NBC gets super aggressive in YouTube TV dispute

Banner ads are appearing across select channels. | Screenshot: NBCU

NBC is one of several NBCUniversal channels running prominent banner ads on YouTube TV streams, warning customers that they could lose access over a carriage dispute with Google. The banner lists over a dozen channels that could disappear if a deal isn’t reached by Wednesday, September 30th, and directs customers to an NBCU-owned website offering various ways to pressure Google. These include a pre-written tweet directed at YouTube TV, links to Google’s customer support, and a tool to find alternative providers.

“Attention YouTube TV Customers,” the banner, which runs roughly every 10 minutes, reads, “YouTube may drop 14+ channels including NBC, Telemundo, USA, SYFY, Brave, Oxygen, MSNBC, NBCSN, CNBC, GOLF Channel, and E!. Go to...

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Backbone offers 3D-printed solution for iPhone 13 Pro camera bump issue

Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge

Backbone Labs has acknowledged the issue that hampers the use of its excellent iPhone gaming controller with the new iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max. As we noticed last week, the iPhone 13 Pro’s thicker camera bump means the phone doesn’t sit neatly in the Backbone One controller, either sticking out on one side or causing the bridge on the back to slightly buckle. It’s not unusable, but it’s not great.

“We spent a tremendous amount of time meticulously crafting every surface of Backbone One (both bits and atoms) and even designing universal support for the iPhones available when it was released,” a Backbone representative wrote in an official post on Reddit. “As a result, we’re disappointed in the situation at hand. Several folks on the...

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Facebook says Instagram is not ‘toxic for teens,’ despite damning WSJ report

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Facebook has fired back nearly two weeks after The Wall Street Journal reported that Instagram made body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls according to Facebook’s own data. The salvo comes courtesy of Pratiti Raychoudhury, Vice President, Head of Research at Facebook. Raychoudhury’s post on Facebook’s Newsroom claims that The Wall Street Journal’s characterization of internal research is “not accurate” and blames it all on a poor interpretation of the data the WSJ has in its possession.

On September 14 _The Wall Street Journa_l published a story to The Facebook Files, which is a series of stories based around an enormous cache of internal Facebook documents leaked to the newspaper. The September 14 piece focused on data...

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New Trailers: The Tragedy of Macbeth, Invasion, Spencer, and more

Denzel Washington stars in The Tragedy of Macbeth | Apple TV

We’re nearing the season finale of Ted Lasso (only two more new episodes!), and it seems like the show’s got a lot of story threads that need to be knitted together after episode 10. Titled No Weddings and a Funeral, episode 10 was solid, but I didn’t quite love it. I’m trying to write about the episode without spoiling it, let’s just say I didn’t love how the session between Ted and Sharon which we’ve been waiting for all season was edited together with Rebecca’s retelling of a traumatic event with her own father. Jason Sudeikis and Hannah Waddingham were both so great, but editing the scenes together kind of killed the dramatic momentum. But! New plot twists suggest a cliffhanger of a season finale is coming in two weeks’ time. I’m...

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Apple says it will fix issue with ‘unlock with Apple Watch’ feature on iPhone 13

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple says it has identified an issue where the “unlock with Apple Watch” feature might not work with its new iPhone 13 devices. A new note on its support page describes the problem:

You might see “Unable to Communicate with Apple Watch” if you try to unlock your iPhone while wearing a face mask, or you might not be able to set up Unlock with Apple Watch.

On Friday, users on the r/AppleWatch Reddit board began reporting that they were seeing this problem, and some said they were able to use the Watch unlock feature with other iPhone models, including the iPhone 11 Max.

Apple introduced the ability to unlock an iPhone that uses Face ID with a paired Apple Watch earlier this year with the release of iOS 14.5. It comes in handy during a...

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Tesla opens ‘Full Self-Driving’ beta software to more customers

Tesla opened its “full self-driving” beta to more owners | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Despite the head of the National Transpiration Safety Board expressing serious concerns about its safety last week, Tesla has now enabled access to the beta of its “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) program to more Tesla drivers, via a “request” button on Teslas’ dashboard screens. However, before a driver gets access to the software, Tesla will determine their “safety score,” using five criteria that estimate “the likelihood that your driving could result in a future collision,” according to a page on Tesla’s website.

The score is tabulated using data collected by sensors on the driver’s Tesla, and considers instances of forward collision warnings per 1,000 miles, hard braking, aggressive turning, unsafe following, and forced Autopilot...

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Future Wife is a wedding, a play, and the weirdest thing I’ve done in Google Sheets

The pandemic has led to a collection of unusual digital experiences, from Google Forms escape rooms to whole virtual, two-dimensional comedy shows. But the interactive digital play / upstate barn wedding I attended last Friday, Future Wife: Party in a Spreadsheet, takes things to a strange new level. The show, co-created by playwright ruth tang and director Sarah Blush, and put on by a cast of game collaborators and theater company New Georges, manages to be playful, confounding, and surprisingly, a little touching. Basically all the things Google Sheets never are.

It’s difficult to describe Party in a Spreadsheet in a way that makes sense. There are communist goats, alien activists, several themed islands, and an anonymous audience...

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The biggest news and trailers from Netflix’s Tudum event

Red Notice. | Image: Netflix

Everything from The Witcher to Tiger King

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Netflix confirms there will be a third season of The Witcher

Geralt in_The Witcher._ | Image: Netflix

At its big Tudum event, Netflix confirmed that it will make a third season of _The Witcher._No other details were shared, so we don’t know when we might expect it just yet. Netflix also said that it would continue to expand The Witcher with a second anime film and, surprisingly, a series designed for kids and families.

The announcements further expand Netflix’s ever-growing slate of Witcher content. At the event, Netflix also shared new clips from the second season ahead of its December 17th premiere and a behind-the-scenes look at The Witcher: Blood Origin, the upcoming live-action prequel series. The new content joins the first anime spinoff, The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, released in August, and the hugely popular first season of T...

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The Witcher season 2 gets a few new trailers

Image: Netflix

There was a lot of Geralt of Rivia at Netflix’s Tudum event. The upcoming second season of The Witcher was a major presence at the streamer’s big showcase; fans were able to check out a pair of very short teasers, that gave a good look at what life is like on the Continent, and what we can expect from Ciri in particular.

Additionally, we got a first glimpse at the prequel series Blood Origin with a behind-the-scenes tour of the set, and a trailer to catch fans up on a season 1 — which also has some new footage from the upcoming season.

The first season of the show debuted in 2019 and became a huge hit for Netflix, with the company claiming it was its most-watched first season of television. A second season was inevitable — we got the...

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Watch an all-new clip of Netflix’s Don’t Look Up

NIKO TAVERNISE/NETFLIX

At its big Tudum event, Netflix showed off a nice, two-minute-long look at one of its most exciting upcoming movies: Don’t Look Up.

Don’t Look Up is one of the more interesting films in Netflix’s slate, a story about astronomers trying to save the world from an impending asteroid collision. it also happens to have a stellar cast. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play the aforementioned astronomers, while Meryl Streep is the president, Jonah Hill is her chief of staff, and the rest of the lineup includes Ron Perlman, Timothée Chalamet, Ariana Grande, Kid Cudi, Cate Blanchett, and Tyler Perry. Adam McKay is writer and director.

Don’t Look Up is due to hit Netflix on December 24th but will be in select theaters before that on...

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Watch the opening title sequence for Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop series

Photo: Geoffrey Short / Netflix

We’ve still only caught glimpses of Netflix’s upcoming live-action take on Cowboy Bebop, and today delivers yet another tease: a kinetic opening title sequence for the show. It’s not quite a proper trailer (which we’re still waiting on), but it does give a good sense of the vibe the series is going for.

The Netflix adaptation stars John Cho as Spike Spiegel, Mustafa Shakir as Jet Black, and Daniella Pineda as Faye Valentine, and last month we got our first proper look at the cast — and Spike’s hair — thanks to a series of photos. It’s been a long time coming, as news of the adaptation was first revealed in 2018, with the cast announced a year later. Earlier this year, Netflix confirmed that Yoko Kanno, the original composer, was on...

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Netflix’s Tudum: all the news and announcements from the big event

The logo for Netflix’s Tudum event. | Image: Tudum

Netflix is sharing a huge amount of news about upcoming series and movies

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Tiger King season 2 premieres November 17th

Image: Netflix

Tiger King, the hugely popular documentary heavily associated with the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, will premiere on November 17th, Netflix revealed at its Tudum event on Saturday.

Netflix just announced the second season, which it is calling Tiger King 2, on Thursday as part of a short trailer revealing many other true crime shows heading to the streaming service. Netflix is promising that it will have “just as much mayhem and madness” as the first season. While it’s unclear exactly what the second season might be about, Netflix’s Tudum trailer showed a brief clip of Joe Exotic, the main focus of the first season, in prison, so it could focus in part on that.

Tiger King’s first season was a cultural sensation; in a press...

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Netflix’s new trailer for Arcane, its upcoming League of Legends series, reveals November 6th premiere date

Image: Netflix

Netflix has released a new trailer for Arcane, its upcoming series based on the League of Legends universe, and also revealed when the show will premiere: November 6th. But you won’t be able to watch all of _Arcane_on that day, as Netflix plans to release the season in three separate “acts,” each consisting of three episodes released one week after the last. That means the first act will be out on November 6th, the next will release on November 13th, and the final one will premiere on November 20th.

Arcane was first announced in 2019, though League of Legends developer Riot Games delayed the series to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In May, the news broke that Netflix had picked up the show and that it would debut in the fall.

Earlier...

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Delta Airlines wants competitors to share info about unruly passengers

Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Delta Airlines said in a pair of internal memos to employees this week that it’s asked competitors to share their no-fly lists, to try to keep passengers who cause disturbances on planes from bringing their mayhem to other airlines.

Since January 1st, the Federal Aviation Administration says it has received 4,385 reports of unruly behavior by passengers, which includes 3,199 reports of passengers “refusing to comply with the federal facemask mandate.” The FAA has issued more than $1 million in proposed fines, but the agency does not have the authority to conduct criminal prosecutions.

Among the incidents, according to the FAA (these are across various airlines):

• On a May 24th flight from New York to Orlando a passenger was “allegedly...

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Netflix debuts video from its adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman

Image: Netflix

Netflix debuted a video from its upcoming series based on Neil Gaiman’s DC comic book series The Sandman. The video was brief, but it gave us a good glimpse at actor Tom Sturridge as Dream.

The video was shown during Netflix’s Tudum event that took place Saturday. The show also also featured Gaiman, Sturridge, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste (who plays Death) talking about the series.

If you want to get another preview of what to expect from the series, check out the character posters Netflix shared for Sturridge’s Dream, Howell-Baptiste’s Death, and Mason Alexander Park’s Desire in a Twitter thread.

"Death has family"

meet Tom Sturridge as Dream in Netflix's THE SANDMAN #TUDUMpic.twitter.com/sLb3SDQdaG

— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) S...

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See inside the iPhone 13 Pro in iFixit’s latest teardown

iPhone 13 Pro | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

The team at iFixit has a new teardown of the iPhone 13 Pro, finding it has an enormous battery and some small internal changes to how the components are laid out to accommodate the smaller notch on this year’s models.

First, the battery. After conducting battery swap tests, on the iPhone 13 Pro, iFixit found its tests succeeded, but still got a warning notification. The L-shaped battery echoes the iPhone 12 Pro Max, iFixit notes:

This beefy L caps out at an expected 11.97 Wh compared to the 10.78 Wh obelisk found in the iPhone 12 Pro (and non-Pro), but loses out to the standard’s 12.54 Wh rectangular cell.

iFixit/Creative Electron

An X-ray image of iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max

iFixit posits that Apple was able to...

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Stranger Things season 4 gets a new teaser trailer

Image: Netflix

Netflix debuted a new teaser trailer for Stranger Things season 4 as part of its Tudum event on Saturday. It opened on a family going into an old-timey house, but in classic Stranger Things fashion, things quickly got spooky and, well, strange. The new season will premiere sometime in 2022.

The fourth season has been a long time coming. Stranger Things’ third season debuted more than two years ago, on July 4th, 2019, so fans have been waiting for quite a while to see what happens next in Netflix’s hit series. (Season 3 was quite popular — just four days after it launched, Netflix said that 18.2 million accounts had watched the whole season.)

The company has already shared a few very fleeting hints about what to expect in season 4,...

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Apple reportedly told a TV and movie workers’ union its TV Plus had fewer than 20 million subs

A union for TV workers says Apple claimed its TV Plus streaming service had fewer than 20 million subscribers as of July 1st | Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Apple told the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) that its Apple TV Plus streaming platform had fewer than 20 million subscribers, which allowed it to pay lower rates to IATSE workers than bigger streaming platforms, CNBC reported.

Apple has never publicly released subscriber numbers for its streaming network, which launched in November of 2019. But Apple TV Plus has fewer original shows than larger, more established streaming rivals like Netflix, which said in August it had 209 million subscribers.

“Workers on certain ‘new media’ streaming projects get paid less, even on productions with budgets that rival or exceed those of traditionally released blockbusters,” according to a press release IATSE posted on...

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Save $50 on the Nanoleaf Elements wood-styled LED panels

The Nanoleaf Elements are a unique decor whether they’re illuminated or not. | Image: Nanoleaf

Kicking off these deals on the smart home lighting front, the Nanoleaf Elements light-up wall panels — just released in the summer — have a nice discount at Best Buy. The wood accent hexagon-shaped panels are $50 off for a seven panel kit, bringing them down to $250. If you want to go beyond seven you can opt for a three panel expansion kit for $80 (saving you $20). These panels are customizable and you can connect up to 22 of them in one contiguous pattern.

You may be familiar with the colorful Nanoleaf panels that are popular with Twitch streamers and YouTubers, but the Elements promise a more refined look with their wood grain and white illumination that ranges from cool to warm tones. When turned off their subtle wood aesthetic...

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How to watch Netflix’s major Tudum event today

Netflix is kicking off a massive fan event today. Tudum — named for the ubiquitous chime that plays before Netflix titles — is a global event that will feature a huge slate of news, trailers, celebrity appearances, and more. It’s essentially the Lollapalooza of Netflix news, and anyone hoping to stay ahead of the streamer’s biggest upcoming announcements will definitely want to tune in.

What is Tudum?

Tudum is a global mega-event — the first of its kind for Netflix. It kicks off Saturday and will feature more than 145 celebrities, 70-plus series, and 28 films over the course of several hours. Expect exclusive clips and news for forthcoming titles like Stranger Things,The Sandman, Tiger King, Cobra Kai, The Witcher, Red Notice starring...

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How Elizabeth Holmes sidelined the real scientists at Theranos

Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/The Mercury News via Getty Images

By leaving them off email threads

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Apple says an issue is preventing some animations from using high refresh rates on the iPhone 13 Pros

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Apple’s iPhone 13 lineup launched Friday, and one of the key features of the 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max are their ProMotion displays with variable refresh rates that can top out at 120Hz. But as spotted by 9to5Mac, some app animations in third-party apps are currently only running at 60Hz. That might be frustrating if you were expecting to see buttery-smooth animations across all of your apps with the new phones, but when we asked Apple what was going on, the company shared two reasons why this might be happening.

One reason is that developers will need to update their apps to declare that they use the higher refresh rate. This can be done by adding an entry to the app’s plist, Apple tells The Verge, and the company says it plans to share...

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Netflix queues up a roguelike PC game to go with its action movie Kate

Kate: Collateral Damage | Image: Ludic Studios

Kate: Collateral Damage isn’t the first gaming tie-in we’ve seen for a Netflix original, but now that it’s seriously entering the space, each title feels a little different. Developed by Ludic Studios, the new game is a “time-attack action roguelike” that relates to the movie Kate, a Netflix movie starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead about an assassin who has 24 hours to find the antidote to a poison that is killing her.

The plot of the movie makes the game’s time attack approach easy to understand as players take over the central character on her quest. As its Steam description reveals, players extend the length of each run by killing enemies to slow down the constantly depleting timer, and earning stimulant syringes that reset it entirely.

...

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Twitter says new videos will be less pixelated

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter’s poor video quality has been a long-running frustration for users on the platform, but on Friday, the company shared some potentially promising news: videos uploaded to the service will now “appear less pixelated for a better watching experience,” Twitter said in a tweet from its support account.

Twitter removed a pre-processing step in its video pipeline when you upload, the company tells The Verge, which could mean that the fidelity of a video is closer to the original version. But beyond that, we don’t know much about what’s changing, and it’s unclear why the company is being so vague about what should be a change worth celebrating from the rooftops.

App researcher Jane Manchun Wong uploaded a video to put the supposed...

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Twitter seeking input as it explores Filter and Limit controls on tweets

Image: Twitter

Twitter is looking for input on two new potential features that could give users more control over the tone and quality of replies to their tweets. Filter and Limit, as shared by Twitter designer Paula Barcante, would intelligently hide offensive or harmful replies or prevent repeat offenders from replying at all.

Based on the concept images Barcante shared, Twitter would detect whether or not you’ve received harmful replies and then prompt you to turn on Filter or Limit. “If you have Filter on, potentially harmful replies to your Tweet wouldn’t be shown to you or anyone else,” Barcante writes. With Limit enabled, accounts with a history of offensive or “repetitive, uninvited tweets” would be prevented from replying at all.

...

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How to customize your Windows 11 taskbar

If you’ve updated your computer from Windows 10 to Windows 11, you may find that your taskbar isn’t quite as configurable — and perhaps not quite as useful — as it was before. For example, the old, familiar Start menu with its configurable Live Tiles is now gone. The search box is no longer within the taskbar but is accessed by first clicking on the Start menu — an extra step. (Although the fact that Cortana is no longer automatically part of that search box can be considered, by many at least, as a plus.)

Another thing: the taskbar is now permanently affixed to the bottom of the screen — so if you were more comfortable having it on top of the screen, or on either side, you’re out of luck.

As you might imagine, Windows users are already...

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It’s Friday, here’s the Galaxy S22 Ultra render that has the Android blogosphere abuzz

Image: Digit, OnLeaks

It’s Friday, it’s fall, there’s a breeze in the air (hopefully), and there’s fresh, I’d argue ridiculous, renders of Samsung’s expected Galaxy S22 Ultra to show you. The renders come courtesy of @OnLeaks and Digit, and they feature a new Samsung flagship with what looks like a Galaxy Note 20-inspired body and back that... well you should see for yourself.

Since deciding to skip the Galaxy Note in 2021 — apparently much to the chagrin of T-Mobile_—_Samsung’s been seeding Note features across its popular phones. Both the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra and the Galaxy Z Fold 3 offer stylus support. If these new renders are to be believed, the Galaxy S22 Ultra will go even further. According to OnLeaks and Digit, the new phone will come with the...

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Razer Huntsman V2 review: no need for speed

Fast optical switches plus a fast 8,000Hz polling rate

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