Hulu has officially changed the name of its paid tier as part of a branding update meant to help streamline its service. The $8 per month subscription tier is now simply called Hulu, rather than Hulu Plus. The company will still offer a free tier under the same name. Hulu hopes the change will help it compete with streaming leader Netflix. “While the change in name comes with no other changes to the platform, it comes at a time when things are looking up for the service,” Digital Trends points out. “Paid subscriptions are up 50 percent over last year, according to CEO Mike Hopkins, and video streams in the first three months of 2015 were already up 77 percent.”

Getty Images announced that its premium 360-degree imagery — from the Cannes Film Festival to the FIFA World Cup — would be made available for the Oculus VR platform. “The 360° View by Getty Images collection will offer a deeply engaging virtual reality experience of enchanting creative stills, alongside some of the world’s biggest moments in news, sports and entertainment,” notes the press release. The collection is currently available in the Oculus 360 Photos app on the Oculus Store, and will offer streaming content for the Oculus Rift when it launches Q1 2016. It can already be experienced with the Gear VR Innovator Edition for the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy S6.

IBM has designed a new website for the Wimbledon tennis tournament, which begins in London on June 29. The site will feature Slamtracker, a predictive analytics dashboard that provides real-time stats and game play analysis such as the speed of serves and number of winning shots. “Slamtracker also mines data from past Grand Slam tournaments to give competitors’ historical head-to-head match-ups, as well as determining what each player must do well to win the match based on their previous clashes,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “IBM’s data analysis tools will pinpoint historical records in near real-time to Wimbledon staff, who will then post the content on social networks.”

Intel has purchased Vancouver-based Recon Instruments with plans to integrate it into its New Devices Group. Recon is known for its high-tech eyewear designed for sports enthusiasts. Recon’s Jet glasses, for example, feature a video camera and the ability to project inside the lens info such as the distance and time of a run or bicycle ride. “Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, who took the job in May 2013, has vowed not to miss opportunities in wearable technology the way Intel fell behind in chips for smartphones,” reports The Wall Street Journal. Recon will continue selling its products from within Intel. “We’ll be able to bring our technology and innovation to completely new markets and use cases where activity-specific information, delivered instantly, can change the game,” wrote Recon CEO Dan Eisenhardt.

Tech companies including Adobe, Apple, Dropbox, Sonic.net and Yahoo earned top ratings in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s annual report on data collection practices, while others such as WhatsApp and AT&T landed at the bottom. The report analyzes how companies handle government requests for customer data. The companies are evaluated “based on factors including their transparency to consumers about data requests and data retention, as well as their public positions on so-called back doors that grant government agencies access to customer data,” reports The New York Times. The EFF’s latest report suggests that tech companies are generally improving in this area.

At this week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, the first new versions in five years of music-based videogames “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” were on display. “Guitar Hero Live” by Activision Blizzard offers the opportunity to play in front of crowds that react to the performance. “Rock Band 4,” by Harmonix and Mad Catz Interactive, focuses more on the guitar solos. “Both are attempting to revive a business that seemed dead in 2010 after the market was bombarded with more than 20 games between the two franchises, plus plenty more knock-offs, in a span of just five years,” suggests The Wall Street Journal. “The big question is whether the original music-game model is dead or finally ready for a comeback.”

Google-owned Nest plans to start shipping a new plug-and-play, Wi-Fi security camera next week. The $199 Nest Cam is the first security product to result from Nest’s purchase of Dropcam last summer. The Nest Cam is physically reminiscent of the last Dropcam (although a bit slimmer), features infrared LEDs for night vision, and has been upgraded from 720p to 1080p. “The Nest Cam uses a cloud-based DVR to store video,” explains TechCrunch. “If you want to record and store video (rather than just stream it) you’re looking at paying $100-$300 a year on top of the cost of the device. 10-days of video archiving will cost $10 a month; 30-days of archiving will cost $30 a month.”

Japanese telecommunications corporation SoftBank and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group plan to start selling a robot called Pepper on June 20. The $1,600 robots will be manufactured by Foxconn Technology Group of Taiwan. Alibaba and Foxconn are investing for 20 percent stakes each in the joint venture, while SoftBank will hold 60 percent. SoftBank envisions Pepper “as a companion for the elderly, a teacher of schoolchildren and an assistant in retail shops and offices,” notes The Wall Street Journal. Originally designed by Aldebaran Robotics, a French subsidiary of SoftBank, Pepper can read body language, human voices and facial expressions. There are already about 200 free apps for the robot.

Fox Sports and NextVR plan to demo live streaming of virtual reality coverage during the U.S. Open golf championship. “At the tournament’s VIP tents, approximately 100-300 visitors daily will have the opportunity to view the live stream of what Fox Sports believes might be the first live VR experience with multi-camera coverage,” writes Carolyn Giardina for The Hollywood Reporter. “Five spherical camera rigs will be placed at vantage points around the course in order to allow fans to visit these sites in real-time.” The experience will also be live-streamed to Fox Sports locations in Los Angeles, New York and Vancouver. The NextVR portal will feature highlights for Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR users.

AOL Rise programming, part of AOL’s Content 365 strategy, consists of 90-second live clips with host Mari White that offer highlights on the hour related to finance, lifestyle, music, news, sports and weather. In a “morning rituals” study, AOL learned that “85 percent of consumers use their smartphone before getting out of bed,” reports VideoEdge. “Rise was built so that it is optimized for mobile consumption, making it short and easy to follow on the go,” said Osnat Benari, head of product for AOL On. “From a technical perspective, we rely on the AOL On video platform and capabilities so it can be played across all devices — Web, mobile and even over the top.”

A team of Burbank-based software engineers has been working to bridge the gap between filmmakers in the U.S. and China by developing a Chinese-language version of screenwriting, budgeting and scheduling software commonly used in Hollywood. The Write Brothers — the original creators of Movie Magic software — “have partnered with a Chinese production and financing company, Kylin-Mandarin Entertainment, to create the new Chinese-language software package, called Movie Dreams,” reports the Los Angeles Times. The new cloud-based product, unveiled at the Shanghai International Film Festival, is designed to create more efficiency and compatibility for film production.

KXMZ-FM in Rapid City, South Dakota is a traditional small town radio station in every sense other than it is now owned by Pandora Media, the world’s largest Internet radio company. Pandora acquired KXMZ for $600,000 in order to pay the lower royalty rates assigned to radio station owners (such as iHeartMedia). “Pandora is headed into uncharted territory,” said Matthew Schettenhelm, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst. “But there’s no legal reason that other entities like Apple or Spotify couldn’t try to do the same.” The move is the latest in an ongoing royalty battle between music creators and Internet companies, notes Bloomberg, and will likely trigger additional litigation.

Indiana University Athletics received a $5 million gift from IU alumnus Mark Cuban — owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theatres and Magnolia Pictures — to build a video broadcasting center with a focus on 3D broadcast, virtual reality and 3D virtual studio technologies. The Mark Cuban Centre for Sports Media and Technology is slated to open in the spring of 2017. According to Rapid TV News, “IU students will produce a wide variety of media content for IU Athletics, including virtual-reality videos for fan experience, athlete instruction, recruiting videos and social media, as well as video-board displays, team-specific shows and live event broadcasts for all 24 IU sports.”

Twitter is taking on Google and Facebook, today’s leaders in online video advertising, with the introduction of ads that play automatically in users’ timelines. The new function will also apply to GIFs and Vine videos. “When users scroll through their Twitter feeds and see a video, it will begin to automatically play while muted,” The Wall Street Journal explains. “Clicking on the video will play it in its entirety in the full-screen viewer with sound. Think Facebook-style video, as opposed to the model that requires a click to start playing.” Since video ads command higher rates than display ads, the auto-play feature represents a much-needed financial opportunity for Twitter.

ViewSonic plans to debut new 1080p projectors this August that feature SuperColor tech for enhanced brightness and color accuracy. The LightStream Full HD projectors, which will run a suggested $943-$1,174, offer a brightness range of 3200-3500 lumens. The projectors also feature SonicExpert audio tech that enables a wider frequency range and less distortion. According to TWICE, “The projectors display 3D images from 3D Blu-ray players, feature two HDMI ports, and offer a variety of other in/outs, including RGB, composite, mini USB, USB, and audio in/out.” The models also include the option to wirelessly stream multimedia content.