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It’s taken a couple years, but regional sports networks are starting to realize they charge too much to stream local games. NESN 360, which offers live streams of the Boston Red Sox and Bruins, just dropped its annual price from $330 to $240, while also throwing in four Red Sox tickets. Main Street Sports Group, which operates regional FanDuel Sports Network channels, has hinted at lower prices as well, and in some markets, local games stream for free or are available over-the-air with an antenna. What you’re witnessing are the first tweaks to a misguided sports streaming strategy, one that assumes high direct-to-consumer prices will discourage cord-cutting while offsetting the revenue losses linked to the decline of cable TV. That strategy hasn’t been working for regional sports networks, and it’s not going to work for the likes of ESPN and Fox, which plan to launch their own expensive streaming services later this year. A broken model The regional sports model—and live sports in general—used to be extremely lucrative. Sports networks earned per-subscriber fees from every cable customer, so they made money even from folks who never watched sports. That model’s been unraveling as more folks cancel their cable and satellite subscriptions. Most live TV streaming services don’t offer regional sports networks because they don’t bring in enough viewers to justify the cost, and those that do—namely DirecTV Stream and Fubo—relegate regional sports to more expensive tiers. Even on the cable side, Comcast has stopped offering regional sports in its base packages to keep prices down. Meanwhile, a growing proportion of cord-cutters are realizing they don’t need pay TV bundles at all. These trends have put regional sports networks in a bind. They don’t want to offer anything that would risk the easy money that still comes from cable, but they also can’t ignore their declining customer base and the growing proportion of viewers who’ve moved away from pay TV. The failed solution To address this dilemma, most regional sports networks have opted to charge excessive rates for standalone streaming. FanDuel Sports Network, for instance, only costs between $3 to $8 per month as part of a cable bundle, yet it costs $20 per month on its own. NESN’s carriage fee was a little over $5 per month as of 2021, yet NESN 360 costs $30 per month. The thinking goes that if standalone streaming is expensive enough, it’ll reach a new generation of cable-free superfans without actively encouraging more cord-cutting. Too bad the strategy isn’t working. When FanDuel Sports Network’s streaming service launched in 2022 (under the name Bally Sports+), its owners hoped it would eventually reach 4.4 million subscribers. The actual subscriber count today is only around a half-million, and now it projects to reach a less-ambitious 2.8 million subscribers by 2027. Meanwhile, the channel has lost 22 million pay TV subscribers over the past four years, and by 2027 its owners expect to lose 6 million more. The truth is that there just aren’t aren’t enough people willing to pay $20 to $30 per month for regional sports, nor are there enough people willing to keep expensive pay TV packages just to watch those channels. Like a lot of streamers, the regional sports networks have underestimated peoples’ ability to tune out. Lowering the paywall All this brings us to the news that NESN 360 is cutting the price of annual plans, from $330 to $240. The service’s monthly plan still costs $30, but the annual option will make a lot more sense for year-round Boston sports fans, especially with Red Sox tickets thrown in. Speaking to Mollie Cahillane at Sports Business Journal, NESN president David Wisnia acknowledged that it was asking too much. “Inflation is high,” he said. “There’s a saturation limit in terms of DTC [direct-to-consumer] right now, and we wanted to get into people’s homes and make it as available as we can, while balancing the financials of it and making sure it still makes sense for us.” NESN isn’t alone in changing its tune. Last month, Main Street Sports Group CEO David Preschlack told CNBC’s Alexander Sherman that the company is considering price cuts for FanDuel Sports Network as well. “We have the ability to go lower, and we’re going to test different price points, absolutely,” he said. Meanwhile, some teams are already embracing a philosophy of long-term reach over short-term subscription revenues. In Utah, a subscription to watch local Jazz games still costs $20 per month, but you can also watch for free with an antenna or your can stream individual games for $5 each. Jazz owner Ryan Smith told Sherman he’d never go back to the old model. “The more people watch, the more people come to games, the more we sell in concessions, the more money we bring in with sponsorships,” Smith said. Omens for ESPN and Fox The strategy of charging high standalone rates for sports streaming isn’t just going to be troublesome for regional sports networks. This year, both ESPN and Fox plan to launch their own standalone services. ESPN’s is rumored to cost between $25 and $30 per month, and Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch has told investors that it will intentionally charge a high price, so as not to cannibalize its pay TV business. “We don’t want, and we have no intention of, turning a traditional distribution customer into our direct-to-consumer customer,” Murdoch said. “So, our subscriber expectations will be modest, and we’re going to price the service accordingly.” Good luck with that. If sports fans are balking at $30 per month to watch their favorite teams every day or two, why would casual sports fans pay similar prices for a smattering of nationally televised games they might not even care about? Moreover, what’s even the point of offering a service whose price is intentionally unappealing? Regional sports networks are already failing at the same strategy, and the national sports networks will be next. What’s the solution? Sports streamers still have to pay astronomical costs for live sports rights, and those costs aren’t coming down anytime soon. That means direct-to-consumer streaming probably won’t get much cheaper on its own. What we’ll likely see instead is more attractive and flexible bundling. Disney and Max are already finding success bundling their non-sports streaming services together at a discount, and Disney could pursue something similar for ESPN with Fox’s streaming service. Perhaps they could also offer regional sports add-ons at lower-than-standalone rates. Instead of making everyone pay for sports, they can offer fairer pricing by putting lots of sports in one place. Sports networks have spent far too long trying to prop up traditional TV packages with little to show for it. They’d be wise to start building something better to replace it. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV insights. Read...

After more than a year out of sight, Alexa+–the new Alexa with its AI-powered revamp–took center stage at a crowded coming-out party in New York City on Wednesday, and I got a first-hand look at what this turbocharged voice assistant can do.  Following the big unveiling, we were all led to a demonstration hall with about a half-dozen break-out rooms, where we were able to see and hear—but not participate in—Alexa’s new conversational tricks, from controlling smart home devices and researching sports tickets to suggesting recipes and dialing up tunes on Amazon Prime Video.  If all that sounds like old hat, consider this: While the old Alexa requires falling back into what Amazon devices head Panos Panay rightfully described as “Alexa-speak,” the new Alexa is a far more flexible and understanding companion, capable of sussing out your intentions from the vaguest of queries, and—at least, from what I saw on Wednesday—getting it right more than it failed.   While the demonstrations we saw appeared carefully choreographed, we were frequently assured that what we were seeing and hearing was the “live” Alexa+, rather than a canned demo—and from someone who’s spent a fair amount of time with ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode, the exchanges sounded genuine.  Here are my biggest takeaways after sitting through Amazon’s Alexa+ show-and-tell, starting with… Alexa+ didn’t make many mistakes  Naturally, everyone’s waiting for the new AI-powered Alexa to bungle a command or start hallucinating, but the demos I saw on Wednesday went surprisingly smoothly.  Granted, the Amazon presenters on hand were likely sticking to a pre-arranged script, asking the same questions and issuing the same commands over and over.   Still, the questions and queries were open-ended enough to invite mistakes. Yet I witnessed only one genuine screw-up on Alexa+’s part: When asked to move a music selection to a speaker in “the office,” it instead began playing an episode of The Office on Peacock. Oops!  On a few other occasions, Alexa+ appeared to freeze when asked a question, but those pauses could be chalked up to the din of the demonstration hall (I myself had a difficult time hearing) and/or an overloaded Wi-Fi network.  Alexa+ could make controlling the smart home much easier  One of the biggest pain points when using voice assistants to control smart home devices is the dreaded, “Sorry, I don’t know which light bulb you mean,” or “I can’t help with that.” It’s gotten so bad lately that I almost never use my smart speakers for smart home control anymore, relying instead on apps, routines, or old-fashioned buttons and switches.  Alexa+ promises to get us using our smart speakers again, thanks mainly to its ability to ponder what we’re saying and then deducing what our intentions are.  For example, in one demo, Alexa+ was asked to turn on the light in the “sitting room,” an area (we were told) that hadn’t been previously defined within the smart home setup. The new Alexa turned on a lamp positioned near a sofa, correctly guessing that the light was located in a sitting area. Of course, a home might have several different potential “sitting areas” with multiple lamps next to sofas, but the demonstration does show how Alexa+ can get creative (hopefully not too creative) when it comes to understanding smart home commands.  We also saw how Alexa+ can pull up videos from your Ring history, plucking out selections based on queries like, “Show me when the kids were playing in the snow,” as well as (in a separate demo) how Alexa+ could make it way easier to move music from one smart speaker to another, cutting down on those irksome “Sorry, I don’t see a dining room speaker” flubs.   Just ask, and Alexa+ can call up clips from your Ring video history. Ben Patterson/Foundry Finally, there’s the promise of Alexa+ creating routines based on natural-language voice prompts. For example, this query: “The family is having a hard time getting ready for bed at night, can you help create a routine to solve that,” yielded this automation: “Every night at 9 p.m., Alexa will announce ‘it’s time to get ready for bed’ on all devices, then all the lights will dim to 50 percent brightness before turning off completely.” Not bad, and you can always follow up with tweaks to perfect the routine.  Alexa+ can create routines based on natural-launguage queries. Ben Patterson/Foundry It could be a game-changer in the kitchen  I’ve recently been fascinated by how generative AI can make an excellent cook’s companion, crafting recipes on the fly and making suggestions on ingredient substitutions, but Alexa+ could take those abilities to the next level.  Besides the fact that the new Alexa can operate from a kitchen smart display–a far easier setup than juggling a phone with slimy food hands—Alexa+ can remember what ingredients you have (you will need to tell it or show it what’s in your cupboard or fridge), and it can also take note of who in the family likes what, then order the proper ingredients on Amazon Fresh or another supported online grocery store (“supported” is the key word; more on that in a moment).  I also like the fact that Alexa+ sources thousands of recipes from partner publications—meaning it’s not just scraping recipes off the web and then concocting its own versions (with sometimes questionable results).  It can be a little too chatty  Similar to the classic Alexa, the new AI Alexa can be something of a motor mouth, nattering on excitedly about how it “loves” that song you picked, praising you for “hitting the nail on the head,” opining that a certain TV show is the “perfect antidote to the Sunday blues,” and so on.  Such verbal flourishes will be familiar to anyone who’s chatted with ChatGPT in Advanced Voice Mode, and the sycophantic buttering-up gets tiresome after awhile. I can certainly imagine times when I’d want Alexa+ to simply tee up a playlist without the asides.  Luckily, I was told that it will be possible to tone down Alexa+’s responses with a prompt like, “Simpler please.”  Alexa+ works the best with Amazon partners The amount of tasks that Alexa+ can actually do, from teeing up music tracks to booking dinner reservations, scheduling events and service appointments is impressive, and stands in contrast to how ChatGPT and Google Gemini are still fairly isolated within their respective chatboxes. (Gemini is taking its first steps in the smart home via extensions in the Gemini app.)  But many of Alexa+’s abilities are tied to service providers that have already partnered with Amazon. So, you can book a carpet cleaning appointment thanks to Alexa’s integration with Thumbtack, you can’t book an annual checkup through ZocDoc, which hasn’t teamed up with Amazon–at least not yet.  And while Alexa+ will be able to order groceries from Amazon services like Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods, it probably won’t be much help for a FreshDirect customer like me (or at least not until FreshDirect forges an alliance with Amazon).  Many of Alexa+’s coolest abilities are tied to those services that have partnered with Amazon.Ben Patterson/Foundry You’ll need to trust Alexa+ with an awful lot of personal info  Some of the most impressive demos during Wednesday’s unveiling involved Alexa+’s abilities to absorb lengthy documents—including personal ones—which it can then summarize and answer questions about. In one example, the new Alexa poured over a complex homeowners association agreement, explaining the various rules and plucking out key details.  Alexa+ can also remember personal preferences, such as favorite restaurants, who your best friends are, what music genres you favor, and so on. The more Alexa+ knows about you, the more powerful it gets as a personal assistant.  But as with the “classic” Alexa, privacy will surely be a thorny issue with Alexa+, and one should probably think twice before allowing the AI to scour sensitive documents like health or financial records.  For its part, Amazon says the new Alexa is designed to “protect [the] privacy and security” of its customers, while providing “transparency and control.” Amazon also notes that it will “centralize” privacy controls, while promising “world-class privacy and security protection” through the “secure infrastructure” of Amazon Web Services.  Echo display owners will get first dibs on Alexa+  The new Alexa will work on “almost all” existing Echo devices, including the diminutive Echo Dot, I’m told. (Some of the “earliest” Amazon smart speakers won’t work with Alexa+, including the first-generations of the Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Plus.)  That said, you’ll need to be the owner of an Echo Show display to get first dibs on the new Alexa. Amazon is rolling out Alexa+ in phases (starting in the “coming weeks”), and owners of Echo devices with displays—including the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21—will get access first. If you do become an early Alexa+ user, the new assistant will work across all your compatible Echo devices, including speaker-only products like the Echo Dot.  [Further reading: These are the best smart speakers and displays] Alexa+ will be a great Prime perk  Once the free early access period is up, Amazon will charge $19.99 a month for Alexa+. “Ouch,” I initially thought, but that wasn’t the full story.  As it turns out, Alexa+ will be free for Prime members, making the new Alexa the latest Prime benefit. That’s terrific news for those (many) of us already shelling out for Prime, and thus making it far more likely that a lapsed Alexa user like me will give the new AI-enhanced version a go. Read...

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If you’ve had it up to here with dumb responses from Alexa, get ready for a big change.  At a glitzy event in New York City on Wednesday, Amazon unveiled–again–its AI-enhanced and “completely re-architectured” Alexa, and we’ll all soon have a chance to kick the tires ourselves. Starting next month, Amazon will kick off a public preview for the new Alexa, which it’s calling Alexa+. The public preview will begin gradually, with more users gradually being added to the group. This news is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart speakers. The revamped Alexa will indeed cost extra: think $19.99 a month, in line with paid “plus” memberships for ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. That said, Alexa+ will be free for Amazon Prime members. Amazon has previously promised that “classic” Alexa would remain available for free, but there was no mention of that during today’s presentation. Ben Patterson/Foundry The new AI-enhanced Alexa (which will offer new phone and web apps) will have a variety of tricks up its sleeve, including “agentic” abilities (autonomous AI is the new hotness in artificial intelligence). For example, Amazon says Alexa+ will be able to go shopping, book travel tickets, text contacts, suggest recipes, and fine-tune your smart home routines, weaving all those tasks within a single interaction. Most importantly, the revamped Alexa will be able to “reason and take action,” such as following up on conversations to set reminders. During a demo, Amazon devices head Panos Panay chatted with Alexa+, carrying on an animated conversation reminiscent of ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode. The new Alexa also showed off its multimodal capabilities by “looking” at a live video feed of the assembled audience at the presentation, and then describing the scene, the size of the crowd, and the “wowed” reaction. Panay said Alexa+ will be able to create routines based on natural language prompts. He also showed how the new Alexa could pluck the music track “Shallow,” from the A Star is Born soundtrack, off Amazon Music in response to a vaguely worded query, and then asked Alexa to “jump to that scene” in the movie streamed on Amazon Prime Video. (It worked.) Showing off a new Alexa Ring integration, Panay asked Alexa+ “what’s happening at my house,” and Alexa promptly put up a live feed of a Ring security camera on the screen, accurately describing it what was happening. Other notable smart home and home entertainment integrations include Wyze, iRobot, Govee, Shark, Sonos, and Vizio. With Alexa+, “there’s no more Alexa speak,” Panay promised. We also got a peek at the Alexa+ user interface, including a new “expressive” blue animation that will replace the classic Alexa blue line) that changes shape as you talk. Other features including the ability to share lengthy documents with Alexa+, which the AI can remember, analyze, and summarize. (Experienced LLM users will be familiar with such “RAG” functionality.) The new Alexa can also do things like add calendar events based on information in the files shared with it. Amazon also promised new Alexa+ features for children, showing a video of the new assistant telling on-the-fly stories and otherwise engaging with the tykes. We also saw Alexa+ answering questions about sports and other current events. Ben Patterson/Foundry Daniel Rausch, vice president of Amazon’s Alexa and Echo divisions, explained how Alexa+ is powered using a mixture of models from Amazon and Anthropic. Alexa+ can also switch models in the background depending on the task at hand, Rausch said. We’ll still getting the scoop on Alexa’s new AI-infused abilities, so stand by for more details on that score; plus, my hands-on impressions.  Amazon first showed off the new Alexa during its September 2023 hardware event, and at the time it promised a public preview “early” in 2024.  Instead, the year came and went without a public beta for the revamped Alexa. What we did get were insider accounts of a hallucination-prone Alexa that gave lengthy and frequently inaccurate answers, while also having trouble with basic smart home capabilities.  Of course, those AI-related troubles aren’t unique to Amazon. Google has taken a careful approach when it comes to allowing Gemini to interact with smart devices, while Apple has yet to open its Home app to Apple Intelligence. Read...

One of my tech dilemmas is that I’ve somehow accumulated a disparate group of laptops with integrated GPUs. That means they’re great to write on but when it comes to graphics processing power — without using expletives — let’s just say they can’t play any big-name PC games. My work laptop, for example, can handle just about any work app or program I need to run and is as compact and portable as heck, but will it let me potter for even a minute in Bethesda’s Starfield? Nope — not a chance. That just means swapping hats on articles from tech pieces to gaming pieces for PCWorld is a little more cumbersome than it needs be. I need to also swap devices, or else I’m relegated to testing only pixilated indie games (not that I don’t love playing pixilated indie games — I’m really looking forward to the release of Cattle Country on Steam, by the way). But it would be nice to have a laptop that can do it all. Alas, Asus has thrown me a lifeline with the 2025 Asus ROG Flow Z13, which will, when I get my mitts on one, conveniently make that problem go away. Its specs, when they were revealed at CES 2025, really surprised me for one reason: It didn’t have a dedicated GPU listed. That makes it very different. To be honest, previous year’s ROG Flow Z13 iterations haven’t blown me away. Not because they weren’t well-built, but because they have occupied a dubious gray area of performance, being less powerful than most fully fledged gaming laptops. That’s despite the configurations having their own dGPUs and being fairly expensive. But the 2025 ROG Flow Z13 is inexorably more powerful than any model that has come before it, and that’s with no dGPU. What makes it so special is its AMD Ryzen AI Max processor, the top model of which integrates a Radeon 8060S GPU consisting of 40 — yes, 40! — RDNA 3.5 GPU cores. This APU comes under the banner of AMD’s Strix Halo laptop hardware, which includes the AMD Ryzen AI Max platform announced earlier this year and shown off by AMD at CES 2025. In case you missed it, AMD Ryzen AI Max is designed to be a unified computing solution for both CPU power and integrated graphics performance. In the top-tier 2025 ROG Flow Z13 model, that power is obvious — along with a huge iGPU, its Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chiplet boasts 16 AMD Zen 5 cores and 32 threads with a maximum boost clock of 5.1GHz. So there’s serious compute power there for the taking. The chip feeds an impressive 128GB of LPDDR5X RAM running at 8,000Hz too. The fact that there’s no dGPU means it has killer portability. Yes, it’s a compact 13-inch size, which isn’t anything to rave about in itself, but Asus has also managed to keep the weight down to just 2.65 pounds (1.2kg) and achieved a maximum thickness of just 0.47 inches (12mm). It makes any alternative gaming laptop look like a chunky, heavy, overwrought beast. Sounds great, but what’s the catch? So, what’s the catch? Surely it must compromise on GPU power, considering it has no dGPU, right? No, in fact it doesn’t. Graphically it’s more than a match for most rivals, poised to shred in triple-A games. Graphics folks are already comparing its chip’s graphics performance to mid-range Nvidia RTX 4070 GPUs and claiming it has a 2.5- to 3x boost in performance over Nivida dGPUs paired with AMD Strix Point processors, which is very solid performance for a processor/laptop with only an iGPU, if you ask me. Furthermore, AMD claims it has demonstrated 1.4x faster gaming performance than Intel’s flagship Lunar Lake Core Ultra 9 288V processor, and 84 percent quicker rendering than the Apple MacBook M4 Pro. On the power side the ROG Flow Z13 can draw to a maximum 120W TDP, so there’s more than enough grunt available too. Asus Indeed, at the Asus booth at CES 2025, the ROG Flow Z13 had no issues playing Black Myth: Wukong, on its 2.5K, 180Hz display, which is a very promising sign. Okay, so granted it can shred in games and is portable, there must be something else we can catch this laptop out on, right? Admittedly, I do have a few lingering questions… Being a unified CPU / graphics solution, Strix Halo represents a kind of U-turn from previous AMD mobile processor platforms not just because the AMD Ryzen AI Max has an integrated GPU. Looking at the stats charts it has a noticeable CPU processing advantage over AMD Strix Point, but it’s likely less power efficient (since it lacks scaled-down AMD Zen5c cores). That did get me thinking about the Z13’s battery life and also performance when power levels are lowered; Strix Point holds its own very well at lower power levels. Still, initial reviews say the ROG Flow Z13’s battery life, in the very least, is quite good, lasting more than 10 hours (for lighter tasks. Battery life for gaming will be less than that.). Asus I’ve had slight concerns about its cooling too, considering the 120W maximum TDP (that’s a lot of power in a thin and lightweight laptop). But those too, for now at least, have mostly been abated, based on the list of the Z13’s cooling apparatus. Asus has incorporated a specially designed vapor chamber and air vents that direct air behind the touchscreen. It also sports second-generation Arc Flow fans with 0.1mm fins to circulate air. So, trusting that those things work as they should, this laptop sounds like quite the package. Not only is it extremely lightweight and thin and therefore portable, but it’s stacked with CPU power and, more importantly, GPU power (sans a dGPU), and without the chunkiness of a gaming laptop. Of course, I’m looking forward to reading more reviews when they become available to get a better handle on the points I made about cooling and efficiency. Right now, though, my intention to get one of these laptops is unshakable. Further reading: The best gaming laptops Read...

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