KC Symphony musicians to wear Google Glass KSHB “So as they move their head or interact in different ways with the instrument itself, the Google Glass will be capturing that perspective using a camera that is out of the front of the device,” Darren Clawson of Engage Mobile Solutions said. Future ... |
Verizon is using the biggest sporting event of the year to demonstrate a new multicast streaming technology. To see it its new broadcast network, though, you’ll have to go to NYC’s Bryant Park.
As promised, Verizon Wireless is using the country’s marquee sports event, the Super Bowl, to show off its new LTE-broadcast technology. Verizon’s eventual plan is to turn its two-way LTE data networks into broadcast towers that can multicast simulcast video and other content to millions of phones and tablets. But before you get your hopes up too high, Verizon’s Super Bowl broadcast this year is going to be fairly limited.
In fact, it’s limited to a single room: its remote “skybox” Bryant Park, NYC, on the other side of the Hudson River. Verizon isn’t broadcasting the Super Bowl in and around the environs of MetLife stadium. In fact, the NFL is blocking all live video streams of the game within the stadium itself due to the immense load video traffic would place on 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi networks in the arena.
But according to Parissa Pandkhou, Verizon Wireless’ director of mobile video delivery, Verizon is using its Bryant Park demo to show why future bans on video streaming at big events like Super Bowl might be unnecessary – at least for Verizon customers.
Verizon’s LTE coverage in dark red
The problem with mobile video streaming today is it’s all unicast. Even if two separate viewers are watching the same content in real-time while connected to the same tower, the network essentially creates a separate channel for each viewer. And each of those channels eats up a separate chunk of bandwidth on the network. It doesn’t take more than a few dozen video streams to shut down even a high-powered LTE cell, and at an event like the Super Bowl, thousands of people trying to stream can cause the cellular network to grind to a halt.
LTE-Broadcast simply combines all of those disparate live streams into a single multicast feed, similar to how a TV tower broadcasts the same signal to millions of televisions. So in a stadium, you could send the same the same live video feed to a thousand different phones and use only a tiny fraction of the network’s capacity.
You’ll have to wait for future events to actually see LTE-broadcst in action on your own Verizon phone though. Pandkhou said Verizon’s vendors Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson are currently performing the necessary upgrades to its LTE networks nationwide and expects to launch live in 3rd quarter.
The network in Byrant Park is just a demo, streaming four simultaneous NFL video feeds to some Samsung tablets and a few smartphones. On Sunday they will broadcast the game itself. Many of the LTE devices currently on Verizon’s network will support LTE-broadcast, but they’ll need software updates. And Verizon is still waiting on device vendors to deliver that software, Pandkhou said.
This isn’t the first time Verizon has taken a crack at broadcast video. It sold Qualcomm’s FLO TV service back several years ago, but there was little consumer interest. LTE-Broadcast will be different. Instead of selling video content to directly consumers, it’s opening the networks to developers and content providers. The NFL will offer broadcast video feeds to its customers through its own app.
Digital First Media CEO John Paton has just launched a company-wide effort called Project Unbolt that is aimed at detaching digital from the newspaper chain’s dying legacy print operations — but there is a long road between that and becoming truly digital
Large newspaper companies are struggling with a very real-world version of Clay Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” — namely, the need to transition from a print-focused business model to a digital one, with all the mess and upheaval that entails. But how do you actually take a chain of almost a hundred small daily and weekly newspapers and transform those newsrooms in real time? That’s what Digital First Media is trying to do with what it calls Project Unbolt, a new effort that CEO John Paton launched earlier this week.
The name, Paton said in a presentation to the Online Publishers Association, comes from the way in which traditional media entities often see digital or online publishing as something they “bolt on” to their existing processes, which he argued is exactly the wrong way to approach the problem — and in fact dooms anyone who does approach it that way to almost certain failure:
“If legacy news media wants to win this fight and successfully transition to a more vital future then in my part of it – newspapers – we need to start with this: Acknowledge Print is dying. Accept it and plan for it. News isn’t dying. Newsrooms are not dying. Just Print. We can no longer treat digital as a bolt-on to our strategy and protect the legacy business.”
Even Digital First Media — which under Paton has made a point of pushing the digital transformation of its newspapers as hard or harder than any other chain in the country — the continuing decline of print means that it is sliding two steps backwards for every step it takes forward: Paton said profit is up more than 40 percent over the last three years, but that still means it is down by almost 60 percent since 2006, the peak year for newspaper advertising.
So how does Digital First, or any other newspaper chain, get to where it needs to go? Paton said that Project Unbolt, which is being driven by editor-in-chief Jim Brady — the former head of the Washington Post‘s digital unit — will go through every part of how the chain’s papers currently produce the news and make digital the focus and print the afterthought, even though print still produces the lion’s share of the company’s profits as it does for most newspaper publishers.
“Starting with some test sites we will work through every process, every workflow step of what makes a digital newsroom digital and make that the very core of what we do… we won’t forget print but when we are finished this process it will be the bolt on to digital and not the other way around. The newsroom of the future is not the current one dragged into it. It is going to be re-built from the ground up.”
In addition to Brady, one of those leading Digital First’s new project is “digital transformation editor” Steve Buttry, who has been blogging for some time about the challenges of moving from print to digital. As he goes through each and every newsroom among the chain’s 75 daily and weekly newspapers, Buttry says he will be focusing on a number of key elements of a truly digital-first approach, including:
Live and interactive: Newsroom efforts should be focused on being digital first and live/interactive whenever possible. “Reporters and/or visual journalists covering events plan for live coverage unless they have a good reason not to,” Buttry said.
A focus on speed: Editors need to make sure what they are doing produces content quickly (but accurately) for digital platforms, with print editors then “harvesting and adapting” digital content for their print editions, instead of “shooting for the deadlines of a morning newspaper.”
Community engagement: The chain’s papers need to engage with their communities through a variety of tools and techniques, including social media, blogs, crowdsourcing and live events. “The editor explains newsroom decisions and developments regularly in a blog, social media and community appearances.”
Becoming mobile: For every story, newsrooms have to think about their mobile audience and provide content that works for them. “Editors and staff in the unbolted newsroom routinely use mobile tools in their work and in personal news consumption. Most of staff routinely uses newsroom’s app.”
As both Buttry and Paton have hinted in their respective blog posts and presentations, the kind of transformation that Digital First is trying to engineer isn’t just about feel-good efforts at community engagement like “open newsrooms” — it’s also going to involve making hard decisions about resources, including laying people off and cutting costs in a variety of other ways. To take just one example, one of Digital First’s newspaper units has had to file for bankruptcy protection not just once but twice to deal with legacy costs like pensions.
David Carr, the media writer for the New York Times, came up with a terrific analogy for what most newspapers are going through at an event in Toronto that I attended: Newspaper companies are in one room, he said — the print room — and they know they have to get to another room (the digital room) but at the moment most of them are stuck in the hallway, and it’s dark, and no one really knows how long it is or how they are going to get there.
In many ways, digital-only media entities such as BuzzFeed or Gawker (or Gigaom) have an easier time of it because they aren’t dragging around a legacy business that is declining rapidly but still makes up a large part of their revenues. Any decisions that are made can be taken based solely on what is right for a digital platform or online audience — there is only one room.
While Digital First is still stuck in the dark hallway along with everyone else, it at least appears to be trying hard to fight its way to that digital room. How long the journey will take is anyone’s guess.
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock / Chung-Sung Jun
The world of alternative UIs is expanding, so getting developers to build compelling apps to advance your technology is tough. Leap Motion hopes an accelerator program can help it compete.
When you build something new, you need to show people it’s worth it. In the technology world one way to do that is to find applications for your invention to show people what the new-fangled tech can make possible. If you’re Apple, maybe you can open up an app store and developers will rush to fill it because of the huge potential audience, but if you’re a startup gesture-controlled controller maybe you have to pay developers a bit of money to seed your market with awesome apps that show off the technology’s promise.
They may not agree with the characterization, but that’s what some investors in Leap Motion have managed to create with the Founders Fund and SOSventures teaming up to offer the Leap AXLR8R program. On Friday it named 10 startups to the program — all that take the Leap’s gesture-based controls out of the realm of gameplay into something far more interesting.
These applications range from physical therapy and sterile operating room interfaces to controlling robots and enabling a computer-vision-aided wearable. Each participant in the 13-week accelerator program gets mentoring and $25,000 in seed funding from SOSventures. They’ll also debut at a demo day on May 9 to a room full of investors and potential employees.
This sort of program is a good move by Leap and its investors since Leap’s technology has so much promise, but many of the implementations so far are a bit limited to games. I believe the tech has promise, but my initial review didn’t convert me to the technology. And as more alternative user interfaces emerge it’s not enough just to have a developer program and an SDK for folks to play with. Not only is there a lot of competition to build apps for a variety of UIs (Kinect, MYO, Leap, Oculus Rift etc.) some of the greatest promise for the Leap might end up in relatively smaller, niche, professional markets like medicine or industrial design that will still need a lot of hand-holding before adopting a new UI and app.
That’s not the kind of business one can build in a 48-hour hackathon. I’ll be curious to see how this first class of Leap-focused startups does and what it might mean for the adoption of the Leap technology in more places. And for those who are wondering, here are the startups participating in the program:
Google Glass gets image makeover as launch nears Reuters India A stamp-sized electronic screen mounted on the side of a pair of eyeglass frames, Google Glass can record video, access email, provide turn-by-turn driving directions and retrieve info from the Web by connecting wirelessly to a user's cell phone. The ... |
The Dutch crowdfunded journalism site De Correspondent is already bringing in almost $2 million per year in subscription revenue, and part of its success is being driven by the relationship it is building between its writers and their readers
Everyone likes to point to the New York Times as the model for a news outlet with a successful paywall or online-subscription model, but as the authors of Columbia University’s report on “Post-industrial Journalism” noted last year, there is only one New York Times — just as there is only one Wall Street Journal. The only real lesson that these publishers have to teach other news outlets when it comes to paywalls is: “Too bad you aren’t the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.”
Among the smaller players, however, some interesting lessons are emerging about what makes a subscription model work. For me at least, one of the most compelling is that your ability to build and maintain a strong connection to your community is crucial — and the example of Holland’s massively successful crowdfunded news site De Correspondent is a case in point.
Just to recap, De Correspondent is a site founded by two former staffers at Holland’s NRC Handelsblad — an offshoot of one of the country’s leading national dailies — who were dissatisfied with their employer’s weak attempts at adapting to the world of online journalism and decided to strike out on their own. They launched a crowdfunding effort that raised an eye-popping $1.7 million, with more than 19,000 signing up for an annual subscription.
According to an update in a recent post at Fast Company, the newspaper now has a total of almost 30,000 subscribers who are paying five Euros a month (about $6.84). That means even if it were to stop growing its subscriber base right now, De Correspondent would still be pulling in almost $200,000 every month from subscribers, or more than $2 million every year.
That wouldn’t seem like much if you were running a newsroom the size of the New York Times or Washington Post, of course, but as media analyst Ken Doctor points out in a recent piece at the Nieman Journalism Lab, the costs of a digital-only media startup are substantially lower than they are for established entities — which helps explain why so many people are starting them.
De Correspondent also has a 5-percent profit cap, with the rest of its revenues reinvested into the site, and publisher Ernst-Jan Pfauth said the site is already in the black. “If 40 percent of our members don’t renew in September, we will still survive,” he told Fast Company.
One of the key principles behind De Correspondent is that the news outlet and its community of readers are two parts of one thing, not just a seller on one side and a consumer on the other. In a telling detail, the Dutch news outlet doesn’t even refer to its reader comments as “comments,” but instead calls them “contributions” — unlike many news sites, which completely ignore and/or downplay comments or reader feedback. Said co-founder Sebastian Kersten:
“The whole platform, we are building that around the dialogue rather than the monologue that it is usually. You as the journalist are the conversation leader.”
As the Fast Company piece notes, a recent editorial meeting was held in a public cafe at a local cinema museum, and each writer is responsible for hosting one get-together a month where readers can come and learn about a topic and/or interact with other subscribers and journalists. Those kinds of real-world events are an important factor in building a community as well — which helps explain why so many media companies are expanding into running conferences.
The connection to and relationship with readers is further reinforced by the fact that De Correspondent subscribers can subscribe to individual writers, and each writer gets their own area to respond and engage with readers. Beacon, a crowdfunded platform for journalism that launched last year, is pursuing a similar type of approach — readers subscribe to a single writer, but those payments help support the entire stable of authors across a range of subjects.
That connection with readers is also crucial for sites like The Daily Dish, the standalone site launched by former Daily Beast and Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan. By the end of last year, the Dish had pulled in close to $800,000 from subscribers — and in a recent update, Sullivan said that he got close to $500,000 worth of renewal income in just the first two weeks of January. The site has 34,000 paying subscribers and is profitable, he told me in a recent interview.
As I tried to point out in a post last year comparing Sullivan with Amanda Palmer, the alternative musician who crowdfunded an album to the tune of over $1 million on Indiegogo, the crucial element of what both are doing is the connection they have built — and work hard to maintain — with their readers and/or fans.
That’s not to say other things don’t help with paywalls, such as having a valuable niche the way that outlets like the Financial Times and The Economist do — and some startups with paywalls that did have relatively strong connections to their community, such as Matter and NSFW, have not succeeded. But without some strong connection to your readers, you will almost inevitably fail.
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Giuseppe Bognanni
Chrome is now telling you exactly which of its tabs is playing audio – but how does the browser actually know this?
Google’s Chrome browser recently introduced little loudspeaker icons to tell you which tab is playing audio or video. It’s a neat feature, especially if you have lots of tabs open and one of them suddenly starts to auto-play an annoying ad at full volume. But how does the browser actually know this? It’s a fascinating question, and the answer has a lot to do with the evolution of media playback on the web.
Essentially, there are two ways media is being presented online: Publishers either rely on third-party plugins like Flash, or use HTML5 instead to play audio or video natively in the browser. The latter is the more modern approach, and also an easy feat for Chrome. By using HTML, publishers essentially turn your browser into a media player, and Chrome just needs to tell you which of its tabs is playing what.
But Flash, or other third-party plugins, are a different story. If Chrome has five tabs with Flash open – how does it know which one of these is making noise? Until recently, it actually wouldn’t have been able to tell you.
Google recently started to phase out support for a plugin API established by Netscape back in the 1990s, which essentially allowed a plugin like Fresh to play audio independently of the browser. Instead, it introduced a new architecture that routes any audio through the browser – thereby giving Chrome a way to know which tab is playing what.
Multimedia hacker Mike Melanson has the entire backstory to this in a fascinating little post on his website that also explains why this new approach is a lot more easier for developers. Check it out if you want to read a neat piece of multimedia geekery.
