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Roku looks to be seriously tightening its pursestrings. The company’s laying off a full ten percent of its workforce, over 300 employees, in addition to a conducting a number of other cost-cutting measures, as reported by Variety. These job cuts are just the beginning, as Roku’s also removing streaming content, consolidating office space and reducing outside service expenses. The goal here is a major reduction in the year-over-year operating expense growth rate.

The company hasn’t announced which content it would be removing from its various streaming platforms and whether or not these cuts would be culled from third-party providers or from in-house projects like the recently-released Weird Al biopic. Roku’s so serious about these cuts that it’s willing to pony up $65 million for impairment charges after deleting this content, according to an SEC filing. Additionally, the company’s planning on forking over $45 million to $65 million to supply outgoing employees with severance benefits and up to $200 million for abandoning office space. 

The stock market, as usual, loved the layoffs and related austerity measures, with Roku’s stock rising nine percent in the wake of this news, before settling down to a more modest increase of around four percent. As of this writing, the stock price is still fluctuating.

This is Roku’s third round of job cuts in less than a year. Back in November, it laid off 200 staffers, with 200 more let go in March of this year. That’s a grand total of 700 pink slips, representing around 25 percent of the total workforce. As expected, the company also announced that it’s holding off on new hires for the time being.

After this round of restructuring and affiliated impairment charges, Roku hopes for an increase in Q3 net revenue to $835 to $875 million, with adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) in the negative $20 million range, up from negative $40 million. However, even Roku admits these figures are uncertain, noting in a Q2 letter to shareholders that the “macro environment continued to create uncertainty,” given the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/roku-lays-off-300-workers-and-removes-streaming-content-to-save-money-183715207.html?src=rss 

The European Union has confirmed the first six tech “gatekeepers” that will need to abide by strict new rules under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). The names of these companies should be pretty familiar: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft. The European Commission (EC), which is the EU’s executive branch, noted that after assessing whether certain companies met thresholds related to revenue, valuation and user numbers, Samsung hasn’t been designated as a gatekeeper as yet.

The EC stipulates that digital platforms can be designated as gatekeepers “if they provide an important gateway between businesses and consumers in relation to core platform services.” The gatekeepers now have until March 2024 to make sure their applicable services comply with the DMA regulations. Between the six companies, the EC has designated 22 core platform services that the law applies to:

Alphabet: Google ads, Google Search, Android, YouTube, Chrome, Google Maps, Google Play and Google Shopping

Amazon: Amazon Marketplace and Amazon ads

Apple: iOS, App Store and Safari

ByteDance: TikTok

Meta: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Meta Marketplace and Meta ads

Microsoft: LinkedIn and Windows

The DMA stipulates that gatekeepers can’t favor their own services over rivals’ offerings and can’t keep users locked into their own ecosystems. They have to let third-party entities interoperate with their services in certain situations too.

Microsoft and Apple have argued that, despite meeting the thresholds the EC laid out, Bing, Edge, Microsoft Advertising and iMessage don’t qualify as gateways and shouldn’t have to comply with the DMA. The EC has opened a market investigation in each case to review the companies’ claims. 

Meanwhile, the EC notes that iPadOS doesn’t meet the thresholds, but it has opened a market investigation to determine whether it should be designated as a core platform service. Gmail, Outlook.com and Samsung Internet Browser did meet the thresholds, but their respective owners (Alphabet, Microsoft and Samsung) successfully convinced the EC that none of these services qualify as gateways for core platform services. 

The rules are likely to have a major impact on Apple in particular. The company has tried to keep a firewall around the iOS ecosystem despite jailbreakers’ efforts to sideload apps onto iPhones over the years. Reports previously indicated that Apple is set to allow third-party app stores and sideloading in iOS 17 — we could find out more about that next week when the company holds its fall iPhone event. Microsoft (specifically Xbox) and Epic Games are among the companies that are preparing their own mobile app stores for when the wall around the iOS garden crumbles.

Apple has also so far rebuffed Google’s (slightly embarrassing) efforts to convince it to support the RCS messaging standard. The former very much understands the value of iMessage and blue text bubbles. However, if the EC designates iMessage as a gateway, Apple could be forced to play nicely with RCS and other messaging services.

To that end, Apple told Reuters that it’s concerned about the privacy and security risks that may emerge as a result of DMA compliance. “Our focus will be on how we mitigate these impacts and continue to deliver the very best products and services to our European customers,” the company said.

If a gatekeeper fails to abide by the DMA rules, there may be serious consequences. The EC can fine an infringing gatekeeper as much as 10 percent of its global turnover. That can rise to 20 percent if the gatekeeper continues to break the rules. The EC has also given itself the power to force a gatekeeper to sell a business and to block it from buying related services in cases of systematic DMA violations.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/eu-confirms-the-six-tech-giants-subject-to-its-strict-new-competition-laws-161917822.html?src=rss 

YouTube is launching an in-app platform for bite-sized games, adding to the ways you can interact with content on the popular video service. Sadly, this is no full-fledged cloud-gaming experience — think of it more like Miniclip living inside the social video site.

This is an experimental offering and, as such, only available to select participants or beta testers. How to know if you’ve been chosen? Open up YouTube and look for a “Playables” tab alongside content on the home feed. For the lucky few, games work on both the desktop website and mobile devices.

There’s no list of published titles at this time, but 9to5Google reports that there’s a game called Stack Bounce available that involves a ball smashing through rings via well-timed clicks. If the title sounds familiar, that’s because Stack Bounce was already offered on Google’s GameSnacks service.

Also, moving a 3D ball around is a far cry from the kinds of games Google Stadia was offering when it shuttered, though the company notes that the system will save game progress, which is accessible via the “History” tab. In other words, more complicated experiences could be forthcoming, as there isn’t much progress to save when moving a bouncing ball through rings. For now, though, it’s a repository for minigames. 

YouTube isn’t the only video-streaming service dipping its toes into cloud gaming. Netflix has made a pretty significant push into the space in the last couple of years, most recently expanding services to select smart TVs and personal computers. Even TikTok is experimenting with simple in-app games, in addition to live trivia contests with cash prizes. Google’s Stadia cloud streaming service went belly up back in January.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/youtube-is-testing-bitesize-games-on-desktop-and-mobile-163742756.html?src=rss 

The latest Apple AirPods Pro are back on sale for $199 at Amazon and Walmart. This is a deal we’ve seen for much of the past several months, but it’s still $50 less than the cost of buying from Apple directly. Typically, this is as low as we see the wireless earphones drop at major retailers.

We gave the AirPods Pro a review score of 88 last September, and we currently list them as the “best for iOS” pick in our wireless earbuds buying guide. They continue to be the best true wireless model Apple sells, with a slightly bassy sound that plays well with most kinds of audio, effective active noise cancellation (ANC) and a top-notch transparency mode that blends outside noise with your music. Like all AirPods, they also come with a host of Apple-friendly features: fast pairing, automatic switching between active Apple devices, Find My tracking, spatial audio, audio sharing with other AirPods and Beats users, hands-free Siri and so on.

The six-hour battery life could be longer, there are better options for call quality and many of the other picks in our buying guide come with a richer feature set. There’s no way to manually adjust the EQ or ANC strength, for instance. If you want a pair for working out, the Beats Fit Pro offer many of the same Apple-centric perks in a more gym-friendly design. Nevertheless, if you solely use Apple devices, there’s still plenty to like here.

There is a caveat, though: Bloomberg reports that Apple will likely update the AirPods Pro with a new USB-C charging case as part of its iPhone event on September 12. (The current AirPods Pro case uses Lightning.) The new iPhones should switch to USB-C too, so if you’d prefer the updated port, it’s worth waiting. That said, no other changes to the actual AirPods Pro hardware are expected, and the USB-C model may cost more than this discounted price to start. The earphones will receive new features later this year, but those’ll be software-based, with iOS 17 adding a new “Adaptive Audio” mode and faster device switching, among other upgrades.

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-airpods-pro-are-back-down-to-199-150816670.html?src=rss