Technology

Netflix is laying off around 150 employees as well as dozens of contractors following a disappointing earnings report, citing “slowing revenue growth,” as first reported by Variety. A source familiar with the situation tells The Verge the cuts include at least 26 contractors working on the company’s fan-focused Tudum website, which serves as a supplement to Netflix’s content. Prior to this recent round of layoffs, Netflix cut around 25 marketing roles, including close to a dozen who worked on Tudum. The 26 workers laid off today were informed of the move in a mass email, which Netflix spokesperson Erika Masonhall said was sent by the contracting company. The streaming giant told The Verge that most employees affected by the layoffs are located in the US. Masonhall issued the following stat...

Almost five months after Google announced that it was going to make G Suite legacy free edition users start paying for their accounts, it seems to finally have a path in place that most people will be happy with. According to 9to5Google, there’s now a no-cost option that’ll let people keep using their G Suite accounts for personal use, and signing up for it won’t involve a song and dance of joining a waitlist or transferring data between accounts. In January, Google announced that free G Suite users would have to start paying for Google Workspace if they wanted to keep their accounts, after around a decade of keeping the legacy free tier around. The company said that if users didn’t decide which paid Workspace tier they wanted by May 1st, they’d be automatically upgraded based on their use...

Verizon announced this week that the LG Wing will be getting an update that will allow it to use Verizon’s newest 5G spectrum — over a year after LG left the smartphone business altogether. The LG Wing has been certified to use mid-band spectrum called C-band, an important piece of Verizon’s 5G network that delivers better-than-LTE speeds and wide-ranging signal. Verizon spokesperson George Koroneos says that the update started arriving on devices yesterday and will continue to be pushed out through the rest of the week. That’s good news if you’re one of the few people who bought an LG Wing, and really a testament to LG for making good on its promise to keep providing some support for its devices. But why is a one-and-a-half-year-old phone from a defunct mobile brand getting this update no...

Though Bruce Banner’s been one of the most physically powerful people running around Marvel’s movies for years at this point, that’s all about to change this summer as his cousin Jennifer Walters makes her way to MCU in Disney Plus’ She-Hulk: Attorney At Law. While both Hulks make appearances in She-Hulk’s first trailer, the show’s clearly going to be Jennifer’s to own as she embarks on her own path to heroism. She-Hulk: Attorney At Law’s first trailer introduces Jennifer at a tricky point in her already complicated life. Because the world’s filled with so many villains committing super crimes, Jennifer’s legal skills put her in high demand, but she isn’t quite certain that’s the kind of force for justice she wants to be. That soul searching’s likely what leads to her meeting up with Bruce...

When Disney Plus’ ad-supported plan goes live later this year, it will reportedly run ads for four minutes on movies or shows that last an hour or less, according to reports from Variety and The Wall Street Journal. As Variety points out, this would make Disney offer fewer ads per hour than some of its competitors. NBC’s Peacock runs no more than five minutes of ads for every hour of content, while HBO Max shows four minutes of ads per hour. Disney Plus’ planned number of ads even beats the Disney-owned Hulu, which runs anywhere from nine to 12 ads in one hour. As for the content of the ads themselves, the company is reportedly taking a cautious approach to maintain its family-friendly image. Disney isn’t just cutting out ads that may have adult themes, like anything related to alcohol or ...

Netflix has been showing movies and TV shows ahead of their public release to small groups of subscribers in the US, according to a report from Variety. Subscribers who participate in the feedback panels will watch “several upcoming movies and series over the course of about six months,” Variety says, and after they finish watching a piece of content, they’re asked to fill out a survey. The company then takes that feedback into account for potential changes ahead of a film or show’s debut. Netflix is well-known for testing many of its software features ahead of wider releases, like the Top 10 row and the “Play Something” shuffle feature, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that the company is also testing its content with small groups of users. The company has apparently been doing this sin...

Asus has teamed up with renowned fan manufacturer Noctua once again to make a large brown and tan graphics card that should pump out frames while staying relatively quiet. The two companies’ last collaboration was an RTX 3070, but now they’ve announced a decidedly enthusiast tier card: an RTX 3080. According to Noctua’s press release, the card features two 120mm fans and a custom heatsink, making it “the quietest air-cooled graphics card in its class.” Apart from the fancy cooling, it’s a relatively standard Asus graphics card with two BIOS profiles, a backplate, and 10GB of GDDR6X RAM. There are 3080s with 12GB of memory, but that doesn’t seem to be an option with the Noctua heatsink. The card will go on sale “starting early June 2022,” though whether you’ll be able to buy one is another ...

The PlayStation 5 is getting three new console cover colors — starlight blue, galactic purple, and nova pink — on June 17th, but preorders are open on PlayStation Direct right now. All three colors are available in the US, UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Sony has been slowly releasing accessories to make its PS5 more customizable, starting with the custom console covers it announced last December. Despite previewing a full range of colors, it only released the black and red options to start. It also rolled out blue, pink, and purple DualSense controllers (in addition to the black and red controllers it already has), which will finally have matching console covers coming this summer. The PlayStation covers are pretty easy to pop off and replace. Adding a new color can ...

The Overwatch 2 beta is now over. If you were one of the lucky handful that were able to snag an invite, congratulations. If not, don’t worry. There will likely be more opportunities to try out Overwatch 2 in the future. One of those opportunities could be revealed during an Overwatch 2 event slated for June 16th. Overwatch 2 game director Adam Keller thanked the beta participants and shared some thoughts about what it meant to the developers to see players’ reactions to the game, saying, “It can be scary putting something that means so much to you out there for other people to look at. Especially when you know that it’s not finished and you’re asking for people’s real and valid criticisms of what you’ve made.” While excitement for the finished game is still pretty high, critics have given...

Apple is delaying moving forward on its hybrid return to work for office employees, saying in a memo seen by The Verge and (reported earlier by Bloomberg) that “we are extending the phase-in period of the pilot and maintaining two days a week in the office for the time being.” Employees who are in the current two-day-per-week pilot will have the option to once again work fully remote if they feel uncomfortable coming into the office, In the memo, the company’s COVID-19 response team says that its updates are based on monitoring local info like test positivity and hospitalization rates. The memo also asks employees to go back to wearing masks when in common areas like meeting rooms, hallways, and elevators. The Bloomberg report added that, on Tuesday, retail employees in about 100 US stores...