On Wednesday, Netflix revealed the teaser trailer for its upcoming satire on the war in Afghanistan starring Brad Pitt, “War Machine.” Based on the best-selling book “The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan,” the movie follows Pitt as a four-star general who has been tasked with commanding the US war in Afghanistan, but the complexity of the job becomes overwhelming. Netflix reportedly nabbed the movie, on which Pitt is also a producer, for $30 million. It also stars Tilda Swinton, Ben Kingsley, and Lakeith Stanfield.
“Eye tracking sensors provide two main benefits,” says Oscar Werner, vice president of the eye tracking company Tobii Tech. “First, it makes a device aware of what the user is interested in at any given point in time. And second, it provides an additional way to interact with content, without taking anything else away. That means it increases the communication bandwidth between the user and the device.”
There’s a chance that soon eye tracking will be a standard feature of a new generation of smartphones, laptops and desktop monitors setting the stage for a huge reevaluation of the way we communicate with devices—or how they communicate with us.
Technically speaking, Snap is a camera company, and has been for a number of months. In September, it announced the launch of Spectacles, camera-equipped sunglasses that allow you to record a ten-second video by tapping a button near your left eyebrow. (For the moment, Spectacles are sold exclusively in itinerant vending machines called Snapbots.) But the company’s vision of the future appears to be more expansive than that. “In the way that the flashing cursor became the starting point for most products on desktop computers, we believe that the camera screen will be the starting point for most products on smartphones,” it writes.
This is high season for securing a summer internship, an essential talent pipeline for employers and steppingstone for students. Postings peak in March, with 30,443 advertised positions in March 2016 (if you don’t have anything by May, you’re probably out of luck). But before sending that résumé, take a good hard look at what’s on it.
When the warmth’s away, the daters will play. That appears to be what Tinder’s data suggests when it comes to cold weather and dating habits. Earlier this week, the northeastern portion of the United States was pummeled by Snowstorm Niko, which dumped some 18 inches of snow in parts of the country. But if history is any indication, snowed-in folks took the opportunity to be extra productive … on their dating apps.
When Winter Storm Jonas hit the same region of the nation in January 2016, Tinder reported seeing an increase of 10 percent on the day of the storm, resulting in more than 25 million matches during the worst weather. In fact, during Snowmaggedon 2016, nearly two billion swipes were made by folks apparently yearning for warmth — preferably provided by another person.
Netflix dropped the highly anticipated trailer for the second series of “Stranger Things” during the Super Bowl last night, earning the streaming service the biggest buzz generated by any of the big game commercials on Sunday night.
Doritos might have crashed out of the Super Bowl after a decade of fun ads, but Frito-Lay still has a few party tricks up its sleeve for this year’s big game. The chip maker’s Tostitos brand has made a limited-edition “Party Safe” bag that can tell when you’ve been drinking, and will help you get home safely from that Super Bowl party.
The special bag, created by Goodby Silverstein & Partners, comes equipped with a sensor connected to a microcontroller calibrated to detect small traces of alcohol on a person’s breath. If any alcohol is detected, the sensor turns red and forms the image of a steering wheel, along with an Uber code and a “Don’t drink and drive” message. The bag also uses near-field communication (NFC) technology, allowing fans to tap the bag with their phone to call a ride. With Uber and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Tostitos will offer partygoers $10 off their Uber ride during and after the Feb. 5 game.
Ad tech companies are intermediaries between advertisers and publishers, and add value to the ad delivery process by consolidating inventory, automating workflows, and offering precise targeting capabilities at scale. The automation of ad buying is also known as “programmatic advertising” — that is, using technology and software to buy digital ads. Programmatic ad spend in the US is quickly ramping up: It will top $20 billion this year and reach $38.5 billion by year-end 2020.
Moriarty believes that as computer graphics improve, the faces of actors, or even political figures, could be subtly altered to echo the viewer’s own features, to make them more sympathetic. Lifelike avatars could even replace actors entirely, at which point narratives could branch in nearly infinite directions. Directors would not so much build films around specific plots as conceive of generalized situations that computers would set into motion, depending on how viewers reacted.
“What we are looking at here is a breakdown in what a story even means—in that a story is defined as a particular sequence of causally related events, and there is only one true story, one version of what happened,” Moriarty said. With the development of virtual reality and augmented reality—technology akin to Pokémon Go—there is no reason that a movie need be confined to a theatrical experience. “The line between what is a movie and what is real is going to be difficult to pinpoint,” he added. “The defining art form of the twenty-first century has not been named yet, but it is something like this.”
Beyond trying to use social media to simply create the next viral sensation, many consumers are using social channels to communicate about their media consumption, including the programs they’re watching on TV. In fact, according to an analysis in the report leveraging Nielsen Social insights, there were an average of 14.2 million social media interactions about TV across Facebook and Twitter each day this past fall in the U.S. alone. Across platforms, social TV activity peaked on Sundays this fall as audiences took to social media to talk about NFL games, specials and Sunday series. Nearly half (43%) of weekly Facebook activity and a third (33%) of weekly Twitter activity occurred on Sundays. On Facebook, the next-busiest day was Saturday—a day known for college football and probaseball.
In a recognition of the popularity of e-sports on college campuses, most Big Ten universities will field teams in the multiplayer online game League of Legends and compete in a style resembling conference play, in a partnership with the Big Ten Network. Besides streaming competitions on the internet, the Big Ten Network will broadcast select games, including the championship in late March, weekly on its cable network, which is available to more than 60 million households nationally. In the first broadcast, on Jan. 30, teams from the Big Ten’s two newestmembers, Rutgers and Maryland, will face off, according to a Big Ten Network spokesman.
Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix series The Crown.
A year ago, Netflix boldly declared that it planned to conquer the global market for streaming television, adding more than 130 countries to its service map. It also promised to start delivering material profits in 2017 after operating at breakeven profitability for several quarters. On Wednesday, the company released business results showing that it is on its way to reaching those targets, even as competition accelerates from services like Amazon and Hulu.
Some startups are born lucky. By the chance of their timing, their technology, or the individuals who helm them, they experience Facebook-size success. Others fail quickly. There is luck in this, too — in an immediate, concise conclusion. Far more startups, having raised funding on the merits of an idea and a team, plod along for years or even decades, constantly casting about for the idea or customer or partnership that will transform them. Their investors are patient, and then exhausted, and then checked out, and then impatient. Their executives change, and then change again. The founders leave, or they hang on in hopes the company they conceived will somehow eventually prove itself. They are zombie startups.
The overall play for Amazon, says Forrester Principal Analyst Thomas Husson, is to continue to make Alexa more useful with more smart home integration and more media capabilities. Why? The more people use Alexa devices, the more likely they are to spend money on Amazon. And so, unlike many rivals, it can afford to take a loss on the gadgets. “Amazon will increasingly subsidize Echo by bundling content (think music, video) with the device,” Husson says. “They can afford this since this is not core to their business model: the end-goal is to facilitate interactions.”
Netflix is continuing to make big gains in international markets, but there’s evidence that it might have hit a ceiling in the US, according to analysts at UBS. “In the US, after nearly a decade of streaming service availability, it appears that penetration of streaming services has stagnated around 50% of US [broadband] homes,” the analysts, led by Doug Mitchelson, wrote in a note distributed Friday (based on a proprietary survey of 2,000).
Two Google Home devices are deep in conversation. And thousands are watching the robots attempt to mimic human interaction. The bots’ ongoing chat, which has ranged from the meaning of life, religion, love, ninjas and Chuck Norris, is streaming on Twitch. The video has had nearly 780,000 views as of Friday afternoon since it started streaming a few days ago.The bots have been aptly named Vladimir and Estragon, perfect for their endless chatter reminiscent of the two perpetually waiting characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot.
Traditional TV viewership continues to fall among every major demographic between the ages of 2 and 49, according to Nielsen’s Q3 2016 Total Audience Report. Teenagers (12-17) are showing the largest decline, with viewership falling 11% year-over-year (YoY) in Q3 2016, as the age group increasingly transfers their media time from the TV screen to mobile devices on apps such as Snapchat and Instagram. But while time spent viewing traditional TV is decreasing, total time spent with all media reached a new high in Q3, increasing 13% YoY to just over 10.5 hours of media content per day among US adults.
