Category Archives: The Mediascape

180 Options Multiply

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Get ready for an onslaught of new immersive video cameras.

Youtube launched the VR180 format last year and parent company Google has just partnered with Lenovo to make the world’s simplest point and shoot camera, the Mirage.

180 is the shorthand for VR180, which is the moniker for 3D VR180. The two front-facing lenses approximate your eyes, creating depth.

Lenovo has published the camera’s specs but the biggest drawback I see is the lack of a view screen. It truly is a point and shoot camera, although you could use the onboard WIFI to send the picture to your smartphone for viewing.

David Pierce, writing for Wired, says:

“VR180, like most things in VR right now, is the simple-but-usable version of what will someday be much cooler. It exists for a few reasons: because 360-degree video is actually really complicated to do well, because there aren’t many great ways to watch 360 video, and because even when they do watch super-immersive footage, viewers don’t tend to look around much. With VR180, your camera can look and operate more like a regular point-and-shoot, and viewers get a similarly immersive feel without having to constantly spin around.”

Digital Trends did a review at CES 2018.

You can pre-order the Mirage Camera now from B&H.

There’s also the YI Horizon VR180 coming soon and it includes a view screen, higher resolution and HDMI out, I believe. See Think Media‘s review:

My take: I’m a big fan of 180 and can’t wait to play around with both of these cameras. (Also, I wish the ‘VR’ label would just go away since this technology is not “virtual reality” but basically “reality”. Virtual Reality to me means computer-generated environments; video games are a prime example. 180 is as close as we’re going to come to reality other than actually being there.)

SVOD leaders differentiate themselves

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Statista reports on a Hub Entertainment Research release that the leading SVOD platforms have differentiated themselves.

Netflix leads the pack in subscribers and its original shows attract the largest segment of its audience.

Amazon Video on the other hand attracts the largest segment of its audience to movies.

Hulu does neither.

Recode has compared content budgets of streamers and traditional broadcasters. Forbes has compiled viewership numbers.

My take: When you do the math, it appears that Netflix spends the least, per viewer, on original content, and that Hulu spends the most. However, it also appears that all of them are spending more than they earn from those viewers. I wonder how long that’s sustainable.

How to Choose the Best Picture Oscar

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held the 80th Oscars last Sunday.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon

Guillermo del Toro‘s “The Shape of Water” won Best Picture.

Going in, I thought “Dunkirk” and “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri” were the front runners, with “Lady Bird” a close third. “Get Out”?

But can the winner be predicted?

Youyou Zhou, writing on Quartzy, offered The Ultimate Statistical Model for Predicting the 2018 Academy Awards Best Picture.

She rated the nine nominations on four scales:

  1. Buzz and fanfare
  2. Prior awards
  3. Money talks
  4. Critic reviews

She then asked the reader to weigh each category to produce a prediction.

Of course, we now know the actual winner, so we can reverse engineer this to gain some insight into what’s important in winning Best Picture.

I played around with the sliders and came up with:

  1. Buzz and fanfare = 15%
  2. Prior awards = 70%
  3. Money talks = 10%
  4. Critic reviews = 22%

I know it adds up to 117% — hey, I didn’t build this.

The biggest predictor was Prior Awards. In fact, “The Shape of Water” wins with all the categories at 25% and Prior Awards at 100%.

This graphic illustrates the favourites on each of the four scales.

My take: This just begs the question, how do you predict the other awards shows?

Binge-watching binge-eating in Korea

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In honour of the Olympics in PyeongChang, let’s delve into the subculture of food webcasts in South Korea, otherwise known as Mukbang.

(Click on CC for English subtitles.)

Since 2009, “Broadcast Jockeys” (or BJs) have generated millions of views of up to hour-long food cooking and/or eating videos.

Banzz, featured above, has amassed over two million subscribers and almost three-quarters of a billion views in less than five years.

Yang Soo Bin takes a different tack, editing her videos down to under five minutes.

Why do Koreans watch? Are they all on diets and tune in to eat vicariously? Are they lonely, and want company while they eat too? Is it the immediacy of real people doing something real? I don’t know.

I do know that food is a cornerstone of Korean culture and is a highly-regarded social activity there.

My take: the sheer number of subscribers and views is staggering; some BJs may actually be making more money doing this than through their regular jobs. It would be worth studying how they build their audiences.

Elton John embraces VR to announce last tour

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On the heels of news of the first big VR film sale at Sundance, Elton John unleashed a VR360 retrospective short to introduce a livestream concert announcement on January 24, 2018.

(Use your A, S, D and W keys to move in space if you don’t have a headset. I found the 1440 resolution provided the best balance between detail and smooth playback.)

His upcoming 3 year, 300 date Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour will be his last; Elton (currently age 70) intends to quit touring to spend more time with his young children and husband.

Watch the full announcement with host Anderson Cooper (interview begins at 16:00 of the clip).

According to Wired, the VR360 video took two years to produce. Amazingly, it pushes the limits for motion sickness in VR.

Here’s the Making Of, Part One and Part Two.

My take: kudos to Elton John for embracing VR (and AR the previous day.) With over 700,000 views to date, the piano man shows us how to build buzz and steal the show.

Netflix in 2018

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As we move into 2018, a quick recap on the strength of Netflix’s streaming domination:

  • Netflix subscribers around the world watched more than one billion hours per week
  • The average subscriber watched approximately 60 movies in 2017

As reported widely, Neflix intends to spend upwards of $8 billion on new content in 2018. The New York Times lists some of the new films coming this spring:

  • “The Polka King” starring Jack Black
  • “Step Sisters”
  • “A Futile and Stupid Gesture” starring Will Forte
  • “When We First Met”
  • A revival of the “Benji” franchise
  • “Roxanne Roxanne”
  • “Come Sunday” starring Chiwetel Ejiofor

Even more new TV series are coming this year.

Nevertheless, there’s backlash…

Ben Kuchera writing on Polygon complains that:

“Netflix believes that its business begins and ends in your living room, which means any movie it buys will lose its shot at a theatrical release.”

He goes on to quote Noah Baumbach talking about his Netflix experience with “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)“:

“To be clear, I didn’t make the movie with Netflix. I made the movie independently, as I’ve made all my movies. I wasn’t even thinking of an alternative — I was thinking this would be shown in theaters, as all my movies are. Netflix acquired it from my producer in post and they have their way that’s important to them…. But I think it’s a singular experience, seeing a movie in the theater. I think audiences should be given the opportunity to see things for the first time that way.”

Netflix is even using their model for blockbusters. The $90 million Bright got savaged by the critics but that doesn’t seem to have scared away viewers.

My take: Although not quoted above, Baumbach also went on to say, “We all end up there anyway — all movies are going to end up on these servers, and that’s great.” The reality is that theatrical releases are very expensive. And the cost per viewer, versus streaming, is astronomical. My advice: add a clause to your contract that lets you four-wall a cinema and hold exclusive screenings for your best supporters. An audience of three hundred or so viewers can’t bother Netflix too much, can it?

Discoverability guide published

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Andra Sheffer‘s Independent Production Fund just gave everyone an early Christmas present.

It’s a PDF entitled ‘Be Discovered!’

Download this right away and learn a new strategy to help your work find its audience on the web — one that goes beyond Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

To summarize, the strategy is:

  1. Create an IMDb page
  2. Create a Wikipedia article
  3. Add JSON-LD Schema to your website pages

I know you’ve heard of IMDb and Wikipedia, but you might be scratching your head when it comes to the third thing.

Simply put, schema is one way of adding metadata (tags) to your data (content) so search engines will understand it better and index it properly. This is known as the semantic web.

Luckily there are a couple of free tools from Google to help you:

You use the first one to quickly tag an existing page to create movie schema code you can add to the page, and the second one to double check that the new code is working without errors.

Andra says if you follow this strategy:

“Ideally, all those ‘knowledge cards’ that pop up on the right side of your search screens or as the priority recommendation on mobile devices, will be Canadian web series, resulting from the use of these techniques and the metadata relationships that are discovered by search engines.”

My take: I love it when I learn something new, and the code for semantic indexing of your web content is new to me. Looks like I’m gonna be busy updating my webpages this holiday.

Battling AI’s create new realities

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The adage “Seeing is believing” is no longer true.

Three researchers, Ming-Yu Liu, Thomas Breuel and Jan Kautz, working for Nvidia, have created an AI that can generate life-like images.

In their system, multiple neural networks learn together by trying to fool each other with better and better solutions to the problem at hand. These are generative adversarial networks or GANs.

See their paper and GitHub. A sample below:

My take: this is kinda scary. Neat to think of “environmental” filters to add to genuine footage (think Nighttime, Winter, Rainy, etc.) but that this technology can create genuine-looking unreal footage is downright Orwellian. How do we distinguish true from fiction, real from fake? The only conclusion is that everything is now suspect. Sad.

The Attention Economy and the blockchain

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Five years ago, I was thinking about a semitransparent way for creators to get paid for their work on the Internet.

Now, someone’s come along and made my dream a reality. And thrown in the blockchain and a cryptocurrency to boot.

Synero, based in Israel, is…

“…developing tools which allow content creators to easily monetize original works without having to turn their channels into advertisment real estate, while granting their followers the opportunity to be rewarded for getting the word out. Simply put, the attention you generate online is worth money. The better the content you create, the more followers you have, the more attention flows around you. Synereo’s applications and monetary models enable you to tap into this resource and reap the fair share of what you create online. Not a content creator? In a world overloaded with information, good taste is as valuable as creative talent. Help curate quality content, and earn your share by promoting creators you appreciate.”

That’s interesting enough. That they intend to use the blockchain and a cryptocurrency to accomplish their goal makes this super-interesting. They have a phased roadmap to accomplish it all.

To be honest, there’s a whiff of a ponzi scheme about the way compensation is distributed.

But wait, there’s more! You won’t get paid in cash, but in a new cryptocurrency called AMP. Super legit, right?

Here are a three more charts on the AMP altcoin.

If you want to do this today:

  1. Get the Chrome Extension
  2. Sign up as a WildSpark Creator

Before you pooh pooh this, see what CMF Trends has to say about them.

My take: I think the frictionless compensation the blockchain could deliver to creators (and potentially influencers) would go far in acknowledging their contributions to the sharing economy. Will it be WildSpark? Not sure. Will the old economy kick and scream about any and all disruption? For sure!

Canadian media wants your eyeballs

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We’re in a battle for eyeballs. Discoverability is the new holy grail.

Whether it’s through mobile apps or websites, Canadian media companies and the cultural sector want you to watch our stuff, eh.

Witness the latest effort: Encore+. Find it on Youtube online or in the Youtube app.

You’ll find weekly playlists of everything from Mr. Dressup to Degrassi Junior High to Da Vinci’s Inquest. Plus over 60 features (and counting).

Encore+ is an industry engagement initiative of the Canada Media Fund.

But there are at least three other Canadian sites vying for your attention:

Then there’s the beloved National Film Board of Canada. They’ve gone it alone, hosting their own productions on the web and in apps.

Of course, there’s the Canadian film and television industry. See this great summary of where to watch in Canada.

Can these sites and apps take on streaming services, like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video? We’re back to the battle for the eyeballs.

My take: Time will tell if any of these destinations get traction. In the meantime, my favourite way to watch is to Chromecast from a mobile device to our big screen TV in the living room. See this list of all the apps and websites that support Chromecast.