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7 Jul 2025

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SKT - Sky appoints new Chief Financial Officer
Sky has today announced the appointment of David Mackrell to the position of Chief Financial Officer

'It's Groundhog Day': Ukraine's sky defenders stuck in relentless battle
Under fire of 100 drones a night, there's little talk of a ceasefire in the front-line city of Sumy.

Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker
Publishers including Condé Nast and Sky News have welcomed the new tech from internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare.

How is the sky looking for Matariki and Puanga stargazing?
Will conditions be too cloudy to stargaze where you are? Here’s what you need to know.

How to find the stars of Matariki
This weekend, Aotearoa officially celebrates Matariki for the fourth time, marked by the reappearance of the star cluster in the night sky. Here's how to find it.

Why some iwi acknowledge Puanga instead of Matariki
Both Matariki and Puanga rise in the eastern sky before the sun rises in winter.

'I saw the plane go down': Teen traumatised after filming Air India crash video
Aryan Asari just wanted to film planes flying in the sky - but he ended up capturing one of the country's biggest air crashes.

How to spot Matariki and Puanga in the night sky
It’s that time of the year again, when Matariki and Puanga reappear in our night sky. But how do you find them?

'Sky the limit' for treble winners Bath - Spencer
Bath captain Ben Spencer says the "sky is the limit" for the club after they ended a 29-year wait for a Premiership trophy.

The HBO Max and Discovery breakup was inevitable
Remember the plan for HBO Max and Discovery to mix their content together into an all-new streaming called “Max”? Well, forget all that. Not even a month after declaring that Max would soon be HBO Max again, parent company Warner Bros. Discovery has announced what pretty much everyone in the industry could see coming: a breakup. Specifically, Warner Bros. Discovery will split in two, with one company taking on HBO Max along with Warner Bros.’s film and TV studios, while the other company will take the (declining) cable assets, including CNN, TBS, and TNT, plus sports, the Discovery linear channels, and Discovery+. The announcement of the split leaves many questions unanswered for streamers. What happens to Discovery content on HBO Max? What about Bleacher Report, the bundle of live sports that’s moving to the second “global networks” business? Will there be pricing changes? (Are there stars in the sky?) And when is all this going to happen? Many of the answers will have to wait, as the Warner Bros. Discovery split likely won’t be finalized until the middle of next year. That said, we should expect the “Max” streaming service of today to look very different from the “HBO Max” of 2026. Namely, Max—er, HBO Max—is pivoting away from the whole “something for everybody” strategy that drove the decision to merge HBO Max and Discovery+ in the first place. In announcing today’s decision to shareholders, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav put it plainly. “We put HBO back in [to HBO Max] for a reason. People see us as the highest quality streaming service out there,” Zaslav said (according to The Hollywood Reporter), while promising to double down on “all the HBO content” as well as the biggest Warner Bros. movie and TV properties. For HBO Max, that means a move away from children’s programming, reality shows, and other content that didn’t bear the traditional HBO moniker—in short, all the stuff that’s going to the other company. Two separate companies with separate missions and content make for an easier story to tell customers as well as investors—or at least, so goes the current thinking. And why go to all the trouble in the first place? It’s all part of the (maddening) cycle of business, from conglomeration to divestiture and back again. Who doesn’t love a merry-go-round?

‘I didn’t want to leave’: Tupou confirms move to Paris
After a tough season in sky blue, Tupou understands Rugby Australia’s position and is now focused on a fresh start with Racing 92 next season

Meteor pieces may have landed on Ben Nevis, say experts
The small meteor lit up the night sky on Thursday and may have landed as meteorites across a vast area of the west Highlands.

TV presenter Dermot Murnaghan reveals stage four cancer
The ex-BBC and Sky journalist says he is "responding positively" to treatment and is "feeling well".

Watch Indonesian volcano spew ash over 11km into the sky
The twin-peaked Lewotobi Laki-Laki volcano erupted on Tuesday creating a vast plume.

Obnoxious GPU prices are pushing PC gamers to the cloud, study claims
One of the most prominent features of this year’s spate of graphics card launches—from both AMD and Nvidia—is the pricing issues they’ve faced. Due to various factors, GPUs that launched at modest MSRPs are selling with price tags several hundred dollars beyond. Though some newer and more affordable cards are bucking the trend, like AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT, most gamers are simply being priced out by the latest GPUs. Anyone looking to upgrade is likely having a hard time, and a new study by Liquid Web suggests these prices are sending gamers toward cloud gaming in greater numbers than ever before. Liquid Web (admittedly a cloud hosting company) polled 1,000 gamers of various ages and backgrounds on their recent PC upgrade interests and intentions. Some of the results are quite stark. PC gamers are being priced out Over half of all polled gamers said they had been so affected by price hikes and scalping on GPUs that they’d been forced to delay—or even cancel—their PC upgrading plans altogether. In fact, 43% of respondents said that life expenses (e.g., rent and bills) had forced them to skip graphics card purchases. You have to imagine there’s a lot of crossover there. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition is incredible, but its exorbitant price puts it out of reach of just about everyone.Foundry That’s no surprise considering the sky-high graphics card prices we’re seeing. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 was supposed to sell at $2,000, but it quickly rocketed to over $3,000 at most retailers. Even much-more-affordable cards, like the RTX 5070 Ti and 5070, ended up retailing for hundreds of dollars north of their MSRP in the weeks following launch. The downside of rapidly rising GPU prices isn’t just that PC gamers miss out on next-generation gaming experiences—it disillusions them to the idea of upgrading at all. Among gamers who were ready to upgrade, 39% said they would wait at least another one to two years to upgrade their graphics cards, while a further 37% said they’d run what they have into the ground and only replace it when it dies. Then again, maybe by that time they won’t feel the need to upgrade anymore. Liquid Web’s study also shed insight on gamers switching to cloud gaming, where upgrades aren’t dependent on hardware availability or retail pricing. And there were an impressive number of respondents who were keen on the idea. Will the cloud replace hardware? Cloud gaming has come a long way over the past decade, and today it’s a relatively solid alternative to native play. Geforce Now, Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus—they all offer relatively affordable options for playing large libraries of PC and console games without needing to own the proper hardware… or, in some cases, even the games. As of this writing, cloud gaming is far from replacing local gaming. There are a number of factors as to why that is, but for the gamers in this study, it’s mainly due to latency problems. 62% of respondents (mostly Millenial and Gen Z) said they would switch to cloud gaming full-time instead of playing on their own hardware if latency were “eliminated.” Cloud gaming makes gaming anywhere with anything a lot easier.Muha Ajjan / Unsplash Unfortunately, that’s just not going to happen. While modern hardware and networking is fast, there’s just no beating the physical immediacy of local rendering on your own machine. However, when the question was asked more broadly of respondents, a sizeable number (42%) said they’d skip upgrading their graphics cards if “their needs were met” with either cloud gaming or AI upscaling. That’s a much more achievable goal for cloud providers who want to deliver a premium remote gaming experience. Around 20% of Millennial and Gen Z gamers believe that high-end GPUs will become less essential in the next three years because of cloud gaming and the growing improvements to AI upscaling like DLSS and FSR. Meanwhile, nearly 60% who are still holding out for a GPU upgrade to improve their gaming experience. I’m not entirely sold on the idea of AI upscaling being everything, but frame generation has made some impressive leaps lately. If Nvidia keeps its focus on AI and can’t figure out how to keep its GPUs in better stock, we may all be relying on more cloud and AI features before long.