FAST.com Now Measures Latency and Upload Speed

washingtonpost | January 28, 2019

When Cory Burdette awoke recently to learn that Winter Storm Gia had caused a two-hour school delay in Reston, Va., he seized the chance to do a little family bonding. Plopping down in front of the TV, Burdette and his 5-year-old daughter spent the morning together playing Minecraft, the Lego-like adventure game where players construct buildings out of virtual blocks.“We play all our games together on the Xbox,” he said. “In Minecraft, we both get to build a house together, find monsters and explore.”The first time he fired up the game, Burdette had to wait for Minecraft to download and install on his Xbox before launching it. But by the time his daughter is old enough to play more-adult games, that wait could be a thing of the past.Major companies including Microsoft and Verizon are exploring how to replace game downloads with Internet-based game services, hoping to do for video gaming what Netflix and Spotify have done with TV and music. Instead of being run directly from a device, high-quality games of the future could be streamed from a data center, with most of the computations and image rendering performed by powerful servers many miles away before being piped online to players' phones, PCs and consoles.

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slashgear | January 22, 2019

Netflix is just about everywhere, thanks in no small part to its vast and largely successful original content library, and as of today, it can now be found in yet another place: Instagram Stories. The new integration makes it possible for Netflix users to directly share their favorite content with followers, but not everyone has access to it.Before Facebook made it possible to directly share content from third-party apps, Instagram users had to take a screenshot from a different app and then share that image in their Instagram Story. The workaround is common, but cumbersome, potentially resulting in lower quality images and requiring more time overall to complete the process.Instagram Stories got support for directly sharing from third-party websites last year, and now Netflix is taking advantage of the feature. Users can open Netflix’s in-app sharing option — which has been around for a while and includes messaging platforms like WhatsApp — to find the new Stories option.

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slashgear | January 18, 2019

When it comes to competition in the entertainment industry, you might be tempted to think that companies only consider similar services to be competitors. For instance, Netflix and Hulu obviously compete with one another, but what about Netflix and Fortnite? As it turns out, Netflix considers Fortnite a major competitor, and it often loses out to the popular game when it comes to winning screen time.On the heels of its freshly-announced price hike, Netflix has delivered a letter to investors in which it covers the state of the company. One section is that letter, titled “Competiton,” is particularly telling, as Netflix reveals that Fortnite is an even bigger competitor than one of its oldest rivals.“We earn consumer screen time, both mobile and television, away from a very broad set of competitors,” Netflix said. “We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO.” The call out to Fortnite might seem a little weird at first, but the game attracts tens of millions of players a month, and time spent playing Fortnite means that time isn’t spent watching things on Netflix.

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