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Roku snaps up X Games streaming rights

X Games Ventura 2024
Skateboarder Carlos Ribeiro during X Games Ventura 2024. | Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

Roku got the exclusive US streaming rights to next year’s X Games Aspen and a “soon-to-be-announced” X Games event in the summer, the company announced on Wednesday. Both events will air on Roku’s free 24/7 sports channel as the service continues its push into live sports.

Though the X Games were founded by ESPN in the ‘90s, the sports network sold majority ownership to MSP Sports in 2022. Since then, the X Games have streamed on various platforms, including YouTube, Twitch, ESPN, ABC, and the VR app Xtadium.

But now, X Games Aspen will appear on the Roku Sports Channel, a newly launched hub for Roku’s live Sunday MLB games, Formula E races, and other sports-related content. This channel lives within the overarching Roku Channel that comes pre-installed on most Roku devices and is also available on the web, as well as an app on third-party smart TVs and mobile phones.

Additionally, Roku launched a free ad-supported streaming TV channel dedicated to the X Games, which will air “programming highlights, clips, interviews, archival content, and more” leading up to the event. X Games Aspen takes place from January 23rd to the 25th, with more details to come on an “additional” X Games coming this summer.

Roku is just one of many streaming platforms getting into sports, with Netflix airing live NFL games on Christmas Day, Max launching a live sports add-on, and Amazon Prime Video picking up streaming rights to NBA games. Even the tournament series Street League Skateboarding signed a deal with the right-wing streaming platform Rumble.

Tech antitrust is about to get really weird

The Google logo on a shield surrounded by flying arrows.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

President-elect Donald Trump’s second term is a regulatory wild card hanging over Big Tech.

Read the full story at The Verge.

8 great games for your Steam Deck

Photo collage showing The Verge’s favorite Steam Deck games of 2024.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

2024 was filled with excellent portable PC games.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Alphabet’s Wing will deliver DoorDash by drone in Dallas-Fort Worth

A Wing drone delivering a DoorDash order.
Image: Wing

Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is expanding its drone delivery service to DoorDash customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Starting today, 50 merchants from malls in Frisco and Fort Worth will be available for drone delivery through the DoorDash app, dropping meals and items to homes “in as little as 15 minutes,” according to Wing.

The drones can fly at up to 65mph and reach a cruising height of about 150 feet before stopping to hover and safely lower orders to the ground at their delivery destinations. DoorDash customers will need an “eligible address” in Dallas-Fort Worth for the drone delivery option to appear on the checkout page. Locals can check the Wing website to see if they qualify.

A screenshot of the DoorDash app checkout showing the option for drone delivery. Image: DoorDash / Wing
This option will only appear at the DoorDash checkout if the order is being delivered within the service catchment area.

Wing says the company has now completed more than 400,000 commercial deliveries worldwide following its first US pilot in 2019. The Alphabet drone service trialed similar DoorDash partnerships in Australia and Christiansburg, Virginia, though the latter was limited to delivering Wendy’s.

This isn’t the first service Wing has introduced to Dallas-Fort Worth, having previously teamed up with Walgreens to airdrop local deliveries. Walmart also operates its own drone delivery program in the area via partnerships with Wing and Zipline.

Seagate is getting ready to launch its first high-capacity HAMR hard drive

An image showing Seagate’s HAMR hard drive
Image: Seagate

It’s been more than two decades since Seagate began working on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) — and now the company may finally be ready to release a hard drive using the technology. A new product page spotted by Tom’s Hardware shows an Exos M hard drive sporting up to 32TB of storage using Seagate’s Mozaic 3 Plus HAMR platform.

Seagate’s Mozaic 3 Plus technology allows for bigger hard drive capacities by making data bits smaller and closer together on each disk. To write data, a laser diode attached to the drive’s recording heads heats small areas of the disk. “Each bit is heated and cools down in a nanosecond, so the HAMR laser has no impact at all on drive temperature, or on the temperature, stability, or reliability of the media overall,” Seagate writes on its website.

Seagate says its Exos M hard drive has a 3TB per platter density, making it useful for enterprise applications like powering AI systems. We still don’t know when Seagate could release its Exos M hard drive, as its product page currently shows a link to “Stay Informed,” but a launch seems imminent.

As pointed out by Tom’s Guide, Seagate said in a filing earlier this month that it had “successfully completed qualification testing” for its HAMR hard drives with “several customers within the Mass Capacity markets, including a leading cloud service provider.” It says it will start shipping its HAMR-based hard drive to the unnamed cloud provider in the “coming weeks.”

The Verge reached out to Seagate with a request for more information but didn’t immediately hear back.

Seagate isn’t the only company working on high-capacity hard drives. In October, Western Digital launched a 32TB hard drive using energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR), while Toshiba recently demonstrated high-capacity hard drives with HAMR and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR).