Month: August 2018

As crews across California battle more than a dozen wildfires — including the largest in state history — the blazes are spewing enough carbon into the air to undo some of the good done by the state’s climate policies.

What’s even worse: Climate-warming compounds that will be released by the charred forests long after the fires are extinguished may do more to warm up the planet than the immediate harm from smoky air.

Scientists say that only about 15 percent of a forest’s store of carbon is expelled during burns. The remainder is released slowly over the coming years and decades, as trees decay.That second hit of carbon, experts say, contains compounds that do more to accelerate climate change than those from the original fire. And future fires over previously burned ground could make climate prospects even more bleak.

“The worst possible situation is the fire that comes through and kills everything,” said Nic Enstice, regional science coordinator for the Sierra Nevada Conservancy. “Then, 10 or 15 years later, another fire comes through and releases all the carbon left in the trees on the ground. That’s really bad.”

It’s a scenario that could explode at any time. Enstice cited a research paper published this year that laid out a chilling tableau: California has more than a 120 million dead trees strewn around its mountain ranges, with the southern Sierra hardest hit.

When fires hit those downed trees, the state will begin to experience “mass fires” spewing plumes of carbon. The resulting conflagrations, according to the researcher, will be almost unimaginable.

“The emissions from those fires will be unlike anything we will have ever seen,” Enstice said. “And you won’t be able put it out.”

Computing the carbon released from the fires so far this year will not happen soon. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration flies planes through smoke plumes, gathering data, but air traffic over wildfires is tightly restricted. Scientific research is not a top priority when fires are threatening towns.

But some preliminary data is available now.

One method uses inventories of existing forests — surveying how many trees and which type. Those records are updated every 10 years. Researchers then overlay infrared images captured from satellites that show what’s burning and at what intensity. From that, predictions can be made about carbon emissions on any given day. Scientists say that emissions from burned forests are one of the most virulent types, called black carbon.

According to the most recent accounting from the state Air Resources Board, California’s annual black carbon discharge — excluding wildfires — are equal to emissions from about 8 million passenger vehicles driven for one year. Not a small number. But when the state calculates the same annual average of black carbon coming solely from wildfires, it’s the equivalent of nearly 19 million additional cars on the road.

With year-round fire seasons and fire intensity off the charts, state officials admit that wildfires could set back California’s myriad policies to offset the impacts of climate change. “It’s significant,” Enstice said. “We don’t have a lot of data to measure yet, we’re still using primitive tools. But everyone is gearing up to study this.”

This article is republished courtesy of CALMatters. 

NASA has announced a set of public-private partnerships with several U.S. space companies, totaling an impressive $44 million. Blue Origin, Astrobotic, United Launch Alliance and more are the recipients of up to $10 million each for a variety of projects aimed at exploring and utilizing space safely and efficiently.

The 10 awards are for “tipping point” technologies, as NASA calls them, that are highly promising but need funding for a ground or flight demonstration — in other words, to get it out of the lab.

ULA is the big winner here, taking home $13.9M split between three projects. $10M will go to looking into a cryogenic vehicle fluid management system that could simplify and improve lunar landers. The rest of the money is split between another cryogenic fluid project for missions with long durations, and a project to “demonstrate mid-air retrieval capabilities up to 8,000 pounds… on a vehicle returning to Earth from orbital velocity.” Really, that last one is the cheapest?

Blue Origin has $13M coming its way, primarily for… yet another a cryogenic fluid management system for lunar landers. You can see where NASA’s priorities are — putting boots on the regolith. The remainder goes to testing a suite of advanced sensors that could make lunar landings easier. The company will be testing both these systems on its New Shepard vehicle from as high as 100km.

The other big $10M prize goes to Astrobotics, which will like Blue Origin be working on a sensor suite for Terrain Relative Navigation. It’s basically adding intelligence to a craft’s landing apparatus so it can autonomously change its touchdown location, implement safety measures, and so on, based on the actual local observed conditions.

The Mars 2020 Rover will be using its own TRN system, and the ones funded here will be different and presumably more advanced, but this gif from NASA does a good job illustrating the tech:

Several other endeavors were selected by NASA for funding, and you can find them — and more technical details for the ones mentioned above — at the partnership announcement page.

The New York City Council has approved legislation that will halt the issuing of new licenses for ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft.

The stated goal of the policy is to give the city time to study the industry’s impact. During that time, ride-hailing companies would only be able to add new vehicles if they’re wheelchair accessible. The legislation also allows the city to set a minimum wage for drivers.

There were drivers demonstrating in favor of the bill package outside City Hall today, and the Independent Drivers Guild (which says it represents more than 60,000 drivers for ride-hailing apps in New York City) praised the decision.

“We hope this is the start of a more fair industry not only here in New York City, but all over the world,” said IDG founder Jim Conigliaro, Jr. in a statement. “We cannot allow the so-called ‘gig economy’ companies to exploit loopholes in the law in order to strip workers of their rights and protections.”

Uber and Lyft, meanwhile, had asked their riders to oppose the legislation, saying that it would result in fewer drivers and less reliable service. They also suggested there were other ways to address the underlying issues, and in fact proposed creating a $100 million “hardship fund” for drivers as an alternative.

Drivers demonstrating outside City Hall

In response to today’s news, Danielle Filson from Uber’s communications team provided the following statement:

The City’s 12-month pause on new vehicle licenses will threaten one of the few reliable transportation options while doing nothing to fix the subways or ease congestion. We take the Speaker at his word that the pause is not intended to reduce service for New Yorkers and we trust that he will hold the TLC accountable, ensuring that no New Yorker is left stranded. In the meantime, Uber will do whatever it takes to keep up with growing demand and we will not stop working with city and state leaders, including Speaker [Corey] Johnson, to pass real solutions like comprehensive congestion pricing.

The company plans to explore other strategies to keep up with demand. Those include recruiting drivers with licensed vehicles who aren’t currently working with Uber, or finding additional drivers who could drive licensed vehicles at times when they would otherwise be idle.

Lyft, meanwhile, sent this statement from its vice president of public policy Joseph Okpaku:

These sweeping cuts to transportation will bring New Yorkers back to an era of struggling to get a ride, particularly for communities of color and in the outer boroughs. We will never stop working to ensure New Yorkers have access to reliable and affordable transportation in every borough.

The New York Times reports that the cap will take effect as soon as Mayor Bill de Blasio signs the bill.

“Our city is directly confronting a crisis that is driving working New Yorkers into poverty and our streets into gridlock,” de Blasio tweeted. “The unchecked growth of app-based for-hire vehicle companies has demanded action – and now we have it.”

Disney may offer its customers the option to purchase a discounted bundle of its three streaming apps — Hulu, Disney’s upcoming streaming service and ESPN+ — according to comments made by Disney CEO Bob Iger during the company’s’ earnings call this week. He said Disney would rather keep the three properties separate, rather than trying to combine them into a more robust “aggregation play,” so as to better address cord cutters’ desire to pick-and-choose the services they want.

The company will own 60 percent of Hulu when its $71.3 billion deal to acquire 21st Century Fox closes. It already owns ESPN, which now offers a streaming service called ESPN+, and is launching its own Disney-branded streaming service in 2019 that will feature Pixar, Marvel, Disney, Lucasfilm (Star Wars) and, eventually, it now says, National Geographic content.

While Disney’s service is meant to be more family-friendly, Hulu will cater to a more adult market. And the plan is to keep those two separate.

Iger had previously said the idea that a bundle could exist in the future wasn’t out of the question, but had not been definite about Disney’s plans in that area.

Now, he’s making it more clear that Disney believes there’s value in offering a discounted bundle of its services, rather than combining all their content under one roof.

“So rather than one, let’s call it, gigantic aggregated play, we’re going to bring to the market what we’ve already brought to market [with the] sports play. I’ll call it Disney Play, which is more family-oriented. And then, of course, there’s Hulu. And they will basically be designed to attract different tastes and different segment or audience demographics,” Iger explained, in response to a question about whether or not it would ever build an aggregated streaming app instead of pursuing the different market segments.

“If a consumer wants all three, ultimately, we see an opportunity to package them from a pricing perspective,” Iger continued. “But it could be that a consumer just wants sports or just wants family or just wants the Hulu offering, and we want to be able to offer that kind of flexibility to consumers…” he said.

In addition to this potential bundling deal, the company took the opportunity to divulge a few more details about Disney’s streaming service this week.

It noted, for example, that it will have less content that its rival Netflix, but its price point will also reflect that — meaning, it will cost less than Netflix.

“We will be launching the Disney app into the market probably in about a year — sometime the end of calendar 2019,” Iger had told investors. “We’re going to walk before we run, as it relates to volume of content, because it takes time to build the kind of content library that ultimately we intend to build,” he said.

“We feel that it does not have to have anything close to the volume of what Netflix…And the price, by the way, will also reflect a lower volume of product,” said Iger.

He also re-confirmed the service’s lineup will initially include a 10-episode, live-action Star Wars series from director Jon Favreau that cost $100 million; new episodes of Star Wars: Clone Wars; and new series based on existing IP like Disney Channel’s “High School Musical” and Pixar’s “Monsters, Inc.”

Plus, the service will stream Disney’s upcoming slate of films like Marvel’s “Captain Marvel,” “Avengers 4,” “Star Wars: Episode IX” and the live-action remakes of “Dumbo,” Lady and the Tramp,” “The Lion King” and “The Sword in the Store.”

“Ultimately, National Geographic will be a contributor,” Iger noted at one point.

According to an NYT profile of Ricky Strauss, the Disney exec charged with programming the new service, it will also include an original film, “Timmy Failure,” which is based on the best-selling book series about a “comically self-confident boy detective.”

The report said that at least nine movies are in production or advanced development, with budgets ranging from $20 million to $60 million.

This includes a period adventure story about a sled dog called “Togo;” a remake of “Three Men and a Baby;” “The Paper Magician,” which takes places at a school for magic; “Noelle,” starring Anna Kendrick as Santa’s daughter; “Stargirl,” based on a young adult novel; and a version of “Don Quixote,” The NYT additionally reported.

There will “probably” be a new Muppets show and Marvel-themed shows, too, it said.

Fossil’s Q watch line is an interesting foray by a traditional fashion watchmaker into the wearable world. Their latest additions to the line, the Fossil Q Venture HR and Fossil Q Explorist HR, add a great deal of Android Wear functionality to a watch that is reminiscent of Fossil’s earlier, simpler watches. In other words, these are some nice, low-cost smartwatches for the fitness fan.

The original Q watches included a clever hybrid model with analog face and step counter. As the company expanded into wearables, however, they went Android Wear route and created a number of lower-powered touchscreen watches. Now, thanks to a new chipset, Fossil is able to add a great deal more functionality in a nice package. The Venture and the Explorist adds untethered GPS, NFC, heart rate, and 24 hour battery life. It also includes an altimeter and gyroscope sensor.

The new watches start at $255 and run the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 chip, an optimized chipset for fitness watches.

The watch comes in multiple styles and with multiple bands and features 36 different faces including health and fitness-focused faces for the physically ambitious. The watch also allows you to pay with Google Pay – Apple Pay isn’t supported – and you can store content on the watch for runs or walks. It also tracks swims and is waterproof. The Venture and Explorist are 40mm and 45mm respectively and the straps are interchangeable. While they’re no $10,000 Swiss masterpiece, these things look – and work – pretty good.

Elon Musk, billionaire founder of Tesla, startled the Twittersphere yesterday by announcing he wanted to take the company private at the price of $420 per share. While some speculated the tweet was a joke or a marijuana reference, others took to the market. The tweet sent the stock soaring up 11 percent, causing a halt in trade for a portion of the day.

Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the matter.

Wall Street Journal sources say the SEC has since made inquiries to Tesla to find out whether Musk’s tweet was truthful and why he chose to announce such a move on Twitter instead of through a regulatory filing. Musk could be held legally liable if regulators determine he was intentionally trying to boost the stock price with his tweet.

We’ve reached out to the SEC and Tesla for more.

Musk also indicated in the tweet he’d secured funding for the startling move, though it’s unclear where the funding would be coming from at this time as he has yet to disclose those details. The tweet appeared shortly after news broke that a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund bought a $2 billion stake in Tesla and, according to the WSJ, Musk spoke with a group of Tesla’s board members last week about taking the company private.

So this is bad. Black Hat, the king of enterprise security conventions, kicked off today, and most noticeable amid the fusillade of security research was some impressive work from Ruben Santamarta of IOActive, whose team has unearthed worrying vulnerabilities in satellite communication systems, aka SATCOM, used by airplanes, ships, and military units worldwide.

Now, it’s not catastrophically bad: in particular, while attackers could mess with or disable your in-flight Wi-Fi, conceivably try to hack into devices connected to them, and/or disable all in-flight satellite comms, they couldn’t actually affect any systems which control the airplane. The bigger worries are in the military or maritime spheres, because these are remote vulnerabilities — anyone on the Internet can hack into a connected vulnerable SATCOM device. Which is to say, presumably most of them, since communication is their whole reason for being.

In the former case, in addition to the risk of attackers modifying or disabling satellite communications, devices with onboard GPS could leak the location of military units. And in both cases, this opens up the prospect of “cyber-physical attacks”, a brilliantly dystopic phrase if ever there was one; basically, if you crank enough power through a satellite antenna, it can radiate energy powerful enough that it affects biological tissue and electrical systems. Same general principle as a microwave oven.

But wait, it gets worse! These are embedded systems. In general there’s no easy way to beam a remote upgrade to them; in some cases the only upgrade is a wholesale replacement. And while there are mitigations (not fixes per se, but approaches which will reduce the severity and likelihood of attacks) for aviation and military SATCOM, maritime systems are … more problematic.

So. Don’t worry too much if you’re not a sailor or a soldier, your airplane won’t plunge or divert because of this … but someone sitting at a computer far away on the ground might be able to take over your in-flight Wi-Fi. Santamarta (who has a history of this kind of thing) and IOActive are working with vendors and unspecified “government agencies” to address these vulnerabilities, but it sounds like, at least on the high seas, this problem is going to be with us for a while.

(The full technical talk regarding these vulnerabilities is tomorrow; today’s press conference was merely a teaser. I’ll update this post with any important details which arise there.)

In the very near future, robots are going to be picking the vegetables that appear on grocery store shelves across America.

The automation revolution that’s arrived on the factory floor will make its way to the ag industry in the U.S. and its first stop will likely be the indoor farms that are now dotting the U.S.

Leading the charge in this robot revolution will be companies like Root AI, a young startup which has just raised $2.3 million to bring its first line of robotic harvesting and farm optimization technologies to market.

Root AI is focused on the 2.3 million square feet of indoor farms that currently exist in the world and is hoping to expand as the number of farms cultivating crops indoors increases. Some estimates from analysis firms like Agrilyst put the planned expansions in indoor farming at around 22 million square feet (much of that in the U.S.).

While that only amounts to roughly 505 acres of land — a fraction of the 900 million acres of farmland that’s currently cultivated in the U.S. — those indoor farms offer huge yield advantages over traditional farms with a much lower footprint in terms of resources used. The average yield per acre in indoor farms for vine crops like tomatoes, and leafy greens, is over ten times higher than outdoor farms.

Root AI’s executive team thinks their company can bring those yields even higher.

Founded by two rising stars of the robotics industry, the 36 year old Josh Lessing and 28 year old Ryan Knopf, Root is an extension of work the two men had done as early employees at Soft Robotics, the company pioneering new technologies for robotic handling.

Spun out of research conducted by Harvard professor George Whiteside, the team at Soft Robotics was primarily comprised of technologists who had spent years developing robots after having no formal training in robot development. Knopf, a lifetime roboticist who studied at the University of Pennsylvania was one of the sole employees with a traditional robotics background.

“We were the very first two people at Soft developing the core technology there,” says Lessing. “The technology is being used for heavily in the food industry. What you would buy a soft gripper for is… making a delicate food gripper very easy to deploy that would help you maintain food quality with a mechanical design that was extremely easy to manage. Like inflatable fingers that could grab things.”

Root AI co-founders Josh Lessing and Ryan Knopf

It was radically different from the ways in which other robotics companies were approaching the very tricky problem of replicating the dexterity of the human hand. “From the perspective of conventional robotics, we were doing everything wrong and we would never be able to do what a conventional robot was capable of. We ended up creating adaptive gripping with these new constructs,” Lessing said.

While Soft Robotics continues to do revolutionary work, both Knopf and Lessing saw an opportunity to apply their knowledge to an area where it was sorely needed — farming. “Ag is facing a lot of complicated challenges and at the same time we have a need for much much more food,” Lessing said. “And a lot of the big challenges in ag these days are out in the field, not in the packaging and processing facilities. So Ryan and I started building this new thesis around how we could make artificial intelligence helpful to growers.”

The first product from Root AI is a mobile robot that operates in indoor farming facilities. It picks tomatoes and is able to look at crops and assess their health, and conduct simple operations like pruning vines and observing and controlling ripening profiles so that the robot can cultivate crops (initially tomatoes) continuously and more effectively than people.

Root AI’s robots have multiple cameras (one on the arm of the robot itself, the “tool’s” view, and one sitting to the side of the robot with a fixed reference frame) to collect both color images and 3D depth information. The company has also developed a customized convolutional neural network to detect objects of interest and label them with bounding boxes. Beyond the location of the fruit, Root AI uses other, proprietary, vision processing techniques to measure properties of fruit (like ripeness, size, and quality grading).  All of this is done on the robot, without relying on remote access to a data-center. And it’s all done in real time.

Tools like these robots are increasingly helpful, as the founders of Root note, because there’s an increasing labor shortage for both indoor and outdoor farming in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the mounting pressures on the farm industry increasingly make robotically assisted indoor farming a more viable option for production. Continuing population growth and the reduction of arable land resulting from climate change mean that indoor farms, which can produce as much as twenty times as much fruit and vegetables per square foot while using up to 90% less water become extremely attractive.

Suppliers like Howling Farms, Mucci Farms, Del Fresco Produce and Naturefresh are already producing a number of fruits and vegetables for consumers, said Lessing. “They’ve really fine tuned agriculture production in ways that are meaningful to broader society. They are much more sustainable and they allow you to collocate farms with urban areas [and] they have a much more simplified logistics network.”

That ability to pare down complexity and cost in a logistics supply chain is a boon to retailers like Walmart and Whole Foods that are competing to provide fresher, longer lasting produce to consumers, Lessing said. Investors, apparently agreed. Root AI was able to enlist firms like First Round Capital. Accomplice, Schematic Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures and Half Court Ventures to back its $2.3 million round.

“There are many many roles at the farm and we’re looking to supplement in all areas,” said Lessing. “Right now we’re doing a lot of technology experiments with a couple of different growers. assessment of ripeness and grippers ability to grab the tomatoes. next year we’re going to be doing the pilots.”

And as global warming intensifies pressures on food production, Lessing sees demand for his technologies growing.

“On a personal level I have concerns about how much food we’re going to have and where we can make it,” Lessing said. “Indoor farming is focused on making food anywhere. if you control your environment you have the ability to make food…. Satisfying people’s basic needs is one of the most impactful things i can do with my life.”

Snapchat has largely escaped scrutiny about fake news and election interference since its content quickly disappears and its publisher hub Discover is a closed platform. But now the Infowars mess that’s plagued Facebook and YouTube has landed at Snap’s feet, as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has begun tweeting to promote an augmented reality Snapchat Lens built by someone in his community that puts a piece of masking tape with the word “censorship” written over it across the mouth of the user with a “Free Infowars” logo in the screen’s corner. He’s also encouraging his followers to follow Infowars’ official Snapchat page.

The situation highlights the whack-a-mole game of trying to police the fragmented social media space. There always seems to be another platform for those kicked off others for inciting violence, harassing people, or otherwise breaking the rules. A cross-industry committee that helps coordinate enforcement might be necessary to ensure that as someone is booted from one platform, their presences elsewhere are swiftly reviewed and monitored for similar offenses.

“If they can shut me down, they can shut you down,” Jones says at the start of his 42-second video. He cites Facebook, Twitter and Google among those that are getting mobilised by “the Democrats” in aid of defeating opposing candidates in future elections.

(In actual fact, Twitter and related sites like Periscope have, to the consternation of many, not removed Jones’ or Infowars’ accounts from its platform, and for that matter neither has LinkedIn, Google+, or Instagram. Others like Pinterest and Facebook itself have now gotten behind a wider move to start to take action against accounts like these to reduce the amount of sensationalised information being spread around in the name of “free speech.” You can see the full list of Infowars’ and Alex Jones’ active and now inactive social accounts here.)

Jones himself doesn’t seem to have a Snapchat account, but Infowars’ website cites the ‘Infowarslive’ handle as its official Snapchat profile, and it’s what Jones is now pointing fans towards. However, from what we understand from sources, the account has been inactive since early this year. Snap, according to these sources, is currently monitoring it to see what it does and whether that content violates community guidelines, which prohibit hate speech and harassment.

In the mean time, say the sources, Snap is also looking into the Lens that Jones is promoting to determine whether it violates Snap’s community guidelines. These guidelines include prohibiting content that may incite or glorify violence or the use of weapons; may be considered offensive by a particular group of individuals, or that could foster negative stereotypes, such as slurs or other derogatory language; promotes dangerous, harmful, or illegal activity, or that encourages Snapping while driving; contains hashtags or usernames; or threatens to harm a person, group of people, or property. 

The interesting thing with a Lens, however, is that while the Lens itself may be innocuous, how it gets appropriated might be less so, and that’s not something that might get caught as quickly by Snap. Users can unlock the Lens for 24 hours with a link or screenshot of its QR Snapcode. From there they can do whatever they want with it, including reactivating it each day for further use. Lenses are one of the least ephemeral parts of Snapchat, making them a potent vector for persistently spreading a controversial viewpoint, and indeed viewpoints that might well violate those community standards, even if the Lens itself does not.

The insight that’s emerging from the whole Infowars debacle is that problems exist not only with how public figures use social platforms, but with how their audiences interpret or mutate their messages as they get shared, again and again.

Snap itself — as its earnings showed us yesterday — is still a smaller platform compared to some social networks. That’s another reason it may have avoided becoming a tool for information operations by malicious actors like the Russian agents that attacked the 2016 presidential election via Facebook.

But Snapchat is in a vulnerable place right now. Yesterday’s Q2 earnings report revealed that its daily active user count actually shrank from 191 million to 188 million. If took a hard stance against fake or controversial accounts, either blocking on driving away users, that could further weigh on its growth. Snap is meanwhile starting to see momentum in its ad business, beating expectations with $262.3 million in revenue last quarter. That’s a trend it doesn’t want to mess with.

Now that Jones can’t spread his false news on Facebook and YouTube, he may look increasingly to platforms like Snapchat or his mobile app the Apple hasn’t removed. And if these platforms allow him to stay, that may light a beacon attracting more questionable content creators.

Roku is today bringing its free, streaming entertainment destination, The Roku Channel, to non-Roku devices for the first time, with a launch on both the web and on select Samsung smart TVs, ahead of a wider cross-platform rollout. The channel, which offers free, ad-supported movies and TV shows, will be available across PCs, mobile phones, and tablets, the company says. In addition, Roku is updating the navigation on its own devices, including Roku players and Roku TVs, to include a new feature called “Featured Free,” which will directly point users to free content from The Roku Channel, as well as other apps, like ABC, The CW, CW Seed, Fox, Freeform, Pluto TV, Sony Crackle, Tubi, and more.

The Roku Channel first launched last September, as a way for Roku to differentiate its connected media devices and TVs running Roku software from rivals like Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV and Chromecast.

Despite Roku’s popularity – it’s leading the internet video streaming device market – the company hadn’t really used its platform to promote its own content – the way Amazon pushes Prime Video shows on Fire TV owners, for example – until then.

The channel itself is populated with movies that Roku gained access to through licensing deals with studios like Lionsgate, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Warner Brothers. However, it also leveraged Roku’s strength as a platform by pulling in free content from its existing channel partners (with permission), including American Classics, FilmRise, Nosey, OVGuide, Popcornflix, Vidmark, and YuYu.

The content itself is monetized through advertising, which Roku’s in-house ad sales team is in charge of selling, with some portion going to partners. The company’s goal has been to smartly place the ads to respect the content they interrupt, and to not inundate viewers with the same ad over and over again.

With the channel’s expansion to the web and other TV platforms, Roku can further grow its advertising business, while also making the case for itself device platform. For existing Roku device owners, the channel is just another value-add for being a Roku user – and one that may keep them from jumping ship to another player in the future.

“Roku is the leading platform for free entertainment and our users love it. We’re delighted to deliver even more value to our customers without subscriptions, complicated logins or fees,” said Rob Holmes, Roku’s Vice President of Programming and Engagement, in a statement about today’s expansion. “By expanding The Roku Channel to the Web, we’re broadening the access points to high-quality, free streaming entertainment. With Featured Free, we’re making it easy for our customers to see the great, free content already available on the Roku platform in one place, while creating value for our content providers by connecting them with Roku’s growing audience.”

Meanwhile, Roku is again taking advantage of its platform nature with the launch of the “Featured Free” section on its home screen.

This top-level navigational menu – just above “My Feed” on Roku’s home screen – will include a list of popular free content from its channel partners. The shows are identified by name and include a thumbnail image, but it doesn’t indicate which partner’s channel they’re coming from. And, when launched, customers are taken directly to the content itself.

This section will include the latest in-season episodes of top network shows, full past-season catch-ups, classic series, and hit movies.

The news of these launches follows a recent report from Variety which claimed Roku is planning to launch its own Amazon Channels-like subscription marketplace, as well. The report said Roku would bring together a number of paid subscription services into the same section, to make it easier for consumers to subscribe to paid channels without needing to first find the right app.

The “Featured Free” section paints a good picture of what this new subscription marketplace could look like – a single destination where the content itself, and not the channel it comes from, is what’s highlighted.

These new features also indicate a shift in Roku’s larger business from being fully reliant on device sales, to transitioning more into services; for now, specifically ad-supported services.

Roku is expected to report its earnings later today, after the market’s close, so the timing of the launches is not coincidental. Wall Street is expecting a net loss of $0.15 per share, down from $0.18 in the year-ago quarter, and sales up 41.46% to reach $99.6 million, in Q2. Overall, analysts predict Roku will report annual sales of $697.9 million.

Roku says the “Featured Free” section will begin to roll out to U.S. users starting today, and will reach all customers over the weeks ahead.

The Roku Channel, meanwhile, is available on the web as of now, via TheRokuChannel.com.