GigaOM » video

Drones on parade, and a few fun facts about 4K

Derrick Harris — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 23:38:18 +0000

So I stopped by the National Association of Broadcasters show today to talk big data with Gracenote Co-Founder and CTO Ty Roberts, after which he took me on a brief tour of the nearby show floor. If you’ve never been to NAB, it’s like a behind-the-scenes-version of CES, filled with the biggest, baddest, most-expensive television and movie-production equipment you’ve ever seen.

The big thing this year — 4K television. Here are a few factoids that Roberts, clearly having been educated by his peers in the Sony family, shared:

The storage footprint of 1 hour of 4K video is 512 gigabytes.
That’s a lot of data to move across IP, so 4k cameras just send everything straight to production storage systems over fiber-optic cable.
The picture is so detailed that it’s difficult for one person to shoot scenes and focus at the same time. The answer: new two-person camera setups where one guy shoots and the other stands next to him focusing the shot on a larger screen.

Oh, and there were drones, too:

The Schiebel Camcopter S-100.

This is the civilian version of the Schiebel Camcopter S-100. There’s a military version, too. Its sticker price of several hundred thousand dollars probably isn’t surprising.

For the more cost-conscious aerial cinematographer, Freefly Systems had its own booth:

The Freefly Cinestar helicopter

Or for those who prefer the ground:

A video rover, I guess.

This all kind of makes me wish I shot video for a living. If I had a flying, rotating video camera or an off-road setup, I’m sure I could find some way to use them.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

How to make your mark in professional basketball at 5′ 9″

Derrick Harris — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 21:00:52 +0000

Growing up in India, Vasu Kulkarni was the self-proclaimed “biggest basketball fan in the world.” He watched a lot and he played a lot. He dreamed, like so many kids around the world, of playing professional basketball.

When he headed off to college at the University of Pennsylvania, Kulkarni tried out for the team. He was 5-feet, 9-inches and weighed 130 pounds. He didn’t make it.

But Kulkarni would find another path to basketball success. He never got to don a Dallas Mavericks or Houston Rockets hat on draft day, but he did get a shot to hobnob — and impress — Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey at this year’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

Kulkarni technically studied computer engineering and entrepreneurship but, he joked when I asked the question, “I like to say basketball.” Even though it doesn’t appear on his transcripts, there’s no denying he did his hardcourt homework.

No budget, no problem

Although he didn’t make the varsity basketball team, Kulkarni did play junior varisty ball at Penn — and in doing so spotted a golden opportunity. Penn is the ninth-winningest college basketball program of all time, but it’s no longer a powerhouse and, Kulkarni noted, Ivy League schools simply do not fund athletic programs like some other Division I universities do. There wasn’t a whole video department dedicated solely to processing and analyzing game film. Kulkarni watched the head coach prep for games largely by himself, poring over film to find a few shining examples of good or bad plays that could serve as teaching points.

And then a lightbulb went off for Kulkarni: There must be a whole lot of small colleges and high schools suffering from the same problem. So, in 2008, he launched Krossover.

The company’s flagship service is pretty self-explanatory. Coaches upload their game film after each game. Krossover’s team of hundreds of college students gets to work breaking it down. When the coach wakes up, the last night’s game is online and he can examine just about anything he wants — statistics, individuals plays, where on the field or court most of the action took place. It quite literally analyzes everything that’s quantifiable, and in some cases visualizable, by studying game film. (You can experiment with it yourself here.)

Krossover’s shot chart.

That’s really cool if you’re a high-school or lower-level college coach — and Kulkarni said more than 1,000 of them currently use Krossover — but it’s probably not going to impress too many professional or big-time college coaches. It’s certainly not going to impress the sports-stats superstars that flock to the MIT conference every year. To reach this audience, Krossover needed something new.

Are you smarter than Kevin Durant? (Hint: No)

Hence the startup’s latest idea, an iOS app for testing people’s on-the-court sports knowledge, called sIQ (or sports IQ). Kulkarni said the inspiration for sIQ came while watching Krossover board member and then-head of analytics for the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA franchise Ben Alamar talk about the differences in brain activity between weekend warriors and professional athletes. The biggest is that while wannabe pros make conscious decisions about what to do next, professional athletes just react — they see and they do without hesitation.

Can Kevin Durant do this? Source: Krossover

When you’re measuring someone’s sports IQ, the faster and more-accurately they react, the smarter — in theory — they are. Kulkarni’s first question to Alamar upon hearing this: “Can I take this test and if I do better than Kevin Durant can I get a 10-day contract?”

Funny, yes, but also telling about the mentality of guys who watch a lot of sports — and, like Kulkarni, might still play a lot — and hold out hope in the back of their minds they’re in some way on par with professional athletes. Kulkarni had a hunch the app would go over well at the MIT Sloan event, which is full of, as he described them (and, by proxy, himself and me) “a bunch of sports nerds who probably can’t play worth a damn but know everything about sports.” They could settle a lot of bets over who’s a smarter athlete by watching plays unfold on an iPhone, then when video pauses, predicting the outcome.

So, he told one his developers to take two weeks earlier this year and get something ready for the conference, which took place the first week of March. While there, the Krossover team met Daryl Morey, a former Wall Street quant turned Houston Rockets general manager — an extreme version of Moneyball inspiration Billy Beane in that Morey has no basketball experience and relies almost solely on numbers to make his decisions. He loved the app and quickly dragged over Dallas Mavericks owner (and entrepreneur and investor and blogger) Mark Cuban to play with it. At NBA All-Star Weekend in February, ESPN basketball columnist Bill Simmons played sIQ. Poorly.

By contrast, when Kulkarni gave sIQ to a 15-year-old basketball phenom at the gym where they both play, the kid got the highest scores Kulkarni had ever seen. And not only did he answer correctly, his average response time was about 1 second — about 4 times faster than the guys at Sloan were able to respond.

The fact that it works, as evidenced by the teenage natural’s performance, has some NBA and NFL executives already spotting an opportunity in sIQ. Professional teams — including Alamar’s new employer, the Cleveland Cavaliers — are testing it out as a method to gauge college players’ sports IQs as part of the draft preparation and to train players to react better by using with the app as a way to predict what will happen next in any given situation.

Maybe, Kulkarni suggested, sIQ could become part of the highly publicized NFL Combine and replace the controversial Wonderlick test for gauging draft prospects’ intelligence. It should almost certainly provide a more-compelling platform for high-school coaches trying to get their athletes to study game film.

The positive feedback has Krossover building sIQ as a platform rather than as a just an app. Yes, sports fans will be able to download it and test their IQs, but the company also hopes to build versions specifically for applications like testing and training real athletes. It will start off in basketball, but sports like football, volleyball, soccer, wrestling, boxing and maybe even mixed martial arts are on the horizon.

Taking analytics from the front office to the field

And whether or not sIQ turns out to be the game-changer Krossover hopes it will be, the company seems to be on the right path. Sports analytics is becoming a huge business, but primarily in the front office where executives are trying to figure out who they want on their teams and how much they’re willing to pay. Handicapping the annual NCAA March Madness basketball tournament is a popular pastime, too. (As evidence of how hot the space is right now, Kulkarni said Krossover has raised $4.5 million primarily through angel investors — including some professional athletes — who want to get in on what they see as a sexy business.)

Statwing breaks down the NFL.

However, as I noted when profiling Statwing recently (its full-time-statistician and part-time-sports-geek founders recently uploaded a trove of NFL data for people to play around with), the analytic mindset has yet to trickle down to the coach’s office in most situations and affect decisions such as what type of play to call in what situations. Aside from golf, perhaps, it certainly hasn’t made its way onto the field of play to actually improve players’ performance.

And that was Kulkarni’s major takeaway from the MIT Sloan conference this year: while teams and companies like his are collecting “an obscene amount” of data on every single aspect of nearly every single sport, they’re struggling to find ways to make sense of it.

“The thing everyone’s trying to figure out is: Is there a way for you to find the two or three or four things that will guarantee you a win or at least tip the scale in your favor at any given time,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has cracked the code.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Microsoft’s vision of our future is big screens and big data

Derrick Harris — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 23:42:22 +0000

What do you get when you cross a massive touchscreen, a Kinect, some sort of computing device and a whole lot of data-processing technology? You get Microsoft’s vision of our digital future, both at home and in the office. The company’s struggles to shift from a desktop-and-server-based world to a mobile-and-cloud-based world shed some doubt on whether Microsoft will be the company to actually deliver on its vision, but it definitely gets points for trying.

In an earlier post, I explained how the company is betting on its investment in machine learning and the webscale infrastructure that powers its Bing search engine to fuel its future devices and services. When you consider that any sort of gesture, speech or handwriting-recognition technology incorporates machine learning in order to decipher what human beings are actually doing, saying or writing, it’s easy to see how busy Microsoft has been.

Some of the technology was downright impressive if not occasionally mind-blowing (in theory, at least), while other parts — particularly some of the futuristic tableaus involving hyper-interactivity — seem, frankly, a little annoying. (You can see some examples in the gallery below.)

Showing off: Consumer tech

Microsoft used its TechForum media event to show everything from a speech-recognizing, dual-screen Xbox Live interface (and to hint at forthcoming original, possibly interactive programming from Microsoft) to a research project that allows Kinect to recognize hand gestures in addition to broad movements. The latter would allow for new ways of controlling Kinect-connected devices without controllers or specialized gear (e.g., fake guns) because a gripping (and releasing) motion would replace the press of a button.

Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer, said the company used Kinect to teach an elevator in one building when people are planning to board or just standing in front of it conversing. If the elevator senses that someone wants to get on, the door opens automatically without requiring the person to press a button.

And, of course, pretty much all of Bing is the result of machine learning and big data technologies. Qi Lu, president of the Online Services Division, showed off all sorts of Bing capabilities, including one that surfaces reviews or other information from respected voices in the specific fields about which a user is searching. He said that capability requires searching “trillions of pieces of web data” to determine who’s influential and whether their content is of high quality.

The whole event took place in Microsoft’s new Envisioning Center, which tries to simulate what our work and home lives will be like a decade or more out. What’s Microsoft’s vision? Everything — from the LED bulbs to the omnipresent screens to the stove burners — is digital, connected and equipped with sensors, and 3-D printers sit on every desk. It’s everything the 8 million apps we have today are trying to be, only, well, convenient.

Showing off: Enterprise tech

For the business users, Microsoft demonstrated the machine-learning-based Flash Fill feature in Excel 2013, as well as a research project for indexing structured data sets available on Bing and then having Excel automatically recommend them based on the data someone is already working with. PowerPivot, a BI extension for Excel, can now handle 100 million rows of data in-memory versus its old limit of 1 million rows — allowing users to prove models before deploying on a larger scale using SQL Server and new performance-boosting in-memory, columnar store and compression capabilities.

Microsoft is also working on a workspace environment called DataLab that lets users share data, models, experiments and workflows. Technical Fellow Dave Campbell said the goal is to reduce the need for armies of skilled data experts by letting them publish their work for broader consumption — just like what happened with applications years ago. Some of these — such as Microsoft’s own Synonyms Search tool for figuring out what search terms are often associated with each other — will eventually make their way into the Windows Azure Data Marketplace.

We also saw research projects focused on using machine learning to identify in real time faulty microchip wafers (or, in theory, anything) as they traverse the production line and an application that analyzes petabytes of web data in order to determine how viral content spreads across the web. At Microsoft TechFest event the following day (which I didn’t attend), the company apparently showed off even more research projects in this same vein of fancy visualization and interfaces belying some serious data processing.

On the collaboration front, Microsoft trotted out its Lync video-conferencing platform that also lets users collaborate on documents use virtual ink to write messages. The latter appears particularly useful for creating virtual whiteboards, especially when Perceptive Pixel screens are involved. When the meeting is done, Office Division President Kurt DelBene said, everything saves to the cloud and can be shared with whoever needs it.

If I had one takeaway from TechForum, it’s that I wouldn’t want to be any legacy technology company right now — be it HP, IBM, Sony, Dell or even Apple — trying to ride a skyrocketing innovation curve while also having to maintain a multibillion-dollar collection of legacy businesses. Gun to my head, though, Microsoft wouldn’t be a bad choice.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

6 ways to watch your own videos from your iPhone or Mac on your TV

Geoffrey Goetz — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 13:00:50 +0000

Things were simpler when you would have a stack of VHS tapes that you recorded yourself next to your VCR. There was no YouTube or Facebook and the internet was far away from your television set. Fast forward 10 years and not only are there no longer any tapes, but almost every viewing solution out there just assumes that you want to share all of your video files on the internet for the whole world to see. So what if you just want to view them in your own house on your own HDTV? The following is a guide to some of the techniques you can use when you just want to watch one of your home movies in the privacy of your own home using the Apple TV, a Mac or an iOS device.

Using your Apple TV

If your home is fully equipped with Apple products, the easiest way to watch home movies privately is by using an Apple TV. There are several options to display your home movies on your Apple TV, it just depends on which Apple device you happen to have your movies on.

From your iOS device: With point and shoot cameras dropping in sales by 30 percent in recent months, more people are using their iPhones to capture all of their personal moments on video. Provided you are running iOS 4.3 or greater, when the video files are still on your iPhone, you can view them directly on the AppleTV using AirPlay. Simply turn on your Apple TV, tap on the AirPlay icon and select which AppleTV you want to view your videos on.

Directly from your Mac: If you do not have an iPhone, and you have been off loading your video files from your digital camera directly to your Mac, you can still use AirPlay from your Mac to watch your videos on your Apple TV. Macs running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion can also stream their entire screens directly to an Apple TV using AirPlay Mirroring.

If you do not have a newer generation AirPlay-capable Mac (mid-2011 or newer), you still have two choices. The first is an app in the Mac App Store called HUDTube ($4.99, Mac). This is the only video player app in the Mac App Store that supports streaming to an Apple TV using AirPlay. With HudTube, you simply drag and drop the video file you want to view, and select the Apple TV you wish to stream to.

The second solution for your Mac is to use a product called Air Parrot ($9.99, Mac). This product brings the same AirPlay streaming capabilities to older Macs. One nice feature that Air Parrot has that Apple’s own AirPlay Mirroring does not is the ability to select just one app window. This feature is called “App Mirroring.” As an example, with App Mirroring you can display just the QuickTime Player rather then your entire desktop.

Home Sharing from iTunes: You can also use iTunes on your Mac to stream your home movies to your Apple TV. Beginning with version 10.1 of iTunes, you have been able to share your video files alongside your photos with Home Sharing. Home Sharing is a way to share your entire iTunes Library on your local network to all of your Apple devices. It is easy to enable, but does require that you have an iTunes account. Keep in mind that all Home Sharing will be limited to devices that are configured with that account.

Once you have Home Sharing enabled in iTunes, from iTune’s File menu go back to Home Sharing menu item and click on “Choose Photos to Share with AppleTV.” Here you can select either an iPhoto Library, an Aperture Library, or any other folder on your Mac containing photos and videos you want to share. Just be sure to check “Include Videos” when you first set this up.

To watch your shared movies, you must also enable Home Sharing on your Apple TV. Now you will be able to select any one of the movies you shared by accessing them from the “Computer” icon on the home menu of your Apple TV. Even thought they are videos, they will be listed under “Photos” of your computer’s Home Sharing library. Keep in mind that this Home Sharing solution is limited to your devices connected to your home network.

Direct connection with cables

If you do not have an Apple TV connected to your HDTV, the next best thing is to use a cable to connect your Apple device directly to your HDTV. How you connect to the HDTV will depend on which Apple product you have and the type of connectors your television supports. For the most recent Macs that come equipped with either a mini display port or Thunderbolt, there is the Belkin Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter for $34.95 which will allow you to connect your Mac to an HDTV using an HDMI connection.

For your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad that still has the older 30-pin connector, you can use the Apple Composite AV Cable for $39. While this is not an HDMI solution, it does connect to a wider variety of home theater equipment. There are also the Lightning Digital AV Adapter for $49 that works with the iPhone 5 and latest version of the iPad that come with the new Lightning connector. Each of these solutions will allow you to play back your movies from your Apple device directly to your HDTV.

Copy files to USB thumb drive

If your Mac is not near your home theater equipment, or you just don’t want to mess with cables every time you want to watch a home movie, you may be able to watch your video files from a USB thumb drive. Many of todays home theater appliances come equipped with a USB port. The challenge here is getting your home videos into a format that your device can display. To convert mine, I have always used Handbrake (Free, Mac). Handbrake is capable of reading in a wide variety of video formats and can export to the industry standard H.264.

If you are looking for a solution that works just as well, but is available through the Mac App Store, then try Smart Converter Pro ($4.99, Mac). Like Handbrake, Smart Converter Pro can convert all of your home movies in a batch process. Unlike Handbrake, it can also encode your home movies to DivX, a popular video format that a lot of older home theater equipment still supports. Once you have your home movies in the format that you need, simply copy them over to your USB thumb drive and plug it into your home theater equipment.

Host your own UPnP/DLNA media server

Another option is to host your own Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) or Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) media server from your Mac. Most smart HDTVs, Blu-ray Disc players, Roku and popular game consoles like the XBox and Playstation all can play videos served up by a UPnP/DLNA server. The problem with this solution historically has been finding a media server solution that your home theater appliance works well with. This sounds complicated but it really is not. It is basically the same thing that iTunes does via AirPlay to the Apple TV outlined above. Just think of UPnP/DLNA as AirPlay for the rest of the home theater market.

For the Mac, there are two popular media server solutions that are UPnP/DLNA compliant. The first is Plex Media Server (Free, Mac). Plex has been around for a while now and has done a great job of ensuring that its solution works well on a wide variety of devices. Once installed, there are tutorials and instructions to help publish your local video files over your home network.

The second solution that does not have nearly all of the features the Plex has — but does a great job at serving up a folder full of home movies — is Serviio (Free, Mac). Both solutions are easy to set up and will provide access to your home movies to almost any UPnP/DLNA compliant device attached to your home network.

There are several options available to you when it comes to watching home movies at home. Not every solution requires that you use only Apple products to record and watch your home movies. Each one offers its own benefits, from being able to play back your recently recorded videos directly from your iPhone, to storing years of home movies on your Mac and being able to bring them up any time you want to view them.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

B&N adds more movies and TV shows to Nook Video, but who’s going to watch?

Laura Hazard Owen — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:27:08 +0000

Barnes & Noble announced Thursday that it’s signed partnerships with a number of studios — Lionsgate, MGM, Paramount, Relativity Media, National Geographic, Little Pim and Film Buff — to add new movies and TV shows to Nook Video, the service it launched last fall.

A press release laid out some of the new offerings, including:

“Blockbuster films The Hunger Games, the Twilight movies, Tyler Perry’s Madea Gets a Job, Skyfall, Rocky, Fargo, Flight, Paranormal Activity 4, Act of Valor, Safe Haven, House at the End of the Street; independent films from Film Buff’s catalog including Charles Swan and Exit from the Gift Shop; and TV shows like Mad Men, Border Wars, Great Migrations, Amazing Planet; as well as educational content via Little Pim, the leading foreign language learning program for young children, plus many more.”

The Nook Video store already included content from HBO, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Starz, Viacom and Warner Bros, plus some Disney movies. Barnes & Noble says the store has “thousands” of titles and is adding “thousands and thousands more.”

A number of Nook Video’s offerings are also available for streaming from Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video. Unlike those companies, Nook doesn’t offer streaming memberships — content has to be purchased à la carte on a Nook tablet. (Barnes & Noble says the content will be able to be streamed from its website soon.) It’s certainly an option for someone who already owns one of these devices, but it’s unlikely to draw users away from Netflix, Amazon or iTunes. Adding these titles is B&N’s attempt to create a viable media ecosystem for Nook — and the company insists it’s “committed” to these devices, even as Nook sales plunged in the last quarter.

This story was updated at 3:24 p.m. ET with a comment from Barnes & Noble on how many titles Nook Video contains.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Snapchat’s video feature comes to Android

Eliza Kern — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:47:16 +0000

Snapchat brought video to its iOS app back in December, and now the ability to send video Snaps is hitting Android as well, opening up the new features to Android’s large number of users. The company just recently completed a $13.5 million Series A led by Benchmark, and released the original Android app in October 2012.

Snapchat allows users to send Snaps, which are photos or video clips, to other users who can then view the content for a few seconds before the content sort-of disappears from that person’s phone. The company noted in a blog post Thursday that building video for Android presented unique challenges due to the differences among different Android phones, and Snapchat will keep tweaking the product as it rolls out:

“Making Snapchat video for Android has been exciting, but has also had its fair share of challenges. The Android phones that many of us use were never designed with Snapchat in mind, and that can be tough when developing a hardware-based application. The video feeds and playback behavior can differ greatly – often with no guarantees or warnings.”

A jump to Android is especially interesting in this case, because Instagram, widely seen as the most successful in mobile photo-sharing apps, saw such a jump in usage (and a resulting interest from Facebook) after it went to Android in April 2012.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Video: Tag along with a RootMetrics’ tester as he maps Chicago’s mobile networks

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 21:56:21 +0000

Luke Metz spends a lot of time hanging out Dunkin’ Donuts and Wal-Mart at odd hours. If you ever see him loitering with a cup a coffee in his hand in your town, he’ll probably be carrying a very conspicuous-looking portfolio case crammed full of smartphones.

Don’t worry, he isn’t up to anything illegal or creepy. Rather he works for mobile testing outfit RootMetrics. He’s running network tests on all four of the major carriers mobile networks, using an array of smartphones. Metz isn’t just taking a signal measurement here and running a speed test there. He’s recording thousand of individual data points each hour as he crisscrosses the week’s chosen city in a rental car, following a randomly generated path over highways, side streets and ultimately into stores, pharmacies, restaurants and building lobbies.

After a week or two or three – depending on the size of the market – he packs up his gear and moves to the next town. The measurements he collects will then go into the Seattle startup’s databases along with millions of data-points collected from consumers using Root’s crowdsourced testing app.

On Thursday, RootMetrics released its in-depth report on the performance of Chicago’s networks (Verizon took the overall prize). Metz was part of a team that took the measurements for that report back in November, and they invited us along to get a first-hand perspective on how he does his work. Of course we brought along a camera.

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Video: Take a tour of YouTube’s super cool production Space in LA

Chris Albrecht — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 17:39:17 +0000

YouTube opened up a state-of-the-art production facility in Los Angeles and recently gave us a grand tour. The “YouTube Space,” as it’s officially called, is 41,000 square feet with soundstages, professional green screens, a theater style screening room with a 4k projector, and the highest end equipment that any burgeoning — or actual — Steven Spielberg would love.

Each quarter, YouTube selects a new cohort of content creators to come in and have full reign over the facility at no cost for three months. The Space is meant to be a collaborative place where YouTube creators can come together, work with and learn from each other. Oh, and YouTube wouldn’t mind if they produced higher-end content for the video giant to monetize.

We got the nickel tour of the (very impressive) facility and brought along our video camera to give you an inside peek.

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Twitter’s Vine app now has a 17+ age rating, user reporting tool

Erica Ogg — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:11:26 +0000

Last week after Twitter’s new Vine app for iOS was found to be littered with pornographic content, I asked what made Vine’s app so different from iOS photography app 500px, which was yanked off of the App Store with little warning. Vine was never pulled, but as of late Tuesday night, it has made some changes to bring it more in line with Apple’s App Store standards.

Vine now has a 17+ age rating and a warning that the app may contain mature content, and it also has a new tool to report inappropriate content or individual users as part of an update first spotted by The Verge. The changes were part of an app update.

The situation was handled far differently for 500px. The photography app, which had been available for download on the App Store for several years, was given a warning from Apple during a review of one of the app’s updates that there was possible pornographic content. 500px said they would look for and remove the content, but then the app was removed from the App Store altogether, and Apple claimed it received complaints of pornography involving children.

Though 500px maintains it never found and was never show examples of images involving children, 500px’s app was put back into the App Store after working with Apple over a few days to institute the company’s requested changes. Those adjustments included stricter search filters for images containing nudity and — like what Twitter added to Vine — a 17+ rating on it and a user reporting tool.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.