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If you’ve got a new LG TV, you might have noticed that the picture feels eerily smooth. This effect, which LG calls “TruMotion,” tries to make your TV’s picture feel smoother but often ends up looking strange.

TruMotion is LG’s implementation of motion smoothing. Motion smoothing works by increasing the framerate (the speed at which your TV shows a new picture) of the video by inserting extra “fake” frames between each real frame. Most movies and TV shows are shot at 24 frames-per-second (FPS), and by guessing what the in-between frames would look like, your TV can bump the framerate up to 48 or 60 FPS. This can make certain fast-paced content (like sports) look a lot better, but ruins the cinematic quality of movies and TV shows for some people.

While high refresh rate video is weird looking enough on its own, the other issue with motion smoothing is that it’s a fake effect, and often makes the “fake” frames look very blurry. Because it has to guess, it ends up being slightly off a lot of the time, which can make it look even worse.

RELATED: Why Does My New HDTV’s Picture Look Sped Up and “Smooth”?

You can disable the TruMotion feature in your TV’s settings. LG’s settings are a bit abnormal though. Their TruMotion tech also manages synced backlight scanning, which syncs the refresh rate with the backlight. They say you can’t turn this off on any TVs, but you can adjust the motion interpolation, which is the thing that makes TruMotion look weird.

LG hides the option under Picture Menu > Picture Mode Settings > Picture Options. From there, you can set different levels for TruMotion:

• Off: probably what you want
• Smooth: uses motion blur
• Clear: doesn’t use motion blur
• Clear Plus: uses backlight scanning in addition to interpolation

If you have a problem finding the option, it could be under a different section, so it’s best to consult your TV’s manual, which you can find online. Just enter your TV’s model number and, when the page loads, use Ctrl+F (or Command+F on Mac) to search for “TruMotion.”

It’s possible some older TVs might not even have an option to turn it off, in which case you’ll have to buy a new TV if you want to disable it.

Photo Credits: Shutterstock

Motorola’s G series of phones has long been a favorite among bargain hunters looking for flexible Android handsets on the cheap. Today the company updated the series for 2019 with the G7, G7 Play, and G7 Power.

The G7, sans adjective, is the most expensive of the line, though it’s still more than reasonable at $300. Three bills gets you a relatively large 6.2-inch 1080p LCD screen over a mid-range Snapdragon 632 processor, 64GB of storage, and 4GB of RAM. The rear camera is a dual setup of 12MP main and 5MP depth sensors, with an 8MP front camera chilling in a “teardrop” notch. The phone features a USB-C port and, thankfully for anyone who doesn’t want to buy more adapters, a headphone jack.

The G7 Power (header image) drops the price down to $250 but bumps the battery up from just 3000mAh to a whopping 5000mAh, which should last for at least two days on moderate use. Like the more expensive G7, it can do fast charging at 15 watts. The bigger battery and fetching clear plastic back make the G7 Power noticeably thicker, and it has just 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, though the processor remains the same. It also drops the second rear camera and has a much longer iPhone-style notch on the front. The screen is still 6.2 inches, but it drops down to 720p resolution.

For just $200, the G7 Play gives you a 5.7-inch 720p LCD, 32GB of storage, and a somewhat anemic 2GB of RAM. The rear camera is a different 13MP shooter and the battery drops back down to 3000mAh, this time with 10-watt charging. Oddly, the G7 Play is the only member of the trio to get a front-facing flash in its camera notch. Oddly, all three designs are missing NFC and wireless charging, but they have both fingerprint and face unlock options.

The three new G7 phones go on sale today in Mexico and Brazil, with launches in the US and Europe in the spring. They run Android 9.0 “Pie,” but don’t expect these models to get fast updates when Google’s yearly operating system refresh comes in the third or fourth quarter.

Source: Ars Technica

Charts are great for visualizing data. Adding animation to charts can make that visualization even better, letting you do things like introduce one piece of a pie chart at a time, so you have more room for discussion. Here’s how to do just that in Microsoft PowerPoint.

First, open up your PowerPoint presentation and go to the slide where you want the animated pie chart. To insert a pie chart, switch to the “Insert” tab and click the “Chart” button.

In the Insert Chart window that appears, select “Pie” from the list on the left. On the right, select the pie chart style you’d like to use from the five options that appear. When you’ve made your selection, click “OK” at the bottom right of the window.

You’ll notice the pie chart has now appeared on the slide and, with it, and Excel chart. Change the labels of the pie chart by editing the text in column A, and enter its respective data in column B. Once done, close the spreadsheet.

Next, select the pie chart and head over to the “Animations” tab. Here, select whichever animation you’d like to use from the available options. In this example, we will use “Wipe.”

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Cricket Wireless

Around mid-last year, we published a couple of pieces about the best phone plans for families and single lines. Cricket was close to the top of both lists, and today it’s probably the best unlimited plan you can get.

RELATED: The Best Cell Phone Plans for Families

Cool, so why are we talking about it again if nothing really changed? Because I recently switched to Cricket Unlimited and man let me tell you: I wish I would’ve done this ages ago. Ages.

Here’s the scenario. Back in December, I was away from home for about two weeks visiting family in Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia. Lots of driving, lots of hotel time. The hotel Wi-Fi was crappy, so I was quickly approaching my 8 GB data limit on Cricket.

Then it hit me: I would also be traveling to Vegas for CES in early January, where I would undoubtedly need a lot more data. At that point I had two choices: add more data as needed, one gigabyte (at $10 a pop) or change my plan.

But here’s the thing: I have four lines on my Cricket plan and was grandfathered into an old pricing scheme. Even one change would’ve killed this pricing and raise my bill by $30 in addition to the increase in the plan itself.

Then I remembered Cricket’s killer pricing for its unlimited plan: just $100 for four lines. That was less than I was paying at the time, but I had concerns because that particular plan caps the speed at 3 Mbps (opposed to Cricket’s usual 8 Mbps cap). Can you really survive with just 3 Mbps?

I had little choice, so I took the plunge and hoped for the best. I wish I would’ve done it a long time ago.

That’s the question, right? Can you survive with such “slow” speeds? That’s the biggest thing I wanted to know, and it was especially daunting knowing that if I were to try to revert to my old plan later, I’d be paying more money for the same thing (who the hell wants that?).

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Google Assistant voice commands for your smarthome work best if your devices are in groups (Google calls these groups “rooms”). Skipping this step during setup makes using your devices harder. Here’s how to create rooms and add devices to them.

With your smarthome devices associated with rooms, Google will let you accomplish more in fewer words. Rather than tell it “turn off living room light 1, turn off living room light 2, turn off living room light 3” and so on, you name the room Living Room and then say “turn off the living room lights” to turn everything off at once.

Better yet, if the Google Home you are speaking to is physically in the same location as your smart lights, then you can add it to the same group as the lights. Then all you have to say is “turn off the lights” —Google Assistant will understand the association and turn off the correct lights.

To add a device to a room, open Google Assistant and tap the “Add” button.

Tap the “Set Up Device” option.

Tap “New Device” for any Google Home or Chrome Cast device, or tap “Have Something already set up?” for external devices like Philips Hue or Wink hub. For this example, we’re using the latter option.

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Mark Van Scyoc/Shutterstock.com.

Wireless routers have fourteen different channels they can use for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, but three of them are off limits. Channels 12 and 13 are allowed in low-power mode, while channel 14 is banned—and only allowed in Japan.

Wi-Fi uses radio waves to communicate over short distances. Wi-Fi networks can operate on several different channels to help reduce interference. Each channel is a range of frequencies. When several Wi-Fi networks are within range of each other, they can operate on different channels, so they aren’t “talking over” and interfering with each other.

2.4 GHz Wi-Fi networks can work on a small number of channels: Just channels one through eleven in the USA. These channels overlap with each other, too. That’s why people often recommend choosing either channels one, six, or eleven.

While the USA restricts 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi to eleven channels, channels 12 through 14 are available elsewhere in the world. You might even be able to activate them by changing your router settings, although you should not do so. Channel 14 is the most tempting to people, as it would have even less interference—but it’s illegal to operate your router on this channel in the USA.

The newer 5 GHz Wi-Fi standard uses a larger number of channels to reduce interference further, but 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi is still in wide use. In fact, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi offers a better signal over long distances and through solid objects, so it still has its place. The Wi-Fi industry was particularly focused on 5 GHz Wi-Fi for a while, but Wi-Fi 6 now brings many improvements to 2.4 GHz, too.

RELATED: Wi-Fi 6: What’s Different, and Why it Matters

In the USA, the Federal Communications Commission regulates the wireless spectrum. You can’t just start broadcasting on any radio frequency you like. Different parts of the wireless spectrum are reserved for amateur radio, satellite, aircraft, maritime, military, AM radio, FM radio, and—yes—Wi-Fi. Here’s a chart produced by the US government in 2016, showing just how complicated and detailed this allocation is.

The FCC is pretty serious about this stuff. For example, if you build a transmitter and start transmitting on FM radio frequencies, that will interfere with other people’s receiving FM radio. They could report a problem to the FCC, and the FCC could confiscate your broadcasting equipment and fine you.

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“Do Not Track” had a lofty goal: A simple checkbox in every web browser that would tell websites not to track you. It achieved that goal, but here’s the problem: Websites didn’t care.

As we pointed out back in 2012, the “Do Not Track” option doesn’t stop you from being tracked. It just sends a special piece of information whenever you connect to a website, asking that website not to track you. The vast, vast majority of websites ignored this. That never really changed. There was no penalty for ignoring the request and little reason to actually honor it.

Still, “Do Not Track” has been shuffling along for years. This option is part of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Internet Explorer. You can go check the box and that might make you feel a bit better if you’re upset about being tracked online. But it doesn’t really do anything. It’s misleading.

In fact, Do Not Track has been used to track people. If you’ve enabled Do Not Track, it’s an extra piece of information about you that can be tracked. Advertisers could direct privacy-related advertisements your way, for example.

Everyone was content to ignore that useless checkbox for a while, but now it looks like DNT is finally collapsing. As DuckDuckGo noticed, Apple is removing the “Do Not Track” preference from Safari. As Gizmodo spotted, work on the standard quietly ended on January 17, 2019. With the standard abandoned and the first browser dropping it, we expect other browser makers to follow Apple’s lead.

Is this bad? No. “Do Not Track” never went anywhere and was widely ignored. At this point, the Do Not Track option acts a placebo and misleads people just by existing. It’s long past time to get rid of DNT.

Do Not Track’s history is messy. Microsoft only made the problem worse by enabling it by default in Internet Explorer 10, causing more websites to ignore it. That’s particularly funny because Microsoft itself never obeyed the DNT setting, saying that “Because there is not yet a common understanding of how to interpret the DNT signal, Microsoft services do not currently respond to browser DNT signals.”

Modern browsers that include tracking protection don’t wait for a “common understanding” to develop in the industry. Instead, they proactively block trackers. Apple’s own Safari browser includes “Intelligent Tracking Protection” that prevents sites you don’t visit directly from tracking you. Mozilla Firefox includes a content-blocking feature you can enable to block a list of known trackers.

That’s not to say tracking or targeted advertising is necessarily bad. There are arguments for and against it. But, as a society, let’s have that discussion without the distraction of a misleading checkbox that doesn’t actually do anything.

1. Blackbeard's Treasure
2. The Titanic
3. Apollo Rocket Parts
4. The Lost Library of Alexandria

Think you know the answer?

Misplacing an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch can be infuriating, especially if you’re sure it’s around here somewhere, but just can’t put your hands on it. If you have Find my iPhone/iPad/Apple Watch active, ask Siri to find it for you.

You’re probably already aware that you can find an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch by using the Find my iPhone app, but there’s an altogether cooler, more friction-free way of doing it. Asking Siri to “find my iPhone” or other device is a quick way to do exactly that, and Siri can even initiate a ping to the missing device, making it easier for you to find it.

Things get even better if you own a HomePod, too, because you can ask it to do everything just as you would any other Siri-toting device. There’s something magical about shouting at a HomePod and having your iPhone ping like crazy from behind the sofa cushion.

For any of this to work, you’ll need to have enabled Find my iPhone/iPad/Apple Watch during setup. Assuming you did, here’s how to find any of those devices using your voice, thanks to Siri.

To get the ball rolling, invoke Siri the way you normally would and then ask it to “Find my x” and replace x with the device for which you’re looking.

• “Find my iPhone.”
• “Find my iPad.”
• “Find my Apple Watch.”

If you have multiple devices, like two iPads for example, Siri will ask you to confirm which one you want to locate. If you have multiple family members, you can even ask Siri to find their device too. Simply add their name to the request; “Find Rachel’s iPhone” will have Siri do exactly that.

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PC gamers drop big bucks to feel immersed in their games. But some new smarthome tech is enabling amazingly immersive effects with just a few lights. Take this Philips Hue plugin for Minecraft as an example.

There are plenty of bias lighting setups that can observe data from a monitor or TV screen and match the light color to the average color on the screen. This tool isn’t doing that: it’s actually using Minecraft’s API to gather light source data from the game itself, matching the color of the bias lighting behind the screen to the objects actually emitting light in the in-game environment.

So if you’re traversing a sunny day in Minecraft, your Hue light will shine almost pure white matching the sun. At sunset you get a slowly-darkening orange, and lightning will flash white then fade to a darker blue. Travel to the game’s final environment The End, and your walls will light up with the ethereal purple glow from the horizon. Inside your cabin you’ll get the flickering reds and yellows of the fireplace. In a nod to utility, it will flash red when you take damage.

It’s a super-cool effect to watch in motion. Since it uses the APIs from Minecraft and Hue, it only works with those specific lights and single game. But as smarthome tech becomes cheaper and more prevalent, you can expect to see this sort of thing more often. To implement the plugin you need to download the source code from Github, then compile it and install it on a Minecraft server. HIt the link for full directions.

Source: Reddit /r/Minecraft

If you’re giving a presentation for a company or teaching a lesson in a math class, it’s likely you’ll be using fractions in the presentation. PowerPoint provides several different fraction structures, including skewed, stacked, linear, and small. Here’s how to use them.

There are a few ways to write fractions in PowerPoint. If you’re happy with the default fraction structure that you get by simply typing in the fraction, that’s great! If you’re discussing more complex equations, it might be worth looking at the other available structures in PowerPoint.

As mentioned before, the default fraction structure that you get by simply typing the fraction in PowerPoint is called a linear structure. Here’s an example of how that looks. In this case, the fraction maintains the current font style and size settings as the rest of the text in your paragraph.

When you use the tool provided by PowerPoint to insert the linear fraction, it reformats it a bit. Here’s an example of how that looks.

As you can see, it looks a bit different than when you type it in directly. The inserted version italicizes the text and uses the Cambria Math font.

PowerPoint also provides several other fraction structures if linear doesn’t work for you. Here’s a list of the different styles:

• Stacked Fraction
• Skewed Fraction
• Linear Fraction
• Small Fraction
• dy over dx
• cap delta y over cap delta x
• partial y over partial x
• delta y over delta x
• pi Over 2

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Ring

Video doorbells are one of the most useful smarthome gadgets to have for your house, but if you’d rather not deal with the wiring situation, you can buy battery-powered models that you simply just mount to an outside wall and connect to your Wi-Fi.

So why exactly would you want a battery-powered video doorbell? Perhaps the biggest reason is so that you don’t have to replace your existing wired doorbell, either because you want to keep the traditional doorbell there as a backup, or maybe you just don’t really have the knowledge on how to take your doorbell’s wiring and hook it up to your new video doorbell.

It’s also possible that your existing doorbell just doesn’t work all that great, either because the transformer is crapping out or it just doesn’t work at all. You may not want to hassle with fixing it or calling a handyman to do the same, especially if you’ve been wanting a video doorbell anyway.

RELATED: The Best Video Doorbells with HD Video, Motion Detection, and More

Unfortunately, there’s really only one reputable company that makes a decent video doorbell that can be completely powered off of battery—Ring. The good news is that Ring makes really good products, which have made appearances in several of our roundups.

Keep in mind, though, that if you go the battery-powered route, you’ll need the Ring Chime device in order to get traditional doorbell chime alerts inside your house. If you have an Echo smart speaker or display, you can set up chime announcements whenever someone comes to the door, but if not, the Ring Chime is highly recommended. Otherwise, you’ll just get alerts on your phone whenever someone rings the doorbell, which you may or may not see in time.

Without further adieu, let’s check out the best battery-powered video doorbells

If you want a battery-powered video doorbell, your best bet is the Ring Video Doorbell 2. You have the option of hooking it up to your existing doorbell wiring, but it can also just be powered off of the battery, which will last you a good few months in between necessary recharges.

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Still rocking those old wired headphones? Now might be the time to grab some stylish, wireless Beats by Dre.

Right now, Best Buy is selling the matte gold Beats Solo3 for just 160 dollars. That’s almost a 50 percent discount. These headphones also come with three free months of Apple music, making this a killer deal that’s hard to pass up.

If you aren’t up to speed on these new Beats headphones, then you’ll be excited about them after a quick run-down. The Beats Solo3 headphones are completely wireless, and they use Bluetooth to connect to your phone or computer. You don’t have to worry about charging them too often, because they have a massive 40-hour battery life. They’re built with comfortable, lightweight materials, and they have a built-in microphone that makes hands-free calls easy.

Of course, all of these features are compounded when you consider the well-known sound quality of Beats headphones and their famous flashy branding. A pair of Beats Solo3 headphones for just $160 is a crazy deal, and it won’t last forever. Just don’t forget that Best Buy is only discounting the matte gold color of these headphones. If you want a different color, you’re going to have to fork up more cash.

New Vizio TVs use motion smoothing to make the content you watch appear smoother. This looks good for some content, like sports, but can ruin the feel of movies and TV shows.

Motion smoothing works by increasing the framerate of content you watch on the TV. It does this by artificially adding extra frames in between each real frame, to sync up the content to the refresh rate of the display, which can sometimes double or even quadruple the perceived refresh rate and “smoothness” of the picture.

However, this doesn’t always look good, and often leads to blurry images and nasty artifacts. Plus, some people just don’t like higher refresh rates and would prefer to disable the option.

RELATED: Why Does My New HDTV’s Picture Look Sped Up and “Smooth”?

On Vizio TVs, open up the settings menu, select “Picture,” and then switch to the “Advanced Picture” tab. Here you can set different levels for the “Smooth Motion Effect,” like adjusting how much interpolation and motion blur is applied. You can disable it entirely by setting it to “Off.”

On some TVs, you might find the option may be under Picture Mode > Advanced Video Features.

If you have an older TV with the feature, you may have to consult your TV’s manual if you can’t find the option, which you can find online.

It’s no secret that the best games on the Nintendo Switch are made by Nintendo. Sadly, Nintendo tends to sell these games at full price year round. So when a good deal comes by, it’s irresistible.

Right now, Walmart is selling six of the best Nintendo Switch games for just $45. While a $15 discount may not sound like much, you have to remember that good Nintendo games are rarely ever discounted. To put it in perspective, Nintendo games didn’t even get a discount on Black Friday.

So if you’ve been avoiding the new Zelda and Mario games because of their price point, now may be your only chance to grab them at a reduced price. Who knows how long you’ll have to wait for the next discount?

Here are the six games that are on sale for $45:

• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Starter Pack)
• Splatoon 2
• Super Mario Odyssey
• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
• Super Mario Party
• Mario Tennis Aces

Some of these games are by far the best single player titles on the Switch (play the new Zelda ASAP), but most of them are killer multiplayer titles. Since this is one of the few discounts you’ll ever find for Switch games, why not grab a couple fun multiplayer games for the next family get together?

Nejron Photo / Shutterstock

Windows lets you assign individual apps to different playback devices, but all your Chrome tabs are treated as a single application. Here’s how to split up your Chrome tabs and play sound from different tabs through different audio devices.

A word of caution: installing Chrome extensions is more dangerous than you’d think, so we generally advise against adding too many of them. However, this one seems okay and is open source to boot. If you’re still cautious, you can manually set it to only work on certain sites, like YouTube, in Chrome’s extension settings.

RELATED: Browser Extensions Are a Privacy Nightmare: Stop Using So Many of Them

Click “Add to Chrome” on AudioPick’s download page, and accept the permissions. You’ll have a new icon in the menubar, which brings up the interface:

By default, it’s set to use your system’s main audio output, or more specifically whatever you’ve set Chrome to use in Windows’ per-app sound settings. You can change the current tab to use any other output you have set up in Windows.

AudioPick remembers your selection for each tab. Your selection also won’t affect other tabs. Current tabs keep using whatever you set them to, and new tabs will use the System Default Device.

This works with any device, even virtual ones, which makes this extension useful if you’d like to play music through your speakers while listening to something on your headphones, like game audio.

One bug we’ve found: occasionally, when hotplugging audio devices, the extension can get stuck and mute output. If this happens, just set it back to the System Default Device, and then re-enable your preferred device.

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Smartwatches aren’t just for adults any more. These kid-centric offerings are ideal for a kid who wants a smartwatch just like their mom and dad. There’s seemingly a smartwatch for every situation now, which is why your kids can also enjoy having their own smartwatch. We’ve checked out the best wearables for your kid, no matter their age or taste.

Now, in recent years, smartwatches for kids haven’t had the greatest of reputations. Some are littered with serious privacy and security flaws that are a major concern. We’ve made sure to pick out high-quality smartwatches that don’t have any such issues. That way, your kid can have fun, and you won’t have to worry about who’s snooping on them.

Here’s our pick of the best smartwatches for your child.

The VTech Kidizoom DX2 is a solid offering from VTech, a company well known for manufacturing durable tech toys for kids. It’s well priced, while also feature packed, and splash proof.

Kids can learn to tell the time with the analog and digital watch faces, as well as play some games. There’s a monster catching game that uses augmented reality technology, along with active play challenges in conjunction with the watch’s motion sensor and pedometer. Two cameras add to the fun with kids able to take videos, pictures, and selfies before customizing them or opting to turn them into watch faces.

It’s sure to be a hit with most kids, as well as practical too.

For parents, they don’t have to worry about kids accessing anything they don’t want them to (connectivity is super limited with everything about this watch being self-contained), plus they can limit their child’s usage via parental controls.

It is worth noting that a few years back, VTech was in the news for a serious data breach via its Learning Lodge service (the company’s online portal that covers everything from education apps to cosmetic downloads for connected VTech products). Some serious security patching and fines from the FTC later, they’ve fixed things up, but if you’re worried about that you can skip using the Learning Lodge functionality altogether.

Kids want to be able to chat to their friends, just like anyone else. The Kurio Watch 2.0+ is a watch that offers messaging features but with some security conscious limitations thrown in. The watch allows kids to message their friends via Bluetooth. They can share texts, emojis, selfies, doodles, and voice recordings with other Kurio watches and Android devices, providing you have the Kurio app installed.

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Sony/Blizzard/343 Studios

The future of game streaming is an open road. But we already have some markets we can use to draw a map: online video streaming services. If we’re not careful, game streaming will hit the same speed bumps.

As Microsoft, Sony, NVIDIA, Google, and others start to ramp up their game streaming subscription services, we can already see what the biggest problem for gamers will be: an increasingly fragmented selection. As platforms and consoles fight to get the biggest and best games on their streaming service, and only their streaming service, gamers will find that it’s impossible to play all the titles they want on just one of them. Not that this is anything new for the gaming industry, of course: it’s the good old-fashioned platform exclusivity problem, now spread out among more and more platforms.

To be clear about our terms: the “game streaming” in this article refers to playing video games in your home over a broadband connection, where the actual hardware that hosts the game (the PC or game console doing the number-crunching) is on a server somewhere.

Current examples include PlayStation Now, which streams a selection of PS2, PS3, and PS4 games to either a regular PS4 or a program running on your computer, NVIDIA GeForce NOW, which can stream full-power PC games to either the NVIDIA SHIELD set-top box or PCs, and Google’s Project Stream, which used a single PC game in a test run earlier this year.

We’re not talking about streaming video of someone else playing a game that you watch on a service like YouTube or Twitch.

If you’re not familiar with it: game streaming is very cool. It enables someone with minimal hardware, like, say, a $200 SHIELD, to play games that are otherwise limited to a $1000 gaming PC. It doesn’t need local media or massive 50GB downloads, and a relatively small monthly charge can give you access to hundreds of games, a la the Netflix setup. Regarding pure hardware, the only real downer is that you need a solid broadband connection: most of these services recommend 25 Mbps, but I’ve found that they tend to stutter on anything less than 50.

With those pieces in place, the experience is pretty amazing. You can play games at maximum graphical settings with almost perfect sync, including the fastest multiplayer shooters or fighters. And it’s only going to get better and more available: Microsoft is heavily rumored to be developing a streaming-only version of the next Xbox console, the service of which would undoubtedly be available on Windows, too. Even Nintendo is dipping a toe in: the company is currently streaming some older titles to SHIELD owners in China. Predictably, Amazon is looking to get in on this action as well.

Here’s where the “but” comes in.

Streaming video services are fighting tooth and nail to get original, exclusive content: Netflix’s has its high-profile Marvel series, conventional shows like Orange is the New Black, and even full theatrical movies like Bird Box. Hulu has exclusives like The Handmaid’s Tale and continuations like The Mindy Project. Amazon Prime video is home to shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Man in the High Castle.

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A handful of digital services will be terminated this year, and you’ve probably bought digital copies of games or movies from them. You’ve purchased this digital property, but there’s a chance that you won’t be able to keep it.

The number of times that users have been unable to access digital content that they have paid for is unprecedented. We aren’t discussing something theoretical, either; this is something that’s happened in the past and will continue happening in the future.

It’s fair to assume that a ton of digital services will shut down in 2019; that’s just the way things work. But the big three that we know about are the Wii Shop Channel, the Ultraviolet movie streaming service, and the Google+ social network. At some point or other, these were pretty popular services, and their termination may cut you off from the digital property for which you’ve paid.

The Wii Shop Channel was a service that sold digital copies of video games, and most people used it to purchase classic Nintendo games. The service was discontinued this past month (January 2019), and the only way to save your purchases was to download them on your Wii console—you couldn’t transfer those purchases to newer Nintendo consoles.

Ultraviolet is a video service that lets you purchase movies. Some DVD’s come with codes that you can use to redeem a digital copy of the movie on Ultraviolet. This is mostly a movie streaming service, but you can use it to download movies if you put in a little bit of work. Sadly, Ultraviolet is shutting down on July 31, 2019. If you want to save your Ultraviolet purchases, the company suggests transferring licenses to a competitor’s service, like Movies Anywhere. These competitors are probably just trying to poach the remaining Ultraviolet users, but if it weren’t for them, you’d lose all of your Ultraviolet purchases.

Google+ is shutting down on April 2, 2019, and Google is going to clear all of the data from the Google+ servers. But you have the opportunity to save your data (a form of digital property) before Google kills the service. This isn’t really property that you’ve purchased, but it’s valuable for personal and public archives, and the loss of this data will probably come as a source of mild frustration for archivists in the future.

Looking at this list, you’ll notice an annoying trend. These services, which are either failing or being discontinued, aren’t really doing anything to preserve your digital property. They put that responsibility on the customer.

It’s kind of understandable for Ultraviolet and Google+. Ultraviolet can’t afford to offer a solution, and Google+ was a flop from the get-go. But why is Nintendo operating like this? You’re not going to boot up your old Wii to play a download of Super Mario Bros 3, so why can’t you just transfer that purchase to one of the other four digital platforms that sell Super Mario Bros 3?

For that, you can blame DRM.

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1. Ray Bradbury
2. William Gibson
3. Arthur C. Clarke
4. Douglas Adams

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