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7 stories to read this weekend

Om Malik — Sat, 11 May 2013 07:00:36 +0000

After a long hiatus, I am back with my curated list of recommended stories for the weekend. My travel schedule has made it difficult to do this newsletter on a more regular basis, but I am going to try and do this twice a month at the very least. Hopefully you will enjoy this weekend’s edition.

The rise and fall of a reality TV star: It has been a long time since I have enjoyed something on Esquire.
Predictions for privacy in the age of Facebook: Of course, what is fun is that Smithsonian dug up a 1985 article from the Whole Earth Review.
Meet the stalkers: A look into the shadowy and murky world of data brokers who are chopping and shopping our life stories. They make the Facebook crew look like amateurs.
Raymond Chandler on writing: Great piece by Maria Popova on how the great Mr. Chandler created and what we can learn from him.
Live in infamy: The New Inquiry‘s Hazma Shaban writes about how what we say on Facebook will impact our future lives.
How a Miami cold case was solved through memories.
Dead Man’s Float: The death of hedge fund operator Seth Tobias. It is from 2008 and surfaced courtesy of LongReads.

Also, if you are in the Bay Area, we are hosting a BitCoin meet up in San Jose, Calif. on May 16 at 6 p.m. Details are here.

If Apple decides to make a television, Foxconn will be ready to build it

Erica Ogg — Tue, 07 May 2013 14:44:28 +0000

The biggest and most important client of Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn is Apple, and its ability to manufacture the iPhone and iPad has made it indispensable to the California company. As Apple’s fortunes have risen, so have Foxconn’s. But according to the New York Times, as Apple’s growth has slowed a bit, Foxconn has begun planning for a future “far, far beyond Apple.”

Time for Apple investors to panic? Not quite.

Foxconn, the story says, “wants to reduce its reliance on Apple. Its new strategy is a shift away from making products that other companies design, and toward developing products of its own, with an especially aggressive push into designing and manufacturing large, flat-screen televisions.” The idea is that Foxconn would be its own brand, not just the maker of products behind others’ brands. To do that, it’s invested in Sharp’s flat panel display factory and partnered with RadioShack (in China) and Vizio to sell its TVs.

But reading further, it becomes clear that it’s not quite that Foxconn is looking for ways to reduce its dependence on Apple; it’s really looking for ways to rely less on the iPhone.

The analysts quoted in the story believe that what Foxconn is up to by improving its ability to manufacture TVs quickly and cheaply is anticipating a move Apple may make. From the article:

Analysts say Mr. Gou’s efforts to buy an LCD factory and vertically integrate his television manufacturing represent anticipation that orders for an Apple television product will come his way.

In other words, Foxconn wants to produce the long-rumored Apple TV. That’s not a bad idea either: one day Apple is going to have to move past the iPhone too, or at least augment its hardware lineup in other ways. That may include wearable computing devices, a TV or something else entirely. Either way, Foxconn wants to be ready for whatever that next move is.

So Foxconn doesn’t actually appear to be looking to extricate itself from Apple; rather it’s looking to extend its relationship with the company further into the future.

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Two deals that make it obvious where Twitter’s heart lies: inside your television

Mathew Ingram — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:06:38 +0000

There were a number of reports last week that Twitter was looking to do TV-related content deals with broadcast networks such as Viacom and NBC so that it could add video clips to its real-time stream, and now we have seen two deals announced that show the kind of thing Twitter has in mind: one with BBC America that was revealed (naturally) via a tweet, and an interesting arrangement with Comedy Central, both of which emerged over the weekend.

These deals reinforce something I tried to make clear in an earlier post about the company’s plans: namely, if you don’t like television then you’re probably not going to be very happy with the future of Twitter. The deal with BBC America — which is owned by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the agency, and carries such popular shows as Doctor Who and Top Gear in the U.S. — will presumably see Twitter run clips from those shows inside its users’ streams, in much the same way it did with ESPN during March Madness.

.@Twitter and @BBCAmerica, home of #DoctorWho & #TopGear, ink deal to offer 1st in-Tweet branded video synced to entertainment TV series—
BBC AMERICA (@BBCAMERICA) April 18, 2013

TV shows inside your Twitter stream

There have been other such one-off deals — as well as arrangements like the one with the Weather Channel, which will bring weather clips into Twitter’s expanded tweets — but the BBC America partnership seems to be the first one that involves an entire channel and potentially all of their shows, and it could easily be the prototype for further such deals. But will users react positively or negatively to all of this real-time video showing up in their Twitter streams?

Meanwhile, Twitter is also launching a somewhat different project with the Comedy Central channel that illustrates just how much the company wants to bring video as an experience inside the stream: the network is launching what it calls a five-day “comedy festival,” but all of the content will appear within Twitter, and most of it will be either created or distributed via Twitter’s recent video acquisition, Vine — which is designed for video clips of six seconds or less.

According to a report in the New York Times about the arrangement, a number of comedians — including legends like Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner — will be posting video snippets of comedy routines as well as jokes using the hashtag #ComedyFest. On Tuesday, comedian Steve Agee will reportedly host a “Vine Dining” party as part of the festival, in which he and others will tell stories in six-second video clips that will be hosted and distributed by the Twitter network.

Video plus brands equals ad dollars

As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post last week about the rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, these moves are just part of Twitter’s ongoing plans to not only host TV and video content on the network, but to monetize it (or help its creators monetize it) as well. In addition to Vine, one of the recent acquisitions that could help Twitter do that is Bluefin Labs, which specializes in tracking the real-time data about who is watching what show.

That kind of information — along with the data from Twitter’s partnership with Nielsen, announced last year — would in turn help Twitter appeal to advertisers who are looking for as much targeting information as they can get. And that appeal could be paying off already: according to a report from the Financial Times on Monday, Twitter has signed a major multi-year deal worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” with Starcom MediaVest Group, a large ad-buying firm that represents clients like Walmart and Coca-Cola.

Moves like these — and the launch of Twitter Music last week — reinforce just how much the company has evolved away from its original nature as a short-messaging service that gave you only 140 characters or less, and could be consumed quickly. Now, it is becoming a lot more like a broadcast network, or at least a willing handmaiden for broadcast networks, as CEO Dick Costolo predicted in a speech last year. But is that what users really want from Twitter?

This post was updated on April 24 to note that BBC America is a unit of BBC Worldwide and not a joint venture with Discovery Channel as was originally stated.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K and Eva Blue

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State of the media: The cracks are still widening, but some light is also getting in

Mathew Ingram — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:40:36 +0000

If you’ve been following the media industry over the past year, you probably don’t need anyone to tell you the waves of disruption continue to increase in both height and frequency — so the news that widespread cutbacks have caused dissatisfied readers to flee won’t come as much of a surprise. But while those waves have swamped some traditional players, other parts of the industry have been able to ride the tide, and non-traditional sources continue to play a growing role in how people get their news — although whether that is good or bad is still open for debate.

All of that and more is contained in the latest State of the Media report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which was released on Monday morning (Note: We will be discussing many of these issues and more at our paidContent conference in New York on April 17). There’s a lot to take in, but here are what I believe to be some of the key takeaways:

The Bad News:

Cutbacks continue, and consumers are leaving: Close to one-third of U.S. adults say they have stopped using a news outlet because of dissatisfaction over the content — in other words, because they weren’t getting the news they wanted, or the news they expected to get. Survey respondents mentioned both fewer stories in general and less complete reporting, and while it’s impossible to know whether this phenomenon is related to the repeated rounds of cutbacks and job losses, it seems likely.

No one cares about the industry’s financial problems: One interesting aspect of Pew’s research is that only a small number of respondents were even aware of the financial woes of the media industry — and even worse, those who were the most aware of the situation were also the most likely to have stopped using a traditional news outlet. Are some readers choosing to desert what they see as a sinking journalistic ship? It certainly looks that way.
The disruption of advertising is accelerating: Although digital advertising rose by 17 percent last year, that was not nearly enough to make up for the ongoing decline of print advertising, Pew said. In 2012, approximately $16 in print revenue was lost for every $1 in digital revenue — an even worse ratio than the already dismal 10-to-1 relationship that existed in 2011. And much of the growth in digital is benefiting Google and Facebook.
It’s not just newspapers any more: The Pew research shows that local television is also being decimated by the disruption in both viewership and advertising revenue — to the point where viewers have started to notice the difference. Whether because of cutbacks or a desire to appeal to more viewers, Pew says that local TV news is also focusing more on sports and entertainment, and less time on crime and political coverage.

The Good News:

Demand for news is growing, not shrinking: Although it may be coming at the expense of some traditional players, there is clearly a large and growing appetite for news, since the top news sites saw traffic increase by 7 percent in 2012, according to Pew. And the impact of social media seems to be clearly positive, in the sense that those who have heard about news from friends and family through such channels show a stronger interest in finding out more.
Some outlets are having success with subscriptions: In the wake of the success of the New York Times paywall, many newspapers have erected their own subscription walls, and this is generating some reader-provided revenue that has helped to stanch the bleeding for some publishers (although even for the NYT and the Financial Times, this has not filled the gap entirely).
The sources are going direct: This is probably one of the most contentious aspects of the disruption in media — namely, the fact that social tools such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms produce a “democratization of distribution” that allows everyone from celebrities to politicians, and even brands and companies themselves, to reach an audience directly. Is that good or bad for journalism? The debate on that question continues to rage.
New forms of advertising are emerging: This is another contentious topic in media — that is, the rise of what some choose to call “native advertising,” or sponsored content, and in some cases “brand journalism.” To detractors such as political blogger Andrew Sullivan it is ethically dubious, and to many traditional journalists such as former NYT executive editor Bill Keller it is a “slippery slope,” but new media entities like BuzzFeed and even The Atlantic are using it to some success.

Is the glass half full or half empty?

As with any overview of the media business, there will be those who see this picture as a glass half-empty, and those who see it as a glass half-full — and perhaps a growing number who have completely lost interest in the glass because they are already getting their water elsewhere. As Emily Bell of Columbia and her fellow authors Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson pointed out in their recent report on “Post-Industrial Journalism” and author Clay Christensen noted in a recent interview at Harvard, upheaval is the order of the day in the media business and will likely be so for some time.

Shirky said in an essay in 2011 that we as a society actually need the media business to be chaotic, as unpleasant as that may be, because we literally don’t have any idea what the future of the industry will look like. Even now there are new entities being born, and new models being applied — like the Forbes “BrandVoice” model, or Sullivan’s direct-to-readers model — that could either be the savior of the industry or a dangerous distraction. If you like bumpy rides with an uncertain ending, the media industry is definitely the place for you.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / Scorpp

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CBS launches an iOS app to stream full episodes of some shows

Laura Hazard Owen — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:49:48 +0000

CBS on Thursday launched an iOS app that offers full episodes of primetime shows a week after they air. Daytime and late-night shows are available to watch within 24 hours of airing. Android and Windows 8 apps are on the way.

The app lets people “watch CBS shows on the best screen available for them,” CBS Interactive president Jim Lanzone said in a statement, “with a host of extra features that give them a richer viewing experience whenever and wherever they tune in.” Those extra features, which will be integrated “by the start of the Fall TV season,” will include “integrated social feeds; live events that allow fans to engage directly with talent; and second-screen experiences synched to the broadcast with additional content for select shows.”

Shows available through the app include NCIS, The Good Wife, Survivor, CSI and How I Met Your Mother, among others. But full episodes of some well-known shows, like The Big Bang Theory and The Mentalist, are missing from the app even though they’re available through CBS’s website. And the app does not provide a way to catch up on past seasons, or even all of a current season: only select episodes are available.

Other networks are also experimenting with offering streaming through their apps. NBC allows streaming of some shows through its iOS app, for example, while Fox only lets users stream full episodes through its “Fox Now” app if they authenticate their subscription to a TV provider.

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How big an area would 1 billion televisions cover?

Om Malik — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:31:11 +0000

Editor’s note: The market-research company that put out the report on which this story is based, IHS, initially said that 1 billion TV sets would cover a country the size of Norway. That is, in fact, not accurate, and we’ve corrected our story to reflect that. (A special thanks to the commenters who helped flag the error.)

Over the past four years, TV makers have shipped about a billion television sets. If you combined them, that would be equivalent to a single TV set with a 330-million-square-meter screen, according to IHS, a market research company. That is about the size of a city. Of course, no one knows what screen size those sets have, but it’s still a fun (if unscientific) stat. As for me, I am about to move and so I am getting rid of all the screens in my house except for four: MacBook Pro (Retina), iPad (Original), Kindle Paperwhite and iPhone5. Everything else is going to eBay.

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What a pig, a goat and an eagle can tell us about the decline of traditional media

Mathew Ingram — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 16:11:54 +0000

If the rise of social media — and specifically the explosion of “viral” content on networks like Facebook and Twitter — has done nothing else, it has certainly given mainstream media plenty of “user-generated content” to add to their dwindling repertoire of journalism. Almost every newscast seems to include a video of cute animals or some other clip that is making the rounds on the social web. Unfortunately, no one seems to care much whether any of these videos are real or not, and that is a very real problem.

The New York Times has written about one recent example of user-generated content gone bad: namely, a video clip of a baby pig “rescuing” a hapless baby goat who is trapped in the pond at a petting zoo. Within hours of the clip being posted to YouTube last fall and subsequently shared on Reddit, it had appeared on The Today Show, NBC’s Nightly News, Good Morning America and dozens of other channels — and why not? It was incredibly cute, and had a feel-good message of the kind that morning shows in particular enjoy.

Of course, the video turned out to be a clip from a new TV show, which the creators manufactured and then uploaded as a kind of viral-marketing ploy. Not only did the baby pig not “rescue” the baby goat, but the producers of the show had to spend hours building an underwater track to even get the pig anywhere near the animal — and in the end they had to use a trained pig, after the one they were originally planning to use showed no intention of going into the pond.

Does it matter whether these clips are real?

As the NYT piece notes, when NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams introduced the video clip, he said he “felt duty bound to share this” with the audience, and added that he didn’t know whether it was real or not. Is that enough of a disclaimer to absolve a media outlet of responsibility for figuring out whether something can be verified or not? Many would argue that it is not. Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute compared it to “a form of malpractice” for journalists (McBride has more on that in a blog post about the incident at Poynter).

@mathewi No. Even though it may seem trivial because it's a pig video, it's embarrassing and adds to distrust of the media.
—
Liz Heron (@lheron) February 27, 2013

Obviously, part of what shows like Good Morning America do is pure entertainment — in other words, not journalism by any stretch. But clips like the baby goat rescue show up on programs like The Nightly News as well, and the hosts rarely say anything about whether a clip is real or not. In some cases, these videos come right after a news report about something serious. How are audiences to know when something is “just entertainment” and therefore hasn’t been checked?

In another recent incident, a video purporting to show a golden eagle snatching a small child from a park went “viral” on the social web and showed up on a number of media outlets. It too turned out to be fake — the creation of some hard-working students in a computer-generated imagery course at a school in Montreal. The students deliberately chose something that seemed almost believable, based on “urban legends” of such incidents in the past.

We need to be careful what we amplify

Interestingly enough, the clip was debunked within hours of being uploaded, by another young programmer with some expertise in computer-generated imaging (as well as by other outlets such as Gawker, which pointed out obvious signs others could have noticed). But as with many corrections in a digital age, it took longer for the truth to propagate than it did the original video — and many of the outlets that shared the original didn’t bother to update their audience with the facts.

Om wrote recently about how one of the key responsibilities of journalists in this new age of “democratized distribution” of information is to pay attention to what they choose to amplify and what they don’t, and incidents like the baby goat video bring that home with a vengeance.

If all a media outlet is doing is sharing the latest video from Reddit or a tweet from a celebrity, how is that adding anything meaningful to what viewers can get elsewhere? It isn’t. And if traditional media continue to imitate their online competitors like BuzzFeed or Reddit without adding anything of value, then they will likely find that audiences are happy to go to the original source of that content rather than relying on the TV news to find it for them.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

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Nielsen, Billboard shift their tracking to account for cord cutters

Laura Hazard Owen — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 20:42:09 +0000

For the first time, Nielsen will begin tracking the habits of viewers who watch TV over broadband. And in another example of online media consumption shaking up traditional tracking methods, Billboard will begin including YouTube music video views in its charts.

The Nielsen news was first reported on Wednesday by The Hollywood Reporter, which said that by September 2013 “Nielsen expects to have in place new hardware and software tools in the nearly 23,000 TV homes it samples.” Nielsen confirmed the news on Thursday, with Nielsen SVP Pat McDonough telling the New York Times that the company’s definition of “television household” will now include “those households who are receiving broadband Internet and putting it onto a television set.” According to the AP:

“This will add roughly 160 homes to Nielsen’s current sample of 23,000 houses nationwide with meters monitoring viewing habits.

More significantly, Nielsen will return to its sample to find homes that have cable or broadcast, but also separate TV sets hooked up through broadband. This will add an estimated 2,000 more broadband sets, significantly increasing the sample size.”

The company is also working on ways to track viewing on smartphones and tablets.

Separately, Billboard has begun including official YouTube music video views (from the U.S.) in its rankings. “All official videos on YouTube, including user-generated clips that utilize authorized audio, will now factor into how a song’s popularity is determined,” YouTube said on its blog. Billboard’s charts have included digital download and streaming data, tracked by Nielsen, since last year.

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Consumers are stuck between ISPs and content giants in the battle for online video

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:34:31 +0000

On Friday night I rented Pitch Perfect on Amazon’s Instant Video service and settled in for a chill evening of popcorn and cheesy singing. But the experience was less than perfect. The movie stopped roughly 15 minutes in, and once it restarted after a brief moment to load, it proceeded to stop several more times.

I called Amazon(samzn), which said it was having server issues that was causing problems for those streaming through a Roku box (I was), and got a refund for the movie. But the customer service rep said that based on my stream the Roku server issues weren’t the likely problem; my internet connection was. He said my internet service kept dropping the connection. I asked for a copy of the stream results he was looking at so I could call my ISP and find out what was going on, but that wasn’t possible. The customer service rep ended up offering to be on the phone with me while I called my ISP, something I haven’t done yet because he didn’t offer me a way to contact him other than email.

As I was on the phone with Amazon, I knew this might make a good story, so I took notes. But honestly, I didn’t want to spend Friday night troubleshooting my 30 Mbps cable broadband connection, my Roku box, my home Wi-Fi network or my inability to stream a rental via Amazon. I wanted to watch a $4 movie and relax. The trouble is that technology has enabled us to break up the process of getting a movie or TV show into many different pieces controlled by different service providers. But as we do this, we’ve have also taken out any accountability, which puts the consumer in the middle of any disputes over service quality.

Stuck in the middle with you

My experience on Friday is just one example — other content companies are eliciting help from consumers in the quest for better quality video streams. This week Netflix said it will offer 3D movies and a higher quality stream to customers whose ISPs put a Netflix Open Connect box on their network. The Open Connect program is Netflix’s homegrown content delviery network that many ISPs in Europe are using as well as a few in the U.S. But Comcast, Time Warner Cable (stwc), Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink — which together comprise about 61.3 million broadband customers — aren’t using the service.

Netflix has offered up a handy web site so customers can see if they can get the higher quality streams, and suggests that if they can’t, those consumers should call their ISP. So now, I’m supposed to call Time Warner Cable and ask it to make the business decision to add Netflix Connect as well as try to get tech help on my Amazon issue; possibly by asking the technician to hold and wait for me to dial back in to Amazon’s help line to find the guy who helped me on Friday. I am not excited.

So many points of failure

This box is yet another possible point of failure.

Other than making me get in the middle of a fight between two corporate behemoths, there are some other issues caused by the disaggregation of TV that are worth exploring. My Amazon movie, for example, was streamed from Amazon’s servers possibly to Roku’s servers before heading over the network to my house. Depending on how much Amazon and/or Roku traffic was coming into Time Warner’s network in Central Texas at that time, the packets may have been stymied there before ever reaching that last mile to my home.

It’s a well-known secret in the peering world that ISPs sometimes choke the traffic coming in from large content companies as a reason to charge them more money for the privilege of interconnecting to them. That’s suspected of happening with Free in France, and has triggered an investigation by the French telecoms authority. It’s also happened in the U.S., although most of the arguments on the issue are solved by negotiation rather than a government probe.

Should my Pitch Perfect packets hit the last mile network, they still have to run the gauntlet of all of my neighbors’ traffic (cable networks are shared, and Friday night is a great time for others to stream their own movies). Once inside my home it has to traverse my Wi-Fi network and travel through my Roku box to the TV. A congested Wi-Fi network or even glitches on my Roku may also affect the quality of my service.

Pay TV might be the option, if…

Comcast’s Xfinity app

So as you can see, there are several places where my stream can get caught up and turn my Friday night rental to a pixelated or buffering mess, even if Amazon and my cable company were on speaking terms. My ISP would argue that the solution here is that I get my videos through it via on-demand rentals. And it is right. That may become the real value that pay TV services can provide. They control the packet from its origination all the way to the home (or set-top-box in some cases) and can deliver a quality experience.

But right now, they don’t provide enough value in terms of quality of service for me to spend $100 a month. As someone who rents maybe two or three movies a month and watches one or two shows on TV, it’s not worth it. It’s like buying a Maserati when a minivan or maybe even a moped would do.

Right now the cable companies and some telcos are pushing on-demand content to more devices (YAY!) through services like Comcast’s Xfinity, which is a concession to how customers want to watch more content on their time at on the device of their choosing. However, for the most part, they are ignoring that some people don’t want everything.

The pay TV industry has fought a la carte programming for years, and may not give in now. Without a lot of competition it’s tough to see that dynamic changing — and in some cases it would upend the pay TV business model. Pay TV companies generally sign long-term contracts to channels paying them a set fee for each subscriber. Even as subscribers fall, cable companies are still paying those fees. As television makes the transition to broadband, consumers, pay TV companies and the content companies are all making sacrifices, but asking customers to mediate disputes between Amazon and an ISP shouldn’t be one of them.

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US spends 35 percent more time using apps in 2012, while web usage drops

Erica Ogg — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 18:15:27 +0000

When it comes to entertainment, watching television is still where those in the U.S. primarily turn on a daily basis: on average, we watch TV for almost three hours per day. But mobile app usage continues to grow at a pace that is coming closer to rivaling television, according to new data released Wednesday. We spend more than two hours a day using apps on our phones or tablets, which suggests that eventually what is now considered the “second screen” is inching closer to overtaking the first screen.

Mobile analytics firm Flurry released its 2012 update on mobile app usage on Wednesday, with data gathered from the more than 250,000 applications it monitors every day, as well as information from ComScore and Alexa. It shows that between December 2011 and December 2012, while we watch TV for 168 minutes per day (according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics latest stat, which is from 2011), the firm’s own data shows that we spend 127 minutes per day using mobile apps — either playing games, shopping, checking social media feeds, etc. The 127 minutes is a significant step up from the data measured between December 2010 and December 2011, when we were averaging just 94 minutes per day in smartphone or tablet applications. That’s an increase of 35 percent. At the same time, we are spending a diminishing amount of time browsing the web: Flurry found an average use of 70 minutes per day on the web over the last year, versus 72 minutes per day from the year before.

As the chart shows, the amount that mobile app usage increased is far greater than the decrease in average web use. So while some of our time is shifting from the web to apps, Flurry says the shift is also due to how many more apps are out there today that we’re using more than ever. Plus those apps are doing things we turned to television for:

In fact, we ultimately expect apps on tablets and smartphones to challenge broadcast television as the dominant channel for media consumption. Compared to the 60-year-old television industry, apps are just over 4 years old. In particular, tablets will drive growth in app consumption in 2013 as TV-style content and major programming moves to the tablet. Most TV Networks have already adjusted to a dual screen world and are synchronizing their TV content with their tablet app content.

This also explains why companies like Netflix, professional sports leagues, and companies built around entertainment content are focusing one “second screen” apps. They know you are, more than ever, probably using apps anyway while you’re watching TV — or even instead of.

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