My picks from audio and video trends for 2016:
Smartphone have increased screen sizes and have finally become mobile TVs: Smartphones have overtaken the tablets as the most popular mobile device for viewing videos. The most watched content were targeted at teenagers videos and animation series for children.
Smartphone cameras are great, or at least close enough to great that you don’t notice the difference. We’ve reached the point where you’ve got to work pretty hard to find a phone with a mediocre camera. Compared to a DSLR, smart phone cameras are lousy because they use tiny sensors, but still the camera in your pocket is crazy good considering the limitations manufacturers work under. The vast majority of top-tier smartphones use Sony sensors for their main cameras. The molded plastic lens elements in many cameras have reached the point where they’re essentially perfect. Smart phones are already deployed in many newsrooms for mobile journalism video shooting as it is easier (and cheaper) to learn how to film and edit on your phone than it is to use a big camera.
For new smart phone camera technologies you could see array of lenses to enable Lytro-like refocusing, create 3-D depth maps, and improve image quality in low light. In many cases smart phone cameras and DSLR are complimentary: Although the smartphones have decimated the point-and-shoot segment, sales of DSLR and other high-end rigs remain.
Live streaming video from smart phone becomes mainstream. Periscope was one of the first apps to really make live streaming events simple and easy enough that people wanted to do it. Many other apps are following the trend. Facebook begins testing live video streaming for all users.
Drone videography will ger more popular as drones become more popular. Many people will learn basic and creative aerial filming techniques for drone video cameras.
Whether or not the 2016 International CES holds any big surprises remains to be seen. This year’s CES will focus on how connectivity is proliferating everything from cars to homes, realigning diverse markets. It is quite probable that 4K TV will be big at this years’ CES show due to growing demand and falling prices. 4K becomes mainstream in 2016. CES will also have some 8K sets, though the market for 8K is at least five years away if not more (Tokyo Olympics in 2020 may be broadcast in 8K). Some new display technology is coming. LG has already demoed rollable 55, 66 and 77-inch OLED-based panels. Avegant’s Glyph technology literally beams video content onto your retinas. Analysts Predict CES 2016 Trends article gives you more ideas what to expect.
We can finally declare that 3D image in TV was a flop. Five years ago, it was estimated that the 3D technique can occupy the rapid pace of living cinemas addition. Then slowed different with technologies. But why the technology is virtually failed even though every new TV set has been added to display the 3D image as an option? Analysts said some people lack the ability to stereoscopic vision and for many, the 3D image caused eyestrain or nausea. Stereo image is to be left to various virtual reality applications.
After a year in which the weakness of smart TVs were exploited, Samsung goes on the offensive in 2016. Samsung’s new Tizen-based TVs will have GAIA security with pin lock for credit card and other personal info, data encryption, built-in anti-malware system, more. Samsung’s betting big on the internet of things and wants the TV to sit at the heart of this strategy. Samsung believes that people will want to activate their lights, heating and garage doors all from the comfort of their couch. If smart TVs get a reputation for being easy to hack, then Samsung’s models are hardly likely to be big sellers.
Whole TV industry need to go through a major transition as in most major developed markets, TV growth is slowing and in some cases stagnating. TV will account for 38.4 percent of the $503 billion global ad market in and will drop to 38 percent of the market in 2016. Digital ad spending will overtake TV as biggest category by 2017 or 2018.
Streaming video will be big in 2016. Almost all of the networks are streaming their content and streaming media is going mainstream fast. Third, 15% of American adults report they have become “cord cutters” – meaning they have abandoned paid cable or satellite television service. Many of these cord cutters say that the availability of televised content from the internet and other sources is a factor in their move away from subscription television services.
There seems to be a strong nostalgic audio trend going in. Whether it’s a sweet portable record player, a tabletop wooden radio or a full-size jukebox, the market for vintage-inspired electronics remains strong. Aside from record players, the vintage trend carries over to radios and speakers.
It seems that Americans were willing to spend on vinyl records. Nielsen numbers show that vinyl record sales rose 260 percent between 2009 and 2014, and sales for 2015 are on track to beat 2014’s total vinyl sales of 9.2 million units. Vinyl records generated more revenue in the first half of 2015 than free-to-use streaming services, but that’s not the full story. Despite vinyl sales increase it’s clear that the future of the music industry is digital. Total revenues from the digital music sector is expected to rise while physical sales will drop. Future is filled with streaming music services – both subscription services and free.
On the other end of audio spectrum High resolution audio tries to push to market at CES (again). Hi-Res Audio is the fastest growing category in music. Apple Music is planning to launch new its Hi-Res music streaming in 2016.
W3C group formed in the summer of 2015 a new working group: The Music Notation Community Group consists of representatives from some of the biggest names in the music notation software business who’ve come together to create a standardised way to display western music notation in your browser. It believes are achievable goals that can be met in 2016.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Sean O’Kane / The Verge:
GoPro hangs turnaround hopes on its software division, which this year will launch an iMovie competitor and a cloud backend to tie the GoPro ecosystem together
GoPro Needs a Hero
Can a shift to software save the action camera giant?
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/2/11837018/gopro-storyteller-desktop-app-video-editor-ceo-nick-woodman-interview
The next time you shoot video with your phone, Nick Woodman wants you to edit it with GoPro software. Then he wants you to do that again and again and again. It will be so good and fast and easy that you’ll get a rush, like a surfer riding the barrel of a wave, or a skateboarder stomping the perfect trick. And then that rush will keep you coming back for more. Woodman thinks this could turn you into a “habitual storyteller,” and maybe then, if you don’t already own a GoPro, you might want to buy one.
“One really exciting aspect of our brand is how many people like it, whether they’re a customer or not,”
2015 was, by all accounts, not a great year for GoPro. The company, famous for wearable cameras targeted toward surfers, mountain climbers, and anyone else living on the edge, shipped more cameras than ever, but its revenue dropped 31 percent between the fourth quarters of 2014 and 2015.
“Our growth rate has slowed”
Over the last three years, GoPro has been building a software team from scratch, cobbling together acquisitions and a few key hires into what is now a 100-plus employee division that makes up about one-tenth of the company.
In the last four months, GoPro bought, rebranded, and relaunched two powerful mobile editing apps called Replay and Splice — opening up GoPro to users who don’t own any of its cameras. And in the second half of 2016, GoPro will release a desktop editing experience that will rival iMovie and a cloud backend that will tie everything — devices, files, and the overall GoPro experience — together into a single ecosystem.
No one knows what kind of revenue this new branch of the company will generate, and meanwhile, GoPro’s longstanding competitive hardware advantage is shrinking
But just over the last three years, Sony’s Action Cam line, Garmin’s Virb, TomTom’s Bandit, and a number of startups have entered the market.
GoPro was born, appropriately enough, on a surfing trip.
Woodman saw an opportunity, and, using shell-covered belts bought at a Bali market, set out to make the first GoPro product: a camera strap.
sales went toward founding GoPro and, in 2004, Woodman sourced a cheap-but-durable 35mm camera to sell along with the strap. He dubbed the whole package the GoPro Hero.
The first digital Hero, released in 2006, caught on fast in the extreme sports community
It was an era in which our hunger for personal documentation and social media sharing was exploding for the first time, and GoPro quickly became a phenomenon.
In 2010 and 2011, it became the fastest-growing camera company in the world, capturing 70 percent of the wearable camera market and selling an estimated 800,000 cameras for a revenue of $250 million. The Hero cameras married exceptional video quality with a small form factor in a way that no one had ever seen before
Today GoPro employs over 1,000 people
Woodman is clear-eyed on the fact that the hardware-first chapter of GoPro is coming to an end. Cameras will still be important
“Most people don’t even watch their GoPro footage,” says Woodman
Until 2011, GoPro essentially had no one in the company working on software. In fact, GoPro had been using contract manufacturers to handle what was a pretty light load, paying them to develop things like the firmware for the Hero cameras. The first time GoPro developed its own firmware was on Hero 3 Black
The decision to build an entire software division came in 2013
CineForm created a piece of software that could quickly and easily convert digital video files between formats.
“We saw ourselves as this little startup that was fixing the mistakes of camera vendors,”
GoPro is entering crowded fields when it comes to content-creation tools and platforms
the amount of video being consumed is steeply rising — more than 80 percent of smartphone users stream video, according to a recent report from NPD. GoPro already has strong footholds in the two biggest video platforms, Facebook and YouTube.
But young consumers are increasingly choosing smartphone cameras over traditional ones, meaning they’re probably less likely to ever buy a GoPro.
“while GoPro has gained share in a declining category, we note overall camcorder ownership declined to 28 percent among teens versus 31 percent last Spring. To put this into perspective, camcorder ownership was north of 40 percent in 2013.”
All of which makes it critical for GoPro to unmarry its brand from its hardware as soon as possible.
For now, GoPro is still a healthy company, with a projected revenue of $1.35 billion in 2016 and a slate of exciting new hardware and software releases.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Polaroid’s Action Camera Now Has a Shot Glass Adapter For Documenting Your Drinks
http://gizmodo.com/polaroids-action-camera-now-has-a-shot-glass-adapter-fo-1780147310
It can’t compete with GoPro’s offerings when it comes to image quality, but what the Polaroid Cube action cam can do one thing well. The tiny form factor makes it easier to stick wherever you need to capture your extreme activities—or a night of bar crawling with this new shot glass accessory.
Available now for just $15, the Polaroid Cube fits into the plastic shot glass’ base with the lens pointing up through your drink, and its record button still easily accessible.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Netflix built a tool to gauge real-world video quality
It wants to know how good its streaming looks for the human eye.
http://www.engadget.com/2016/06/06/netflix-real-world-video-quality-tool/
Real-world video quality is tricky to measure: a bitrate that looks good for a crowd shot might be terrible for a close-up. Netflix, however, thinks it has the problem licked. It developed a tool that measures videos based on perceived quality, not just pure numbers. The technology works by gauging visual information fidelity (how much has changed?), detail loss and the effect of motion. The end result is a test that’s much more reflective of real life, regardless of what you’re watching; you know what should be appealing, whether it’s a live-action drama or an animated kids’ movie.
While Netflix created the tool, it’s not hoarding the technology for itself. It’s releasing the software as open source code
VMAF – Video Multi-Method Assessment Fusion
https://github.com/Netflix/vmaf
Perceptual video quality assessment based on multi-method fusion.
VMAF is a perceptual video quality assessment algorithm developed by Netflix Inc. VMAF Development Kit (VDK) is a software package that contains the VMAF algorithm implementation, as well as a set of tools that allows a user to train and test a custom VMAF model.
The VDK package has its core feature extraction library written in C, and the rest glue code written in Python
Tomi Engdahl says:
Toward A Practical Perceptual Video Quality Metric
http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/06/toward-practical-perceptual-video.html
At Netflix we care about video quality, and we care about measuring video quality accurately at scale. Our method, Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF), seeks to reflect the viewer’s perception of our streaming quality. We are open-sourcing this tool and invite the research community to collaborate with us on this important project.
Streaming video requires compression using standards, such as H.264/AVC, HEVC and VP9, in order to stream at reasonable bitrates. When videos are compressed too much or improperly, these techniques introduce quality impairments, known as compression artifacts. Experts refer to them as “blocking”, “ringing” or “mosquito noise”, but for the typical viewer, the video just doesn’t look right. For this reason, we regularly compare codec vendors on compression efficiency, stability and performance, and integrate the best solutions in the market.
For example, we run comparisons among H.264/AVC, HEVC and VP9, and in the near future we will experiment on the next-generation codecs developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) and the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET).
We encode the Netflix video streams in a distributed cloud-based media pipeline,
Finally, as we iterate in various areas of the Netflix ecosystem (such as the adaptive streaming or content delivery network algorithms) and run A/B tests
VMAF – Video Multi-Method Assessment Fusion
https://github.com/Netflix/vmaf
Tomi Engdahl says:
High Quality Video Encoding at Scale
http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/12/high-quality-video-encoding-at-scale.html
Pipeline in the Cloud
The video encoding pipeline runs EC2 Linux cloud instances. The elasticity of the cloud enables us to seamlessly scale up when more titles need to be processed, and scale down to free up resources. Our video processing applications don’t require any special hardware and can run on a number of EC2 instance types. Long processing jobs are divided into smaller tasks and parallelized to reduce end-to-end delay and local storage requirements. It also allows us to exploit our internal spot market where instances are dynamically allocated based on real-time availability of the compute resources. If a task does not complete because an instance is abruptly terminated, only a small amount of work is lost and the task is rescheduled for another instance. The ability to recover from these transient errors is essential for a robust cloud-based system.
Our preferred source type is Interoperable Master Format (IMF). In addition we support ProRes, DPX, and MPEG (typically older sources).
A modern 4K source file can be quite large. Larger, in fact, than a typical drive on an EC2 instance. In order to efficiently support these large source files, we must run the inspection on the file in smaller chunks. This chunked model lends itself to parallelization.
At Netflix we stream to a heterogenous set of viewing devices. This requires a number of codec profiles: VC1, H.264/AVC Baseline, H.264/AVC Main and HEVC. We also support varying bandwidth scenarios for our members, all the way from sub-0.5 Mbps cellular to 100+ Mbps high-speed Internet. To deliver the best experience, we generate multiple quality representations at different bitrates (ranging from 100 kbps to 16 Mbps) and the Netflix client adaptively selects the optimal stream given the instantaneous bandwidth.
Before we implemented parallel chunked encoding, a 1080p movie could take days to encode, and a failure occurring late in the process would delay the encode even further. With our current pipeline, a title can be fully inspected and encoded at the different profiles and quality representations, with automatic quality control checks, within a few hours.
Before automated quality checks were integrated into our system, encoding issues (picture corruption, inserted black frames, frame rate conversion, interlacing artifacts, frozen frames, etc) could go unnoticed until reported by Netflix members through Customer Support.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung Display rollable OLED prototype
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX3_sSwiWIk
A prototype rollable display device demonstrated by Samsung Display at SID 2016 in San Francisco, CA. This sort of screen could one day be featured on a pocket-friendly smartphone or tablet, collapsing down to a small stick form-factor, but then expanding to reveal a 5.7-inch panel.
Watch Samsung’s rollable display in action
http://www.slashgear.com/watch-samsungs-rollable-display-in-action-24441409/
Shown off for the first time at SID 2016 in San Francisco this week, the 5.7-inch screen takes Samsung Display’s OLED technology and furls it up into a very pocket-friendly form factor.
Opened out, it’s a 5.7-inch screen running at 1920 x 1080 Full HD resolution, for a total pixel density of 386 ppi. It’s just as bright and the colors just as vivid as we’ve come to expect from the company’s displays on production devices like the Galaxy S7 edge,
the panel is just 0.3 mm thick, and weighs 5g. It has a rolling radius of 10R (10mm radius)
That 0.3 mm thickness is before you add in a touch layer
What Samsung Display isn’t saying is just how many roll-ups and unrollings the OLED could handle before it might be expected to crack or otherwise break.
It’s not the only flexible panel Samsung Display has at the show. Less dramatic, arguably, but just as technically impressive is a 5.7-inch flexible screen running at 2560 x 1440 resolution and 420 nits of brightness.
It too is 0.3 mm thick, and comes in with a pixel density of 551 ppi.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andy Huang / Facebook:
Facebook rolling out ability to upload and view 360-degree photos on iOS and Android
Introducing 360 Photos on Facebook
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/06/introducing-360-photos-on-facebook/
For the first time, you can now easily share 360 photos on Facebook. Simply take a panorama with your phone or capture a 360-degree photo using a 360 photo app or 360 camera, and then post it on Facebook as you would a normal photo. From there, we’ll convert it to an immersive 360 photo that people can explore, similar to how people experience 360 videos on Facebook.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andy / TorrentFreak:
Canadian court issues temporary injunction banning the sales of some Android-based set-top boxes with piracy software pending a full trial — For years Internet piracy was the preserve of desktop machines running various flavors of peer-to-peer file-sharing software.
Canada Federal Court Restrains Sale of ‘Pirate’ Boxes
https://torrentfreak.com/canada-federal-court-restrains-sale-of-pirate-boxes-160610/
The Federal Court in Canada has handed down a interlocutory injunction against distributors of Android-based set-top boxes configured for piracy. The devices, which are loaded with software including Kodi (with pirate addons) and Showbox, are now banned from sale pending a full trial.
For years Internet piracy was the preserve of desktop machines running various flavors of peer-to-peer file-sharing software. Now, with viable computing available in devices as small as a phone, piracy is a do-anywhere affair.
As a result it’s now common for people to stream media to their living room and for that purpose there are few more convenient solutions than an Android device. Whether phone, tablet, HDMI stick or set-top box, the Android platform can bring all the latest movies, TV shows and live sports to any living room, for little to no outlay.
This type of Internet piracy is thriving all around the world and has already resulted in arrests in the UK and civil actions elsewhere.
The broadcasters’ claims are relatively straightforward. As station operators they own the Canadian rights to a variety of TV shows. The defendants (ITVBOX.NET, My Electronics, Android Bros Inc., WatchNSaveNow Inc and MTLFreeTV) all sell devices that come ready configured with software designed to receive copyrighted content over the Internet.
Unsurprisingly the devices contained at least three sets of software – Kodi (along with the necessary infringing addons), the Popcorn Time-like Showbox application, plus tools to receive pirate subscription channels for a monthly fee.
Describing pre-loaded set-top boxes as an “existential threat” to their businesses, the plaintiffs said that piracy and subsequent declining subscriptions are the main factors behind falling revenue. On this basis and as a deterrent to others supplying such devices, an injunction should be granted.
Vincent Wesley of MTLFreeTV told the court that he had nothing to do with the development or maintenance of the installed software. The set-top boxes, he argued, are just pieces of hardware like a tablet or computer and have “substantial non-infringing uses.”
The court wasn’t convinced.
“This is not the first time a new technology has been alleged to violate copyright law, nor will it be the last.”
Police Raid Pirate Android Box Sellers, Six Arrested
By Andy on March 18, 2016
https://torrentfreak.com/police-raid-pirate-android-box-sellers-six-arrested-160318/
The UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has arrested six individuals suspected of being involved in the supply of ‘pirate’ set-top boxes configured to obtain free TV from the Internet. The operation, targeting the north of England, was carried out in conjunction with the Federation Against Copyright Theft.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Marty Swant / Advertising & Branding:
YouTube debuts new tools for SMBs to make video ads, including Director, a free app with a number of templates and editing tools — YouTube wants to turn video ads on its platform into a DIY possibility for small- and medium-sized businesses. — Today, Google is launching three ways …
YouTube Is Introducing New Ways to Help Small Businesses Make Better Video Ads Including a free app with music and editing tools
http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/youtube-introducing-new-ways-help-small-businesses-make-better-video-ads-171999
YouTube wants to turn video ads on its platform into a DIY possibility for small- and medium-sized businesses.
Today, Google is launching three ways for SMBs to create video ads for YouTube that are—at least for the most part—free. With a new app called YouTube Director, the video juggernaut is helping businesses with little or no marketing budget create commercials on their own. The app includes a number of templates, music and editing tools and is free to use.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jon Fingas / Engadget:
Periscope go-live broadcast button available to all in Twitter’s iOS and Andoid apps
Twitter brings its go-live Periscope button to everyone
Livestreaming your adventures is just a tap away on Android or iOS.
https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/15/twitter-periscope-button-reaches-everyone/
Kerry Flynn / International Business Times:
Periscope embeds will soon be available anywhere tweets can be embedded, says Alex Khoshnevissan, head of business operations at Periscope
Twitter Jailbreak: Periscope Embed Feature Will Make Live Video Viewable Across The Web
http://www.ibtimes.com/twitter-jailbreak-periscope-embed-feature-will-make-live-video-viewable-across-web-2382660
Twitter’s Periscope is finally taking flight off network. Embeds of the live video app will become available in the coming weeks, Twitter said Wednesday at an event for social media editors at its New York headquarters.
The update means Periscope videos will be viewable live across the web, instead of simply nestled within the Periscope app and on Twitter feeds. That change will increase the reach of Periscope video and, Twitter hopes, make it more engaging for video creators who have recently been favoring competitors Facebook, YouNow and Snapchat.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A new kind of 3D-image sensor
Infineon and another German firm PMD Technologies have developed a new type of image sensor 3D imaging and machine vision for. Real3 sensor detects the distance to the image displayed by measuring the travel time of light to the camera and back.
The camera illuminates the object photographed modulated infrared light that is reflected back from the camera. The camera’s image sensor, each pixel receives the reflected infrared signal.
For each pixel is obtained by measuring the distance to the reflected light signal from the phase difference between the transmitted and.
Real3 sensor depending on the model up to 352 × 288 pixels, which seems to be quite modest in many modern cell phone almost twenty-megapixel separation of the bone.
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2016/06/14/uudenlainen-3d-kuva-anturi/
More:
3D Image Sensor for Consumer
Ready for Integration in Mobile Devices
http://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/sensor/3d-image-sensor-real3/3d-image-sensor-for-consumer/channel.html?channel=5546d4614937379a0149382ec29c0079
Tomi Engdahl says:
Daniel Frankel / FierceCable:
As pay TV provider group releases “Ditch the Box” proposal to FCC, Google-backed group calls it a delay tactic
Google-backed group says ‘Ditch the Box’ proposal a ploy to delay negotiations with FCC
June 17, 2016 | By Daniel Frankel
http://www.fiercecable.com/story/google-backed-group-says-ditch-box-proposal-ploy-delay-negotiations-fcc/2016-06-17
A trade group backed by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has derided the pay-TV industry’s counter-proposal to an FCC plan to open cable, satellite and telco TV set-tops to third-party manufacturers, labeling it a ploy to delay negotiations with the agency.
INCOMPAS also accused the pay-TV industry of making apps-based promises it has reneged on before.
“It is encouraging to see the cable industry willing to agree to three critical points,” said INCOMPAS chief executive Chip Pickering. “First, consumers should be free from rental boxes and have the power to choose their own devices. Second, consumers should have integrated search capabilities so they can find the Internet streaming content they crave. Third, cable induced fears over privacy, copyright, and licensing in an open, competitive device market are false.
On Thursday, the Future of TV Coalition — a grouping of mostly top TV service providers hellbent on stopping the FCC’s “Unlock the Box” NPRM — released details on a plan it calls “Ditch the Box.”
That scheme would be centered around open, HTML 5-based apps, released by pay-TV operators, which would work with a range of third-party devices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ellen Gamerman / Wall Street Journal:
As its famous hosts leave the airwaves NPR seeks a younger audience but is having trouble keeping up with innovative podcasters — With both its stars and audience aging, NPR is struggling to adapt to the digital age: ‘The most innovative people are doing podcasts’ — Old hosts die hard in public radio.
Public Radio’s Existential Crisis
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/radios-existential-crisis-1466111586-lMyQjAxMTA2ODEzNzUxNjc0Wj
With both its stars and audience aging, NPR is struggling to adapt to the digital age: ‘The most innovative people are doing podcasts
By the end of the decade, NPR projects that younger listeners under age 44 will make up only around 30% of the overall audience for its member stations, compared with about 60% in 1985. Currently more than 80% of podcast listeners are under age 55, according to recent data released by Edison Research and Triton Digital.
These shifts in listening habits promise to continue. Auto makers are working to install voice technology in new cars that would allow drivers to simply say the name of a show they’d like to hear, making it less crucial to stay tuned to a particular radio station. Within seven years, 57% of all cars will be sold with built-in internet, controllable by smartphone, up from 32% in 2015, said Egil Juliussen, principal analyst for car-market researcher IHS Automotive.
Public radio is pushing hard on digital, too.
Despite the growth of digital, Americans ages 13 and over spend more than half their total listening time on AM/FM radio and 2% of their listening time on podcasts, according to Edison. NPR’s weekly broadcast radio audience now averages 26 million.
Some older hosts still balk at the digital experience. “To me, podcasting is like pretending you’re on the radio,”
“The people who are inventing what could be the weekend shows are tending to leave radio,”
Others question the wisdom of sticking with old shows, even if they’re still popular.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A/V structured connectivity: Wheels within wheels
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/print/volume-24/issue-5/features/convergence/a-v-structured-connectivity-wheels-within-wheels.html?cmpid=Enl_CIM_CablingNews_June202016&eid=289644432&bid=1437580
The last two decades have redefined A/V technology in particular. Today we might think of technology in terms of internet connectivity and of software as a service (SaaS). Anything we want, and much of what we own, resides in the “cloud.” This view has become so ubiquitous that some might even say the only low-voltage infrastructure necessary can be provided by the local area network (LAN). Everything we need to do we can do on the network.
Upon closer inspection we find that this belief isn’t fully baked. While we may evolve to that point at some future time, for both today and the coming decade we will still need to have dedicated A/V infrastructure for most applications. From huddle spaces to conference rooms, classrooms and boardrooms, A/V technology is really best thought of as the last 100 meters of connectivity between the network drop and the imagination. A/V technology is an element of how we communicate. It’s the last bit of wire that makes so much of our work work. It’s not a detail that should be left to chance.
All around us are computers that use VGA connectors, Blu-Ray players that use HDMI connections and smartphones that use, well, some of them appear to use no connection at all. What connectivity do we really need to maximize the utility of a space? Is there a way to support laptops issued five years ago and tablets that might not be purchased for another five years? There is if we think of A/V connectivity as a wheels-within-wheels and select the wheels we need to make our spaces go.
There is a new USB connection waiting in the wings that will change your relationship with personal technology in profound ways. Called USB Type-C, this littler connector can deliver up to 100 watts of power, high-definition video to drive multiple monitors, and even allow the screens on our desks to be upgraded to interactive touch-sensitive devices. USB Type-C is just now making its way into the market, but in a year or two you’ll see it everywhere. Fortunately, when USB Type-C arrives in force it will come with a plethora of adapters to allow easy interface with the structured wiring decisions we have to make today.
it’s not a connection that regularly reaches the flat panel or projector, with one glaring exception. That exception is interactivity. Every interactive touch panel will demand a USB interface.
Following our chain to the next link, we find DisplayPort and HDMI direct digital connections. These are the connections we commonly associate with digital video. HDMI is the most ubiquitous A/V connection in the industry, and any structured solution we consider must include at least one HDMI port.
DisplayPort is the connection that is replacing the now-obsolete VGA connector.
These three connections-USB, HDMI and DisplayPort-are at the core of our A/V concerns. Research will reveal that each of these has fairly tight length restrictions that must be observed if we’re going to get the best performance from our structured A/V connectivity design. Generally speaking, we can get to about 10 meters with any of these in either a plenum or in-wall space, but beyond that we need to look for special solutions. Fortunately for us, there are two very effective solutions readily available for connectivity beyond 35 feet-HDBase-T and optical media conversion.
Longer-distance options
HDBase-T was adopted as a standard for whole-home and commercial distribution of uncompressed high-definition multimedia content by the IEEE in 2015. The cornerstone of HDBase-T technology is 5Play, a feature set that includes uncompressed UltraHD 4K digital video, embedded digital audio, 100Base-T Ethernet, USB 2.0, up to 100W of power, and various control signals through a single category cable for connectivity up to 100 meters. HDBase-T solutions are available in a small box transmitter-receiver form factor or in a wallplate version
HDBase-T uses a similar physical topology to the LAN, but it is a dedicated point-to-point digital A/V solution.
it’s vital that we demand either a shielded F/UTP Category 6 or a discontinuous shield U/UTP Category 6 for our system
When A/V connectivity distances might exceed the 100-meter limitation of HDBase-T, or if we need a solution that supports 32-bit color space and is scalable to the maximum levels of A/V performance deliverable today, then the best solution is optical media conversion. There are two ways to do this. We can use traditional Om3 or Om4 multimode 50/125 optical fibers and a pair of transmit/receive modems, or we can use a unified solution that includes electrical-to-optical and optical-to-electrical conversion built into the fiber interconnect. Typified by products like RapidRun Optical, these unified solutions are particularly easy to install and can accommodate runs up to 330 meters in length.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rob Levine / Billboard:
Taylor Swift among 180 artists and organizations signing petition for DMCA reform in ad spot, protesting “safe harbor”, upon which services like YouTube rely
Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney Among 180 Artists Signing Petition For Digital Copyright Reform
http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7408970/taylor-swift-paul-mccartney-180-artists-signing-petition-digital
For the last three months, the music industry has been fighting — or at least negotiating in public — with YouTube.
Now, artists are adding their voices.
In an ad that will run Tuesday through Thursday in the Washington DC magazines Politico, The Hill, and Roll Call, 180 performers and songwriters are calling for reform of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which regulates copyright online. A range of big names from every genre signed the ad — from Taylor Swift to Sir Paul McCartney, Vince Gill to Vince Staples, Carole King to the Kings of Leon — as did 19 organizations and companies, including the major labels.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), enacted in 1998, gives services like YouTube “safe harbor” from copyright infringement liability for the actions of their users, as long as they respond to takedown notices from rightsholders. In practice, labels and publishers say, this gives YouTube a negotiating advantage.
Google Sees DMCA Notices Quadruple In Two Years
https://torrentfreak.com/google-sees-dmca-notices-quadruple-in-two-years-160618/
Google is being overloaded with DMCA takedown requests. The company has seen the number of takedown notices from rightsholders quadruple over the past two years. In 2016 alone, Google is projected to process over a billion reported pirate links, most of which will be scrubbed from its search index.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter pays up to $150M for Magic Pony Technology, which uses neural networks to improve images
https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/20/twitter-is-buying-magic-pony-technology-which-uses-neural-networks-to-improve-images/
Twitter today is taking another step to build up its machine learning muscle, and also potentially to improve how it delivers photos and videos across its apps: the company is acquiring Magic Pony Technology (that is really the name), a company based out of London that has developed techniques of using neural networks (systems that essentially are designed to think like human brains) and machine learning to provide expanded data for images — used, for example, to enhance a picture or video taken on a mobile phone; or to help develop graphics for virtual reality or augmented reality applications.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed but we have two separate sources who tell us that Twitter is paying $150 million in all for the deal.
This is the third machine learning startup Twitter has acquired, after Whetlab last year, and Madbits in 2014.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Matt Waite / Nieman Lab:
New FAA rules will allow any newsroom to legally use drones for journalism in 60 days, with restrictions — In 60 days, drone journalism will be legally possible in any newsroom in the United States. That’s not to say it will be easy, but it will be legally possible in ways that it has never been before.
In 60 days, drone journalism will be legally possible in any U.S. newsroom
http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/06/in-60-days-drone-journalism-will-be-legally-possible-in-any-u-s-newsroom/
“There are still challenges, and we haven’t even talked about state and local laws that have been piling up while the FAA lumbered toward today. But the future of drones in journalism is much brighter today than it has ever been.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nathan McAlone / Business Insider:
Study: Amazon Video downstream traffic share in North America hits 4.26%, up from 1.97% in 2015, overtaking iTunes; Netflix has 35.15% share, YouTube has 17.53%
Amazon has doubled its performance in a hot market over the last year, and is pulling away from Apple
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-video-usage-continues-to-climb-2016-6?op=1%3fr=US&IR=T
Streaming video companies like Netflix are notoriously secretive about their numbers, but there are proxy measurements we can use to get a sense of how many people are watching, and Amazon just made a big jump in one of them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wake up and listen: Vesper quiescent-sensing MEMS device innovation
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/electronic-product-reviews/other/4442252/-Wake-up-and-listen–Vesper-Quiescent-Sensing-MEMS-Device-innovation?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_analog_20160623&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_analog_20160623&elqTrackId=d9d2a455ebe643cdb9a17e3a84e57f91&elq=631c228ccb254eca8cd79952b15c7565&elqaid=32798&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=28647
I have a strong belief that the most natural and efficient way to communicate with devices, in the coming of the Internet of Things (IoT), is the human voice. The primary element for this effort to be successful is the microphone and the primary features needed in such a system are low power, small size, rugged construction, and excellent signal-to-noise capability.
Designers, take heart! Your solution is here from Vesper, a privately held piezoelectric MEMS company
Vesper has now demonstrated the first commercially available quiescent-sensing MEMS device, providing designers the possibility of acoustic event-detection devices at virtually zero power draw at just 3 µA of current while in listening mode. This piezoelectric MEMS microphone — VM1010 — will allow designers to advance voice and acoustic event monitoring in their systems.
Matt Crowley, Vesper CEO told me that this quiescent-sensing MEMS microphone is the only device that uses sound energy itself to wake a system from full power-down. It is known that even when fully powered-off, batteries in smartphones and smart speakers naturally dissipate 40-80uA, which is far more current than this device needs.
Even in sleep mode, this microphone preserves its very high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
This microphone employs a rugged piezoelectric transducer that is immune to dust, water, oils, humidity, particles and other environmental contaminants, making it ideal for deployments outdoors or in kitchens and automobiles.
http://vespermems.com/
Vesper uses piezoelectric materials to create the most reliable and advanced MEMS microphones on the market. This is a major leap over the capacitive MEMS microphones that have dominated the market for over a decade.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is The Future Of Television Watching on Fast-Forward?
https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/16/06/26/2044239/is-the-future-of-television-watching-on-fast-forward
The average American watches three hours of TV each day, and researchers have found that most people already prefer listening to accelerated speech. “After watching accelerated video on my computer for a few months, live television began to seem excruciatingly slow…” writes the Washington Post’s Jeff Guo. “Movie theaters feel suffocating. I need to be able to fast-forward and rewind and accelerate and slow down, to be able to parcel my attention where it’s needed…” Slashdot reader HughPickens.com distills some interesting points from Guo’s article:
Speed up, slow down, advance and rewind any HTML5 video with quick shortcuts.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk?hl=en
HTML5 video provides native APIs to accelerate playback of any video, but most implemented players either hide or limit this functionality. This extension fixes that, plus more…
It will help you optimize your video viewing by allowing you to make quick playback speed adjustments, as well as rewind the video to hear the last few second one more time.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Exclusive: Google, Facebook quietly move toward automatic blocking of extremist videos
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-internet-extremism-video-exclusive-idUSKCN0ZB00M
Some of the web’s biggest destinations for watching videos have quietly started using automation to remove extremist content from their sites, according to two people familiar with the process.
The move is a major step forward for internet companies that are eager to eradicate violent propaganda from their sites and are under pressure to do so from governments around the world as attacks by extremists proliferate, from Syria to Belgium and the United States.
YouTube and Facebook are among the sites deploying systems to block or rapidly take down Islamic State videos and other similar material, the sources said.
The technology was originally developed to identify and remove copyright-protected content on video sites. It looks for “hashes,” a type of unique digital fingerprint that internet companies automatically assign to specific videos, allowing all content with matching fingerprints to be removed rapidly.
Such a system would catch attempts to repost content already identified as unacceptable, but would not automatically block videos that have not been seen before.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ad Blockers Imperil Internet Video Revenue
http://www.btreport.net/articles/2016/06/ad-blockers-imperil-internet-video-revenue.html?cmpid=enlmobile06232016&eid=289644432&bid=1441472
According to Parks Associates, U.S. broadband households watch an average of 3.8 hours of Internet video on TV screens each week, accounting for 20% of all video viewed on this device. The research house says consumers might increasingly use ad-blocking solutions while streaming video if the digital advertising methods disrupt their viewing experience. Parks Associates’ digital media analysts advise service providers and media companies that the best defense against ad blockers is to develop digital advertising models that are integrated and nondisruptive to the viewing experience.
“Many content creators rely on advertising revenue to monetize video, especially as newly launched digital services seek revenue. As digital video viewership increases on all screens, use of ad-blocking technologies is a concern for content owners and distributors,” said Glenn Hower, Parks research analyst. “Ad blockers have their roots in web publishing, often to prevent full-page overlays or popups that would disrupt the experience. As Internet video viewership on the television screen increases, advertisers are seeking to leverage prime living room real estate in this new media model. Content and OTT providers and advertisers need to ensure their methods do not interfere with the viewing experience, which would otherwise drive viewers to ad-blocking technologies.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cord Cutting Not Just about Price Any More
http://www.btreport.net/articles/2016/06/cord-cutting-not-just-about-price-any-more.html?cmpid=enlmobile06232016&eid=289644432&bid=1441472
According to Limelight Networks’ (NASDAQ:LLNW) semi-annual “State of Online Video” research report, as consumers find themselves with a wider variety of over-the-top (OTT) content options, price is becoming less of a factor in the decision to cut the cord with pay TV providers, while content availability increasingly drives decision-making. Streaming video services are surging in popularity, with seven out of 10 consumers now subscribing to at least one service.
Some 29% of respondents cited rising prices as the primary reason they would cut the cord, down more than 8% since May 2015. By contrast, 20% of consumers said a key factor would be the ability to directly subscribe to the channels they want online, up 4% in the same timeframe. The number of respondents who would “never terminate cable or pay television subscription” has risen from 10% to 15% since 2015. This reinforces the diminishing impact of price on cord cutting and a shift to content availability driving behavior.
The availability of content is particularly important to Millennials (aged 18 to 35), who were similarly price-averse as the population as a whole. The most striking contrast is that Millennials are 7% more likely to shift viewing to OTT content and cancel pay TV subscriptions when they can subscribe to channels directly. Millennials are also at the center of the overall surge in OTT content consumption. Some 80% of Millennials subscribe to at least one OTT service, and 39, report watching at least seven hours of online video per week. Among the entire consumer population, 69% subscribe to at least one OTT service, a 10% increase since May 2015.
The study also indicated that computers and laptops remain the dominant devices for watching online video; however, their days at the top may be numbered. For Millennials, the smartphone is the most popular device for watching online video and gaining ground among the broader population.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CMOS Image Sensor Market Strengthens on Added Functions
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329992&
LONDON—Functionality beyond simply taking “snaps” is pushing change in the CMOS image sensor market and has caused market researcher Yole Developpement to increase its market size forecast for the years to come.
Yole now says that the CMOS image sensor market was worth about $10.4 billion in 2015 and will expand with a compound annual growth rate of 10.4 percent to reach a value of $18.8 billion in 2021.
If the CAGR was uniform that would put this year’s CIS market at $10.4 billion and the next three years at $11.5 billion, $12.7 billion and $14.0 billion respectively.
The market is being driven by increasing camera content in smartphones that will more than offset slower smartphone volume growth with a trend towards dual and 3D cameras. Yole notes this strengthening CMOS image sensor market attracted more than $7 billion of mergers and acquisitions in 2015.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brandy Shaul / SocialTimes:
Mobcrush Officially Launches Live-Streaming Platform for Mobile Games
http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/mobcrush-officially-launches-live-streaming-platform-for-mobile-games/641258
Mobcrush announced the official launch of its live-streaming application on mobile. The app allows users to watch live streams and broadcast gameplay from mobile games.
With the Mobcrush app, users can browse new and popular live streams, as well as view content from featured broadcasters and games. Users can also search for their favorite games to view any available streams.
As a social platform, users can chat with others while watching live streams. Gamers can also follow others within the app, and they will see broadcasts from users they follow in a separate “following” feed of content. Finally, gamers can visit other users’ profiles to view their past broadcasts, as well as the users they follow.
While Android users can use the Mobcrush app to instantly broadcast gameplay, iOS users must download a separate Mobcrush broadcast app on their Macs or PCs in order to stream content.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook rolls out Slideshow movie-maker feature on iOS to compete with Google Photos and Apple’s Memories feature coming in iOS 10
Facebook rolls out Slideshow movie-maker to compete with Google and Apple
https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/27/facebook-slideshow/
Most people can’t shoot compelling videos, and static photos are boring. That’s why the tech giants are all pushing their own versions of automatic movie makers based on your media. This month, Apple announced its version called Memories coming to iOS 10 Photos, Google Photos already has its Movies Assistant and today Facebook is rolling out Slideshow to all iOS users around the world.
Originally launched in August as part of Facebook’s photo-sharing companion app Moments, Slideshow began testing with some users as part of the Facebook app’s status composer in December.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hasselblad does a first: the X1D, a compact mirrorless medium-format camera
https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/22/hasselblad-does-a-first-the-x1d-a-compact-mirrorless-medium-format-camera/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity_1462_6775889981072151257
With every camera being handmade in Sweden, the X1D is actually a special piece of hardware. It’s also apparently a compact mirrorless medium-format camera — and that’s a first, actually.
To out this camera, Hasselblad turned its focus to size and optical quality. The X1D has a 50MP CMOS sensor, ISO range from 100 to 25,600 and 14 stops of dynamic range. It also shoots in full HD with dual SD card slots, GPS and Wi-Fi. Viewing options for all your future shots would include a 3-inch 920K pixel touch display, or a 2.36MP XGA electronic viewfinder.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Devialet’s $3,000 Speaker Destroys Worlds With 4,500 Watts of Loud
http://www.wired.com/2016/06/devialet-phantom-gold-speaker/
I get to audition a panoply of speakers on this job, and one of the most striking—both visually and aurally—is Devialet’s Phantom. The French company’s speaker is designed to look like some ovular starseed space egg, with cylindrical drivers firing outwards from both sides as you crank the jams, extending and receding in a blur of sound and motion. It’s also goddamn loud. The base model Phantom puts out 750 watts, and the bigger Silver Phantom is rated at 3,000. I’ve tested both versions, and the Phantom is dramatic, impressively loud, and easily generates enough of a racket to get you evicted.
To satisfy the sound gluttons, Devialet is releasing an even-higher-end speaker. The Phantom Gold boasts 4,500 watts of power and can achieve peak volumes of 108 decibels. That’s about as loud as a motorcycle, a power saw, or an Opeth concert.
The frequency range of the speaker exceeds that of the human ear, extending to an ultrasonic 27kHz on the high end, and reaching all the way down to 14Hz in the basement.
But the real selling point here? It’s the rose gold coating on the exterior. That’s actual 22-carat gold
Tomi Engdahl says:
4K 4 U: How to Prepare for UltraHD Video
http://www.btreport.net/hangouts/2016/06/4k-4-u-how-to-prepare-for-ultrahd-video.html?cmpid=enlmobile06282016&eid=289644432&bid=1444749
4K/UltraHD video is coming – consumers are buying the TV sets, and more content is becoming available. But actually delivering 4K video presents some significant challenges for service providers. Where will the bandwidth come from? What capacity planning needs to be done? And what’s the best way to secure that high-value content from piracy?
Tomi Engdahl says:
This Tiny Camera Can Be Injected Into Your Body
Get great shots of those hard to reach places
http://www.popsci.com/this-tiny-camera-can-be-injected-into-your-body
If you’ve ever wanted to take photographs of the inside of your spleen, you may be in luck. Scientists at the University of Stuttgart in Germany have created a camera so tiny it can be injected into your body through a syringe.
Using something called a “femtosecond direct laser writing system,” they 3D printed a three-part lens, no bigger than a grain of salt, onto the end of a fiber optic cable the width of two human hairs. The researchers say the device could be injected into previously difficult areas to photograph such as inside an organ–even the brain–and pave the way for next-generation endoscopes (those snake-like devices surgeons use to glimpse your insides).
Once in the body, the camera can take high quality images of tissue just 3 millimeters from the lens. Until now, such tiny, high quality lenses were impossible to make. But remarkably, the researchers say, they designed, built, and tested the tiny camera in just a few hours.
The process was described in the journal Nature Photonics.
Two-photon direct laser writing of ultracompact multi-lens objectives
http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphoton.2016.121.html
Current lens systems are restricted in size, shape and dimensions by limitations of manufacturing. Multi-lens elements with non-spherical shapes are required for high optical performance and to correct for aberrations when imaging at wide angles and large fields. Here we present a novel concept in optics that overcomes all of the aforementioned difficulties and opens the new field of 3D printed micro- and nano-optics with complex lens designs. We demonstrate the complete process chain, from optical design, manufacturing by femtosecond two-photon direct laser writing and testing to the application of multi-lens objectives with sizes around 100 µm
Tomi Engdahl says:
Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab:
Reuters report: consumers prefer text over video for hard news but big breaking stories increase video interest
Sure, people like online video, but that doesn’t mean they want to watch your hard news videos
http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/06/sure-people-like-online-video-but-that-doesnt-mean-they-want-to-watch-your-hard-news-videos/
“Even for brands associated with hard news…their top or second videos in terms of Facebook engagement numbers turned out to be animal videos.”
On November 13, 2015, terrorists coordinated multiple attacks in Paris, killing 130 people and injuring hundreds. On the day of the attacks, the BBC experienced the highest online traffic day in its history; the following day, November 14, 19 percent of the visitors to the BBC’s site watched video, compared to 11 percent on a typical day.
A report released Tuesday by Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism finds that “interest in video news does increase significantly when there is a big breaking news story.”
But the rest of the time? Online video news is less of a force than publishers might hope. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2016, which came out earlier this month, noted that only about a quarter of 50,000 respondents across 26 countries watch online news video in a given week.
“Website users in particular remain resistant to online video news,”
We keep hearing about the boom in online video, so what’s going on? To be clear, the report’s authors distinguish between “news video” hosted on publishers’ own sites and video on social networks or centered around “softer news and lifestyle content (or premium drama and sports on demand)” rather than hard news. They researchers urge caution in conflating the fast growth of online video in general with the growth of, specifically, hard news video.
“So far, the growth around online video news seems to be largely driven by technology, platforms, and publishers rather than by strong consumer demand,”
On Facebook, almost 40 percent of the most successful videos from the 30 brands that Reuters looked at “related to lifestyle or entertainment content (for instance about animals, babies, or cooking) rather than harder news subjects such as current affairs, politics, science, or the environment.” And “even for brands associated with hard news like The Telegraph, The Guardian, or The Independent, their top or second videos in terms of Facebook engagement numbers turned out to be animal videos.”
Monetization of online news video remains a big challenge. On their own sites, publishers still tend to monetize videos with preroll advertising. That’s a problem: Of the users in Reuters’ previously released survey who hadn’t watched online news video in the past week, 35 percent said preroll ads put them off.
“Video is clearly going to be a much bigger part of the future news landscape, but it is unlikely to replace text,” the report’s authors conclude. “We should also not expect a new format like video to solve the fundamental problems of the news industry any time soon.”
More:
Online video news driven by technology, publishers and platforms, not consumers – new report
http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/online-video-news-driven-technology-publishers-and-platforms-not-consumers-new-report
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brian Steinberg / Variety:
NBCUniversal to provide 6,755 hours of TV coverage and 4,500 hours of live-streaming from Rio Olympics, also plans on distributing 4K UHD and VR content — For 16 days, people who tune to NBC expecting to see a repeat of “The Blacklist” or a fresh episode of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” will be out of luck.
NBC to Go Nearly Wall-to-Wall With Olympics Programming
http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/nbc-2016-rio-olympics-1201805054/
For 16 days, people who tune to NBC expecting to see a repeat of “The Blacklist” or a fresh episode of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” will be out of luck.
Between Friday, August 5 and Sunday, August 21, the flagship broadcast network of NBCUniversal will show 260.5 hours of programming related to the 2016 Rio Olympics. On most days, NBC primetime programming will air from 8 p.m. to midnight ET/PT; daytime will run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET/PT; and late night will air from 12:35 a.m. to 1:35 a.m. ET/PT. Replays will fill the slots
The events will also have digital coverage., NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app will live-stream 4,500 total hours — including all Olympic competition for the third consecutive Olympics — for authenticated pay TV subscribers to desktops, mobile devices, and tablets, plus connected TVs for the first time.
Some content will be offered in 4K Ultra HD to distribution partners, and some virtual-reality programming will also be available – both Olympics firsts.
NBC’s daytime and late night programming will originate from a studio located at Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach
Tomi Engdahl says:
CMOS-based image sensor based on the camera’s popularity remains strong. CMOS sensor production is forecast to grow by an average of over ten per cent annually over the next five years and reach sales of 18.8 billion dollars in 2021.
The number of cameras in various mobile devices is on the rise and in addition to growing the cells pixel range accelerate the replacement of old equipment sales and shorten the life cycles.
The actual digital camera sales have already plummeted best days as and action cameras demand has also maturing and saturating, but a completely new type of application objects such as four helicopters, robots, virtual reality and augmented reality will place on this so strongly that the CMOS image sensor in terms of total sales will continue to grow a good pace in the coming years, Yole predicts.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4644:cmos-kamera-elaa-ja-voi-hyvin&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Video Compression Feels a Pinch
Recent gains fall short of 25%
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1330023
Recent advances in video codecs have fallen short of historic gains but experts from Google and Microsoft remain hopeful advances will pick up steam in the future. The good news is pioneering work in areas such as augmented reality is opening new doors and one effort may produce a royalty-free codec in less than a year.
Improvements in video codecs reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to serve video over the Internet. The gains determine the quality of the experience for constrained devices such as smartphones on cellular networks and are key to supporting the business models of cloud-based video services such as Hulu, Netflix and YouTube.
Over the last 20 years, video codecs doubled gains in compression about every decade in a trade-off for ten-fold increases in encoder complexity. Gains in more recent work peak at about 30% with practical results below 25% compared to existing codecs, said experts at an event here sponsored by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE)
“I’ve seen less revolutionary ideas for encoding for normal camera-view video than what we saw 10-15 years ago”
Sullivan is heading up an effort the ISO started in October to define a new video codec by 2020. The current work shows 15-20% gains over today’s leading edge codec, HEVC.
In an early June meeting, the MPEG group agreed on a goal for the future video coding standard of a 50% bit-rate reduction for equal quality video. If it hits its goal the improvement “would be about the same amount that was achieved for each of the two previous major standards — AVC and HEVC,” Sullivan wrote.
Since the release of the H.261 several years ago, “we keep adding more techniques for special cases and special cases of special cases,” said Debargha Mukherjee, a video codec expert at Google.
“It looks like we’re reaching the asymptote [in video codec gains] and we have to go back to the drawing board,”
VP-10. It currently delivers gains of less than 25% compared with today’s VP-9, its biggest advantages are on low-resolution video and existing encoders run as much as 40-times slower.
“We are still very much hoping to get better compression on the order of 40% at reasonable complexity by the time we are ready to release AV1 [a royalty-free codec using VP-10],”
Within the next six months Google expects to turn over its work on VP-10 to the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) which aims to craft it into AV1, a mainstream, royalty-free video codec. Founding members of the group include Amazon, ARM, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix and Nvidia.
The alliance will need to blend Google’s contributions with those from others to create a final royalty-free offering. Google
The most interesting and revolutionary work in video these days is in virtual and augmented reality, said Microsoft’s Sullivan.
For example, today there are several different ways to map video from 360-degree cameras into a rectangular display. He expects engineers ultimately will standardize on one or more approaches.
In the short term, engineers have done significant work to extend today’s HEVC codec since it was launched in 2013, Sullivan said. For example a suite of extensions were released earlier this year to improve by 30-60% the compression on text and video overlays, he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
This Pocketable Camera Gear Will Change the Way You Take Travel Photos
Want to take your travel photography to the next level? Ditch the hulking DSLR for a trio of small shooters with superpowers.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/this-pocketable-camera-gear-will-change-the-way-you-take-travel-photos-1467311630?cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=poptarget&cx_artPos=1
Passport? Check. Swim shorts? Check. Massive honkin’ DSLR? Check.
For years, the Big Important Camera™ was always on my packing list for any vacation, be it to the ocean, city or country.
But what I’ve realized lately is that, as technology allows us to relive our time off in entirely new dimensions, the best way to document your vacation in the 21st century isn’t to carry one amazing camera. It’s to carry three.
Did I just say that you should carry three cameras on your next vacation? Yes. But hear me out.
One of those cameras is the smartphone that’s practically a part of your hand, outfitted with special lenses.
To find the ideal vacation-photography arsenal, I toured New York City for a week with three devices: the LG 360 CAM, a 360-degree camera; the Narrative Clip 2, a wearable cam that automatically snaps photos every 30 seconds; and the Moment smartphone lenses and case, which equip your phone to shoot like a full-fledged camera. All three items combined were lighter, smaller and less expensive than the kind of DSLR “serious” photographers lug around. Plus, I didn’t have to wear a fanny pack.
Tomi Engdahl says:
1024 “Pixel” Sound Camera Treats Eyes to Real-Time Audio
http://hackaday.com/2016/07/01/1024-pixel-sound-camera-treats-eyes-to-real-time-audio/
A few years ago, [Artem] learned about ways to focus sound in an issue of Popular Mechanics. If sound can be focused, he reasoned, it could be focused onto a plane of microphones. Get enough microphones, and you have a ‘sound camera’, with each microphone a single pixel.
Movies and TV shows about comic books are now the height of culture, so a device using an array of microphones to produce an image isn’t an interesting demonstration of FFT, signal processing, and high-speed electronic design. It’s a Daredevil camera, and it’s one of the greatest builds we’ve ever seen.
[Artem]’s build log isn’t a step-by-step process on how to make a sound camera. Instead, he went through the entire process of building this array of microphones, and like all amazing builds the first step never works.
The Daredevil Camera
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/06/29/the-daredevil-camera/
Once upon a time I was reading a Popular Mechanics article, the title of which eludes me. Something about playing different music for different parts of a dance floor. They were describing a way to focus sound towards different people.
What struck me about the idea was that there was a way to focus sound. It was a piece of mesh of some sort, which acted as a lens for ultrasonics.
Imagine using such lenses to focus sound onto a plane of microphones. Just like light in a camera. One microphone is one pixel. An ability to see sound
Then, I read an article about the FFT telescope — how you can resolve an image from a grid of wave sensors using zero optics and a lot of mathematics.
That was the first breakthrough: I didn’t need to build the box or the mesh optics! The project suddenly collapsed into something portable and plausible.
Each microphone gets its sound, which is a waveform. FFT is something that can split this waveform into its constituent frequencies, a set of amplitude and phase for a set of “buckets” representing a frequency. This lets us get the intensities of the sound waves of different frequencies, rather than a trace of the microphone’s membrane going up and down.
So, what would we get if we apply 2D FFT to THESE waves, and plot them based on the deflection angle?
An IMAGE.
And that’s all the magic there is.
a MEMS microphone is etched directly in the silicon, and comes with the pre-amp and ADC already on chip. It’s a DIGITAL OUTPUT microphone!
Suddenly, the project collapsed in complexity, and for the first time it was on the edge of feasibility.
With the digital microphones, all I really needed were microphones and an FPGA to process it.
I settled on a 32×32 array, made out of 8×8 cells.
With 64 channels of data to be sampled at 3Mhz, an FPGA was the only real option
Tomi Engdahl says:
Spotify: Apple is holding up app approval to squash competition
The battle between the two streaming services heats up.
https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/30/spotify-claims-apple-blocking-app-approval/
How do you catch up with the biggest music streaming service? Well, not approving app updates is one tactic, and Spotify says Apple is doing just that. The streaming service sent a letter to Apple’s legal counsel this week claiming that the company is rejecting an update to Spotify’s iOS app and it’s “causing grave harm” to users by doing so. The letter explains that Apple won’t approve the new version because Spotify doesn’t use the company’s billing method for in-app purchases and subscription services. Apple announced the changes to app subscriptions in iTunes just before this month’s WWDC.
Tomi Engdahl says:
That Digital Music Service You Love Is a Terrible Business
https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/16/07/03/1843254/that-digital-music-service-you-love-is-a-terrible-business?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Rdio goes bankrupt, Pandora hangs out a ‘For Sale’ sign and then gets rid of its CEO, artists and labels ramp up their criticism of YouTube. Now we have Tidal in acquisition talks with Apple, while Spotify complains about Apple treating it unfairly… the digital music business is becoming an industry in which only a truly massive company with huge scale and deep pockets can hope to compete.
That Digital Music Service You Love Is a Terrible Business
http://fortune.com/2016/07/01/digital-music-business/
Digital music appears to be dead as a standalone business, or at least on life support.
Every few months, the ongoing upheaval in the digital-music business forces its way into the public consciousness—Rdio goes bankrupt, Pandora hangs out a “For Sale” sign and then gets rid of its CEO, artists and labels ramp up their criticism of YouTube. Now we have Tidal in acquisition talks with Apple, while Spotify complains about Apple treating it unfairly.
The media and music community seem divided on whether an Apple-Tidal combination would be a good idea.
From a macro perspective, there’s a common theme among all of these developments: Namely, that the digital music business is becoming an industry in which only a truly massive company with huge scale and deep pockets can hope to compete. And that spells trouble for Spotify and every other independent music service.
Realistically speaking, Tidal must be acquired by someone, whether it’s Apple or Amazon (which is also trying to grow its music service) or even Rhapsody, another music service with which Tidal has also apparently had discussions.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Does this mean that virtual reality video is really catching the big markets:
Google Searches For ‘VR Porn’ Increase 10,000% In Just 20 Months
http://vrtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?3280-Google-Searches-For-VR-Porn-Increase-10-000-In-Just-20-Months
‘The trend is your friend,’ they say in the investment world, but Google trends can be quite useful for a variety things. For instance, understanding a market better, particularly the virtual reality porn market. I thought it would be fun to take a quick look at Google trends for the key phrase ‘VR Porn’. Heck maybe we will learn a thing or two, right?
So where were all these searches coming from? The United States? Nope. The top seven countries leading the pact, when adjusted for searches per capita were Norway, Hong Kong, Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Sweden and Malaysia.
Statistics:
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=vr%20Porn
Tomi Engdahl says:
73% of Subscribers Would Download Netflix Content, Says Survey
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/07/05/215217/73-of-subscribers-would-download-netflix-content-says-survey
A report surfaced a couple weeks ago suggesting Netflix is soon going to let users download videos for offline playback. AllFlicks decided to poll 1,000 stakeholders to see what they think of the bold new idea. In their survey, they asked respondents to tell them how important offline viewing was to them. Nearly two thirds of Netflix subscribers said offline support was either “Important” or “Very Important” to them.
The respondents agreed overwhelmingly that they would download Netflix videos if it became possible. A whopping 73% said they would, while only 16% were confident that they would not.
Netflix to Soon Let Users Download Videos, Says Report
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/06/24/1927225/netflix-to-soon-let-users-download-videos-says-report
Tomi Engdahl says:
3D-printed micro-optics
http://scottadams-tttt.tumblr.com/post/146766594801/top-tech-256-space-sensors-micro-optics
Researchers at University of Stuttgart in Germany have used an ultra short laser pulses to create optical lenses “which are hardly larger than a human hair.”
The 3D-printed lenses will “permit the construction of novel and extremely small endoscopes which are suited for smallest body openings or machine parts that can be inspected,” Nature reports.
The scientists also printed optical free form surfaces and miniature objectives directly onto CMOS image chips, and combined the optics with LED illumination systems.
Two-photon direct laser writing of ultracompact multi-lens objectives
http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphoton.2016.121.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lulu Yilun Chen / Bloomberg:
Millions of Chinese live-streaming daily events, with most popular “showrooms” attracting 400K people at a time, earning top streamers $100K+/month
Millions of Chinese Stream Reality Shows Starring Themselves
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-04/millions-of-chinese-stream-reality-shows-starring-themselves
One popular video featured the nation’s richest man playing poker. Startups and web giants alike are cashing in by selling virtual gifts to people keen to reward popular live-streamers.
Pole dancing, bungee jumping, a woman eating maggots: at any given hour, millions of Chinese are live-streaming all of this and much more on their smartphones.
Crazes come and go at neck-snapping speed in the world’s largest online marketplace, but China’s live-streaming phenomenon shows staying power and is already a significant business. Tiny startups and internet giants alike are making money selling virtual gifts—flowers, cars, toys—to people keen to reward their favorite live-streamers. As the business matures, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and others may start selling ads on the most popular streams.
“This isn’t a fad that will disappear, as the business model has proven to be viable,”
In the U.S., tech companies are eager to make live streaming more popular. Twitter Inc. last year acquired the app Periscope and has integrated live video into its main product. Facebook has made it possible for users to stream live and has boosted the prominence of such broadcasts in its news feed. Mobile app YouNow has taken off among teens.
But the Chinese version of live-streaming has caught on much more quickly and broadly. Tens of millions of young people (many of them single men) live in soulless megalopolises far from where they grew up and are seeking human connection—even if it means watching and interacting with a stranger eating dinner. “China’s wide adoption of mobile phones and the loneliness brought on by a fast-paced migrating society means people are more willing to connect this way,” says Jia Wei, who runs the live-streaming division for Nasdaq-listed social media app Momo In
Many streams—known as showrooms—feature ordinary people doing remarkably ordinary things
as many as 60,000 people are broadcasting at the same time
The most popular streams attract as many has 400,000 people at a time. They often feature famous people.
Top streamers earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, according to Momo’s Jia. They get as much as 50 percent of the revenue generated from admirers’ virtual gifts; the hosting companies keep the rest.
Censorship isn’t much of a concern for Li since he focuses mostly on travel and leisure in Japan.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Huawei: Our fake phone camera pic shame
Chinese giant caught using expensive camera to shoot photo supposedly taken by mobe
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/05/huawei_in_phone_camera_shame/
Huawei is under fire after admitting a photo it supposedly took with one of its phones was actually snapped using an expensive digital camera.
The (since deleted) image was posted to Huawei’s Google+ page and was presented as having been taken with the P9, an Android-equipped smartphone that carries a pair of on-board 12Mp Leica cameras. Huawei has made the high-grade camera hardware a key selling point of the P9.
It was soon found, however, that the photos had not been snapped with the P9′s camera, but rather a more expensive digital camera. Android Police discovered that the EXIF data on the image showed it was taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III, which lists at $2,599 for the body unit (lenses will cost you even more).
When confronted, Huawei was quick to admit its mistake, though the Chinese hardware giant stopped short of admitting it was trying to mislead consumers.
“It has recently been highlighted that an image posted to our social channels was not shot on the Huawei P9.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung unveils world’s first UFS memory cards — the successor to microSD
http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/7/7/12115616/samsung-ufs-removable-memory-cards
What comes after microSD cards for removable storage? Samsung has the answer: UFS. The company announced today the world’s first removable UFS (Universal Flash Storage) memory cards, offering storage capacity of either 32, 64, 128, or 256 gigabytes, and performance speeds that simply blow older formats out of the water.
The UFS cards have sequential read speeds of up to 530 megabytes per second — five times faster than the best microSD cards. That means reading a 5 gigabyte, full HD movie in roughly 10 seconds, says Samsung, compared to a UHS-1 microSD card which manages the same feat in around 50 seconds.
Write speeds are also significantly improved, with rates of up to 170 MB/s. That’s nearly double the performance of the very fastest microSDs (this SanDisk Extreme Pro card, for example, has write speeds of up to 100 MB/s), but seven or eight times faster than the cards recommended to non-professionals.
Samsung Introduces World’s First Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Removable Memory Card Line-up, Offering up to 256-Gigabyte (GB) Capacit
https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-introduces-worlds-first-universal-flash-storage-ufs-removable-memory-card-line-up-offering-up-to-256-gigabyte-gb-capacity
Tomi Engdahl says:
The new standard will improve the TV picture
The International Telecommunications Union, ITU has approved a new standard, which improves TV picture even further. HDR-standard (high dynamic range) to expand the UltraHD visual standard, and allows the use of new, more improved display technologies.
Officially, at the recommendation ITU-R BT.2100 TV HDR-propelled improves image quality by using new technologies.
BT.2100 Recommendation provides TV producers the opportunity to choose from three resolutions: HDTV (1920 x 1080), the so-called UHDTV. 4K (3840 x 2160) and 8K, which separates 7680 x 4320 pixels. All the corridors of progressive scanning and a previous ITU refresh rates specified in UDHTV standard.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4670:uusi-standardi-parantaa-televisiokuvaa&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jesus is coming… to virtual reality
The power of Christ compels you (to put on a VR headset).
https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/01/jesus-is-coming-to-virtual-reality/
Producers have been fretting about how to do feature films in VR, because the format doesn’t lend itself to traditional Hollywood techniques. However, it’s about to be used on one of the best-known tales of all time for Jesus VR — the Story of Christ, slated to arrive in Christmas, 2016, according to Variety. The 360-degree, 4K film will work on all major VR platforms, including the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear and PlayStation VR. Produced by Autumn Products and VRWERX, it’ll tell the story of Christ’s life from baptism to crucifixion.
Film directors are used to controlling what viewers watch, constantly cutting between close-ups, swooping crane shots, special effects shots, etc. However, that doesn’t work well with 360-degree VR, because the total immersion makes scene changes jarring. The medium also makes you feel you’re in the movie, not just watching it. “I think that’s going to be the definition of how you tell a story: Are you an observer, or are you a participant?” art director Robert Stromberg recently told Engadget.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amir Efrati / The Information:
Source: ESPN plans to offer live programming packages directly to consumers on the web, won’t include pro football or basketball — Walt Disney’s ESPN sports network plans to unveil a package of live programming it will offer directly to consumers on the Web, said a person with knowledge of the plans.
ESPN Takes a Baby Step Outside the Bundle
https://www.theinformation.com/espn-takes-a-baby-step-outside-the-bundle
Walt Disney’s ESPN sports network plans to unveil a package of live programming it will offer directly to consumers on the Web, said a person with knowledge of the plans. The move is a baby step towards ESPN becoming a direct-to-consumer service.
ESPN’s new offering won’t include high-value content like professional football or basketball, but rather more niche leagues and possibly some types of college sports, the person said. ESPN has offered some content directly before, for a specific event like the Cricket World Cup in 2015.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Natalie Jarvey / Hollywood Reporter:
Eddy Cue on Apple’s TV Plans and Why Netflix Isn’t a Competitor — The senior vp also dishes on what he learned from Steve Jobs, why the company won’t be buying a Hollywood studio anytime soon and why agents should be “very, very excited.” — The morning after the Golden State Warriors earned …
Eddy Cue on Apple’s TV Plans and Why Netflix Isn’t a Competitor
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/eddy-cue-apples-tv-plans-910093
The senior vp also dishes on what he learned from Steve Jobs, why the company won’t be buying a Hollywood studio anytime soon and why agents should be “very, very excited.”
Cue brushes off questions about his Hollywood aspirations (he and Apple won’t comment on reports Apple wants to buy Jay Z’s Tidal streaming service), but there’s no denying the Miami-born exec is behind the company’s recent original programming efforts. Starting with a Taylor Swift tour documentary designed to entertain Apple Music’s 15 million subscribers, Apple also is experimenting with series
Will we see an Apple skinny bundle or live-TV streaming service?
Whether we’re providing it or somebody else is, it really doesn’t matter to us. What we’re trying to do is build the platform that allows anybody to get content to consumers. If a Time Warner [Cable] or a DirecTV wants to offer a bundle themselves, they should do it through Apple TV and iPad and iPhone. As a matter of fact, I’m not a big fan of the skinny bundle.
In 10 years, how will we be watching TV?
TV is made up of three things. One is the actual, physical TV set. Obviously, in the last 10 years, the amount of innovation that’s happened on the TV is incredible. If you look at the content side of the business, it’s never been better. The quality of TV, I think, is at an all-time high. The problem with it is the way that we end up consuming it — generally a cable box. A satellite receiver is, to me, nothing more than a glorified VCR. And so I think there’s huge opportunities in that space because people now want to watch on their phones, they want to watch on their iPads, and they want to watch on their TVs.
It’s still very unclear what Apple plans to do in the original content space.
We are only going into the content business [with projects] that we think are really tied to our products. Right now, that’s Apple Music. The rest of it is about giving [talent] a platform that allows them to be creative in new ways.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Hackaday: Does Apple Know Jack About Headphones?
http://hackaday.com/2016/07/15/ask-hackaday-does-apple-know-jack-about-headphones/
If you’ve watched the tech news these last few months, you probably have noticed the rumors that Apple is expected to dump the headphone jack on the upcoming iPhone 7. They’re not alone either. On the Android side, Motorola has announced the Moto Z will not have a jack. Chinese manufacturer LeEco has introduced several new phones sans phone jack. So what does this mean for all of us?
This isn’t the first time a cell phone company has tried to design out the headphone jack. Anyone remember HTC’s extUSB, which was used on the Android G1? Nokia tried it with their POP Port. Sony Ericsson’s attempt was the FastPort. Samsung tried a dizzying array of multi-pin connectors. HP/Palm used a magnetic adapter on their Veer. Apple themselves tried to reinvent the headphone jack by recessing it in the original iPhone, breaking compatibility with most of the offerings on the market. All of these manufacturers eventually went with the tried and true ⅛” headphone jack. Many of these connectors were switched over during an odd time in history where Bluetooth was overtaking wired “hands-free kits”, and phones were gaining the ability to play mp3 files.
The humble phone jack may well be the oldest electrical connector still in common use. The original ¼” (6.35mm) jacks were developed back in 1878. They were used as patch connections in manual telephone switchboards.
The ⅛” (3.5mm) miniature jack and the 3/32” (2.5mm) sub-miniature versions appeared in the 1960’s on transistor radios. In 1979, the Sony Walkman made the stereo ⅛” phone jack a common consumer standard.
As connectors go, they’re not half bad. Phone jacks are orientation agnostic, and can rotate without breaking connection. They have become an issue in phones though. Thinner and thinner phones have created lower profile sockets. With less plastic in the socket body, these jacks become more prone to breakage – especially when subjected to heavy use.
So if phone companies are going away from the classic ⅛” phone jack, what options do we have?
USB Type-C: USB-C allows for digital audio at 44 or 96 kHz using a headphone mounted DAC. The connector also allows for analog stereo audio through the sideband pins.
Lightning: Apple’s Lightning supports digital audio at 48 kHz, but does not support analog audio.
Bluetooth: These days every phone has the option of Bluetooth audio, however Bluetooth has a reputation for terrible audio quality.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ben Sisario / New York Times:
In a non-public filing with the US Copyright Royalty Board, Apple proposes simplified flat rate of 9.1¢ per 100 streams in songwriting royalties
Apple, in Seeming Jab at Spotify, Proposes Simpler Songwriting Royalties
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/business/media/apple-in-seeming-jab-at-spotify-proposes-simpler-songwriting-royalties.html?_r=0
In the music industry’s streaming battles, the fight extends to even the minutiae of copyright.
Apple, in a government filing on Friday, proposed simplifying the highly complex way that songwriting royalties are paid when it comes to on-demand streaming services like Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal.
According to Apple’s proposal, made with the Copyright Royalty Board, a panel of federal judges who oversee rates in the United States, streaming services should pay 9.1 cents in songwriting royalties for every 100 times a song is played. This formula would replace the long passages of federal rules for streaming rates, which often leave musicians bewildered about just how the money flows in streaming music.
But even in this seemingly innocuous proposal, which was not made public but was obtained by The New York Times, Apple’s target is clear: Spotify, its archenemy in streaming music. The proposal would significantly raise the rates that Spotify pays, and the filing includes lines that are clearly directed at Spotify and its so-called freemium model.