The Oscar nominees have been announced! And the broadcast is moving to YouTube in '29.

I'm not going to bother talking about the nominees. There was a point in time where I had a minimal interest in that, but not anymore. Most of the Best Picture nominees never show at my local theater, and my theatrical movie watching has really declined over recent years.

The thing that I find interesting is that in two years, we'll have the last broadcast on broadcast television. It is estimated that ABC/Disney paid over $100,000,000 for last years broadcast, and were looking for lower fees as viewer numbers have been declining. With the broadcast going streaming, there's no time limit: as the article says, the broadcast could be six hours long with Mr. Beast hosting.

It will be mildly interesting to see what kind of viewership numbers YouTube/Google can pull. Most people with streaming can pull it up on the same TV with which they watched it on ABC, but now they can easily view it in more countries than ABC/Disney was able to reach. And people can probably watch it more easily on devices while at work.

But I still don't really care.

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/oscars-youtube-2029-1236610989/

https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/12/17/210247/the-oscars-will-abandon-broadcast-tv-for-youtube-in-2029

GitHub announces charging you for running it on your own hardware, then walks it back

GitHub is software mainly intended for programmers and developers as a software repository. Very useful stuff, very widely-used. And now about to get a lot more expensive for large teams.

Microsoft bought GitHub a few years back, and a month ago, announced that it would start charging people who ran it on their own hardware $0.002 per minute charge for "self-hosted runners executing jobs on private GitHub repositories. At the same time, GitHub noted in a Tuesday blog post that it's lowering the prices of GitHub-hosted runners beginning January 1, under a scheme it calls "simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub Actions." Self-hosted runner usage on public repositories will remain free, we note." This was to go into effect in March.

One person contacted noted that they had run the numbers and it would cost them $3,500 a month on top of their normal monthly fee for using GitHub.

There was a large hue and cry, and pretty much the same day Microsoft announced that they were rescinding the charge.

HOWEVER, as The Register article points out about the later MS announcement, "We note that GitHub didn’t say it won’t ever go forward with charging for self-hosted runners, only that it’s postponing the change. As one commenter on the community thread pointed out, that means charging for self-hosted runners may be a foregone conclusion."

The Slashdot article lists many completely free, open-source alternatives to GitHub and I expect people are making migration plans as we speak.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/17/github_charge_dev_own_hardware/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/12/17/2042247/github-is-going-to-start-charging-you-for-using-your-own-hardware