MLS Season Pass on Apple TV is dropping its price to account for the fact that about half of the season is now over. The 2023 pass subscription is now available for $49 (down from $99), with an additional $10 discount for Apple TV+ subscribers. The monthly subscription price is unchanged. Although Apple does not release viewership figures, Apple SVP of services Eddy Cue commented this week that MLS Season Pass had exceeded its own expectations and doing “much better than forecasted” in terms of both subscription and viewership numbers. more… The post MLS Season Pass drops price for midseason, Apple says service uptake beat its own expectations appeared first on 9to5Mac.

New figures from the UK's television ratings service says while most other streaming services saw small declines, Apple TV+ had a slight growth in the country.In June 2022, the UK's Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB) put the number of UK homes with access to streaming services at 19.57 million. Now the latest BARB figures show that overall streaming access has declined to 19.08 million homes.Surveying the change in streaming access between Q4 2022 and Q1 2023, BARB says that only Apple TV+ and UK-only NOW TV avoided a decline. Read more...

Chief executive officers of some of the leading companies in artificial intelligence, including OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind, and Anthropic, have joined a growing chorus of leaders warning about the potential risk of extinction the fast-developing technology. Jackie Davalos for Bloomberg News: A brief statement released Tuesday by the the nonprofit Center for AI Safety said, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The statement was signed by more than 350 executives and researchers including Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, Demis Hassabis, who heads DeepMind and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, a startup co-founded by OpenAI veterans. In March, more than 1,100…

New ratings research says that Apple TV+ hit "Ted Lasso" reached a series high with viewers in April, with season three landing in the Nielsen streaming top ten."Ted Lasso"As the comedy's third and final season approaches its end, viewing figures for the end of April 2023 have now been released by the Nielsen ratings company. According to Variety, for the week of April 24, 2023, to April 30, 2023, "Ted Lasso" came sixth with nearly 800 million minutes viewed. Read more...

Mimestream is what happens when you mix Gmail and Apple Mail. | Image: Mimestream The most important thing I can tell you about Mimestream, the email app for Mac that just came out of a yearslong beta, is that it finally made me stop going to Gmail.com. I’ve tried a lot of email apps over the years, and they all have at least one fatal flaw. (Some have several.) Search is the most common culprit: very few apps can search through messages as fast or as well as Gmail, which is why I’ve dumped everything from Spark to Edison to Apple Mail to Newton over the years. But some apps have a hard time finding contacts, others do weird stuff…

Cue the lightsaber noises. | Image: EA Today, in sales figures that should surprise no one: Star Wars Jedi: Survivor became April’s bestselling video game within two days of release. And if you’re a PC gamer who has yet to play Respawn’s excellent follow-up to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, you can pick up a digital copy on the Epic Games Store for $52.49 (about $18 off) as part of Epic’s ongoing Mega sale, which runs until June 15th. We praised the game in our review, namely for the way the Star Wars title builds upon the original without completely rejiggering what made the first game such a joy. The puzzles, frantic lightsaber battles, and Force antics are still there,…