The free, ad-supported streaming video market is getting extremely competitive.

IMDb, the movie and TV website owned by Amazon, launched a free streaming channel on Thursday. Called IMDb Freedive, it’s available to U.S. viewers on the IMDb website and Amazon Fire TV devices. 

IMDb Freedive offers a variety of content, spanning film and television, at no cost. There is no IMDb or Amazon Prime subscription required, as the service is supported by advertisements. Viewers simply need to create a free IMDb account to begin watching.

Older movies like The Illusionist, Memento, and The Last Samurai are currently available to watch on the service. Fringe, Heroes, Without a Trace, and The Bachelor make up some of Freedive’s current television offerings. (There are multiple categories on the service, including drama, comedies, horror, action, family, and so on.) The streaming service also boasts of a few IMDb original series’ that take a look at the movie and TV industry.

Video streaming services are extremely hot right now. A recent study found that Netflix alone consists of 15 percent of the entire world’s internet traffic. Netflix competitors such as Amazon’s paid subscription service, Prime Video, and Hulu are also experiencing growth. Disney is about to launch its own streaming service filled with Star Wars and Marvel content. 

However, as subscription-based streaming heats up, major players have also been launching free ad-supported streaming services.

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Late last year, YouTube rolled out a “Free to watch” section on its Movies & Shows vertical showcasing ad-supported Hollywood films. The vertical was previously reserved for content that needed to be rented or purchased to watch. The company also announced that its own YouTube Original videos, such as its Karate Kid spinoff Cobra Kai, were all going the free to watch, ad-supported model as well this year. That content use to require a paid subscription to YouTube Premium.

Roku, one of the leading set-stop streaming media box companies, also has its own free-to-watch channel, The Roku Channel. Last summer, the company launched a stand-alone website for The Roku Channel, no longer requiring a Roku device in order to watch content on its free streaming video network.

Currently, the only set-top media devices that can stream IMDb’s Freedive are Amazon’s Fire TV products. It will be interesting to see if Amazon eventually opens Freedive up to other set-top boxes like Roku. 

Amazon has notoriously made it difficult for Amazon Prime Video subscribers to consume its content on non-Amazon devices. Amazon Prime Video was conspicuously absent from Apple TV’s app offerings until a little more than a year ago. You still can’t stream Prime Video movies and shows to Google Chromecast.

IMDb says they will be make Freedive more widely available, but so far the only platform explicitly named is the IMDb mobile app. Judging by the Prime Video rollout, it’s possible that IMDb Freedive remains a Fire TV exclusive — for at least the near future.

You’re finally ready to build a smart home and purchase a Ring security camera. But maybe slow your roll, because according to a new report, at least in the past, it may not have been that smart or secure. 

So reports The Intercept, which notes that in 2016 Ring allowed a Ukrainian team of engineers “virtually unfettered access” to all Ring customers’ unencrypted video streams. And yes, that means the streams both outside, and inside, their homes. 

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This access was reportedly granted because the AI needed help distinguishing between things like cars and people. 

And so, to help train the AI, The Intercept reports that Ring Labs hired “Data Operators” to watch and tag objects in customer video feeds. A similar job posting, below, is still live as of the time of this writing. 

“We are looking for a Data Operator who will be responsible for labeling the objects on the videos,” reads the listing. “You must be able to recognize and tag all moving objects in the video correctly with high accuracy.”

We reached out to Ring with a host of questions regarding claims that the Ukraine team practically had unlimited access to all Ring customer videos in an unencrypted format, and that some customers’ videos are still being shown to workers for purposes of AI training, but received no response as of press time. 

This wouldn’t, however, be the first time a company used human workers to accomplish what a customer might reasonably assume to be an automated task. In late 2017, it was revealed that expense management software company Expensify had been employing so-called mechanical turks to label and tag some submitted customer receipts. 

For example, say you submitted a ride-share receipt to your job for reimbursement via Expensify and selected the “SmartScan” option. This feature would input all the receipt details for you, but unbeknownst to you, what often happened was your receipt — and if it was an Uber of Lyft receipt, this likely included your name as well as your pickup and drop-off location — was shown to a person on the Mechanical Turk jobs platform. In other words, a real human paid minute amounts of money saw that receipt. 

The Mechanical Turk platform is owned by Amazon. Amazon purchased Ring in 2018. 

And what does Ring have to say about all of this? While we didn’t hear back from the company, a Ring spokesperson told The Intercept that the videos currently being reviewed by humans are “sourced exclusively from publicly shared Ring videos from the Neighbors app (in accordance with our terms of service), and from a small fraction of Ring users who have provided their explicit written consent to allow us to access and utilize their videos for such purposes.” 

So, if you already own a Ring, maybe it’s time you go on a deep dive into your settings to determine exactly what you’ve allowed the company to see. 

Walter White lives on. Sort of.

More than five years after Breaking Bad ended, fans of the show will be able to dive back into the meth-filled underbelly of New Mexico with the upcoming mobile game Breaking Bad: Criminal Intent, The Hollywood Reporter revealed Thursday.

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We don’t know a ton of details about the game yet, but we do know that it will be free to play and players will be strategically building up a criminal operation, undoubtedly intent on selling the infamous blue methamphetamine.

Here’s a short teaser of Breaking Bad: Criminal Intent:

The game will feature science-teacher-turned-meth-producer Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and fellow criminal Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), and players will be able to interact with other iconic characters including Saul Goodman, Gus Fring, and Mike Ehrmentraut, THR reported.

Breaking Bad: Criminal Intent is being developed by Plamee and published by FTX Games, which previously released Narcos: Cartel Wars for mobile based on Netflix’s Columbian cocaine cartel series Narcos.

According to FTX Games’ site, the company is also producing games based on Criminal Minds and The Walking Dead.

If you’re worried about the handling of the Breaking Bad IP, showrunner Vince Gilligan seems to quell those fears in a statement provided to THR, saying, “[FTX Games] care as much about the details as our creative team, and I have been very impressed with their commitment to building an authentic extension of the series’ story universe. I think this will be a fun experience for fans, to interact with characters from Breaking Bad in a completely new way.”

Breaking Bad: Criminal Intent will be arriving on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store in 2019.