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(credit: Flickr: Rego Korosi )

YouTube announced its long-rumored YouTube TV service last week, plunging the online video platform into the competitive world of live TV streaming. On the surface, the $35-per-month YouTube TV looks like a good deal: dozens of broadcast and cable channels (including numerous sports networks), a cloud-based DVR service, up to three simultaneous streams, and more. YouTube TV will launch sometime later this year, but there is already a lot of competition for the service. The biggest challengers—DirecTV Now, PlayStation Vue, and Sling TV—offer many similar features to YouTube TV, and that will undoubtably make it difficult for aspiring cord-cutters to know if they should wait for YouTube's service or take the plunge now.

To aid in that decision, here's a breakdown of these four TV-streaming services and their major features.

The first thing to note about YouTube TV is that it will launch with just one subscription tier. Everything the service offers will be included in the $35-per-month price—at least for now. As YouTube and Google land deals with other networks, we could see YouTube TV expand into higher-priced subscription tiers. But since there's just one plan right now, it makes it easy to compare it to the base-tier packages of DirecTV Now, PlayStation Vue, and Sling TV. In this comparison, we're only looking at live TV-streaming services, not online video streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon Video.

(credit: Adam Bowie)

Amazon is handing prosecutors cloud-stored data from its Alexa Voice Service that the Arkansas authorities say might be used as evidence in a murder prosecution.

The Seattle-based company originally had balked at a warrant demanding the recorded voice and transcription data from an Amazon Echo near a murder scene. The company claimed that the data, and the responses from the voice assistant itself, were protected by the First Amendment. What's more, Amazon said that the Arkansas authorities had not demonstrated a "compelling need" for the data.

But the novel and vexing questions this case poses—such as what is the legal standard for when data from an Echo or other Internet of Things devices can be used in a court of law—won't be answered. The reason? The murder defendant, James Bates, agreed late Monday to allow Amazon to forward his Echo's data to Arkansas prosecutors.

(credit: Facebook)

Facebook was forced to report the BBC to the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) after the broadcaster shared with the company screenshots of "sexualised images of children" that it had copied from the site, Ars understands.

On Tuesday, Facebook was bombarded with criticism after the BBC claimed that the free content ad network had failed to nix 82 images, even though they appeared to clearly break the firm's own "community standards" rules.

Ars has learned that Facebook had requested links to the offending material from the BBC —which reportedly included "pages explicitly for men with a sexual interest in children," and "an image that appeared to be a still from a video of child abuse, with a request below it to share "child pornography"—but instead the broadcaster provided screenshots taken from the site.