Imagine sweeping through green fields, floating five feet above ground, sun on your face as you slide by on track to your destination, not a car in the world as you simply lean back.

And before you know it, you're there.

This is how travel should feel, and on our trains, it does.

Avanti West Coast. Feel good, travel.

These are the Daily Tech headlines for Monday, August 14th, 2023. I'm Sarah Lane.

The Financial Times has declared an end of an era, that era being cord cutting to save money, noting that a typical bundle of the top US streaming services, Netflix, Disney Plus,

Max, Hulu, Warner Bros. Discovery, etc. will cost about $87 this fall, after recent price hike announcements, compared with $73 a year ago.

It also points out the average cable TV package also costs around $83 per month.

Higher interest rates and media stock price dips are both factors that made Disney in particular, raised subscription fees twice in less than a year.

Columbia Business School professor David Rogers tells the Times, quote,

from a business point of view, streaming was going to have to move in this way.

The price point was going to have to go up. This was accelerated by the fact that we no longer have cheap debt to flood the market with streaming content.

In his power on newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark German says that Apple's planning a big Apple watch refresh, but not the upcoming models due next month.

The new models reportedly will only have minor refreshes. German reminds us that last year, the Apple Watch Series 8 models new thing was body temperature sensor.

In 2021, it was a larger display. In 2020, Apple boosted watch performance with the Series 6, certainly all improvements, but incremental.

The Apple Watch Series 9 is expected to be announced alongside the iPhone 15 at an event scheduled for September 12th.

The US Cyber Security Review Board, or CSRB, which investigates major cybersecurity incidents, said it will seek a broader review of the recent intrusion of US government email systems with data provided by Microsoft.

The board has been seeking a probe after learning of the Microsoft Cloud breach, which saw China state-backed hackers break into government email accounts, including US Commerce Secretary Gina Romando,

several officials at the US State Department, and other organizations which were not made public.

According to a Reddit post, YouTube has started testing a new anti-adblocker pop-up for non-premium viewers.

The warning includes a countdown timer in the top right corner between 30 and 60 seconds before an ad plays.

It also explains the benefits of YouTube premium and offers options to allow YouTube ads or try YouTube premium.

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