Andrew

When you watch a baseball game, you're also listening for the hum of the crowd and the crack of a baseball bat. People like Andrew Stoakley make that happen.

He mixes audio for teams like the Toronto Blue Jays, which means he combines a tangle of audio feeds to create the soundscape you hear when you watch the game at home. And he's done it for a long time, too, with experience including hockey, NBA, lacrosse, and almost every other game that needs sound. Oh, and he's very Canadian — in the winter months, he mixes curling.

He was nice enough to guide me through how he helps sports sound amazing, answering some questions I'd never thought to ask before: How do they keep the crowd from cursing into the microphones? What makes a baseball bat sound so good? And what's it really like making all that noise into an incredible show?

1) Mixers show up six hours before game time

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Stoakley walked me through a typical Blue Jays game. He's worked a lot of them this year, and as an "A1," he leads their sound mixing.

When the TV truck arrives, he and his assistants get to work. They'll show up at 1 for a 7 pm game, since they have a lot of work to do.

Stoakley runs audio lines from the TV truck to the "patch room," which serves as a clearinghouse for connections to the stadium's audio lines. As Stoakley patches in, his assistants are busy placing the TV station's mics on the field, which will stay there during a home series.

A large stadium like the Rogers Centre (where the Blue Jays play) has an audio and visual system built into it, plus a circulatory system for TV. Though audio mixers might need to improvise more at other venues, big stadiums are made for mixing a broadcast as easily as possible.

2) Hidden mics capture home plate excitement

The sound of a baseball bat cracking a home run is instantly recognizable, but for home viewers, that's only because of a careful audio mix.

Look at the two square Blue Jay images in the photo below. Those birds hide the microphones Stoakley uses to record the sound for home games:

YouTube

It takes more than luck to get a sound like that. Stoakley uses two parabolic dishes with lavalier mics that, together, mix for stereo sound (you can read more about them here). Imagine a tiny mic in a handheld satellite dish, and you get the idea.

"You want to hear that ball," Stoakley says. "My mix tends to be a little sharper, and when you hit a ball on a bat, you have a deeper sound, and that's characteristic of the dish with the lav."

That sound — which defines a baseball game for the home viewer — can vary wildly by A1 and by the mic type used by the stadium.

3) Each key sound needs its own special mic

"I have a parabolic dish at first base and third base for pick-off mics," Stoakley says. "I have two microphones in the bullpens, so you'll hear the pitcher and catcher's mitts. I might put mics on cameras that can get into the dugouts."

That arsenal of microphones gives the team a veritable soundscape of gameplay to select from. And when it comes to players, that requires discretion.

4) Players need to be mixed carefully ... especially when they're angry

The players are a wild card that mixers like Stoakley need to interpret on the fly. If somebody's made a bad play, Stoakley might not track the audio for a player who's upset (and likely to curse). But if they're celebrating, he'll throw in some of their cheers.

In curling, a huge sport in Canada, the expectations for hearing players are a lot different. Players' grunts, chants, and shouts are a huge part of the broadcast mix. In a featured game, mixers will put a mic on every team member and mix that in with the game's announcers. You end up with sound like this, from an epic shot in the 2014 Grand Slam of Curling:

But some of the most important sounds aren't from the players at all.

4) A great mix captures the crowd — but not the drunk fan swearing

Steve Russell/Toronto Star/Getty Images

"I have a series of six microphones that I use to pick up crowd noise," Stoakley says. From those, he composes the ambient sound that most of us take for granted.

Translating the crowd's roar is harder than it might seem. Sometimes that means noticing that a drunk guy is shouting into one of your mics. Mixers have to quickly fade him out so he doesn't overwhelm the sound.

"Baseball is not like hockey," Stoakley says (he mixes those games as well). Hockey is noisy both on and off the ice, which can mask one or two unruly fans. But baseball has more silences, so mixers need to be vigilant to fade out that one person "who will sit and scream, and no matter what you do you're gonna hear them."

Mixers also have to deal with the blaring public announcement system, which TV listeners at home don't want to hear. "The PA is the bane of every audio person's existence. You can't eliminate it — you just try to minimize it."

Even the building itself can change the sound. "My bat cracks sound different when the roof is closed versus open," Stoakley says. "You have a giant dome that acts as a reflective surface, but when the roof's open, the sound escapes." He prefers the open roof: "It allows the sound and the city to come in."

6) Mixing all that together happens live in a very noisy truck

Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images

There's a ton of raw audio coming into Stoakley's truck parked outside.

"I have the director, producer, color commentator, play-by-play person, host, on-air talk back, master control, and studio mix on," he says — and that's in addition to the many mics in stadium. That means he's listening to all of those feeds on speakers as he creates a mix for both the TV broadcast's play-by-play announcers and the audience at home.

The art of the job is mixing it all together.

When Stoakley described what it's like inside the truck, I couldn't help but think of a bizarre, slightly dated reference: a scene in 2006's Superman Returns, where Superman hovers above the Earth, listening to millions of voices and trying to make sense of them all.

"There is a din," he says, and the truck's audio room becomes its own mini-stadium as he creates his mix. That's necessary to hear everything going on, from the guy yelling, "You suck!" over and over to the cues coming from a broadcast announcer. To whip to a third-base speaker in time for a tag, he has to pay close attention.

7) This sound mixer appreciates the quiet, too

Stoakley's been mixing sports since 2008 (after decades of audio TV work prior to that), and it's a loud environment even in the trucks. Part of the reason he moved from Toronto to Niagara Falls was to get a little more quiet when he came home from work. After a long Blue Jays season and more gigs, from curling to hockey, on the horizon, he told me he's taking a week off soon for the very quiet sport of golf.

He appreciates that an audio mix is subjective and intense. The setup is long and hard, but his work affects how we feel a game. That's because everyone at home, whether they know about audio mixing or not, can appreciate the perfect sound of a home run.

There are two kinds of people: Those who use a napkin to blot off pizza oil, because hey free calories, and those who laugh at the first group. How much difference could it possibly make?

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Photographer Kotama Bouabane of Toronto, Canada, has a camera that attracts strange stares when he uses it in public. He shoots with a coconut.

The Banff Centre, where Bouabane is an artist in residence this year, just published this 2-minute video that features the artist and his strange camera of choice as of late:

To create his coconut camera, Bouabane drained a coconut, cut it in half, removed all the meat, cleaned it, dried it, and punched a hole in one of the halves for the lens. To shoot with the camera, he places a piece of light-sensitive paper in between the two halves, and then uses a piece of tape over the whole as a shutter mechanism.

The paper is then developed in the darkroom, which reveals a blurry, black-and-white representation of what Bouabane was photographing.

“I think that there’s a lot of humor in the work that I do, as well,” says Bouabane. To capitalize on the absurdness of his contraption, Bouabane also began attaching his camera to a selfie stick and taking it into public places (where people are often seen with real cameras on selfie sticks):

“It’s an absurd gesture to do,” the photographer says, “but I also think that it comments on how we’re obsessed with place, and how we use objects, and how we photograph in this day and age.”

You can find more of Bouabane’s work over on his website.

(via The Banff Center via Imaging Resource)

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Image credits: Video, photos, and still frames by Kotama Bouabane and The Banff Center

Once this Internet fad blows over.

According to a mid-year report released last week by the RIAA, vinyl music sales brought in almost $60 million more than ad-supported streaming services during the first half of 2015. Vinyl album and EP sales generated $221.8 million in value from January to June this year, a 52 percent year-over-year increase. Ad-supported streaming — which includes services like YouTube, Vevo, and Spotify's free version — grew too, but not as quickly: it brought in $162.7 million in revenue, a 27 percent year-over-year increase. The gap between vinyl sales and ad-supported streaming is just one piece of the music industry's increasingly complicated revenue puzzle, one that now consists of three near-equal parts: physical sales, downloads, and streaming...

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Words like “fact,” “theory,” and “law,” get thrown around a lot. When it comes to science, however, they mean something very specific; and knowing the difference between them can help you better understand the world of science as a whole.

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Here’s a crazy but true statistic: selfies are now a bigger cause of death in the world than shark attacks.

Shark attacks are extremely rare: only about 5 people die from them every year around the globe. By comparison, there have already been 12 confirmed cases of people accidentally getting killed while trying to take a selfie.

That’s an eye-opening figure reported today over at The Telegraph, which writes that most of the selfie-related deaths have been due to people falling. The second most common? Getting hit by a moving vehicle while trying to snap a photo.

Other risky selfie takers are barely just surviving, or the figure would be even higher. Some are getting bitten by rattlesnakes while trying to take a selfie with them. Others are getting flipped into the air by wild bison.

No wonder Russia launched a country-wide “Safe Selfie” campaign back in July to warn its citizens of engaging in risky selfie behavior. Perhaps other countries will soon follow suit.

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Image credits: Shark header photo by Jeff Kubina

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Last week, the New York Times published an analysis of man bun hairstyles in the United States. The verdict? The state of the man bun is strong.

So what are man buns, and what do they mean? Where did they come from? And most importantly, why, just...why? Though it's impossible to exhaust the limits of 2015's most luscious and enigmatic hairstyle, we can catch you up on the man bun basics.

1) What is a man bun?

This question is harder to answer than you might think.

That's because the man bun is a surprisingly versatile hairstyle that incorporates many different elements. It's easiest to say what a man bun must include: hair from the top of the head, tied, and not hanging freely down (as it might in a ponytail).

But after that, just about anything goes. As the graphic below shows, dramatically different looks are still, technically, all man buns:

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Lots of variables can affect a man bun's appearance, including:

• The size of the bun. This depends on raw materials. If a man has a lot of hair to work with, he's likely to have a large bun that includes a lot of hair. If not, he's more likely to have a "nubbin" of hair that will stick up or out and not appear as a full bun (this style is occasionally called a "top knot").
• The position of the knot. The bun or nubbin can appear on top of the head or toward the back, greatly affecting the look of the bun. If a man bun travels too far back on the head, it is called a "pony bun."
• The hair on the side of the head. A full man bun uses the same base materials as a pony tail — a large amount of hair, on all sides, pulled back and put into a bun. However, just as particularly long hair isn't required for a man bun, side hair isn't required. Often, man bun wearers will shave the sides of their heads or closely clip the sides (a style called an "undercut").

2) So when did these things become popular?

Mike Windle/Getty Images

Largely within the past couple of years. Google Trends is one useful gauge, showing a few pops of man bun curiosity in 2013, a surge of interest in 2014, and then an unabated rise through 2015.

That's a good proxy for public interest, but it's by no means the first time the phrase showed up. Man buns showed up in New York Times trend pieces as early as January 2012, and one of the first Tweets about the man bun came in 2011:

"@PrincetonBrooke: How I wore my MAN BUN today lol #TeamBlackAndFilipino #LongHairDontCare" (I REMEMBA THOSE DAYS) pic.twitter.com/cpD6buMm

— son of Hephaestus (@gvf_idont) November 8, 2011

So the man bun has existed throughout history, but it's safe to say the bun really came into its own after 2012.

3) Did celebrities make the man bun a hit hairstyle?

Handout/Getty Images

That's debatable. Early man bun journalism often pointed to bunned celebrities, who no doubt influenced its popularity. Notable evangelists included Jared Leto, Joakim Noah, Chris Hemsworth, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Orlando Bloom.

But others credit lower-profile sources of inspiration, including Brooklyn bartenders and other garden-variety hipsters. As with all fashion, tracing the exact lines of influence can be difficult.

4) What about historical sources? Didn't samurai have man buns?

NBC/Getty Images

Not exactly. This is certainly a widespread perception, likely influenced by John Belushi's portrayal of a samurai in Saturday Night Live skits.

But photographs and woodcuts of actual Japanese samurai show far more varied hairstyles. A few samurai wore a bun-like shape, but many others displayed the chonmage, which involved shaving the front of the head:

Jiji Press/Getty Images

In any case, today's man buns aren't really a throwback to samurai fashion. Most of today's man buns tend to be paired with a trendy shirt, a beard, cool pants, or some other fashionable accessory. A man bun is more than the bun itself — its part of a broader lifestyle statement.

5) Can I have a music break? Preferably with a man singing the word "man bun" in falsetto?

As man buns have become famous, they've taken over pop culture. Like any trend, they inspire parodies. But a host of factors have made the man bun great for spreading quickly: it has a catchy name, it's emerged in an era of increasing internet influence over the culture at large, and, most importantly, everybody has an opinion about it.

There are too many man bun parodies to list, but they include celebrities with man buns Photoshopped on, satirical guides, and man bun clipping vigilantes.

6) So why did normal people start growing man buns?

Is there a unified theory of man bun?

Let's look at the previous trendy haircut. That haircut is called the "high and tight," or, less-sensitively, the "Hitler Youth" (so-called because of its similarity to the popular 1930s German haircut). Still in vogue in many places, it involves growing the top long and shaving or closely clipping the sides, as shown by Macklemore (one of many celebrities who wears the style):

Andrew Chin/Getty Images

Man buns, especially undercut man buns, are an easy extension of that look. Grow out your hair a little more, and you suddenly have enough to make a top knot. Truly popular men's haircuts often appear on a timeline — a new trend succeeds when it's easily adaptable from an old one. After all, the "high and tight" followed a Mad Men inspired trend of slicked back hair and close-cut sides.

Just as helpfully, the cut also works on different types of hair: biracial NBA player Joakim Noah was one of the first big stars to wear it, and many black men have modified the man bun for their hair type using braids or dreadlocks in the bun (with variation on the sides that's similar to all other man bun wearers).

Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images

Curly-headed man buns are common too, though they can require slightly longer hair. The accessibility of man buns means that anyone with the current cool haircut can wear them surprisingly quickly.

7) What does the man bun really mean?

Jeff Hahne/Getty Images

The man bun is arguably a symbol of something new and daring in an age when it's harder than ever to buck the status quo. Short neat hair has been "in" ever since Mad Men brought it back, and the man bun is a fresh transgression.

Alternatively, you could see the man bun as the latest in a series of gender redefinitions, since men are wearing what's traditionally seen as a female style. That's nothing new. From the fashionistas of the 18th century, to long-haired hippies, to the early 2000s "metrosexuals," men's fashion trends have often been interpreted as pushing the boundaries of traditional masculinity.

So when will the man bun die? Nobody can predict that. Maybe the 1990s Caesar cut will come back into style — right now, that would be a radical act. But then again, so would a rat tail, or a mullet, or bleached tips.

What's certain is that as long as the man bun is bold, it will be beautiful.

8) Should I grow a man bun?

Shuttestock

You must be the bun you wish to see in the world.

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VIDEO: Pop culture trends inspiring popular belief

This is the sort of backwards compatibility that doesn't get enough airtime at Apple's keynotes: making sure that even the company's latest devices keep up with the Old Memes. If you take a close look at this image of the Apple Watch's contacts app from the company's own support page, you might notice something odd about the initials of the friends. Something familiar. Yep, it's a Rickroll, and one as quiet and restrained as if Jony Ive had come up to you at party and whispered Britishly in your ear: "Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that's a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity means I'm never gonna give you up, never going to let you down."

This low-key gag was spotted by Mike Rundle on Twitter, but, perhaps surprisingly,...

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An anonymous reader writes: Apple today launched Move to iOS, the company's first Android app built in-house. As we noted earlier, "It should surprise no one that the first app Apple built for Android helps you ditch the platform." The fact that the app is getting flooded with one-star reviews is not particularly surprising, either. At the time of publication, the app has an average rating of 1.8. The larger majority (almost 79 percent) are one-star reviews, followed by five-star reviews (almost 19 percent).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How long does it really take to make a sandwich? That's the question filmmaker Andy George asks in the video above. In it, he shows his six-month project to make a sandwich with every ingredient mined from scratch.

In addition to time, it took money: the video puts the cost at $1500 for George to do everything himself. That means harvesting wheat to make bread, getting honey from bees' hives, and even piloting a boat into the Pacific Ocean, scooping up some water, and boiling it for some artisanal sea salt.

He's released the full series on his YouTube channel, and each episode shows just how slow slow food can really be. In an age of remote mass production of food often assembled from a dazzling array of ingredients, George's project is a good reminder of how both how dependent we are on complex supply chains and how complicated even a simple sandwich can be. The experiment isn't limited to sandwiches, however — his project also includes attempts to make a suit and make a book.

But one question's just as important as meditations on the nature of modern food: how did the $1,500, six-month sandwich actually taste? George ends the video with his review: "It's not bad."

Elon Musk's company SpaceX has a pretty lofty goal: get people to Mars and build a colony. To do that — or to do any other human exploration of space, really — in any kind of affordable way, the cost of spaceflight needs to come way down. So that's why SpaceX has been working on making its flagship Falcon 9 rocket reusable. If you can save a rocket's giant fuel tank and engines (known as the "first stage") instead of losing it after every launch, you can reduce the cost of a single flight by tens of millions of dollars.

Trying to land this first stage is tricky (read: explosive) business, so Musk has been testing landing it way out in the ocean on a drone ship. And on both attempts, the company came agonizingly close to succeeding.

Just...

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Casey Johnston has a interesting piece for The Awl on the reckoning that’s coming when ad-blocking goes mainstream with iOS 9:

The Awl’s publisher Michael Macher told me that “the percentage of the network’s revenue that is blockable by adblocking technology hovers around seventy-five to eighty-five percent.”

They better move fast. iOS 9 probably ships tomorrow.

It took seven seasons, 80-some-odd episodes, and countless face plants off giant metal scaffoldings, but American Ninja Warrior finally has its first official winner.

The show, which puts contestants through a rigorous obstacle course of incredible physical challenges, until Monday had never once had a contestant complete all three stages. Contestants need a practically superhuman combination of core and upper-body strength, agility, and endurance to get through the course's more difficult segments, like the warped wall and salmon ladder. The increasingly difficult courses culminate at Las Vegas's Mount Midoriyama course, the seemingly impossible final stage that no one had ever completed before last night. Isaac Caldiero, a busboy from Colorado, achieved that landmark on last night's season finale with an astounding run.

As he faced the final jumps separating him from the metaphorical peak of Mount Midoriyama (starting around the four-minute mark in the below video), the crowd began to realize that history might actually be made here.

Caldiero made all four jumps, which brought him to the mount. While fellow contestant Geoff Britten had also made it to this stage, Caldiero scuttled up that final rope to claim the title with a better time — by just three seconds. He even made it look easy.

As the first winner of American Ninja Warrior, Caldiero is also the first contestant to win the $1 million prize — which at this point, producers probably figured they'd never have to give up, not least to a busboy.

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Apple and Adobe sparked some unintended controversy yesterday after unveiling and demonstrating the new iPad Pro. Adobe mobile design director, Eric Snowden, took to the stage and showed off a new app called Adobe Fix, which offers powerful face detection features for mobile photo retouching. This is the mobile Photoshop app that was previously referred to as Project Rigel.

As an example of the app’s powers, Snowden showed how the app can easily turn a woman’s neutral expression into a smile. The demo drew some chuckles from the audience, but journalists and commentators immediately turned to social media to condemn the demo as sexist.

“I’m not quite happy with the model’s smile,” Snowden said, after opening up the portrait in a page mockup. “I wish she had just a little bit more of a smile. I think it’d warm up the design quite a bit.”

Snowden then loads the photo into Photoshop Fix, selects the lips, and drags a slider to instantly give the woman a smile. You can see the demo at about 38.5 minutes in the Apple event replay. Here’s a short clip of the exact moment:

“The move is being called ‘tone-deaf’ and unfortunate, given the tech industry has been in the firing line lately for its lack of diversity,” writes the New York Times. Mashable adds: “Apple, let’s not force women to smile at your Keynote event.”

Here’s a sampling of reactions on Twitter from journalists and others:

After all the stick Apple get about women & they choose to PHOTOSHOP A WOMAN'S FACE. I cannot. #AppleEvent

— Guardian Tech (@guardiantech) September 9, 2015

1 woman on Apple stage so far is model they're photoshopping. "I don't really like the model's smile, but at least we have an app for that"

— Georgia Wells (@georgia_wells) September 9, 2015

So you're telling me no one in @apple PR previewed this Adobe demo and was like "guys, let's not force a woman to smile during this."

— Nilkanth Patel (@nilkanthjp) September 9, 2015

Are they seriously doing "I wish she would smile more?"

— Nick Spencer (@nickspencer) September 9, 2015

Watching a man photoshop a woman to make her smile more is kind of a cruel joke.

— Lauren Hockenson (@lhockenson) September 9, 2015

It is so obvious that Apple has very few women on staff because a woman would have been like "uh no. let's not tell women to smile, maybe"

— kelsey mckinney (@mckinneykelsey) September 9, 2015

Apple just *had* to make their demo a digital version of “Hey, baby, you’d be so pretty if you smiled!” street talk.

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) September 9, 2015

The Apple keynote or: if you can’t get a woman to talk on stage, you can at least photoshop one live

— Monica Dinosaurescu (@notwaldorf) September 9, 2015

Adobe Photoshop Fix. When women just aren’t smiling enough for techbros. Did they not run this idea past anyone?! #AppleEvent

— John Walton (@thatjohn) September 9, 2015

how did someone at Apple OR Adobe not think through the optics of a dude "fixing" a woman's smile?

— Beth Carpenter (@bethshanna) September 9, 2015

Adobe VP Scott Belsky, the founder of Behance, took to Twitter to assure people that Apple meant no offense by the demo:

@drew i know team never meant for photoshop demo to be offensive. #1 use of retouch apps is for selfies, intention was to show off the tech

— Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky) September 9, 2015

@drew watching live, got excited seeing ppl like feature and retweeted. but I agree, don't like the "make someone smile" context. At all.

— Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky) September 9, 2015

After this hoopla, we’re guessing Adobe won’t be proudly showing off this smile-creation feature when it unveils its new mobile Photoshop app in October at Photoshop MAX.

When The Washington Post published a photo of the TSA's set of master luggage keys, there were concerns that it had inadvertently compromised the agency's system by handing over details of the keys' cuts to intrepid lock-pickers. Now, that appears to be exactly what's happened, as 3D printing plans for the keys have been posted online.

As Wired reports today, that's not a trivial security problem for the agency, or for many of the people just hoping to keep their luggage safe. The TSA asks lock-makers to use designs approved by the agency, ideally keeping the luggage out of thieves' hands while still allowing the TSA access. But with the photos — and now the 3D printing plans — readily available, anyone with a 3D printer also has...

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The contrasts between the original Star Wars trilogy and its prequels were stark. Where Episodes IV to VI were told economically, the prequels felt bloated. Where the originals used practical effects, puppets, and people to build its galaxy, the prequels leaned on computer effects to make a universe that felt fake. Where A New Hope introduced characters we wanted to root for, The Phantom Menace featured a cast of punchable irritants, led by a character so annoying his name is shorthand for "the worst."

But now, less than a hundred days from the premiere of The Force Awakens, fans are finally finding some parellels between the two Star Wars trilogies — particularly in the way they are shot, with the prequels echoing scenes first put on...

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Apple TV's new remote has a touch pad, motion controls, and a few buttons, all of which will help it double as a video game controller. The remote's design — a thin candy bar of plastic that can be used both vertically and horizontally — should be identifiable to anyone who has used Nintendo's Wii. The Apple TV Remote Loop in particular looks identical to the Wii Bracelet, both harnesses wrapping around the wrist of their respective hand model. According to Apple's press materials, though, the Remote Loop isn't part of the remote. It's an accessory sold separately.

I grok the argument to be made that paying for the Remote Loop is no different than paying for a phone case. Or maybe that the Remote Loop, which doesn't have a listed price,...

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For years, Tim Cook has been telling users that iMessage's encryption makes it impossible to wiretap — and now, the Justice Department seems to have found out the hard way that he's right. According to a New York Times report, Apple received a court order from the Justice Department this summer, demanding real-time access to a suspect's iMessage account. Apple replied that iMessage encryption made the request impossible. The company later handed over iCloud backups of the suspect's messaging history, but the request for real-time access (akin to a traditional wiretap) remained unfulfilled.

There are still a number of unanswered questions around the report. We don't know the nature of the court order or the justification for Apple's...

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The easiest way to prevent an avocado from browning is to eat the whole thing in one sitting, but if you just want a couple of slices, a thin coating of oil can prevent the rest from oxidizing.

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Kids who grow up on farms are far less likely to develop asthma or allergies compared with the average child — and now scientists think they know why.

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Hulu is finally joining competitors Amazon and Netflix in offering ad-free video streaming, albeit at an extra cost to ad-averse subscribers. As reported by The New York Times, the video streaming service is splitting its existing subscription service into two tiers: an ad-supported version that costs roughly $8/month, and an ad-free version that costs $12/month. (Its free version, also called Hulu, will continue to exist alongside its premium subscription options.) The split has been rumored for months, with a July Wall Street Journal report nailing both the potential price and release date of Hulu's ad-free tier.

The company's decision to split their premium business into two different options is arriving in the midst of a major drive...

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