Who says everything in the film business has ground to a halt? Some directors are finding ways of keeping the cameras rolling. When the pandemic halted his war thriller, Timur Bekmambetov popped his leading actor inside a video game and completed the shoot from 1,200km away. Will movies now have to be made this way?
Source: Is this the future of film? How to finish a shoot when the coronavirus strikes
With people told to work from home and stay away from others, the pandemic has deepened reliance on services from the technology industry’s biggest companies while accelerating trends that were already benefiting them. Streaming services like Netflix have dampened box office sales for movies in recent years. Now, as movie theaters close under government orders, Netflix and YouTube are gaining a new audience.
Source: Big Tech Could Emerge From Coronavirus Crisis Stronger Than Ever
Each of the 20 amino acids that make up proteins has a unique vibrational frequency. The chemical structure of entire proteins can consequently be mapped with audible representations, using known concepts from music theory like note volume, melody, chords and rhythm. The specific sounds generated, determined by the way a protein folds, can be used to train deep learning neural networks.
Source: Artificial Intelligence Composes New Proteins – The Building Blocks of Life – as Musical Scores
YouTube will sacrifice streaming quality in the EU to help avert internet gridlock as tens of millions of Europeans, confined by the coronavirus outbreak, switch to working from home. Alphabet Inc’s YouTube is the second online video company after Netflix to respond to a call by the European Union industry chief Thierry Breton to cut picture quality to prevent overload.
Source: YouTube forgoes streaming quality to prevent European networks buffering
As bans on public gatherings have proliferated nationwide in response to coronavirus, shows and special programs are announcing streaming plans daily. Organizations across the country are scrambling to find ways to stream productions, working through copyright issues and coming to agreements with unions, such as Actors’ Equity and United Scenic Artists, to ensure the show goes on.
Source: No Theater? No Problem. Plays and Musicals Switch to Streaming.
The Ultra Virtual Audio Festival will start on UMF Radio this Friday, March 20. It is a limited-run radio channel with exclusive DJ sets from many of the artists booked for Ultra Miami. DJ sets include Afrojack, Martin Garrix, Armin van Buuren, Major Lazer, and many more. SiriusXM President Scott Greenstein said the Ultra Music Festival virtual experience is ‘necessary.’
Source: Ultra Music Festival Is Going Completely Virtual – SiriusXM Is Helping Out
YouTube will rely more on AI to moderate videos during the coronavirus pandemic, since many of its human reviewers are being sent home to limit the spread of the virus. This means videos may be taken down from the site purely because they’re flagged by AI as potentially violating a policy, whereas the videos might normally get routed to a human reviewer to confirm that they should be taken down.
Source: YouTube will rely more on AI moderation while human reviewers can’t come to the office
Companies including Ericsson and General Electric have joined a major video-coding licensing platform, which seeks to collect royalties from smartphone and tablet manufacturers using the technology. According to Sisvel, operator of the platform, the patents relate to the VP9 and AV1 video codecs, which are commonly used in video streaming devices such as smartphones, TVs, and computers.
Source: GE and Ericsson join fees hunt for Google’s ‘royalty-free’ tech
Security firm Positive Technologies discovered the flaw, and is warning that it could break apart a chain of trust for important technology like silicon-based encryption, hardware authentication, and modern DRM protections. “This vulnerability jeopardizes everything Intel has done to build the root of trust and lay a solid security foundation on the company’s platforms,” explains security researcher Mark Ermolov.
Source: A major new Intel processor flaw could defeat encryption and DRM protections
Music ML 2020 is the second annual hackathon held by Sony Music, The Orchard and Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the first to be expanded out of the US. The Orchard office hosted the New York competition and Sony Music simultaneously hosted in London over the course of three days. The hackathon’s primary purpose is to allow cross-functional teams of industry professionals to create business solutions at the intersection of music and machine-learning.
Source: Sony Music and The Orchard held a machine-learning hackathon