Friday’s top tech news: 1080p but better

Illustration by Alex Castro / The VergePlus LumaFusion comes to Android and ChromeOS, and PlayStation holds another trailer showcase. Continue reading…

Lynk Lynk
Feb 24, 2023 - 21:02
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Friday’s top tech news: 1080p but better

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Plus LumaFusion comes to Android and ChromeOS, and PlayStation holds another trailer showcase.

YouTube is testing another perk for its Premium subscribers that offers a higher bitrate than existing 1080p streams. The option, named “1080p Premium,” is currently in testing for a small number of users, and appears to boost the bitrate of video streams by a couple of Mbps. It could be a neat option for subscribers who watch primarily on smartphones, where 1080p-resolution displays are far more common than 4K.

And speaking of video bitrates, the popular LumaFusion video editing software is now widely available on Android and ChromeOS, after previously being available for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Finally, if you missed PlayStation’s State of Play yesterday, my colleague Ash Parrish has a great roundup of the most interesting trailers. Personally I’m most excited by Baldur’s Gate 3 finally getting an official release date: August 31st. It previously had a vaguer “August 2023” release window.

And now, here’s a silly tweet to start your day:

Stay tuned, as we continue to update this list with the most important news of today: Friday, February 24th, 2023.

Remember Ozy Media, the company with splashy New York events, star guests, high-profile writers, and no readers?

Its 2021 shutdown followed this NYT article (called a “hit job” at the time by founder and CEO Carlos Watson) exposing the whole thing as a sham, reporting COO Samir Rao pretended to be a YouTube executive while on a call with potential investors.

Now Rao has pleaded guilty while Watson has been arrested, with prosecutors calling him a con man whose lies didn’t stop there:

Watson directed Ozy’s then-Chief Financial Officer (CFO) to send the bank a fake signed contract between Ozy and the cable network purporting to be for the second season. When the then-CFO refused, Rao, with Watson’s approval, sent the fake contract — which contained terms favorable to Ozy and a forged signature — to the bank, copying the then-CFO. 

Later that day, the then-CFO emailed Watson and Rao to say that she was resigning effective immediately. She explained, “this . . . is illegal. This is fraud. This is forging someone’s signature with the intent of getting an advance from a publicly traded bank.” She continued, “To be crystal clear, what you see as a measured risk — I see as a felony.”


Meta’s next big round of layoffs are coming.

From the newest edition of my Command Line newsletter, which just hit inboxes for paid subscribers:

Meta is planning another round of layoffs, I can unfortunately confirm. Leadership has been coy both internally and externally about what is coming, but I’m told that the current plan is to announce more cuts in March after last year’s performance bonuses are paid out. Given what I’ve heard about plans to cut certain orgs by double-digit percentages, I wouldn’t be surprised if the total number is somewhere in the ballpark of the last layoff, which was about 11,000 people or 13 percent of the company.