Disney/Pixar’s new film, “Brave,” will be the first to test out Dolby’s new Atmos format, the next generation theatrical sound system designed to make films sound more “natural and lifelike.”
“Dolby aims to have the new sound system, which it debuted this week at CinemaCon, installed in 10-15 theaters worldwide for the test, for which Pixar will prepare a special mix of the film,” indicates The Hollywood Reporter. “Seven-time Oscar winner Gary Rydstrom is serving as sound designer and re-recording mixer on the project.”
Oscar-nominated sound designer and editor Erik Aadahl says the new sound format is “the biggest breakthrough in sound that has happened in my career.”
Dolby details Atmos by noting that it’s “capable of transmitting up to 128 simultaneous and lossless audio channels, and renders from 5.1 up to 64 discrete speaker feeds,” according to THR. In order to create a completely immersive experience, speakers will be positioned around the theater and overhead.
A new report from Sandvine found that real-time entertainment (primarily video) has risen to 64.5 percent of total U.S. network traffic in March from 53.6 percent last September.
YouTube accounted for 13.8 percent of total traffic in March.
Sandvine also reported last fall that half of North America’s Internet use was related to video; Netflix accounted for 27.6 percent of daily downstream volume with HTTP following at 17.8 percent, YouTube at 10.0 percent and BitTorrent coming in at 9.0 percent.
With this transition to broadband for video content, usage can become an issue for both video quality and the network. “Technical solutions such as adaptive bit-rate streaming or buffering content to a hard drive help,” GigaOM reports. “But Sandvine concludes that basic monthly usage caps, such as the ones ISPs are implementing, don’t.”
“Are caps a worrisome protectionist tool to keep subscribers locked to both broadband and pay TV subscriptions?” GigaOM asks. “And if that’s a yes, then what should the FCC, Department of Justice or Congress do about it?”
AOL is making its foray into the TV sphere with a new Web channel that aims to go beyond being just a YouTube clone with its six new original programs produced by some top entertainment names.
“Yesterday the company launched a new video site called AOL On Network, which will bring all of the company’s video offerings (Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget, AOL.com, and others) under one umbrella,” VentureBeat reports.
“The video content will play across 14 content channels, including food, business, entertainment, style, tech, travel, and health,” explains the post. “The AOL On Network will reach an audience of 57 million U.S. consumers on a variety of Internet-connected devices, according to a comScore report of video viewing behavior for March 2012.”
The site will offer “320,000 high-quality, short-form videos created by over 1,000 third-party publishers as well as AOL,” according to the post.
While AOL remains among the top 10 most popular sites for video content online, “the biggest factor in that success is in delivering video content that people actually want to see — meaning people don’t mind sitting through a few commercials or pre-roll ads during a video,” comments VentureBeat.
Yahoo! and VEVO presented Digital Content NewFront events yesterday in New York City, each announcing original programming scheduled for the coming year.
Katie Couric will host her own ABC News show on Yahoo! called “Katie’s Take,” a weekly online-only series debuting May 1 that will have its own page dedicated to the program. This will be one of several shows on Yahoo! that will be offered to ad buyers to get them to spend TV ad dollars on digital. The launch sponsor will be Nestle’s Poland Spring Natural Water.
Yahoo! also announced: “Electric City,” an animated sci-fi series produced by Tom Hanks; “Cybergeddon,” a feature length film to be released in segments, written and directed by Anthony Zuiker; a talk show hosted by Jeff Goldblum and produced by Yahoo! Studios; “Stunt Nation,” a weekly five-minute show; and “KaBOOM!” a three-minute show featuring “ridiculously fun objects getting blown to smithereens.”
Primarily known for music videos, VEVO announced six new series, including: a singing competition program, a scripted musical comedy series, a dating show, a comedy series about album covers, a show that searches the country for talented female musicians, and a show detailing the music culture of specific cities.
Apple exceeded expectations when it announced its second quarter numbers on Tuesday, nearly doubling profits from one year ago.
Blame it all on the iPad. The company sold 11.8 million of its tablets during the second quarter.
Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook gave the situation this perspective: “Just two years after we shipped the initial iPad, we sold 67 million. It took us 24 years to sell that many Macs, and five years for that many iPods, and over three years for that many iPhones.”
The tablet market is growing fast and Apple faces little serious competition in the area. “It faces competition from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony in the subsegment of people who want to use the device primarily to read e-books,” explains The New York Times.
Higher frame rates have been the talk of CinemaCon in Las Vegas this week where notable filmmakers have been discussing the shift to 3D production for more than just “the right kind of movies.”
“Right now, we still need an excuse to watch 3D. Someday we won’t need those excuses,” suggested Ang Lee who was joined onstage by Martin Scorsese. “I just think you have to accept it as a part of storytelling,” added Scorsese.
The two directors “took the unequivocal position that very soon, 3D will be the standard not just for the ‘right’ films but for all films. Scorsese, Lee and Baz Luhrmann are among filmmakers taking the format beyond tentpole fare. Luhrmann’s 3D footage from ‘The Great Gatsby’ was warmly received at the confab, even without the benefit of color correction or vfx,” reports Variety.
Scorsese pointed out that depth was one of early filmmakers’ pursuits, and that technology has finally reached the point of achieving that dream. Scorsese’s team on “Hugo” screened Alfred Hitchcock’s 3D thriller “Dial M for Murder” for inspiration. “It was this whole other approach to something that was not a horror genre, that was literally a stage play in 3D,” he said. “I decided I wanted to go more that way (with ‘Hugo’).”
Directors such as Peter Jackson and James Cameron have been touting higher frame rates, the next cinematic innovation that has taken center stage at this year’s convention.
“Scorsese said he did not see the 48 frames-per-second demonstration of ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’ that divided viewers at Caesars — but he defended it sight unseen, comparing it to the change from nitrate to regular black-and-white film — another cinematic evolution that was initially controversial,” reports Variety.
On Tuesday at the CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas, Warner Bros. screened 10 minutes of Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit,” which was shot at 48fps. The film will become the first shown in 48fps 3D when it debuts in December.
In a video message from New Zealand, “Jackson implored theater owners to project his new film at 48 frames per second,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “The new speed, he said, gives the ‘illusion of real life, where movement feels smoother, and you’re not dealing with strobing.'”
Reactions to the footage were mixed: “…the wide vistas were pretty breathtaking,” said one of the exhibitors in attendance, also noting concern regarding close-ups. “It will take some getting used to, for sure.”
While some theater owners are anxious to show the film in its 48fps format, not all will be equipped to do so. More recent digital cinema installations are already capable, but others will require software upgrades or new hardware.
James Cameron plans to shoot the “Avatar” sequels in either 48 or 60fps. In a test screening with Cameron’s team, “images that would normally appear adequate abruptly look fuzzy by comparison, as if the moviegoer had been wearing glasses with the wrong prescription but now could suddenly see straight,” according to Wired.
Reportedly, Thomas Edison’s early experiments showed that 46 frames-per-second was the ideal frame rate as “anything less will strain the eye.” But the need to save celluloid and cut production costs led to 24fps becoming the standard for the past 80 years. In the 1980’s Douglas Trumbull attempted to get interest in his Showscan system which ran at 60fps. Interestingly, he’s now shooting 3D test footage at 120fps.
As the theory goes, Internet advertising is more effective than traditional models because advertisers can be sure to get their messages directly to the targeted audience.
But according to Peter Kafka writing for AllThingsD, that theory isn’t proving true. He suggests that these methods only work “for some stuff, some of the time.”
“An ad on the Web may do a better job of reaching its audience than, say, a magazine ad. But that doesn’t mean it does a good job,” writes Kafka.
According to data from Nielsen, which tracked a recent ad campaign aimed at “a manufacturer of women’s personal care products” designed to target women aged 25-54, the most accurate publisher got the ads in front of that targeted group only 40 percent of the time. Nearly half of the time, those ads were served to men.
The Nielsen study suggests that Facebook is a better candidate for targeted advertising than other sites, because of how much information the social network has about its 800 million users.
“The Web’s sorta-close, sorta-not targeting problem hasn’t hampered Google, obviously. But that’s because Google’s search ads respond directly to your input and your intent,” comments Kafka. “Now, Facebook, Google and everyone else are going after the branded ads that dominate TV, where the really big money lives. And if they want to get bigger bites of that, they’re going to have to get more accurate.”
The PlayStation Vita and Skype have teamed up for voice and video chatting on the gaming device, which can even receive calls in the background while games are being played.
It’s been a while since people predicted that the Vita would attempt to become a sort of tablet device for gamers, notes TechCrunch. This brings that prediction one step closer to reality.
“While the addition of the Skype app doesn’t make the Vita a fully-fledged cellphone, the app does support Wi-Fi and 3G WLAN calls and essentially makes the device the N-Gage everyone always wanted,” according to the post.
The free Skype app is available in the Vita app store starting today.
Consumers purchased 56 million tablets in 2011. According to a new report from Forrester Research, that number will significantly increase in the next several years.
Forrester says that there “will be 375 million tablets sold by 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate of 46 percent, and that by 2016 there will be 760 million tablets in use overall.”
While those numbers would still put the tablet behind the projected total numbers for PC’s, Forrester believes that tablets are fast becoming the computing device of choice for consumers, especially within emerging markets.
Because tablets are not as fully functional as an average PC, Forrester predicts that “a new class of consumer electronics” will emerge to “fill that gap,” according to TechCrunch. One such product is the “frame,” a dock which Forrester predicts will “become a common way to give tablets more features, more power and link them up to other devices, like TVs, to use them to consume content.”
Could the growing app Socialcam do for video sharing what Instagram did for photo sharing? According to the app’s founders, it attracted 4 million new users over the last weekend.
Socialcam is available on iOS only and is now in competition with another video-sharing service, Viddy, which saw 5.5 million new users in 11 days and has funding coming in from rapper Jay-Z.
“Its addition of 4 million users in just two days is all the more impressive considering that the team behind the app is just three people strong,” according to The Next Web.
Within the app, users can create videos with custom filters, store them in the cloud and share via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, email and SMS. It also includes the familiar community elements basic to social networking like browsing, commenting and sharing.
The U.S. International Trade Commission judge overseeing the lawsuit between Motorola Mobility — now being acquired by Google — and Microsoft found that Microsoft infringed on four Motorola patents in making its Xbox gaming consoles, but the fifth patent in question was not violated.
“The patents in the complaint are for technology like wireless connections for the Xbox to the Internet and video compression to speed transmission,” explains Reuters.
A final ruling will be issued in August after the full commission reviews the judge’s decision.
Motorola Mobility is looking to have the infringed devices banned from importation into the U.S. Even so, Microsoft remains “confident the commission will ultimately rule in Microsoft’s favor,” the company said in an emailed statement. Motorola Mobility is also “confident in our position,” the company said in a statement.
According to a report from The Consumerist, eBay could be removing listings for digital copy codes on the grounds of copyright infringement, setting a standard that selling digital copy codes bundled with Blu-ray discs is illegal.
One user claims that eBay removed his listing for an UltraViolet movie code on the basis of copyright infringement. “The owner claims that despite the existence of similar listings and explaining that the code was legally obtained, eBay maintained its stance,” reports The Verge.
“The resale of physical media, such as DVDs, Blu-rays, and games has long been sanctioned under the first-sale doctrine, while the rights for owners of digital content have been hotly contested,” explains the post. In regards to digital copy films, only the individual who accesses the one-time use code is affected by service terms.
“Ultimately, the rules for digital copy versions of films require further definition, though it seems unlikely that this particular instance will spark the debate,” the post suggests.
Your tweets are now less protected following a decision by New York Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. who ruled prosecutors need not obtain a subpoena for deleted tweets, since “they are considered public information owned by a third party,” reports TG Daily.
This decision is strongly opposed by Martin Stolar, a lawyer representing Occupy Wall Street protestor Malcolm Harris who was arrested for disorderly conduct.
“There’s a whole other recent series of decisions from Supreme Court and New York State, about whether or not using a GPS device to track someone uses a warrant,” Stolar told the Atlantic Wire. “People’s locations while on the street are generally public, like tweets are, but it’s the accumulation of all that information, like someone’s whereabouts, that the courts have said a subpoena is necessary … I think that’s more analogous to tweets than the bank records are.”
Stolar is working to reject a subpoena of Harris’s user information and three months’ worth of tweets.
While Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says that his company is in good shape, Wall Street has its doubts. That concern resulted in Netflix shares dropping 16 percent to $85.45 directly after its first quarter numbers were announced.
Netflix added 1.7 million new streaming subscribers in the first quarter — considered only light growth for the second straight quarter.
Growth for Q2 is predicted to be lower. “During the analyst call, Hastings appealed for calm and said the problem was temporary and seasonal. The second quarter is typically tough on Netflix,” reports CNET. “Skeptics, however, worry that the problems could be more lasting and have more to do with the company’s inability to secure film licenses and growing competition in the streaming-video sector.”
In order for Netflix to remain competitive and elite, it has to secure more content to encourage subscriber growth. “But licensing costs have gone through the roof,” CNET notes, and “Netflix failed to renew a licensing agreement with Starz, the pay-TV cable service that supplied Netflix with films from Disney and Sony Pictures.”
In the meantime, the competition is growing stronger as Hulu, Amazon and HBO Go continue to expand, along with Comcast’s new Xfinity Streampix service.