Substack has enabled video publishing directly from within the Substack app. The move is designed to increase user engagement while helping its authors monetize, including with smartphones. Each video post can be formatted to reach subscribers instantly through email, app notifications, or both. “With millions of weekly active users and 1 million posts discovered daily, the Substack app has become the leading driver of subscriber and revenue growth for publishers building sustainable, independent businesses,” the company claims. The Substack network has also become a discovery ecosystem, helping creators find potential subscribers. Read more

A year after the commercial release of the Vision Pro mixed reality headset, Apple is making progress adding Apple Intelligence, with visionOS 2.4, available now in developer beta in English with consumer release scheduled for April. The AI boost adds Writing Tools, which allows text composition “from scratch using ChatGPT,” as well as Image Playground and the custom emoji app Genmoji. It also integrates Spatial Gallery, a new Vision Pro app for the iPhone that includes a discovery mechanism for curated 3D movies and a remote-viewable Guest Mode for mobile. Additional features and languages will be added throughout the year. Read more

Japanese camera company Sigma has announced the Sigma BF, a 24-megapixel compact with a full-frame sensor whose body is carved from a solid block of aluminum. Designed with simplification in mind, the BF features interchangeable lens and 6K video capture at up to 30p and full high definition at up to 120p. There is 230GB of internal storage but no memory card slot, and the I/O interface is reduced to a single USB-C port. “By simplifying and stripping away all excess elements, this full-frame mirrorless camera redefines the process of taking a photograph as a natural act,” the company says. Read more

Barely two weeks after the launch of its OmniHuman-1 AI model, ByteDance has released Goku, a new artificial intelligence designed to create photorealistic video featuring humanoid actors. Goku uses text prompts to create among other things, realistic product videos without the need for human actors. This last is a boon for ByteDance social media unit TikTok. Goku is open source, trained on a large dataset of roughly 36 million video-text pairs and 160 million image-text pairs. Goku’s debut is received as more bad news for OpenAI in the form of added competition, but a positive step for global enterprise. Read more

YouTube has been testing a low-priced version of its ad-free Premium tier being referred to as “Premium Lite” that is limited to podcasts and how-to clips presented largely without ads. The package is reportedly poised to launch in the United States, Australia, Germany and Thailand, with an aim toward attracting subscribers interested in content other than music videos. Pricing for the new tier has yet to be revealed. YouTube Premium currently costs $14 per month in the U.S. for ad-free viewing of all native YouTube content, including music videos. Read more