Welcome to Lowpass! This week: Popcornflix is back, and AR hardware makers are looking for the next best thing.

Redbox may be dead, but one of the other streaming ventures once owned by its bankrupt corporate parent Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment is getting a second lease on life: Popcornflix, which became unavailable online after Chicken Soup filed for bankruptcy last summer, is once again streaming movies and TV shows via its website and apps.

However, this doesn’t indicate that Redbox or other Chicken Soup properties are going to relaunch any time soon: Popcornflix was sold before Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment filed for bankruptcy last June, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The streaming site was acquired by former Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment investor David Nagelberg, whose trust is listed as its owner in the Roku Channel store. Nagelberg’s trust made a $2 million investment in Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment in 2019, and a David Nagelberg was subsequently listed as an executive producer of a film put out by one of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment’s content companies.

Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment’s management tried to sell off a number of assets to avoid bankruptcy in the spring and early summer of 2024. It’s unclear how much Popcornflix ultimately sold for. The streaming service had about a million monthly average users and generated less than $700,000 in revenue in 2023, according to internal documents I was able to review.

Despite the sale, Popcornflix appears to have gotten caught up in the aftermath of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment’s bankruptcy. The service reportedly went down across multiple platforms in September, alongside streaming apps for Redbox and Crackle. It’s reincarnation is powered by Future Today, a company that provides similar services to companies like Filmrise.

The future of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment’s other streaming properties remains uncertain as the company’s bankruptcy case slowly grinds on. Redbox’s website went down some time ago, and the apps of both Redbox and Crackle remain unavailable on Roku and other smart TV platforms.

Miraculously, Crackle’s website is still up and running  – but that may not last for much longer: Amazon, which has been hosting the streaming service, petitioned the bankruptcy court this week to be allowed to terminate its agreement with Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. Amazon is owed around $4.8 million in AWS usage fees, according to the filing, and hasn’t been paid by Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment since September of 2023.

This week, AR waveguide developer Lumus came out with some news that seemed to be a bit of a head-scratcher: After announcing an AR glasses lens with a 50-degree field-of-view two years ago, Lumus is now debuting a new optical engine with … only a 30-degree field-of-view, and roughly half the amount of pixels. What gives?

To get an answer to that question, I stopped by the Lumus booth at the SPIE AR | MR | VR Conference in San Francisco this week, where the company’s VP of marketing David Goldman had a simple answer: “With 30 degrees, you’re going to have a much longer battery life.”

That answer illustrates one of the big challenges the entire AR industry is facing as companies like Meta, Google and Snap are gearing up to release consumer-ready AR glasses: At the moment, companies can either develop top-of-the-line products that would cost thousands of dollars and require frequent recharging – or they can take  less-is-more approach and build something that’s much less flashy, but can actually be turned into a reasonably-priced product in the near future.