Having ridden the short-form video wave to popularity, TikTok now faces a quandary: advertisers want longer-form content in which to place their messaging, while users say they don’t even have sufficient attention span for minute-long videos. Last year, a TikTok survey indicated 50 percent of its users find clips of more than a minute stressful, and about a third of them zip through 60-second clips at double-speed. “It’s not because I don’t have time, but because I can’t concentrate,” one twentysomething user reportedly explained in a survey response. Despite that feedback, TikTok began experimenting through the second half of 2021 with videos of five minutes and 10 minutes. Read more

Google is working on measures to protect consumer privacy by limiting data sharing from Android OS smartphones. The Alphabet-owned company says its changes will not be as disruptive as steps taken last year by Apple, which revamped its iOS iPhone software so users were required to grant permission for ad tracking. The resulting volume of users who blocked tracking had a profoundly negative effect on companies that rely on targeted advertising. Google didn’t indicate when the changes will roll out, but did say it will support existing operating systems for two more years. Read more

Investment banking firm JPMorgan Chase is betting on the metaverse, which it predicts “will likely infiltrate every sector in some way in the coming years, with the market opportunity estimated at over $1 trillion in yearly revenues.” The company has opened a virtual branch in Decentraland, a browser-based 3D world to coincide with publication of the 18-page “Opportunities in the Metaverse” report by Onyx, the blockchain division the bank launched in 2020. Although it’s the first bank known to open a branch in the metaverse, JPMorgan is just the latest of numerous businesses to plant its flag. Read more

Soul Machines, which creates autonomously animated digital characters that use AI and natural language processing to interact with humans in real time, has completed a Series B1 financing round of $70 million led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The 6-year-old New Zealand-based firm has thus far raised $135 million to fund its effort to create AI-powered “digital people” for digital environments involving entertainment, the metaverse, customer service and education. Soul Machines says it plans to use the new investment to fund continued growth in enterprise markets and ongoing deep tech research for its Digital Brain project. Read more

ETC@USC’s Archive Working Group, a committee within its Adaptive and Virtual Production project, is releasing its most recent white paper, “Practical Cloud Archive,” an ongoing exploration of digital asset preservation challenges, proposing “a number of avenues to introduce cloud storage and cloud technology as part of an overall archive solution, without compromising the basic tenets of preservation.” Led by co-chair, Denis Leconte, VP of technology at Iron Mountain Entertainment Services, the paper is the next step toward the continuing process to study “more precise experimental data on cloud storage characteristics in terms of durability as measured using the fixity process” as discussed in the previous white paper, “Guideline for the Preservation of Digital Audio-Visual Assets in the Cloud.” Read more