the ideal phone for the lucrative £450-£500 smartphone market (its exact price is TBC). It's a market dominated by companies that sell last-generation flagships which once sold for upwards of £600 at cut-down prices, it says, and phones from the likes of Huawei and ZTE that contain own-brand chipsets rather than full-blown Qualcomm Snapdragons. The HTC 10 Evo, with its full-metal body, large 1440p display, and Snapdragon SoC should, on paper at least, cover that segment nicely.

Except I don't know why anyone in their right mind would buy one.

The HTC 10 Evo is powered by a Snapdragon 810, an octa-core SoC that first made an appearance in 2014, and was used in HTC's M9 during 2015. Which is not to say that the 810 makes the Evo slow. Indeed, performance under Android 7.0 Nougat was fine during a brief hands-on. But a brand new, unlocked 32GB HTC 10—which Ars named one of the best Android smartphones released this year—costs less than £500 from numerous online stores. This is a phone that packs the latest (or near-enough latest) Snapdragon 820, 4GB of RAM, and a 3,000mAh battery inside a slick metal chassis.

Enlarge (credit: Orange Is The New Black, Netflix)

Netflix 4K streaming is coming to Windows PCs later this week—but only for the lucky few using seventh generation Kaby Lake processors from Intel.

Netflix launched 4K streaming in 2014 on a select number of TVs before rolling it out to dedicated streaming boxes like the Amazon Fire TV, Roku, and Nvidia Shield. 4K streaming on PC was notably missing from the rollout, due in part to piracy and DRM concerns from Hollywood studios and TV networks.

In an effort to placate the studios, Microsoft introduced "PlayReady 3.0" with the Windows 10 Anniversary update. PlayReady 3.0 is a hardware-based DRM (digital rights management) system that requires dedicated decoding hardware, either on the CPU or on the graphics card, preventing the video stream from being captured in software or via an external capture device.

Enlarge (credit: Transition 2017)

US president-elect Donald Trump has confirmed that the US will pull out of the Trans-Pracific Partnership (TPP)—a trade deal involving 12 Pacific rim nations—"on day one" of his presidency.

Trump, in a YouTube video outlining plans for his first 100 days in office, said: "I'm going to issue our notification of intent to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a potential disaster for our country."

He added: "Instead, we will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back on to American shores."