YouTube has added new features to its apps for mobile, Web and TV, including expanded controls for playback speeds, badges, a miniplayer redesign, and the ability to create collaborative playlists. The company is also debuting an authenticity tool. By affixing a “captured with a camera” label, creators can indicate their work is shot with an actual camera, with unaltered visual and audio. Among the general platform improvements that YouTube implements annually, users can now share playlists via link or QR code, and create custom thumbnails for those lists, either by uploading an image or generating one with AI. Read more

Amazon has launched a new Fire TV Stick HD, supplanting the Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick Lite as its entry level television device. Priced at $34.99 the black stick plugs into the HDMI port at the back or side of most TVs. A micro USB cable and power plug are included. The Fire TV Stick HD streams at up to 1080p HD and also supports HDR, HDR 10, HDR10+ and HLG. While the new device does not feature support for Dolby Vision or Dolby Atmos, its HDMI port will support Dolby-encoded audio. The platform streamlines access to all major streaming services, which of course require independent subscriptions. Read more

Streaming media giant Netflix continues to post strong revenue growth, with a 15 percent increase to $9.83 billion in Q3, year-over-year. Net income hit $2.36 billion, a 41 percent increase over the same period last year, though the company is forecasting a Q4 dip, to $1.85 billion. Operating margin was up 30 percent (versus 22 percent during the same period last year). Ad-tier memberships increased by 35 percent for the quarter. Overall, global streaming paid subscriptions are up 14.4 percent in the third quarter, for a total of 282.72 million. Read more

Nvidia has debuted a new AI model, Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct, that it claims is outperforming competitors GPT-4o from OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The impressive showing has prompted speculation of an AI shakeup and a significant shift in Nividia’s AI strategy, which has thus far been focused primarily on chipmaking. The model was quietly released on Hugging Face, and Nvidia says as of October 1 it ranked first on three top automatic alignment benchmarks, “edging out strong frontier models” and vaulting Nvidia to the forefront of the LLM field in areas like comprehension, context and generation. Read more

Apple is giving bands the opportunity to turn their concert repertoires into Apple Music playlists with the Set List feature, which lets fans savor the live concert experience. Powered by Bandsintown, Set List enables artists to turn the songs from a single show, residency or tour into a playlist that in addition to being shared on Apple Music can be displayed on music app Shazam (Artist and Concert pages). Once a Set List is published, artists can use the Promote feature from the web or the Artists app on iOS to share the playlist with fans on social media. Read more