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Malala Yousafzai Signs Deal With Apple TV+ to Produce Original Programming
Malala Yousafzai has signed with Apple TV+. On International Women’s Day on Monday, Apple announced a multi-year programming partnership with the 23-year-old Pakistani women’s rights activist and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate. As part of the deal, Malala will help create original programming for Apple TV+ across the realms of dramas, comedies, documentaries, animation, and children’s series. Malala will produce Apple TV+ original content through her new production company Extracurricular. This is the first deal for Extracurricular that was established alongside.
“I believe in the power of stories to bring families together, forge friendships, build movements, and inspire children to dream,” Yousafzai said in a prepared statement. “And I couldn’t ask for a better partner than Apple to help bring these stories to life. I’m grateful for the opportunity to support women, young people, writers, and artists in reflecting the world as they see it.
“My focus is entertainment, but the theme that I want to cover is connection. I think [TV shows and movies] — it builds that connection between us, as young people, as parents, as friends. If you’re sitting with your friends and watching one of your favourite TV shows, or you’re watching something in a different language and learning about a new culture, all of this reminds us that we’re such a diverse world but again, there’s so much in common between all of us.
“In my own life, I’ve seen Bollywood movies to Cartoon Network, they all have helped us in who we are, helped us learn about each other, different cultures, and so I hope that I can cover a wide range of areas through my creation as well.
“For me, it was the impact of Bollywood movies and Indian dramas that helped me understand how society was — especially from a perspective of women and girls. And a lot of the Indian soap operas are — they reflect the traditional role of women. And for me, I’d enjoy it and it was a source of entertainment but also, I’d completely disagree with it, and I wanted to see it differently.
“There’s a lack of feminist perspective, there’s a lack of women’s perspective — and I often think, ‘What would it have been like if women had directed these shows, if women had written these shows?’ I can bring in my perspective and I can show my side of the story, and I think we need to do a lot.”
With this, Apple builds on an existing relationship with Yousafzai. Since 2018, the iPhone maker has sponsored research at the Malala Fund, a non-profit organisation that advocates girls’ education. Apple helped the Malala Fund expand to India and Latin America in 2018, and the Washington, D.C.-headquartered non-profit also operates in Afghanistan, Brazil, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey.
For Yousafzai, this is her first foray into audio-visual content. She has previously written best-selling books: “I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban” published in 2013, and “We Are Displaced: True Stories of Refugee Lives” released in 2019. Malala also created Assembly, a digital publication for girls and young women. She has also starred in the 2015 documentary He Named Me Malala.
“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”
The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.
Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.
Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.
In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.
To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.
Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.
The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.
Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.
The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.
For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
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