In storytelling, hauntings are often literal and metaphorical. A character spooked by spirits often has something upsetting in their psyche that they must face at the same time. This is exactly what’s going on in The Haunting of Joni Evers, a narrative-rich walking simulator that’s due to release on January 13, 2025. Its titular character must face her fraught relationship with her estranged family while also solving the mystery of the supernatural happenings in her home. Developer Causeway Studios promises plenty of tense moments and emotional gut punches. In fact, creative director Greg Rogers says players will be surprised by “the emotional places the story takes them. The depth of the characters and the twists in the plot create a ‘page-turner’ we think players will love. There are so many details to discover and connections to make beyond the core plot; it’s a game that stays with you long after you put it down.” Continue reading Solve clues and grab the tissues - The Haunting of Joni Evers arrives in January

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Photo by Aleksander Kalka/NurPhoto via Getty Images Warner Bros. Discovery is reorganizing its business into two separate units: one for linear networks, and the other for streaming and studios business. The move, which is set to be complete by mid-2025, is meant to help the company “pursue further value creation,” potentially bringing it closer to breaking off its linear business entirely. Over the summer, rumors suggested that WBD planned on severing its streaming business from its legacy networks completely, freeing Max from the company’s mountain of debt. The company’s linear networks have been struggling for a while now, with WBD taking a $9.1 billion writedown on its channels in August after TNT lost live NBA games to Amazon Prime Video. WBD isn’t the only one shaking up its cable business. Last month, Comcast announced that it’s spinning off its cable TV channels into a new company. As noted by Deadline, Disney CEO Bob Iger also said last year that the company’s linear networks “may not be core” to its business. WBD will move forward with the “foundational steps” of the new structure now, which CEO David Zaslav said will open up “potential future strategic opportunities across an evolving media landscape.”

Prompt: “King Charles III UK eating a Greggs sausage roll on the throne.” There’s a lot wrong with these results... | Image: OpenAI / The Verge The first version of OpenAI’s Sora can generate video of just about anything you throw at it — superheroes, cityscapes, animated puppies. It’s an impressive first step for the AI video generator. But the actual results are far from satisfactory, with many videos so heavily plagued with oddities and inconsistencies that it’s hard to imagine anyone finding much use for them. Sora was released on Monday after almost a year of teasers heralding its capabilities. There are a few hurdles before you get to the video generation features, though. For one, account creation was closed within hours of launching due to the overwhelming demand. Those who did manage to sign up will find that its features also require a subscription to unlock: a $20 monthly “Plus” membership will let you generate videos at 480p or 720p, capped at either five or 10 seconds in length depending on the resolution. To unlock everything, including 1080p quality and 20-second-long videos, you need to cough up $200 a month for the “Pro” Sora subscription. Prompt: “An indigo-colored cat lounging on a green armchair while wearing a pair of wireless headphones. A smartphone beside it is playing the Vergecast podcast.” ... Read the full story at The Verge.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge I maintain that YouTube TV is the very best of the streaming TV services, but good grief is it getting expensive. Today YouTube announced the service’s latest price hike, which brings the monthly subscription to $82.99. The change is effective immediately for new customers and will be reflected starting January 13th for “most existing customers.” As usual, the company attributes this increase to “the rising cost of content and the investments we make in the quality of our service.” YouTube TV last raised its subscription cost to $72.99 in March 2023. Before that, it was $64.99. The days when the service ran only $50 now feel like a lifetime ago. Some of you who got in early might even remember it costing a mere $35 per month. But since then, YouTube has routinely found itself in carriage disputes with Disney, NBCUniversal, and other content owners, and those renegotiated agreements have led YouTube TV’s price to climb higher and higher. The YouTube TV of today is much different than it used to be; there are more channels, yes, but the service has also shed a number of regional sports networks. The company is quick to note that none of the service’s core benefits are changing. The base subscription still includes over 100 channels, cloud DVR with unlimited storage, up to six user accounts per household, and the flexibility of three concurrent streams. But YouTube TV still charges extra for 4K streaming, which seems harder to rationalize after this $10 price bump. Customers are predictably none too pleased about the news and are weighing whether a service that now costs more than double its original price is still worth it.

XR stands for “extended reality,” which you should get used to explaining to lots of people. | Image: Google Google is taking another run at making headsets work. The company just announced Android XR, a new operating system designed specifically for what Google calls “extended reality” devices like headsets and glasses. It’s working with Samsung and lots of other hardware manufacturers to develop those headsets and glasses, is making the new version of Android available to developers now, and hopes to start shipping XR stuff next year. We don’t yet have a ton of details on exactly how Android XR will work or how it might differ from the Android on your phone. (The Verge’s Victoria Song got to try a few demos and prototypes — make sure you read her story.) Google is making immersive XR versions of apps like Maps, Photos, and YouTube and says it’s developing a version of Chrome that lets you do multiwindow multitasking in your browser. It will also support existing phone and tablet apps from the Play Store, much in the same way Apple supports iPad apps in the Vision Pro. Google’s Gemini AI, of course, is at the very center of the whole experience. Google has been trying to crack headsets for more than a decade — there was Glass and Cardboard and Daydream, all of which had good ideas but none of which turned into much — and the company thinks AI is the key to making the user experience work. “We believe a digital assistant integrated with your XR experience is the killer app for the form factor, like what email or texting was for the smartphone,” said Sameer Samat, who oversees the Android ecosystem at Google, in a press briefing ahead of the launch. As Gemini becomes more multimodal, too, able to both capture and create audio and video, glasses and headsets suddenly make much more sense. Image: Google This is the kind of AR interface you’ll get with Android XR. The choice of the term “XR” for the OS is maybe the most interesting part. There are a million terms and acronyms for this space: there’s virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, extended reality, and others, all of which mean different but overlapping things. XR is probably the broadest of the terms, which seems to be why Google picked it. “When we say extended reality or XR,” Samat said, “we’re really talking about a whole spectrum of experiences, from virtual reality to augmented reality and everything in between.” Google imagines headsets that can seamlessly transition from virtual worlds to real ones — again like the Vision Pro — and smart glasses that are more of an always-on companion. It’s also interested in audio-only devices like the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. Some things might be standalone; others might be more like an accessory to your phone. We’ll see if Google ends up building its own XR hardware, but it’s clearly trying to support a huge spectrum of devices. Android XR is still in its early stages, and most developers are only now going to start getting the software and hardware they need to build for the new OS. But Google’s trying to move quickly next year: a device it’s building with Samsung, codenamed Moohan, is apparently slated to ship next year. Android XR is, in some ways, a culmination of bets Google has been making in AI, the broader Android ecosystem, and the wearable future of technology. All of those bets are about to get the real test: whether anyone actually puts them on.