Amazon’s Twitch is cheating music creators and rights’ owners out of their just due. Using music without permission or payment deprives creators and performers, and impacts everyone that works for them and with them.
Ahead of the 2019 launch of Disney’s Netflix competitor, the company’s digital arm will launch a free, over-the-top video app aimed at millennials sometime this summer. The hook for advertisers is that they’ll have a way to reach Disney’s millennial audience, without the concerns that have afflicted YouTube in recent months.
Netflix’s content investment strategy is seen as the key instigator for its growth, especially as Netflix invests more in local-language fare. In 2018, Netflix plans to spend $10 billion on content and marketing: $8 billion in content (both originals and licensed acquisitions), yielding 700 originals in total; and $2 billion on marketing, with Q1 marketing spend reaching $479 million, up 77% YoY. Going forward, more spend will go to producing original content or licensed originals as a percentage of overall investment, compared with spending on licensed content.
Source: Netflix impresses on subscriber growth in Q1 – Business Insider
What’s really going to kick the addressable revolution into overdrive is the rise of ACR (automated content recognition) data. If you’re unfamiliar, ACR is a technology used to automatically detect and index content that is playing on television in real-time. As a result, brands are able to use this information to determine when a given consumer sees their ad. As ACR data becomes more widespread, the sky’s the limit for addressable TV.
Source: How an Acronym You’ve Probably Never Heard of Will Change TV Advertising Forever – Adweek
New from @YouTube – CEO Susan Wojciki announces a feature to fight conspiracy theories w/ related links to news, Wikipedia #sxsw pic.twitter.com/sLtjdQNqbu
— Maureen Fitzgerald (@movandy) March 13, 2018
Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced at a SXSW panel the company’s plan to add Wikipedia information to videos pertaining to conspiracy theories.
Source: Youtube, Wikipedia team up to combat conspiracy theories – Business Insider
Netflix hasn’t been coy about its plans to take over Hollywood. The company has already said it could spend up to $8 billion on content this year alone. But, for all the awards House of Cards and Icarus rack up, one of the reasons Netflix has tasted success so rapidly is its streaming technology. That’s an area it has been perfecting in-house since 2010, when it became more than a simple mail-order DVD rental shop.
For Netflix, the tech is just as important as the storytelling. Regardless of how many shows or movies Netflix produces, it needs to ensure that its 118 million subscribers can watch them without issue — no matter where they are in the world, which smartphone they own or how fast their internet is. Netflix even recently re-encoded its entire catalog (said to be around 6,000 titles) to produce the best possible picture using the smallest amount of bandwidth, which was made possible by an AI technology it developed called Dynamic Optimizer.
Source: Netflix’s real advantage is that it’s a tech company first
The audio shows are a new source of inspiration for movie and television producers.
Source: How Leading Podcasting Companies Propel Their Shows to Hollywood Heigh
A majority of Americans use Facebook and YouTube, but young adults are especially heavy users of Snapchat and Instagram
Source: Social Media Use 2018: Demographics and Statistics | Pew Research Center
The simultaneous use of second-screen devices—smartphones, tablets and desktops/laptops—while watching TV has increased year to year and will continue through at least 2019.However, 2018 will be the first year in eMarketer’s forecast in which the use of desktops/laptops in this context declines.
Source: In a Multiscreen World, One Screen Is Trending Downward – eMarketer
As one particularly rough week shows, the video platform’s content moderation efforts have become more haphazard and inconsistent than ever.
Source: YouTube’s Content Moderation Has Become an Inconsistent Mess | WIRED
As automated advertising has matured, the structure of programmatic auctions has become more confusing. In 2018, marketers are looking to break through the clutter to understand what’s going on under the hood.
Source: Understanding Programmatic Auction Pricing Is a Major Priority for Marketers – eMarketer
The internet has sparked a new kind of economy, as creators find new ways to directly reach their audiences and customers. Services like Etsy, WordPress, and Amazon’s Twitch don’t have a lot in common, except for the fact that they give creative people ways to make a living doing what they love.
Source: How much people make from YouTube, Etsy, Instagram: CHARTS – Business Insider
The dramatic rise of Netflix and other OTT video services has fundamentally changed viewing habits in the US, especially among younger users, but in the short run it can be easy to overrate that change.
Source: The Impact of Streaming Video Is Huge (and Easy to Overestimate) – eMarketer
The user who posted the video, “mike m.,” stands by his baseless theory that a student at the school is really an actor. And he says he’s “not going to stop.”
Source: The Making of a No. 1 YouTube Conspiracy Video After the Parkland Tragedy – The New York Times
Like the Amazon River itself, Jeff Bezos’s company cuts a powerful, meandering channel through the business landscape, changing every industry it touches.
Source: Amazoned: Is Any Industry Safe?
In recent years, YouTube’s identity has shifted from a video sharing platform and streaming to a cultivator of subcultures. For fans of any YouTuber or YouTube community, this is not news; but for anyone on the outside, the idea of watching a single creator day in and day out for years is still a strange and foreign concept.
YouTube content creators and their audiences share a far more intimate relationship than television audiences share with even the most iconic characters from some of the longest running shows. The medium itself is far more personal—vloggers sit down and talk directly to the camera, while the viewer takes in the video at eye-level, watching on a laptop screen or, quite literally, from the palm of their hand.
Source: What Miranda Sings’ Short-Lived Netflix Series means for YouTube’s future – Ampersand
Data science is an exciting, fast-moving field to become involved in. There’s no shortage of demand for talented, analytically-minded individuals. Companies of all sizes are hiring data scientists, and the role provides real value across a wide range of industries and applications.
The esports industry is growing quickly, with new leagues, teams and distribution channels. And this growth is attracting new high-profile esports investment from brands, media organizations and traditional sports rightsholders.
Amazon-owned Twitch is now pulling in as many monthly viewers as cable news networks. In January 2018, Twitch had nearly a million people watching at any given point. Twitch primarily features live video streams of people playing video games, but the service has added other types of content recently.
Source: Amazon’s streaming service Twitch reaches as many people as cable news networks – Business Insider
The internet of things has never quite found its footing, and some proclaim the once-hyped concept is dead. Even as tech companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google pour money into smart speakers, there’s no real, tangible use for them. Other companies have tried–to little avail–to sell us dumb smart products like smart refrigerators and smart water bottles. And smart homes? They spy on users–and they’re just plain annoying.
For Matt Webb, a technologist at R/GA London, the potential of the internet of things isn’t inside your home. It’s outside of it. “It’s where we can finally start assembling parts to make products or services or companies with a smaller number of people or with greater ambition than before,” he says. “IoT is solving problems in the business space really clearly.”
Source: Is The Internet Of Things Dead, Or Is It Growing Up?
