Image: Disney Disney’s upcoming Disney streaming service is shaping up to be quite the deal. According to CNET, the service will launch on November 12th with support for four simultaneous streams and 4K included, all for the base price of $6.99 a month. Subscribers will also be able to create and manage up to seven profiles on a single account. That will make it highly competitive with Netflix, which raised its prices earlier this year and has in place stricter limitations on simultaneous streams. Netflix now costs $9 a month for a standard definition plan with only one available stream. If you want HD streaming, you need to pay $13 a month, and that gets you two simultaneous streams. For 4K and four simultaneous streams, it’s $16 a month. (The company also recently bumped prices in the UK.) Netflix’s price changes have been so dramatic, in fact, that CEO Reed Hastings blamed the hike for its dip in US subscribers last quarter, the first drop in domestic Netflix users since 2011. The setback slowed Netflix’s overall growth and caused its stock to tumble, too. Disney is making its upcoming streaming service highly competitive with Netflix Notably, Disney’s ESPN and Hulu bundle for Disney won’t have the same simultaneous streaming benefits. With the bundle, which will cost $12.99, subscribers will only get two simultaneous ESPN streams and one basic, ad-supported Hulu stream. Of course, Netflix has much more robust library than Disney right now, but Disney is filling out its upcoming platform with a number of original shows. The streaming limitation and 4K news, which was disclosed during interviews at Disney’s D23 Expo, joins a flurry of new announcements regarding shows and films coming to Disney later this year. CNET also reports that Disney will be releasing new episodes of original series on Disney weekly, as opposed to all at once like Netflix, a strategy that will likely help it extend the lifespan of its earlier slate of programming while it plays catch up to competitors. The company is bringing a Ms. Marvel series to its platform, as well as one centered on She Hulk and one on Moon Knight. Disney also today announced a live-action Lady in the Tramp adaptation that will be exclusive to Disney and confirmed the much-anticipated Obi-Wan Kenobi original series starring Ewan McGregor. Prior to D23, Disney has promised a number of other enticing Disney benefits, including numerous other Star Wars series like The Mandalorian and a seventh season of The Clone Wars; shows focused on popular Marvel characters Hawkeye, Falcon / the Winter Solider, and Loki; and streaming exclusivity for a number of upcoming high-profile films like Frozen 2 and the live-action The Little Mermaid.
OnePlus is continuing the dripfeed of information about its upcoming TV, following news of its September release date and the revelation that it’ll be called the OnePlus TV. Now we know the first technical details of the product, courtesy of a tweet from OnePlus India: it uses a 55-inch QLED panel. Previous filings have suggested Android-based models of between 43 and 75 inches in size, with the 43-inch variant seemingly also bound for India. This announcement doesn’t necessarily rule any of that out, but it does at least confirm that India is getting a 55-inch version. The 75-inch model is likely to come to the US and China. QLED is Samsung’s marketing term for quantum-dot LED screen technology — it’s nothing like OLED, despite the similar name. QLED panels still rely on LED backlighting, unlike OLED where each individual pixel emits its own light, so the image quality of a QLED TV is largely dependent on how effective the backlighting solution is. For example, the number of local dimming zones is critical for HDR performance. In other words, we still can’t say much about the OnePlus TV until we see it for ourselves. But that’s the case with any TV, really, and that time won’t be so far off.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales There are many criticisms of Facebook’s size, power, and business model, but two stand out for the intensity with which they are usually discussed. One is that Facebook is a dystopian panopticon that monitors our every move and uses that information to predict and manipulate our behavior. The other is that Facebook has come such a pillar of modern life that every product decision it makes could reshape the body politic forever. Today, in an impressive flurry of news-making, Facebook took steps to address both concerns. First, the company said it was finally releasing its long-delayed “Clear History” tool in three countries. (The United States is not one of them.) I wrote about it at The Verge:
It was nearly a year and a half ago that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, standing onstage at the company’s annual developer conference, announced that the company would begin letting users sever the connection between their web browsing history and their Facebook accounts. After months of delays, Facebook’s Clear History is now rolling out in Ireland, South Korea, and Spain, with other countries to follow “in coming months,” the company said. The new tool, which Facebook conceived in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, is designed to give users more control over their data privacy at the expense of advertisers’ targeting capabilities. When it arrives in your country, the Clear History tool will be part of a new section of the service called “Off-Facebook activity.” When you open it, you’ll see the apps and websites that are tracking your activity and sending reports back to Facebook for ad targeting purposes. Tapping the “Clear History” button will dissociate that information from your Facebook account. You can also choose to block companies from reporting their tracking data about you back to Facebook in the future. You’ll have the choice of disconnecting all off-Facebook browsing data, or data for specific apps and websites. Facebook says the product is rolling out slowly “to help ensure it’s working reliably for everyone.”
Some writers, such as Tony Romm here, pointed out that Facebook is not actually deleting your data — which would seem to blunt the impact of a button called “Clear History.” In fact, given that the data link you’re shutting off is primarily relevant to ads you might see later, it feels more like a “Muddle Future” button. Facebook, for its part, has cloaked the entire enterprise into a section of the app opaquely titled “Off-Facebook Activity,” which could more or less mean anything. I find it hard to get too worked up about any of this, because regardless of whether Facebook is able to take into account your web browsing habits, it it’s still going to be sending you plenty of highly targeted ads based on your age, gender, and all the other demographic data that you forked over when you made your profile. Or you could simply turn off ad targeting on Facebook altogether, which is more powerful in this regard than any Clear History tool was ever going to be. (Here’s an account from a person who did this.) Second, Facebook released the results of its anti-conservative bias audit, in which the company asked former Sen. Jon Kyl and the law firm Covington
We’ve called SimpliSafe the best home security system you can install yourself — and while there’s a reported vulnerability we now need to test, I’m pretty sure existing owners will want to hear about the company’s latest product: the SimpliSafe Smart Lock. It’s coming September 15th for $99, and it’s designed to work pretty closely with SimpliSafe’s latest alarm system — to the point it can automatically lock the door when you arm your alarm, or even stop it from locking when your door’s open if that door has a contact sensor. That way, you don’t accidentally smash a beefy deadbolt into your doorframe.
Mind you, some rival alarm systems like Amazon’s Ring Alarm and Google’s Nest Secure already let you arm and disarm alarms when you lock or unlock a compatible smart lock, and SimpliSafe already lets you do the one-press-to-arm-and-lock trick with an August Smart Lock too. But SimpliSafe also says its new smart lock is the thinnest on the market at 0.9 inches — compare to 2.3 inches for an August Smart Lock Pro or 1.5 inches for a Nest x Yale — and comes with an external PIN pad you can mount anywhere on the outside of your door, so you don’t have to choose between keyed and keyless entry. In fact, it’ll also work with SimpliSafe’s key fob and interior keypad. If you want to unlock the door with an app, though, SimpliSafe is weirdly charging extra: you’ll need to be paying $25 a month for the company’s remote monitoring service. If you’re already paying for that, no big deal, but it’s a strange limitation. The lock will be available in black on black, white on white, or white with a nickel-colored thumb turn when it arrives at the company’s website next month, and it should go on sale at Best Buy on October 13th as well.
Mark Wilson / Fast Company: A look inside Google’s one-year-old Design Lab for its hardware products at the Mountain View campus, which houses around 150 designers — The special sauce behind Google’s breakout hardware products is its one-year-old Design Lab. We’re the first publication to go inside.
