YouTube is launching new features to help creators make the most of exposure on TV screens. “The living room is increasingly the new prime time for creators,” according to YouTube, which claims that “in the last year, the number of YouTube channels earning six figures or more in revenue from TV screens is up by over 45 percent.” To support that momentum, the Google-owned streaming platform is providing creators with “five new ways to make their content look incredible while making it easier for viewers to discover and shop.” YouTube is introducing AI-powered upscaling, improved search functionality, and QR codes to enable shopping for items in tagged videos. Read more

Cloud Streaming for the Sony PlayStation Portal portable gaming device has officially launched this month after a year in beta testing. PlayStation Plus Premium members can now play “a massively expanded selection of PS5 Games” on the wireless handheld unit without the need to connect to the PS5 console through Remote Play. Sony has retooled the home screen, adding three tabs dedicated to the different modes: Remote Play, Cloud Streaming and Search. Cloud Streaming “makes it easier to enjoy PS5 games on the go” anywhere with a high-speed Wi-Fi connection, playing even when the PS5 console at home is powered off or is in use by another account, according to Sony. Read more

Hyperscalers are gobbling up land for AI data centers and now Google is mapping out property in space. Known as Project Suncatcher, the plan is to launch solar-powered networks of orbiting Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) — Google’s custom-developed machine learning accelerator chips — connected by free-space optical links. Apparently, Google feels that deploying high-performance TPUs in space would not be that different from the satellites that relay Internet communications from orbit. A big advantage over Earth-based AI factories is proximity to the sun, which emits “more power than 100 trillion times humanity’s total electricity production,” per Google. Read more

Disney+ will start streaming content in HDR10+ on Samsung TVs, the world’s top-selling brand. Initially, the HDR10+ support will include about 1,000 titles from Hulu, the streaming platform The Walt Disney Company acquired in full in June. The announcement, via Samsung, indicates additional Disney+ programming will stream in HDR10+ “in the future.” Disney+ had previously only supported Dolby Vision HDR and HDR10. HDR10+ improves on its predecessor by adding dynamic metadata, which allows brightness and color to be optimized on a scene-by-scene or even frame-by-frame basis, approximating more closely the creator’s intent. Read more

OpenAI has entered into a $38 billion cloud computing deal with AWS in a deal set to extend at least seven years, the hyperscaler says. The Monday news propelled Amazon stock to an all-time high of $254 per share, up 4 percent at close. After initially working exclusively with investor Microsoft for cloud services, OpenAI has negotiated expansively to meet increased demand. This year, the startup has signed with Oracle, Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom for storage and processing power as well as funding for data center construction plans of its own, here and abroad. The strategic alliance with AWS marks OpenAI’s first such arrangement with Amazon. Read more