Google and other members of tech trade groups have gone up against the entertainment industry’s chief lobbying organizations in recent years, but now the tech firms are describing themselves in a new light. “We are the new faces of the American content industry, winning Emmys and Oscars, providing distribution for streaming-only Grammy winners, while creating services that address the challenge of piracy by allowing consumers to legally access content globally,” states a letter sent to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, which details concerns regarding the North American Free Trade Agreement. Continue reading Internet Firms Now Describe Themselves as Content Leaders

Western Digital announced its acquisition of cloud services startup Upthere, which offers storage solutions for photos, videos, documents and music. “The Upthere app is platform agnostic and available for iPhone, iPad and Android devices, as well as macOS and Windows PCs,” notes the press release. “The addition of Upthere’s technology and team to Western Digital’s Client Solutions business unit will enhance the company’s consumer products portfolio with new cloud-based offerings.” Upthere CEO Chris Bourdon and his team will continue under Western Digital. Barbara Nelson, formerly of cloud security business IronKey, will lead Western Digital’s Cloud Services business. Continue reading Western Digital Acquires Upthere to Expand Cloud Services

As part of its larger strategy to attract international users who may face inconsistent or costly mobile Internet service, Facebook-owned Instagram has been ramping up the web version of its photo- and video-sharing application. The latest upgrade brings Stories, “one of Instagram’s most popular features, copied from Snapchat, which lets people post videos and photos that disappear after 24 hours,” reports Bloomberg. “The number of people accessing Instagram through the web, instead of an app, is growing, the company said. More than 80 percent of its users are outside the U.S.” Continue reading Instagram Looks to Expand its Global Audience With Stories

Vevo is launching a live talk show format that streams across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vevo.com and Vevo’s mobile apps. Vevo Live includes artist interviews, a studio audience, and interaction with streaming viewers via text chat. The concept evolved from the Vevo Party app, developed during an internal company hackathon last year to enable users to chat while watching the same videos, and eventually became Watch Party. After initial success with its audience, and interest by artists who began hosting their own Watch Parties, the company created Vevo Live. Last week, a Fifth Harmony Vevo Live show attracted more than 3 million viewers across social platforms. Continue reading Vevo Brings New Live Talk Show Format to Social Platforms

High dynamic range (HDR) is gaining steam in movies and television even as it divides into different versions, each of which has its supporters. Dolby Vision has attracted Sony and TCL, while Samsung, with its HDR10+ open standard, gathered Amazon Video as a streaming partner. Now, partnered with 20th Century Fox and Panasonic, Samsung plans to begin licensing HDR10+ in January of this coming year. The three companies hope that television, Blu-ray and set-top box manufacturers will adopt the HDR10+ format. Continue reading 20th Century Fox, Panasonic, Samsung Partner on HDR10+

According to comScore’s annual U.S. Mobile Apps Report, consumers spend 57 percent of their digital media time on smartphones and tablets using apps. The figure is roughly the same as the previous year, suggesting that the shift to mobile has reached a point of leveling out. The report also notes that Facebook and Google own eight of the top 10 apps. Among the most popular mobile apps today are Facebook (top app for all age groups except 18- to 24-year-olds), YouTube (No. 2 overall and No. 1 with 18- to 24-year-olds), Facebook Messenger, Google Search, Google Maps, Instagram, Snapchat, Google Play, Gmail and Pandora. Continue reading Facebook and Google Take the Lead in Popular Mobile Apps

At AMIA’s The Reel Thing conference in Hollywood, HBO director of archives and asset management Randal Luckow and Digital Preservation Laboratories president Steve Kochak discussed cataloging unstructured metadata for preservation in distributed databases using the open standard Archive eXchange Format (AXF). Migrating physical elements often leaves out information important for the future, and metadata generated in the course of the project isn’t always documented, leading to problems linking the metadata to digital audio-video.

Continue reading Archivists Promote AXF as Standard to End Metadata Issues

At AMIA’s The Reel Thing conference in Hollywood, Sony Pictures Entertainment senior vice president of technology for production and post production Bill Baggelaar presented a session on HDR video mastering for classic cinema. He first hoped to dispel myths about high dynamic range. “I’ve heard that you need sunglasses to watch HDR, that filmmakers will hate it and that it will be too hard to deliver,” he said. “People also worry that there are too many formats, with HDR10, Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and HLG.” Continue reading Sony Pictures Masters Classic Films in High Dynamic Range

Facebook is bringing football to its social media platform: not NFL games, but rather 15 college football games whose exclusive rights are owned by Stadium, a 24/7 digital sports broadcaster. Stadium will produce customized programs for Facebook that will not be shown elsewhere, either online or on broadcast television. In sports, Facebook has streamed some NBA and MLB games and signed a deal with Fox Sports to stream some Champions League soccer matches, but the Stadium deal is the company’s first exclusive sports deal. Continue reading Facebook to Stream College Football in First Exclusive Deal

Following a period of testing, LinkedIn is launching a “video” button on its iOS and Android apps, debuting it globally over several weeks. The button will allow users to record a new video or upload an existing one. According to the company, which is a subsidiary of Microsoft, it will allow users to share aspects of their professional lives in a new way, and to a professional audience. The addition of video on LinkedIn takes place as companies such as Apple, Facebook and YouTube are investing in original video content. Continue reading LinkedIn Rolls Out Feature That Allows Users to Post Videos

The National Football League and China’s Tencent Holdings have signed a deal to give the latter exclusive rights to livestream games and other NFL content online for three years. Tencent will stream the games and other content for free on its flagship social media app, WeChat, as well as other mobile and desktop platforms. WeChat has more than 960 million monthly active users. The NFL first made a move into China in 2009 when it produced a 16-episode reality TV series in which a Taiwanese pop band explored football culture. Continue reading Tencent Signs Deal With NFL to Livestream Games in China

Speaking at the Edinburgh International Television Festival yesterday, Snapchat’s head of content Nick Bell said the social platform will likely offer scripted content via Snapchat Shows by the end of the year. However, Bell does not see Snapchat as a broadcast TV killer. “Mobile is the most complementary thing to TV that has been around,” Bell said. “We’re really capturing the audience who are not probably consuming TV at the same rate and pace of engagement that they once were.” He noted that NBC’s “The Voice” and ABC’s “The Bachelor” both experienced a boost in viewer numbers after launching Snapchat offshoots. Continue reading Snapchat Plans to Offer Scripted Content by End of the Year

Microsoft has debuted Brainwave, a system that improves AI hardware performance, enabling machine learning at speeds beyond what’s available today with CPUs or GPUs. At the Hot Chips symposium in Cupertino, California, researchers showed off a Gated Recurrent Unit model running on Intel’s newly released Stratix 10 FPGA (field programmable gate array chip), at a speed of 39.5 teraflops without batching operations. Brainwave currently supports models constructed with Microsoft’s CNTK framework and Google’s TensorFlow framework. Continue reading Microsoft Intros Brainwave, Jumpstarting AI Hardware Speed

This year, 500 scripted TV shows will vie for viewers’ attention. Now, some tech leaders are turning up the heat by entering the original programming market: Apple has budgeted more than $1 billion for original content; Google will spend up to $3 million per episode; and Facebook said it is willing to spend $3 million to $4 million per episode. A few cable companies, including A&E and WGN, are withdrawing from scripted content but, with three tech titans in the game, the competition for eyeballs will be fierce. Continue reading Three Tech Titans Up the Ante in Scripted TV Programming

In an effort to attract younger viewers, CNN has unveiled “The Update,” a daily three-to-five-minute news show exclusively for Snapchat. The show will run at 6:00 pm ET every day, with breaking news updates throughout the early morning and evening. “The Update” will replace CNN’s existing magazine-like “edition” produced daily for Snapchat’s Discover section. NBC also debuted a twice-daily news show in July this year. As one of Snapchat’s first publishing partners, CNN began created editions for the platform in early 2015. Continue reading CNN Targets Young Audience With News Show on Snapchat