LG Display has shown off some interesting ideas as it looks to change the way OLED panels work, from positing bizarre form factors to addressing dimmer brightness levels compared to LED alternatives. Now, the panel maker is exploring a new approach to OLED TV audio. From a report: Today, LG Display announced its creation of a 97-inch OLED EX TV panel that debuts the company's Cinematic Sound OLED (CSO), "which allows the display to vibrate and generate the sound directly from the display without separate speakers."

"A 5.1 channel sound system is embedded into the widescreen, creating a performance that offers a cinematic level of immersion," LG Display said. Sony has used similar technology called Acoustic Surface in OLED TVs since 2017. These sets also don't use speakers and instead vibrate actuators behind the display. However, Sony doesn't compare Acoustic Surface to 5.1 surround sound. Instead, it encourages users to connect their own gear to the set and to use the TV as the center channel for a surround sound setup. Considering audio will be coming from a central point rather than all around you, it's hard to imagine LG Display's gargantuan TV panel can deliver the surround sound experience of a movie theater.

Crunchyroll announced that it's acquired Right Stuf, one of the world's leading online anime superstores. "Expanding Crunchyroll's eCommerce offerings, the acquisition aims to serve anime fans and collectors an even wider array of merchandise for online purchase including manga, home video, figures, games, music and everything in between," writes the company in a post. From the report: Founded in 1987, Right Stuf is a leading consumer source for anime pop culture merchandise online. By visiting its eCommerce portal, enthusiasts and collectors can find thousands of products, including Blu-rays, manga books, music, figurines, collectables, and more. Right Stuf also offers licensed anime home video products through its own label.

"For 35 years, Right Stuf's mission has been to connect anime fans with the products they love," said Shawne Kleckner, CEO of Right Stuf. "Joining forces with Crunchyroll allows us to accelerate and scale this effort more than ever before. There has never been a more exciting time to be an anime fan than today!" Kleckner and the Right Stuf team will join Crunchyroll's Emerging Businesses organization, led by Terry Li. Sony acquired Crunchyroll for $1.175 billion from AT&T, in a deal that closed in August 2021.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Charter Communications has agreed to settle piracy lawsuits filed by the major record labels, which accused the cable Internet provider of failing to terminate the accounts of subscribers who illegally download copyrighted songs. Sony, Universal, Warner, and their various subsidiaries sued Charter in US District Court in Colorado in March 2019 in a suit that claimed the ISP helps subscribers pirate music by selling packages with higher Internet speeds. They filed another lawsuit against Charter in the same court in August 2021.

Both cases were settled. The record labels and Charter told the court of their settlements on Tuesday in filings (PDF) that said (PDF), "The Parties hereby notify the Court that they have resolved the above-captioned action." Upon the settlements, the court vacated the pending trials and asked the parties to submit dismissal papers within 28 days. Charter subsidiary Bright House Networks also settled (PDF) a similar lawsuit in US District Court for the Middle District of Florida this week. The record labels' case in Florida was settled one day before a scheduled trial, as TorrentFreak reported Tuesday. The case was dismissed with prejudice (PDF) after the settlement.

No details on any of the settlements were given in the documents notifying the courts. A three-week jury trial in one of the Colorado cases was scheduled to begin in June 2023 but is no longer needed. The question for Internet users is whether the settlements mean that Charter will be more aggressive in terminating subscribers who illegally download copyrighted material. Charter declined to comment today when we asked if it agreed to increase account terminations of subscribers accused of piracy. "Even if the settlements have no specific provision on terminating subscribers, Charter presumably has to pay the record labels to settle the claims," adds Ars' Jon Brodkin. "That could make the country's second-biggest ISP more likely to terminate subscribers accused of piracy in order to prevent future lawsuits."

US consumer spending on video game products has fallen by $1.78 billion in Q2, according to market research firm NPD. Overall, spending in video gaming in the US totaled $12.35 billion in the recent quarter, down 13 percent year over year. The Verge reports: The findings follow both Microsoft and Sony reporting revenue declines in gaming as the pandemic growth slows. [...] While overall spending on gaming has clearly declined across the industry in Q2, subscription content "was the only segment to post positive gains," according to NPD. That growth is despite Sony launching its revamped PlayStation Plus subscriptions at the end of the quarter.

Hardware unit sales were led by Nintendo Switch in the second quarter, according to NPD, with the PS5 generating the highest dollar sales. Despite the declines in spending amid high rates of inflation and following a big period of growth "consumer spending continues to trend above pre-pandemic levels," says Mat Piscatella, games industry analyst at NPD. "However, unpredictable and quickly changing conditions may continue to impact the market in unexpected ways in the coming quarters."

Former Xbox executive Peter Moore has said his team "encouraged the console wars" during his Xbox 360-era tenure -- as a way to drive competition between Microsoft and Sony. Eurogamer reports: This competition has helped the industry, Moore continued, and saw Microsoft continuing to commit to video games despite the Xbox 360's costly "Red Ring of Death" debacle. "We encouraged the console wars, not to create division, but to challenge each other," Moore said, speaking on the Front Office Sports podcast (thanks, IGN). "And when I say each other I mean Microsoft and Sony. "If Microsoft hadn't of stuck the course after the Xbox, after the Red Rings of Death, gaming would be a poorer place for it, you wouldn't have the competition you have today."

Moore helped launch the Xbox 360, following years of service during the Dreamcast era at Sega. Memorably, he announced Halo 2's release date via a tattoo - though sources disagree on whether the stunt was faked. "If we didn't resolve Red Rings of Death the way that we did I know darn well there'd be no Xbox today," Moore continued, referencing the infamous circle of error lights which showed on failed Xbox 360 hardware. Estimates differ, though millions of consoles were believed to have been affected.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Although PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X have always been extremely close in their tech specs, features, and performance, one area where the Microsoft console established an early lead was in its compatibility with a range of modern displays and display technologies. That gap is finally now set to be closed. After PS5 was updated with support for variable refresh rates in April, Sony has now confirmed that the system will finally be able to output at 1440p resolution. The new feature is introduced in a system software beta available to invited users today, which Sony expects to roll out to everyone "later this year."

Also included in the beta are a bunch of interface customizations, including the ability to group games together in folder-style Gamelists. Although most modern TV sets have 1080p or 4K resolutions, compatibility with 1440p (also known as QHD) matters because it's a very popular resolution for gaming PC monitors. There are a lot of these displays around, many with features like VRR, that PS5 owners will be happy to finally use to their full ability. Games which support 1440p will display at native resolution, while games that display at 4K will supersample down to 1440p for a smoother image.

"T2 SDE is not just a regular Linux distribution," reads the announcement. "It is a flexible Open Source System Development Environment or Distribution Build Kit (others might even name it Meta Distribution). T2 allows the creation of custom distributions with state of the art technology, up-to-date packages and integrated support for cross compilation."

Slashdot reader ReneR writes: The T2 project released a major milestone update, shipping full support for 25 CPU architectures, variants, and C libraries. Support for cross compiling was further improved to also cover Rust, Ada, ObjC, Fortran, and Go!

This is also the first major release where an AI powered package update bot named 'data' contributed more changes than human contributors combined! [Data: 164, humans: 141]

T2 is known for its sophisticated cross compile support as well as supporting nearly all existing CPU architectures: alpha, arc, arm, arm64, avr32, hppa, ia64, m68k, mipsel, mips64, nios2, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv, riscv64, s390x, spare, sparc64, superh x86, x86-64 and x32 for a wide use in Embedded systems. The project also still supports the Sony PS3, Sgi Octane and Sun workstations as well as state of the art ARM64, RISCV64 as well as AMD64 for regular cloud, server, or simply enthusiast workstation use.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Built by Sony AI, a research lab launched by the company in 2020, Gran Turismo Sophy is a computer program trained to control racing cars inside the world of Gran Turismo, a video game known for its super-realistic simulations of real vehicles and tracks. In a series of events held behind closed doors last year, Sony put its program up against the best humans on the professional sim-racing circuit. What they discovered during those racetrack battles -- and the ones that followed -- could help shape the future of machines that work alongside humans, or join us on the roads.

Back in July 2021, [Emily Jones], who is based in Melbourne, Australia, and races for the e-sports team Trans Tasman Racing, didn't know what to expect. "I wasn't told much about it," she says now, a year later. "'Don't do any practice,' they said. 'Don't look at its lap times.' I was like, it's obviously going to be good if they're keeping it secret from me." In the end, GT Sophy beat Jones's best lap by 1.5 seconds. At a level where records are smashed in millisecond increments, 1.5 seconds is an age. But Sony soon learned that speed alone wasn't enough to make GT Sophy a winner. The program outpaced all human drivers on an empty track, setting superhuman lap times on three different virtual courses. Yet when Sony tested GT Sophy in a race against multiple human drivers, where intelligence as well as speed is needed, GT Sophy lost. The program was at times too aggressive, racking up penalties for reckless driving, and at other times too timid, giving way when it didn't need to.

Sony regrouped, retrained its AI, and set up a rematch in October. This time GT Sophy won with ease. What made the difference? It's true that Sony came back with a larger neural network, giving its program more capabilities to draw from on the fly. But ultimately, the difference came down to giving GT Sophy something that Peter Wurman, head of Sony AI America, calls "etiquette": the ability to balance its aggression and timidity, picking the most appropriate behavior for the situation at hand. This is also what makes GT Sophy relevant beyond Gran Turismo. Etiquette between drivers on a track is a specific example of the kind of dynamic, context-aware behavior that robots will be expected to have when they interact with people, says Wurman. An awareness of when to take risks and when to play it safe would be useful for AI that is better at interacting with people, whether it be on the manufacturing floor, in home robots, or in driverless cars.

Bungie, the developer of Destiny 2, is now officially a part of Sony. The Verge reports: The PlayStation maker had announced its intent to acquire the gaming studio in January, and now, that acquisition is complete. At the initial announcement, Sony said (pdf) the deal was worth $3.6 billion, but in an SEC filing on Friday, it said the deal was worth "approximately" $3.7 billion. Though it's now under the Sony umbrella, Bungie will "continue to independently publish and creatively develop our games," Bungie CEO Pete Parsons said in a blog post from the original announcement of the acquisition. And future games in development won't be PlayStation exclusives, Bungie's Joe Blackburn and Justin Truman said.

But Sony does plan to lean on Bungie for its "world-class expertise in multi-platform development and live game services," which "will help us deliver on our vision of expanding PlayStation to hundreds of millions of gamers," Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan said in January. Sony views live service games as a critical part of PlayStation's future, as it plans to launch more than 10 new live service games by March 2026.

Video game sales are set to decline annually for the first time in years, as another industry that boomed in the coronavirus era faces the grim prospect of a recession. From a report: The global games and services market is forecast to contract 1.2% year-on-year to $188 billion in 2022, according to research from market data firm Ampere Analysis. The sector expanded 26% from 2019 to 2021, reaching a record $191 billion in size. Sales of video games have consistently grown since at least 2015, Ampere data shows.

Gaming got a huge boost from Covid-19 shutdowns in 2020 as people spent more of their time indoors. The launch of next-generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony that same year also bolstered the industry's fortunes. However, the arrival of Microsoft's Xbox Series X and S machines and Sony's PlayStation 5 proved something of a double-edged sword -- logistics disruptions and shortages of vital components have meant that shoppers are facing great difficulty finding any of the new consoles on store shelves or online.

VentureBeat reports: Video game legend Bernie Stolar, former president of Sega of America, has passed away at the age of 75, friends said.
Bernie Stolar was the first executive VP of Sony Computer Entertainment America, according to their article, and helped line up the games for the launch of the first PlayStation, eventually signing franchises like Crash Bandicoot, Ridge Racer, Oddworld Inhabitants, Spyro The Dragon and Battle Arena Toshinden.

VentureBeat remembers how Stolar then became president/COO of Sega of America, helping lead the development and launch of the Sega Dreamcast (while killing development of their home video console Saturn). Stolar acquired Visual Concepts for Sega of America, which ultimately led to the creation of 2K Sports. Joining Mattel in 1999, he helped the company sell a line of videogames.

But then Stolar became an adviser/director at Adscape Media, and later sold that company to Google for $23 million. The lead writer for VentureBeat's GameBeat remembers what happened next — and what he'd learned after interviewing Stolar in 2015: "There was no interest in games at Google at the time," Stolar said. "I went to the CEO, who was Eric Schmidt, and said, 'Why don't we put advertising in all these games and give them away for free online?' He said, 'We're not in the game business." I said, 'We're not going into the game business. We're not developing games. We're taking games from publishers and streaming those through our online network.' He wouldn't do it. That's when I knew I should leave the company...."

Toward the end of our interview in 2015, Stolar said, "I've been doing this since 1980. I love this business. I love it because I get to work with people who are young and passionate. I'm one of the old gray-haired guys in the industry, but it's wonderful to work with all this young talent."

Stolar joked he could be the grandfather for the CEOs he was advising. I asked Stolar how long he would work.

"Put it this way. I've spoken to two individuals about this, Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch," he said. "They're both in their 80s. They're both multi-billionaires. They certainly don't have to work, right? And they've both said to me, 'If you retire, you die.' I believe that. My father, when he sold his liquor store and stopped working, passed away three months later. I'm not going to stop."

Microsoft, Epic Games, Meta, and 33 other companies and organizations have formed a standards group for "metaverse" tech. The Metaverse Standards Forum is supposed to foster open, interoperable standards for augmented and virtual reality, geospatial, and 3D tech. From a report: According to a press release, the Metaverse Standards Forum will focus on "pragmatic, action-based projects" like hackathons and prototyping tools for supporting common standards. It's also interested in developing "consistent terminology" for the space -- where many players can't even agree on what a "metaverse" is. In addition to the companies above, the group's founding members include major pre-metaverse entities like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Nvidia, Qualcomm, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and Unity, in addition to newer ones like Lamina1, a blockchain payments startup co-founded by Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson.

Sony might be ready to announce a new lineup of gaming headsets, according to a report from 91Mobiles based on information provided by OnLeaks. From a report: Rather than being specifically PlayStation-branded, like Sony's Pulse headset, the three headsets will apparently be part of a new gaming hardware brand from Sony called "Inzone," which could also include a pair of gaming displays. Leaked images show the three so-called H-series headsets with a similar white color scheme to the existing Pulse headset. The H3 is wired, and has a USB-C port with a physical volume dial. There's a button marked "NC/AMB" shown in renders of the H3, which suggests it might support noise cancellation and have an ambient audio mode to allow players to hear what's going on around them.

PlayStation's revamped version of its video game subscription service went live on Monday, giving members access to a catalog of several hundred games both new and old. From a report: PlayStation Plus, once code-named Spartacus, is Sony Group's attempt to compete with rival Microsoft's popular Xbox Game Pass as both publishers jockey to be the Netflix of video games. The new service combines Sony's previous subscription offerings into a three-tiered system. The most basic level, Essential, costs $10 a month and replaces the old PlayStation Plus, offering two downloadable games per month, a smattering of discounts and access to online multiplayer games. It's the top two tiers that are new for PlayStation users. The Extra tier, at $15 a month, offers a library of about four hundred PlayStation 4 and 5 games, while the $18 a month Premium level adds a few hundred classic games to the pool, mostly from the PlayStation 3. The service only has around thirty PS1, PS2 and PSP games, which has been a disappointment for retro gamers.

Sony said Tuesday that Nobuyuki Idei, its former chairman and CEO who led the Japanese giant's push into the digital network business, has died of liver failure. He was 84. Kyodo News reports: In addition to enhancing Sony's presence in the digital and communications fields, he also focused on the entertainment business, such as movies, music and game consoles, laying the foundation for its current operations. Idei joined Sony in 1960, becoming president in 1995 and CEO in 1998. He served as both chairman and chief executive from 2000 to 2005. He stepped down as chairman and CEO amid lackluster sales in its appliance business, making headlines for naming Howard Stringer as his successor at a time when it was still rare for a Japanese company to be led by a non-Japanese CEO. Idei also contributed to the advancement of the internet environment in Japan, having been appointed to head the government's IT strategy council in 2000. [...]

Under Idei's tenure as CEO, the conglomerate launched its Vaio-brand personal computers and domestic internet service provider So-net. It also ventured into online-based banking services and the nonlife insurance business. But after its earlier success with sales of bulky CRT televisions, Sony was slow to transition to flat screens and was outpaced amid intense competition with South Korean and other overseas rival manufacturers. Company stocks plunged in 2003 in what was referred to as the "Sony shock," and sluggish growth for much of the following decade led Sony to focus on corporate restructuring initiatives.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: From now on, Russian and Belarusian entities can only buy CPUs operating at below 25 MHz and offering performance of up to 5 GFLOPS from Taiwanese companies. This essentially excludes all modern technology, including microcontrollers for more or less sophisticated devices. Due to restrictions imposed on exports to Russia by the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union, leading Taiwanese companies were among the first to cease working with Russia after the country started full-scale war against Ukraine in late February. This week Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) formally published its list of high-tech products that are banned from exportation to Russia and Belarus, which prevents all kinds of Taiwan-produced high-tech devices as well as tools used to make chips (whether or not they use technologies originated from the U.S., U.K., or E.U., which were already covered by restrictions) to be exported to the aggressive nation. [...]

Starting today, Russian entities cannot buy chips that meet one of the following conditions from Taiwanese companies, reports DigiTimes:

- Has performance of 5 GFLOPS. To put it into context, Sony's PlayStation 2 released in 2000 had peak performance of around 6.2 FP32 GFLOPS.
- Operates at 25 MHz or higher.
- Has an ALU that is wider than 32 bits.
- Has an external interconnection with a data transfer rate of 2.5 MB/s or over.
- Has more than 144 pins.
- Has basic gate propagation delay time of less than 0.4 nanosecond.

In addition to being unable to buy chips from Taiwanese companies, Russian entities will not be able to get any chip production equipment from Taiwan, which includes scanners, scanning electron microscopes, and all other types of semiconductor tools that can be used to make chips locally or perform reverse engineering (something that the country pins a lot of hopes on).

Smartphone cameras and DSLRs have been moving in opposite directions for the past few years, and image quality from phones will finally trump that of their single-lens reflex rivals by 2024, according to Sony. From a report: As reported by Nikkei Japan, the President and CEO of Sony Semiconductor Solutions (SSS), Terushi Shimizu, told a business briefing that "we expect that still images [from smartphones] will exceed the image quality of single-lens reflex cameras within the next few years." Some fascinating slides presented during the briefing were even more specific, with one slide showing that, according to Sony, "still images are expected to exceed ILC [interchangeable lens camera] image quality" sometime during 2024. Those are two slightly different claims, with 'ILCs' also including today's mirrorless cameras, alongside the older DSLR tech that most camera manufacturers are now largely abandoning. But the broader conclusion remains -- far from hitting a tech ceiling, smartphones are expected to continue their imaging evolution and, for most people, make standalone cameras redundant.

RED filed a lawsuit yesterday suing (PDF) Nikon for infringing on its video compression patents. PetaPixel reports: The lawsuit was filed in a southern California federal court today and asserts that the Japanese camera manufacturer and its United States subsidiaries have illegally infringed on seven patents that deal specifically with "a video camera that can be configured to highly compress video data in a visually lossless manner."

In the filing, RED notes a type of compression that it says it has patented and is in use by Nikon in the Z9: "The camera can be configured to transform blue and red image data in a manner that enhances the compressibility of the data. The data can then be compressed and stored in this form. This allows a user to reconstruct the red and blue data to obtain the original raw data for a modified version of the original raw data that is visually lossless when demosaiced. Additionally, the data can be processed so the green image elements are demosaiced first, and then the red and blue elements are reconstructed based on values of the demosaiced green image elements."

This compression comes thanks to a partnership with intoPIX's TicoRAW which was announced last December. [...] The TicoRAW feature has been in the news for months, but RED was likely waiting for it to be implemented into a competitor's camera before filing a lawsuit. RED's lawsuit says Nikon's infringement on its patent was "willful" and claims Nikon would have known about RED's patents. [...] RED then cites multiple lawsuits it has filed against Kinefinity, Sony, and Nokia over the years. RED is seeking damages or royalties for the infringement as well as an injunction to ban Nikon from further infringing.

In January, Sony bought Bungie for $3.5 billion, giving the company one of the most popular first-person shooter games to compete with Microsoft and the various game studios it owns. Now, according to Forbes, Sony "has a whole plan to integrate Bungie's live service-building philosophies into its other teams that are making games [...]." From the report: Bungie enjoys one of the major live service successes in the current era, 7, going on 8 years of Destiny as a hyper-engaging franchises, and Sony believes the lessons they've learned can translate into other places. Twelve other places, to be specific. Sony is apparently about to announce a massive slate of live service offerings to join its traditional single player fare. While high profile AAA Sony games like God of War and Horizon Forbidden West sell well and are praised by fans and critics, they are not ongoing revenue streams like live service games can be. For Sony, they feel like they're missing a rather large boat. The plan here is to ramp up to have 3 live service games by FY2022, 6 by FY2023, 10 by FY2025 and 12 by FY2025. Currently, the only game they even consider a live service title in their lineup as The Show 22. So uh, 12 by 2025? That seems... ambitious, even with Bungie on board to help.

Japanese conglomerate Sony said it is well-positioned to play a leading role in the metaverse, or immersive virtual worlds, which commentators speculate will massively disrupt industries and establish new powerhouses. From a report: "The metaverse is at the same time a social space and live network space where games, music, movies and anime intersect," Chief Executive Kenichiro Yoshida said at a strategy briefing on Wednesday, pointing to the use of free-to-play battle royale title Fortnite from Epic Games as an online social space. Sony's game, music and movie units contributed two-thirds of operating income in the year ended March, underscoring the group's transformation from consumer electronics maker into a metaverse-ready entertainment juggernaut under Yoshida and predecessor Kazuo Hirai. The firm is a gaming gatekeeper with its PlayStation 5 console, however observers point to the risk presented by the growth of cross-platform, cloud-based titles and their potential to reduce the influence of proprietary platforms. Sony has been adjusting its approach, enabling cross-play in Fortnite in 2018.