You would be surprised but in the US DVDs are still king. They sell far better than regular BluRays and even better than 4K UHD BRs. So saying it’s dead is difficult.
As a ripper myself for one of the internal groups, both DVDs and Blu rays have this annoying thing where they include the subtitles in image format (PGS for BRs, forgot what the DVD one was). It’s a headache for the rippers and encoders because we then need to OCR the subtitles for the encodes we put out there. Sometimes if we get lucky the movie is on a streaming platform making this process obsolete as we grab the .vtt files from the streaming service and sync it with the BR we’re making (as well as transforming it to .srt) . My only assumption as to why MPAA decided on image format subs for both DVDs and BRs is because it makes it easy to deal with different languages and the likes, you just display a static image and fk everything else. But for the people putting out quality releases if we ship PGS that means we’re just doing a bad job.
Eh, not really. I buy Apple because I’ve had 3 Android phones crap out on me literally days after their warranty died. I got tired of that shit, I paid a bit more and got myself an iPhone 13. It still works as good as it did on the first day. While I do know that Apple devices have a set death day (when they stop getting security updates), I believe I generate far less e-waste by buying 1 iPhone every 7 or 8 years instead of buying a brand new Android every year.
As far as Fortnite goes, I don’t care for the game itself, but I am happy that they fought Apple in court and gave developers the freedom to implement third party IAP, albeit I have no use for it as I only use my phone for phone calls and messaging and the occasional web browsing.
There’s too much bad blood for either side to trust another with political power. Even if they dropped their arms tomorrow, one state solution wouldn’t happen, at the very least not in the nearby time.
They’re not gonna do anything about it for the same reason any other litigious company hasn’t done anything thus far. They’re looking to benefit from AI by cutting costs. If the tech wasn’t beneficiary to these big tech conglomerates they would’ve already sued their asses to oblivion, but since they do care they’ll let AI train on their copyrighted material.
Big knives are up to something