How to Use the Marco Polo App
The Marco Polo app lets you send short, walkie talkie-style videos to your friends. Here’s how it works.
Source: Marco Polo app: How to use, tips and tricks: PHOTOS – Business Insider
Snapchat taps college newspapers to make campus stories and sell ads
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Snapchat is asking student newspapers to create campus editions for its Discover section, which already includes large outlets like BuzzFeed and The New York Times.
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The stories will be visible to Snapchat users located near each respective campus.
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Like larger publishers, participating student newspapers will be able to monetize their efforts by sharing revenue from video ads with Snapchat.
Source: Snapchat taps college newspapers to make campus stories and sell ads – Business Insider
The State of Play in Home Entertainment
In the past year, digital video viewing is on the rise for both free and paid content. And more teens are willing to pay for digital content, with 63% saying they purchased digital video in the past year, up from just 45% in 2016.
How Social Platforms Are Using Video to Capture Audience Attention
Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter are embarking on a massive land grab for video content, hoping to drive increased usage and capture a greater portion of digital video ad revenues with familiar ad formats such as pre-roll and mid-roll.
Source: How Social Platforms Are Using Video to Capture Audience Attention – eMarketer
We’re in the early stages of a visual revolution in journalism
That video that is currently soaring across social media — maybe it’s a text-heavy explainer with dynamic motion graphics, or a video-driven news story with sharply concise captions — is less an evolution of video itself and more of an evolution of the hundreds and thousands of pieces of text-based journalism that are produced and consumed digitally. Audiences that spent time consuming only the first couple of paragraphs of a news story are now watching 45 seconds of a video that conveys the same information. And, yes, sometimes with words on the screen. I believe this will become more sophisticated and more prevalent, and before you tell me that it’s intellectually inferior, just believe me — it’s not in its final form. It’s on us to innovate so that it has the power and impact we want it to.
Source: We’re in the early stages of a visual revolution in journalism – Recode
What Disney Villains Tell Us About Color Psychology
What makes Disney villains so evil and Disney heroes so good? This infographic shows that color selection might have something to do with it.
Source: What Disney Villains Tell Us About Color Psychology [Infographic] – Venngage
The Revolution in Advertising: From Don Draper to Big Data
Advertising in the digital age bears little resemblance to the Mad Men depiction—the Don Drapers of advertising have been replaced by big data and the people who work with it. Professor John Deighton, the author of the case “WPP: From Mad Men to Math Men (and Women),” and Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and group chief executive of WPP and the protagonist in the case, discuss how WPP has been successful in the new advertising world order, where algorithms and robots rule
The Peak TV Bubble Hasn’t Burst, But It’s Leaking
As Netflix, Amazon and Hulu continue to dominate, the quantity of new scripted content from the second tier of cable networks is likely to decline.
Source: Tim Goodman: The Peak TV Bubble Hasn’t Burst, But It’s Leaking | Hollywood Reporter
Is Amazon getting too big?
A 28-year-old law student takes on the “Everything Store” by questioning whether antitrust law is ready to deal with a winner-take-all economy
Source: Is Amazon getting too big? – The Washington Post
See also The Yale Law Journal article: Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox
Why Marx is Essential
What is extraordinary about Das Kapital is that it offers a still-unrivalled picture of the dynamism of capitalism and its transformation of societies on a global scale. It firmly embedded concepts such as commodity and capital in the lexicon. And it highlights some of the vulnerabilities of capitalism, including its unsettling disruption of states and political systems. The election of Donald Trump, the vote for Brexit and the rise of populism in Europe and elsewhere can all be understood as indirect effects of shifts in the global division of labour — the relocation of key aspects of modern production away from Europe and the United States. That has been brought about by changes in what Marx identified as the capitalist enterprise’s incessant drive to expansion.
Source: In retrospect: Das Kapital : Nature : Nature Research
“Take On Me” music video comes to life with AR
Pack it on up, everyone — someone just won ARKit. We’ve seen loooots of fun stuff made with ARKit already, but this one… this one is something special.
Source: Someone made the “Take On Me” music video come to life with AR and it’s glorious | TechCrunch
The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube Kids
Surprise eggs and slime are at the center of an online realm that’s changing the way the experts think about human development.
Source: The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube Kids – The Atlantic
Comcast, CBS ‘ahead of curve’ in linear pay-TV business
Putting his futurist hat on, Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar predicts that the linear pay-TV business will lose around 31 million customers over the next decade.
The Pendulum Swing Of Disruption
When a new technology disrupts a traditional incumbent, it normally does so by being 3 things to the end user:
- Cheaper/free
- Quicker
- More convenient
Napster, YouTube, Amazon, Uber, Netflix, all of these companies have done exactly this. Because they most often build market share and presence using external funding, such companies turn existing economics upside down with loss leading tactics. The result is that audiences switch in their millions and incumbents are left in tatters. Any old business that relies on scarcity economics will be swept away.
Source: The Internet’s Adolescence: The Real World Catches Up Eventually | Music Industry Blog
Sports-free cable TV bundles
Several cable networks are trying to put together a sports-free online TV package for less than $20 a month, but Disney doesn’t think it will work.
Source: Sports-free cable TV bundle: Disney, Discovery weigh in – Business Insider
Netflix Knows What You Really Like to Watch
Netflix, as you may have heard, is killing off its stars. At a recent news conference at its headquarters in Los Gatos, Calif., the company announced it was shedding its former one-to-five-star rating system in favor of binary digits: namely, thumbs up or thumbs down. “Now it’s easier to tell us what you like,” the site promises.
Will Advertisers Abandon YouTube?
A web giant promises to tighten its safeguards to avoid pairing ads with offensive content, but advertisers are not convinced.
Source: YouTube Advertiser Exodus Highlights Perils of Online Ads – The New York Times
Millennials on Social Media
It’s hard enough to hold one person’s attention, let alone an entire generation’s. Millennials—now the largest generational group in the U.S.—have grown alongside advancements in technology and media platforms, placing them in intriguing territory with regard to media habits. When it comes to television, their eyes are glued to the screen. With commercials, they’re still tuned in—but their eyes are on their cell phones.
Source: Millennials on Millennials: A Look at Viewing Behavior, Distraction and Social Media Stars
Google’s YouTube TV Strategy
But even if YouTube succeeds in nailing the tech, and getting a leg up on its competition, that doesn’t mean the streaming TV market will be an instant goldmine. The margins on the early streaming TV services appear to be razor-thin, and the price point YouTube is offering isn’t going to change that.
But the crux of that opportunity doesn’t lie in big initial margins, it comes from the potential to fundamentally shift how TV ads work. As it stands now, TV networks sell most of the ad inventory for their shows. And in the early days of a YouTube streaming TV service, that will continue, with YouTube itself selling only a few minutes of ads per hour on its own service. But that will change, Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves wrote in a note last month.
“Google’s vastly superior data should allow it to monetize its ad inventory at superior rates to networks,” he wrote. “Over time, this disparity should allow Google to capture a greater share of total ad inventory on its service. Played out over several years, we believe the natural evolution of a successful Google vMVPD service [YouTube TV] would be for the roles of content supply and ad selling (both currently done by TV networks) to split, with Google managing the ad selling and networks relegated to content suppliers.”
Source: YouTube TV needs to nail technical performance – Business Insider
When Amazon’s Cloud Goes Down
The dynamics between public and private cloud tip a little more towards private cloud every time that there is an outage or with each new generation of IT technology that folks like Cisco Systems, Dell/EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei Technologies, IBM or Lenovo bring to the market. It is unlikely that businesses will halt their march to the cloud and move back to hosting all their applications on the traditional bare metal or virtualized server environments that had been popular for the last 20 years, but these episodes may cause people to think a little harder about data location and availability. This makes private cloud more interesting. Hybrid IT, gives businesses a combination of their datacenters, co-location and external cloud for hosting applications that could be traditional, virtualized, public cloud or private cloud.
Source: With Its Recent Outage, Amazon Web Services Is Helping To Sell Hybrid IT