The deposed tech CEO returning to his company triumphant is enough of a Silicon Valley trope that they made it part of the HBO sitcom literally called Silicon Valley. Thomas Middleditch's character wants to build a consumer-facing product, and his startup's board of directors wants to sell to businesses, and Middleditch's character gets fired and goes away until the board is ready to do what he wants. He comes back after a few weeks, probably, although it's hard to say on account of it not being real. More famously, Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985 after a board struggle that resulted in his being pushed out. Jobs needed 12 years, and Apple's decision to buy a company he'd started in the meantime, to come home in 1997.

Drawing on the expertise of rights holders, broadcasters and technology providers from across the sports ecosystem, SportsPro's latest Insider Series event returned to the theme of over-the-top (OTT) and broadcast, providing a wealth of insight into the technology that the industry is tapping into to put live sports on our screens. With much to unpack, SportsPro writers select five key takeaways from across the two days, covering piracy, machine learning and remote production. Cameron Andrews, BeIN Media Group's legal director for anti-piracy, said sports rights holders "were slow" to react to the incursion of BeoutQ, but described the Saudi bootlegging operation as "a very good case study" for piracy "and the impact it can have". "I think some rights owners are certainly aware of that and are very engaged," he said. "But unfortunately I think a lot of other rights owners are still quite some way behind." The emergence of BeoutQ has shone a light on the threat piracy poses to the sports industry, and Andrews called on rights owners, such as leagues and governing bodies, to come together to tackle the issue.

There's really no nice way to put this: In his new film, Zone Out, Silicon Valley star Thomas Middleditch makes you want to do just that. It's not simply that he talks about having sex with a jar of salsa, it's also that he looks absolutely ghastly. His face appears to flicker in and out of the head that houses it; his mouth, normally in a wry downturn, droops and then disappears. His co-star, Elisabeth Gray, doesn't fare much better: a mustache--someone else's--finds a home above her lips. The director of the film, who goes by "Benjamin," was not available for comment.

To call the film above surreal would be a dramatic understatement. Watching it for the first time, I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing -- actors taking something without any objective meaning, and breathing semantic life into it with their emotion, inflection, and movement. After further consideration, I realized that actors do this all the time. Take any obscure line of Shakespearean dialogue and consider that 99.5% of the audience who hears that line in 2016 would not understand its meaning if they read it in on paper. However, in a play, they do understand it based on its context and the actor's delivery.

Filmmaker Oscar Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin fed a machine learning algorithm with a bunch of Sci-Fi movie scripts to see what new script it would spit out. A script for Sunspring is the result, and this is the film, starring Thomas Middleditch. The thought of a machine tapping into emotion and creativity likely brings some sneers, but Goodwin argues that it's about assistance and augmentation rather than a replacement for the humans. The machine dictated that Middleditch's character should pull the camera. However, the reveal that he's holding nothing was a brilliant human interpretation, informed by the production team's many years of combined experience and education in the art of filmmaking.

Science-fiction movies written by predictive AI -- the stuff robots once thought they could only dream of doing -- has become a reality. "Sunspring" -- the first ever movie to be made by using an algorithm -- has been produced for the 48-Hour-Film Challenge at the Sci-Fi London Festival. AI researcher Ross Goodwin and filmmaker Oscar Sharp, fed'Benjamin 1980s and 1990s sci-fi screenplays in order to develop the algorithm, using LTSM, Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural network -- and he must have devoured them as the characters Benjamin came up with for the movie, were called H, H2 and C. According to Ars Technica, "The AI has captured the rhythm of science fiction writing, even if some of Benjamin's sentences are hilariously nonsensical. 'We're going to see the money,' C says at one point." Benjamin's co-creator, Sharp, told Ars Technica that the most interesting part of the experiment was learning about patterns in science fiction storytelling.

Perhaps the fear of artificial intelligence taking control of everything is overstated. A.I. might be able to drive cars and beat people at chess, but they can't write a compelling screenplay -- or even get close to one. That's what happened when filmmaker Oscar Sharp and A.I. researcher Ross Goodwin worked together to create Benjamin, a neural network they programmed to become a budding science fiction screenwriter, with pretty terrible results. They fed Benjamin a bevy of sci-fi scripts from the '80s and '90s -- though oddly, the likes of Silver Linings Playbook and Scary Movie 2 were also thrown in, among others -- and with the help of tech website Ars Technica and Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch, set out on a 48-hour mission to turn Benjamin's short film, Sunspring, into a reality. Middleditch and the other actors in Sunspring had their work cut out for them, with choppy dialogue that makes little to no sense (take Middleditch's first line, "In a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood. It's something I can do").

"In a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood." This is the opening line of a short film entered in this year's Sci-Fi London Film Challenge. It's dark, enigmatic, contemporary…and written by a computer. In fact, the film's entire screenplay is the work of a neural net trained on sci-fi scripts. Once the software completed the screenplay--which you can read in all its unadulterated glory here--it was up to the film's director and actors to make it into something someone might actually watch.