Technology

Roku is today bringing its free, streaming entertainment destination, The Roku Channel, to non-Roku devices for the first time, with a launch on both the web and on select Samsung smart TVs, ahead of a wider cross-platform rollout. The channel, which offers free, ad-supported movies and TV shows, will be available across PCs, mobile phones and tablets, the company says. In addition, Roku is updating the navigation on its own devices, including Roku players and Roku TVs, to include a new feature called &Featured Free,& which will directly point users to free content from The Roku Channel, as well as other apps, like ABC, The CW, CW Seed, Fox, Freeform, Pluto TV, Sony Crackle, Tubi and more.

The Roku Channel first launched last September, as a way for Roku to differentiate its connected media devices and TVs running Roku software from rivals like Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV and Chromecast.

Despite Rokupopularity — itleading the internet video streaming device market — the company hadn&t really used its platform to promote its own content — the way Amazon pushes Prime Video shows on Fire TV owners, for example — until then.

The channel itself is populated with movies that Roku gained access to through licensing deals with studios like Lionsgate, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Warner Brothers. However, it also leveraged Rokustrength as a platform by pulling in free content from its existing channel partners (with permission), includingAmerican Classics, FilmRise, Nosey, OVGuide, Popcornflix, Vidmark and YuYu.

The content itself is monetized through advertising, which Rokuin-house ad sales team is in charge of selling, with some portion going to partners. The companygoal has been to smartly place the ads to respect the content they interrupt, and not to inundate viewers with the same ad over and over again.

With the channelexpansion to the web and other TV platforms, Roku can further grow its advertising business, while also making the case for itself as a device platform. For existing Roku device owners, the channel is just another value-add for being a Roku user — and one that may keep them from jumping ship to another player in the future.

&Roku is the leading platform for free entertainment and our users love it. We&re delighted to deliver even more value to our customers without subscriptions, complicated logins or fees,& said Rob Holmes, Rokuvice president of Programming and Engagement, in a statement about todayexpansion. &By expanding The Roku Channel to the Web, we&re broadening the access points to high-quality, free streaming entertainment. With Featured Free, we&re making it easy for our customers to see the great, free content already available on the Roku platform in one place, while creating value for our content providers by connecting them with Rokugrowing audience.&

Meanwhile, Roku is again taking advantage of its platform nature with the launch of the &Featured Free& section on its home screen.

This top-level navigational menu — just above &My Feed& on Rokuhome screen — will include a list of popular free content from its channel partners. The shows are identified by name and include a thumbnail image, but it doesn&t indicate which partnerchannel they&re coming from. And, when launched, customers are taken directly to the content itself.

This section will include the latest in-season episodes of top network shows, full past-season catch-ups, classic series and hit movies.

The news of these launches follows a recent report from Varietythat claimed Roku is planning to launch its own Amazon Channels-like subscription marketplace, as well. The report said Roku would bring together a number of paid subscription services into the same section, to make it easier for consumers to subscribe to paid channels without needing to first find the right app.

The &Featured Free& section paints a good picture of what this new subscription marketplace could look like — a single destination where the content itself, and not the channel it comes from, is whathighlighted.

These new features also indicate a shift in Rokularger business from being fully reliant on device sales, to transitioning more into services; for now, specifically ad-supported services.

Roku is expected to report its earnings later today, after the marketclose, so the timing of the launches is not coincidental. Wall Street is expecting a net loss of $0.15 per share, down from $0.18 in the year-ago quarter, and sales up 41.46 percent to reach $99.6 million, in Q2. Overall, analysts predict Roku will report annual sales of $697.9 million.

Roku says the &Featured Free& section will begin to roll out to U.S. users starting today, and will reach all customers over the weeks ahead.

The Roku Channel, meanwhile, is available on the web as of now, via TheRokuChannel.com.

An Oxford University study of remote gig economy work conducted on digital platforms has highlighted poor-quality working conditions with implications for employees& well-being.

The research comes at a time when political scrutiny is increasingly falling on algorithmically controlled platforms and their societal impacts. Policymakers are also paying greater attention to the precarious reality for workers on platforms that advertise their gig marketplaces to new recruits with shiny claims of &flexibility& and &autonomy.&

Governments in some regions are also actively reassessing employment law to take account of technology-fueled shifts to work and working patterns. Earlier this year, for instance, the U.K. government announced a package of labor market reforms — and committed to being responsible for quality of work, not just quantity of jobs, for the first time.

The Oxford University study, entitledGood Gig, Bad Big: Autonomy and Algorithmic Control in the Global Gig Economy, looks at remote gig economy work, such as tasks like research, translation and programming carried out via platforms such as Freelancer.com and Fiverr (rather than gig economy platforms such as food delivery platforms, where workers must be in local proximity to the work — albeit, those platforms have their own workforce exploitation critiques).

The researchers note that an estimated 70 million workers worldwide are registered on remote work platforms.Their study methodology involved carrying out face-to-face interviews with just over 100 workers in South East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa who had been active on one of two unnamed &leading platforms& for at least six months.

They also undertook a remote survey of just over 650 additional gig platform workers, from the same regions, to supplement the interview findings. Participants for the survey portion were recruited via online job ads on the platforms themselves, and had to have completed work through one of the two platforms within the past two months, and to have worked in at least five projects or for five hours in total.

Free to get the job done

The study paints a mixed picture, with — on the one hand — gig workers reporting feeling they can remotely access stimulating and challenging work, and experiencing perceived autonomy and discretion over how they get a job done: A large majority (72 percent) of respondents said they felt able to choose and change the order in which they undertook online tasks, and 74 percent said they were able to choose or change their methods of work.

At the same time — and here the negatives pile in — workers on the platforms lack collective bargaining so are simultaneously experiencing a hothouse of competitive marketplace and algorithmic management pressure, combined with feelings of social isolation (with most working from home), and the risk of overwork and exhaustion as a result of a lack of regulations and support systems, as well as their own economic needs to get tasks done to earn money.

&Our findings demonstrate evidence that the autonomy of working in the gig economy often comes at the price of long, irregular and anti-social hours, which can lead to sleep deprivation and exhaustion,& said Dr. Alex Wood, co-author of the paper, commenting in a statement. &While gig work takes place around the world, employers tend to be from the U.K. and other high-income Western countries, exacerbating the problem for workers in lower-income countries who have to compensate for time differences.

&The competitive nature of online labour platforms leads to high-intensity work, requiring workers to complete as many gigs as possible as quickly as they can and meet the demands of multiple clients no matter how unreasonable.&

The survey results backed the researchers& interview findings of an oversupply of labor, with 54 percent of respondents reporting there was not enough work available and just a fifth (20 percent) disagreeing.

The study also highlights the fearsome power of platforms& rating and reputation systems as a means of algorithmically controlling remote workers — via the economic threat of loss of future work.

The researchers write:

A far more effective means of control [than non-proximate monitoring mechanisms such as screen monitoring software, which platforms also deployed] was the ‘algorithmic management& enabled by platform-based rating and reputation systems (Lee et al., 2015; Rosenblat and Stark, 2016). Workers were rated by their clients following the completion of tasks. Workers with the best scores and the most experience tended to receive more work due to clients& preferences and the platforms& algorithmic ranking of workers within search results.

This form of control was very effective, as informants stressed the importance of maintaining a high average rating and good accuracy scores. Whereas Uberalgorithmic management ‘deactivates& (dismisses) workers with ratings deemed low (Rosenblat and Stark, 2016), online labour platforms, instead, use algorithms to filter work away from those with low ratings, thus making continuing on the platform a less viable means of making a living.

As a result of how platforms are organized, remote gig workers reported that the work could be highly intense, with a majority (54 percent) of survey respondents sayingthey had to work at very high speed; 60 percent working to tight deadlines; and more than a fifth (22 percent) experiencing pain as a result of their work.

&This is particularly felt by low-skilled workers, who must complete a very high number of gigs in order to make a decent living,& added professor Mark Graham, co-author, in another supporting statement. &As there is an oversupply of low-skill workers and no collective bargaining power, pay remains low. Completing as many jobs as possible is the only way to make a decent living.&

The study also highlights the contradictions inherent in the gig economy&flexible working& narrative — with the researchers noting thatwhilealgorithms do not formally controlwhere workers work, in reality remote platform workers may have &little real choice but to work from home, and this can lead to a lack of social contact and feelings of social isolation.&

Gig platform workers also run up against the rigid requirements of demanding clients and deadlines in order to get paid for their work — meaning therea whip being cracked over them after all. The study found most workers had to work &intense unsocial and irregular hours in order to meet client demand.&

&The autonomy resulting from algorithmic control can lead to overwork, sleep deprivation and exhaustion as a consequence of the weak structural power of workers vis-a-vis clients,& they write. &This weak structural power is an outcome of platform-based rating and ranking systems enabling a form of control which is able to overcome the spatial and temporal barriers that non-proximity places on the effectiveness of direct labour process surveillance and supervision. Online labour platforms thus facilitate clients in connecting with a largely unregulated global oversupply of labour.&

Workers that gained the most in this environment were good at mastering skills independently and navigating platforms& reputation systems so they could keep winning more work — albeit essentially at other workers& expense, on account of how the platforms& algorithms funnel more work toward the best-rated (meaning thereless for the rest).

The studyconcludes that platform reputations have a&symbolic power& — as &an emerging form of marketplace bargaining power& — and &as a consequence of the algorithmic control inherent to online labour platforms.&

The workers who lacked the individual resources of skills and reputationsuffered from low incomes and insecurity.

&Our findings are consistent with remote workers& experiences across many national contexts,& added Graham. &Hopefully, this research will shed light on potential pitfalls for remote gig workers and help policymakers understand what working in the online gig economy really looks like. While there are benefits to workers such as autonomy and flexibility, there are also serious areas of concern, especially for lower-skill workers.&

If you&re a fan of retro games, chances are you have a few emulators installed to let you play Mega Drive or Atari 800 titles. And if you have a few emulators installed, you probably have some ROMs. And if you have some ROMs, itlikely that sometime since the year 2000 you visited EmuParadise, a stalwart provider of these ambiguously legal files. Well, EmuParadise is no more — at least the site we knew and loved.

The site explained the bad news in a post today, acknowledging the reality that the world of retro gaming has changed irrevocably and a site like EmuParadise simply can&t continue to exist even semi-legally. So they&re removing all ROM downloads.

For those not familiar with this scene, emulators let you play games from classic consoles that might otherwise be difficult, expensive or even impossible to find in the wild. ROMs, which contain the actual game data (and are often remarkably small — NES games are smaller than the image above), are questionably legal and have existed in a sort of grey area for years. But thereno question that this software has been invaluable to gamers.

&I started EmuParadise 18 years ago because I never got to play many of these amazing retro games while growing up in India and I wanted other people to be able to experience them,& wrote the sitefounder, MasJ. &Through the years I&ve worked tirelessly with the rest of the EmuParadise team to ensure that everyone could get their fix of retro gaming. We&ve received thousands of emails from people telling us how happy they&ve been to rediscover and even share their childhood with the next generations in their families.&

But the games industry is changing; official re-releases of old games and the consequent legal attention that brings to sites hosting original ROMs has created an unambiguously hostile environment for them. Nintendo, it must be said, has been particularly zealous in its efforts to clear the web of ROMs, especially for its first-party games.

EmuParadise and other sites have been the constant target of legal actions, from simple takedown requests to more serious allegations and lawsuits.

&Itnot worth it for us to risk potentially disastrous consequences. I cannot in good conscience risk the futures of our team members who have contributed to the site through the years,& MasJ continued. &We run EmuParadise for the love of retro games and for you to be able to revisit those good times. Unfortunately, itnot possible right now to do so in a way that makes everyone happy and keeps us out of trouble.

&This is an extremely emotional decision for me after running this site for so many years. But I believe it is the right thing for us at this point of time.&

Alas, they will be unavailable forever now.

I can remember EmuParadise being one of the most reliable sites to get ROMs from back in the day; and in the early 2000s, when emulators were essentially the only way to play many old games — and the web was a bit more wild — it was also one of the few that didn&t attempt to load some kind of virus onto your computer at the same time.

Italways sad when a homegrown site that single-mindedly pursues a single goal, and in this case one that is arguably a public service, legal or no, is forced to bow out. Itsad, but they can at least retire knowing that retro gaming is alive and well and finally being embraced by game distributors and makers the way it ought to have been for the last couple decades. Consoles like the NES Classic are outselling modern ones, and love for old games has not abated.

Not only that, but websites like this, while they provide other services, are no longer necessary for the distribution of ROMs. What was practical in 2002 no longer makes sense, and the advent of both legal game stores on PCs and consoles, and of course torrents, mean that even rare games like Radiant Silvergun are just a click or button press away.

And lastly, EmuParadise isn&t just plain dying. They plan to maintain and update their emulator database and keep the community going, and MasJ says there are plans to launch some new things as well. So, out with the old, in with the new.

Thanks to EmuParadise and those running it for all their hard work, and best of luck in the future!