Articles about Video

The Nintendo NES Classic is quite an amazing console. True, it is not as powerful as modern game systems like Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but it comes pre-loaded with many classic NES titles. Unfortunately, its strength is also its weakness -- those pre-loaded titles are the only games you can play. You cannot load other games, so you are stuck with what you got.

As an alternative, some folks use software emulation and ROMs on their computers to play countless video game titles. Of course, there are moral concerns here, as you are often downloading the games illegally -- unless you own the physical copy, that is. Even then, it is a gray area. Today, a company called Doyodo launches a new Linux-powered emulation console on Indiegogo. The device not only plays NES games, but Atari, Game Boy, PlayStation 1, Genesis, and more. You play using USB controllers. In addition, it can serve as a media player (with Kodi) or a full-fledged Linux desktop.

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While 1080p may look "good enough" to you, once you move to a higher resolution display, it is hard to go back. Prices for both 4K monitors and televisions continue to drop, meaning more and more consumers are buying them. During this past Black Friday, there were many such TVs being offered with big discounts.

Now that there are a healthy amount of these displays in the wild, content creators will be more motivated to release content in that resolution -- movies, TV, and video games. While Google added 4K playback to YouTube years ago, it did not offer live video streaming in that resolution. Today this changes, as the video site finally gets 4K live streaming -- including 360-degree streams. Best of all? Watching the streams won't require Microsoft Edge!

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Many people stream their favorite movies and TV shows today through Netflix. The service, which boasts around 86 million subscribers, is available on all the major platforms, making it easy for users to enjoy it pretty much everywhere and on every PC, smartphone and tablet. That is, as long as there is a working Internet connection.

That changes today, as Netflix announces that it is also making its content available offline. Users are now able to download movies and TV shows and watch them while, for instance, traveling on an airplane or in a remote area. Here is what you need to know.

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Thanksgiving is coming this Thursday, meaning friends, family, food, and football. Around the USA, people will be chowing-down on Turkey, stuffing, and all the other popular food side-dishes too. Another popular Thanksgiving tradition is watching The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV (if you cannot be there in person). If you aren't familiar, it is a New York City parade featuring many giant inflatable cartoon characters, plus floats carrying celebrities.

Unfortunately, not everyone enjoys watching the parade, leading to fights over the television. This year, however, a TV is not required. If you have an internet-connected device, you can watch it on YouTube in glorious 360 degrees for the first time ever. Best of all, BetaNews has the video ready for you below.

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In one of the biggest media acquisitions of all time, AT&T wants to buy Time Warner, in what is an $85 billion deal. This will enable the carrier to expand beyond being a telecommunications company and allow it to offer the media company's wealth of content to its customers, as it is currently the parent company of CNN, TNT, HBO and Warner Bros.

AT&T will pay $107.50 per share of Time Warner's stock, which is a large premium compared to what the stock was trading for the previous week. Overall, the deal is valued at $109 billion, when the media company's debt is taken into account.

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It can be useful finding out when friends are broadcasting live on Facebook, but unfortunately -- depending on your friends, of course -- there is a good chance they won’t be broadcasting something so interesting you’ll want to drop whatever you’re doing to watch there and then.

Facebook will alert you when someone is live, but like any notification, you can disable this so you won’t be alerted when Dave takes a motorbike ride in the rain, or Ellie’s children perform an out-of-tune rendition of "Let it go" from Frozen.

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With increasingly distributed workforces, video conferencing is more than ever an essential business tool. But in conference rooms the size and shape of the space can make it difficult for conventional cameras to include everyone.

Video conferencing technology company Lifesize is launching a new camera with a smart-framing sensor that intelligently adjusts its wide-angle lens to automatically capture and include everyone in the meeting.

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YouTube has announced a new platform which will make creating video ads for the site easier. The number of visits, as well as visit duration, have gone up lately, and the company wants to cash in on the momentum. The new offering is called YouTube Director -- a solution to help businesses create a professionally-looking ad in no time.

There are two ways to do it: the YouTube Director for Business app and the YouTube Director onsite service. The former, free and currently only available in iOS, helps businesses create an ad through a custom template. With a step-by-step walkthrough, the app will "help the business understand not only what to film, but what to say and when".

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FBI director James Comey made the news last month when he admitted that he tapes over his laptop's webcam to avoid being spied upon. Mark Zuckerberg does it too. As Comey puts it, blocking the webcam is a "sensible" thing to do -- and if you too care about your privacy you should follow suit. But, there is a problem.

When you remove the tape to chat with someone you are left vulnerable. And, as a security researcher will demonstrate today at the VB2016 conference, a hacker could use that opportunity to record Mac users' activities "in an essentially undetectable manner".

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There's a great deal of emphasis on securing data and email, but essential business communication via voice and video tends to get ignored. Yet these communications are vulnerable, partly because devices constantly release metadata, telling the network where and how to route communications.

To address this, Privacy-as-a-Service platform specialist Dispel is launching a secure voice and video conferencing service, a single application designed to provide enterprises and individuals with impenetrable private communications on their smartphones and mobile devices.

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There are a lot of media streaming products to choose from, but my personal favorite is Amazon’s Fire TV Stick. It’s compact, powerful and gives you access to Amazon’s full range of on-demand video content, as well as apps and games.

Today, the retail giant announces a new version of Fire TV Stick that’s faster and adds Alexa voice control to the remote. No more browsing long lists of TV shows and movies, now you can simply ask Alexa to play anything you're interested in, launch apps, and more.

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Skype for Business users have had a pretty rough time connecting with other platforms (like Cisco or Avaya), but that’s no longer the case as the Cisco Meeting Server gets released.

Cisco's new product will allow Skype for Business users to easily connect to users on other platforms by clicking a link. The company believes its product will completely reshape office collaboration, and the impact will be "huge".

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Video chat should be simple, but it is not. The biggest issue is fragmentation. On iOS, for instance, Facetime is a wonderfully easy solution, but there is no Android client. While there are plenty of cross-platform third-party options to solve this, they aren't always elegant. Skype is a good example of an app that should bridge the gap, but ends up being buggy and clunky.

Google is aiming to solve this dilemma with its 'Duo' video chat app. With it, the search giant is putting a heavy focus on ease of use. The offering is available for both Android and iOS -- the only two mobile platforms that matter (sorry, Windows 10 Mobile). Announced three months ago, it finally sees release today. There is no news about the Allo chat sister-app, sadly.

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Google is pushing out Chrome 52 for Android, and the big news with this release relates to video. With video being such a massive component of internet traffic, it is perfectly natural for Google to focus on this area, and the company says that improvements have been made to battery consumption and loading times.

There is a marked shift of focus to speed and power efficiency -- compared to the desktop where the focus has long been quality over everything else.

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Microsoft has announced a new video service called Stream that will enable businesses of all sizes to securely manage and share videos.

From today on, any user with a business email address will be able to sign up for the preview of the new service in seconds. With Stream they can then begin to upload, share and tag videos from their organization. It will also be simple to discover relevant videos since the company will employ machine learning to help users find trending videos and will also give them the ability to search by hashtag, most liked videos or other key search terms.

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