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Sports Helping Propel ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV to New Heights

After five years of spadework, ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV is ready for its close-up with the fall football season and growing HDR interest across the sports world. The August 23 NFL preseason game between New Orleans Saints and Denver Broncos was an inflection point, the first time a local U.S. broadcaster delivered an over-the-air show in native HDR from “glass to glass” — camera lenses to NextGen TV home screens. Now the NextGen coalition Pearl TV is gearing up for a marketing push to promote the benefits of HDR in the lead-up to the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Read more

Google Adds Gemini AI Assistant to Chrome Browser in U.S.

Google is rolling out “Gemini in Chrome” to U.S. Mac and Windows desktop users. Business users will get it in the weeks to come, as will Android and iOS mobile devices. The immediate change integrates “Google AI into Chrome across multiple levels so it can better anticipate your needs, help you understand more complex information, and make you more productive when you browse the web.” There are a number of safety features that leverage AI to combat scams and handle things like automatic password resets. And Gemini in Chrome will soon be able to recall websites previously visited without requiring you to scroll through your browsing history. An agentic browsing assistant is also in the works. Read more

‘Europa’: ETC Teams Up with AWS on Cloud-First Production

Sci-fi short “Europa,” written and directed by Jacqueline Elyse Rosenthal, is the Entertainment Technology Center’s latest project to test the expanding possibilities of virtual production and remote collaboration. To call “Europa” a cloud-first production is to rethink filmmaking from the ground up. This wasn’t just a distributed team working online — it was an ecosystem where every workflow, from previs to final VFX, operated entirely in the cloud. It wasn’t a workaround; it was the foundation. And powering that foundation — every tool, every task, every decision — was AWS. Read more

Nvidia Invests $5 Billion in Intel with Plans for AI Infrastructure

Nvidia is investing $5 billion in Intel via a common stock purchase at $23.28 per share, which translates to about a 4 percent stake. The companies plan to collaborate across multiple projects, developing custom data center and PC products to accelerate applications and workloads across the hyperscale, enterprise and consumer markets. Nvidia’s NVLink will be used to connect the architectures, integrating Nvidia’s GPUs with Intel’s CPU technologies. For data centers, Intel will customize x86 CPUs that Nvidia can integrate into its AI platforms. Intel also plans to build x86 SOCs that integrate Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets for PCs. Read more

Microsoft Details $7 Billion Future of Wisconsin AI Data Center

Microsoft is in the final phases of building the $3.3 billion Wisconsin facility it says will be the most powerful AI data center in the world when it comes online in early 2026 to train the next decade of artificial intelligence models. The software giant has already begun staffing the operation and is already planning further expansion, with another $4 billion to be spent in the next three years to build a second data center of similar size and scale — bringing the total investment in Wisconsin to more than $7 billion. Located in Mount Pleasant, the nearly completed facility will be the first in what Microsoft is calling its Fairwater family of hyperscale data centers. Read more

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