In a nutshell: Andy Green will return to Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats on Tuesday in a new kind of record car: one powered by hydrogen-burning engines. The British driver, who holds the land-speed record for a diesel car, will drive JCB’s Hydromax in an official attempt overseen by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile. The company is using the run to demonstrate its hydrogen internal-combustion technology under extreme conditions.

The Hydromax is a 32-foot vehicle powered by two hydrogen engines adapted from JCB construction machinery. Together, they produce 1,600 horsepower. Rather than using hydrogen in a fuel cell to make electricity, the engines mix pressurized hydrogen gas with air and ignite it.

Green reached 368.347 mph during practice last week. If he can repeat that performance in the official attempt, he would beat the 350.092 mph diesel record he set at Bonneville 20 years ago. He could also pass the current hydrogen internal-combustion record of 185.5 mph and the electric-vehicle record of 341.3 mph.

“What the peak speed is, I can’t say. We just don’t know,” Green told The AP. “Part of the adventure here is we’re going to find out.”

The run will be a test of whether hydrogen combustion can work at a level far beyond its usual industrial use. JCB has spent more than $134 million developing hydrogen engines. The company says they produce no carbon dioxide from the tailpipe and could have a role in heavy-duty equipment, where batteries can be difficult to use because of weight, charging needs, and operating demands.

“If you’re serious about emissions, you have to be serious about hydrogen, and a land-speed project is the perfect way to prove it,” JCB Chair Anthony Bamford said at the car’s unveiling in May.

Hydrogen’s environmental case is more complicated than tailpipe emissions alone. Most of the world’s hydrogen is made from fossil fuels. JCB has signed a deal to buy green hydrogen, which is produced using renewable energy, though that form of hydrogen remains a small part of the global supply.

There are also safety issues. Hydrogen is stored under pressure and is highly flammable. Green said the team put the car through extensive testing before bringing it to Bonneville. He has spent months learning how the engines work together and how the car behaves on the salt surface.

“We’re managing the risks very carefully,” Green said.

The conditions at Bonneville add another layer of difficulty. The salt flats offer a long, open course, but the surface has limited grip. Green will use a parachute to slow the car after the run. The attempt is planned for shortly after sunrise, before the desert heat builds.

Bonneville has been used for speed attempts since 1914. The flat, white expanse sits about 100 miles west of Salt Lake City on the Utah-Nevada border. Its straightaway runs for about 10 miles, and spectators watch from roughly a quarter-mile away.

Green understands the place land-speed racing holds in the public imagination. In 1997, he became the first and only person to drive a car faster than sound. His jet-powered Thrust SSC reached 763.035 mph in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, producing sonic booms that shook the nearby town of Gerlach.

Now 64, Green said he had expected to be finished with racing before JCB asked him to take on the Hydromax project. The car will not challenge his supersonic record. Its purpose is more practical: to show what a hydrogen combustion engine can do when pushed to its limits.

Image credit: The AP

GPT-5.6-Cyber for the Daybreak program is ‘less likely to refuse higher-risk tasks.’

Immersive audio formats are not won in engineering labs or hotel suites at CES. They are won when people can press play, hear something better and never have to think about which codec, container or licensing agreement made it happen.

That has always been the challenge for Eclipsa Audio, the open immersive audio format developed by Samsung and Google as an alternative to Dolby Atmos and DTS. When eCoustics first heard Eclipsa at CES 2025, the technology worked, Samsung was putting it into its TVs and soundbars, and Google had given it an enormous potential distribution platform through YouTube. What it desperately needed was more actual content.

Samsung is now trying to solve that problem through Samsung TV Plus.

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Eclipsa Audio Moves Beyond YouTube

Samsung says Eclipsa Audio is now being used with musicals and live performance content on Samsung TV Plus. The company has developed an IAMF-based system for encoding, delivering and playing the immersive audio streams on compatible televisions and soundbars, while unsupported devices automatically receive a conventional stereo version.

Samsung didn’t simply run a few test files through a television and call the press office. During development, the company captured a live performance in a 280-seat concert venue, converted the spatial recording to Eclipsa Audio, streamed it through a Samsung TV Plus channel and played it back through a Samsung television. Samsung says the system preserved the placement of vocals, instruments, audience reaction and the acoustics of the venue.

The more interesting part is what comes next. Samsung says it plans to expand Eclipsa Audio on TV Plus into K-pop concerts, classical performances, movies and sports, with longer-term possibilities including letting viewers emphasize vocals or individual instruments and selecting between commentary and stadium sound during sporting events.

Why Samsung TV Plus Matters

Samsung TV Plus isn’t some experimental streaming app hidden six menus deep beside the owner’s manual. Samsung reported in February that the free ad-supported service had surpassed 100 million monthly active users worldwide, with roughly 4,300 channels and 66,000 on-demand videos across 30 countries.

Obviously, 100 million Samsung TV Plus users are not suddenly listening to Eclipsa Audio. But the size of the platform gives Samsung something every new audio format needs: distribution without asking consumers to subscribe to another service or buy content separately.

YouTube already gave Eclipsa a potentially enormous creator platform. Samsung TV Plus gives it a more conventional television environment where concerts, movies and sports can demonstrate why immersive audio matters without the viewer first searching YouTube for an IAMF demonstration clip.

Does Eclipsa Audio Actually Have a Fighting Chance?

More than it did 18 months ago.

The biggest advantage remains the underlying IAMF (Immersive Audio Model and Formats) architecture. IAMF is an open, codec-agnostic specification designed to deliver immersive audio across everything from headphones and televisions to multi-speaker home theater systems. It does not lock creators and manufacturers into a proprietary audio codec or licensing model.

Google has also continued building the infrastructure around it. YouTube accepts Eclipsa Audio content, Google offers open-source Eclipsa production tools, and Android 16 QPR2 added software decoding for IAMF. Samsung, meanwhile, has incorporated Eclipsa support across its current television and soundbar ecosystem.

Those are not insignificant partners. Google controls YouTube and Android. Samsung sells an enormous number of televisions and soundbars and now operates a streaming platform with 100 million monthly users. If you’re going to pick two companies to push an alternative immersive audio standard, you could do considerably worse.

But Dolby is not packing its office furniture into boxes.

Dolby Atmos Still Has the Huge Advantage

Dolby Atmos has something Eclipsa cannot manufacture overnight: an enormous installed ecosystem of movies, television shows, music, streaming services, AV receivers, processors, soundbars, televisions and other devices.

That remains Eclipsa Audio’s biggest problem.

We have already encountered the hardware gap ourselves. Our recent coverage of the Denon AVR-X2900H and AVR-X3900H noted that Eclipsa decoding was still absent, even though Denon’s new corporate connection to Samsung through Harman makes future support seem like an obvious possibility. The Marantz AV 30 also did not support Eclipsa Audio when we reviewed it earlier this year.

Until Eclipsa appears routinely on mainstream AV receivers, more soundbars and non-Samsung hardware — and until major studios and streaming platforms start delivering meaningful libraries of movies and music in the format — Dolby Atmos remains miles ahead.

Samsung TV Plus doesn’t change that overnight.

It does, however, make Eclipsa Audio considerably harder to dismiss.

The Bottom Line

Eclipsa Audio does not need to kill Dolby Atmos to succeed. It needs enough content, hardware support and distribution that manufacturers and creators have a reason to support both.

YouTube gave Samsung and Google the creator side of that equation. Android is expanding the playback foundation. Samsung TVs and soundbars supplied the initial hardware. Samsung TV Plus now gives Eclipsa another real content platform where ordinary viewers can encounter it without going looking for it.

That is far more consequential than another impressive CES demonstration.

Dolby Atmos still owns the high ground, and Hollywood support remains the mountain Eclipsa Audio has to climb. But for the first time since its introduction, Samsung and Google’s immersive format is starting to resemble an ecosystem rather than an experiment.

And that gives it a fighting chance.

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YouTube could soon become a less viable earning source for new content creators. The platform just announced updated rules for monetization via its YouTube Partner Program and, well, it’s not the best news. New content creators will need to show some impressive metrics in order to qualify for the partner program. Starting on February 1, users will need at least 1,000 subscribers and either 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days.

That’s a gigantic leap from the current requirements. Right now, those looking to enroll in the partner program need 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 watch hours in the past year or 10 million Shorts views in the past 90 days. So in a few months everything is doubling, aside from the subscriber count requirements.

Additionally, Shorts creators will have to maintain 10 million views every 90 days to earn money from the pool. Falling below this threshold won’t boot someone from the program entirely, but will turn off the cash spigot for that 90-day period.

Current partners will also face new rules next year. They must maintain either 1,000 watch hours each year or 1 million Shorts views. However, this can be avoided if creators amp up their release schedules, as posting two long-form videos or five Shorts every 90 days will keep them in good standing with the program. Finally, YouTube will remove creators from the program if they haven’t uploaded content for at least six months.

YouTube says this will all work out because it’s expanding the Premium Lite subscription to “all countries where we offer YouTube Premium.” This is a scaled-back version of the platform that lets people watch videos without ads, but doesn’t include the music-streaming service. The company says “with these additional subscribers, creators can expect higher earnings.” It also says that creators will have access to a better revenue pool for views obtained via Premium Lite subscribers.

However, we don’t actually know if the Premium Lite tier brings in enough new subscribers to offset these new requirements. YouTube doesn’t publicly disclose subscriber counts for each specific tier, though it has reported a combined total of 125 million paid users for both tiers across the globe. YouTube on its own, without any subscriptions, lures in nearly 2.7 billion users each month.

The platform has been making big changes lately, in an attempt to compete with actual streamers like Netflix and HBO Max. YouTube has signed deals for exclusive broadcasting rights to shows from people like Trevor Noah. It also now lets creators organize content into “seasons.”