This may not be the year the Super Bowl finally goes 4K, but The Verge is full of football fans who are looking to answer your big tech-related questions about Super Bowl LVI, which is airing on Sunday, February 13th, 2022.
Tubi is streaming the Super Bowl this weekend, which is pretty much the best imaginable way to get people to try your streaming service. It also has a new original show, The Z-Suite, that is apparently pretty good? This is a fun rundown from our friends at Vulture on what Tubi is, how it’s planning to win big this weekend, and whether it’s going to be able to keep up with the traffic.
[vulture.com]
As usual, Apple does a bang-up job making its “Shot on iPhone” footage look great in this short behind-the-scenes documentary for Usher’s Apple Music-sponsored Super Bowl 2024 halftime performance.
I think my favorite part is the revelation that they used leaf blowers to make that red sheet fly behind Alicia Keys (well, during rehearsals, at least).
With 123.4M average viewers across Univision, Paramount Plus, Nickelodeon, and CBS (where 120M watched), Super Bowl LVIII was the most watched television broadcast in history, according to CBS Sports.
However, the Apollo moon landing drew an estimated 125M to 150M US viewers at a time when the population was slightly more than 200M people, according to the FT, and the 2022 FIFA World Cup final drew about 1.5 billion viewers globally.
That was the vibe when the Curb Your Enthusiasm star called himself “an idiot” during an interview with The Associated Press recently. He was part of the glut of FTX Super Bowl 2022 ads angled on FOMO the same year FTX collapsed, and we know how that story went.
Of course, there were no crypto ads during Super Bowl LVIII — unless you count Jack Dorsey wearing a Satoshi shirt again.
Does Hopkins’ portrayal of the guy in the mascot costume for the Wrexham Association Football Club exist in the same world as Silence of the Lambs?
This Super Bowl commercial doesn’t say he’s not playing Hannibal Lecter playing Wrex the Dragon. I’m calling this canon.
Y’all don’t know this about me, but I had designs of making a cowboy robot comic book in the early 2000s, when becoming a Real Comic Book Artist was my primary goal in life.
I never published one, but this Super Bowl commercial from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, like Cowboys & Aliens before it, was made for exactly me.
Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, and references to so many things are in The Fall Guy’s trailer from the Super Bowl. Also, I think Gosling is just playing a dirty version of Ken from Barbie?
The trailer for the film adaptation of the Wicked musical showed up during the Super Bowl today, giving a first look at John Chu’s version of the sympathetic look at the Wicked Witch that served as Dorothy’s foil in The Wizard of Oz.
The latest trailer for Wes Ball’s take on the Apes story aired during the Super Bowl, giving a closer look than the first trailer did at the society that has sprung up generations after the chimp from the first movie, Caesar, ended his reign.
The NFL posted that Taylor Swift arrived at the Super Bowl to watch Travis Kelce play. Does that guarantee a third pillar of Swift-obsessed viewers will join those who want to know what happens in the game and those who just want to watch the commercials?
The New York Times looked at this season’s Chiefs games ratings and... maybe?
Jon Hamm narrates this Super Bowl trailer for Despicable Me 4 that shows the great, erm, promise of AI-generated imagery.
Naturally, AI image creation has improved, and pictures with glaring errors like those here are somewhat fewer and farther between, but yeah, this is probably what Minion-prompted AI art would look like.
Oreo’s Super Bowl ad imagines a timeline where history pivots on the twist of its cream sandwich cookies, which carries with it dark implications, if you draw certain conclusions from the inclusion of the (likely mythical) Trojan horse that led to the burning of the city of Troy.
There’s a ton of action crammed into this one-minute Super Bowl spot, including a fight scene, car chase, and even zip-lining with a kids’ scooter as two grandmothers chase after a bag of spicy snacks.
And apart from a couple of goofy shots, it’s more believable and fun than most recent Marvel films.
The 30-second version of this week’s A Quiet Place Day One trailer for the Super Bowl tomorrow hits all the big notes from the full-length in a third of the time. Perfect for the trailer-watcher on the go.
The fact that Apple’s CEO didn’t answer Luda’s call with “Good morning!” seems like a missed opportunity in this Apple Music commercial ahead of the 2024 Super Bowl, but nobody asked me.
Cook does sell being really upset that they can’t seem to find Usher, though. (I think he’s hanging out over in that BMW commercial.)
How will we notice aliens hovering overhead when we’re all too busy scrolling? They’ll make a Squarespace website, obviously.
That’s the goofy premise, anyway, of Hello Down There, a Scorsese-directed Squarespace Super Bowl commercial.
The AI-powered Guided Frame feature that debuted on the Pixel 7 describes what’s in the selfie camera’s frame. In this Google commercial (audio descriptions version here) for Super Bowl 2024, director Adam Morse, who is blind, attempts to show how a person with low vision might experience it.
When I was still watching reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation twice a week on UPN in high school and listening to Creed’s Human Clay album on repeat (to my shame), I never saw those two things colliding.
But here we are, and as conflicted as I feel about this Paramount Plus Super Bowl ad’s mash-up, I’m calling it a net good.
Well, as of a couple of days ago, they’ve all sung about T-Mobile for a Super Bowl ad. Is it a good commercial? That depends on how much you liked Scrubs.
Microsoft’s Super Bowl ad focuses on the idea of using AI to be creative. It walks a fine line between empowering people to create images they’d previously need to be skilled in and concerns over AI replacing jobs — particularly in the creative industry. Microsoft is using this minute-long commercial to highlight the company’s new Copilot mobile apps for iOS and Android. But it’s all part of a broader AI effort at Microsoft that you can read about here.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell just gave a really interesting (and surprisingly thorough!) answer to a question about how the NFL thinks about streaming. He gives Peacock and YouTube and others a lot of credit, but ultimately: “We are really committed to broadcast television.”
And when he was asked if an all-streaming Super Bowl might be coming, Goodell was pretty clear: “Not in my time.” The whole thing’s a good state-of-streaming summary, it’s worth a watch.
The Super Bowl is over, and all the advertisements are now easily available on YouTube (for movie trailers other than The Flash, check Polygon’s roundup linked below).
Did you check out Fox’s 1080p HDR-upconverted-to-4K broadcast? How’d it look?
He’s in a luxury box at the Super Bowl, next to Rupert Murdoch (who also knows the pain of wasting money on a social media site you’ve purchased and run into the ground, even if MySpace only cost Fox $580 million instead of $44 billion).
But at least no one can tweet where Elon’s private jet is.
Fox is broadcasting this year’s Big Game on February 12th. And while most of us will have to settle for the standard upscaled “4K” presentation and regular HDR, Comcast is adding something extra: the game will be offered in Dolby Vision for Xfinity X1 cable customers.
“Comcast is taking the 4K HDR feed sent to them from Fox, which they analyze and send through Dolby’s live Dolby Vision production workflow and tools,” Dolby spokesperson Rachel Lowery told The Verge.
I have many questions. Stay tuned for more details.
