Amazon Fire TV Adds Local News In 12 U.S. Cities, With 90 More Coming In 2021

At the end of a record-setting year of news consumption, Amazon Fire TV said local TV stations in 12 U.S. cities will be added to Amazon’s news app, with another 90 on deck for 2021. From a report: The initial dozen stations are in New York, LA, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Tampa, Boston, San Francisco and Seattle. The roster…

From RealPlayer To Toshiba, Tech Companies Cash in on the Facial Recognition Gold Rush

At least 45 companies now advertise real-time facial recognition. From a report: More than a decade before Spotify, and years before iTunes, there was RealPlayer, the first mainstream solution to playing and streaming media to a PC. Launched in 1995, within five years RealPlayer claimed a staggering 95 million users. […] RealPlayer is still very much alive. Now called RealNetworks, a…

What Are the Best Free Streaming Services?

An anonymous reader shares some free streaming media options: There’s over 10,000 public domain audiobooks at LibriVox.org, created by volunteers reading public domain works. (If you’ve got time, why not record yourself reading your own favorite public domain poem or novel?) And there’s also a lot of free audiobooks (and ebooks) available through Hoopla, a free “digital media” service that’s partnering…