philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Gravity’s Amit Kapur Says Personalization Is Going To “Explode” This Year

“The basic notion is that you should stop having to put in work to find information,” he added. “Information should understand you and actually find you. I think that, again, this is really the year that you’re going to see it explode, and for Gravity, the idea of combining with AOL is going to help us take that to scale aggressively.”

See the full story and a five minute video here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/26/gravity-amit-kapur/?ncid=rss?ncid=tcdaily

Sony Unveils 4K-Shooting Smartphone, Tablet

Sony went to the Mobile World Congress to launch its first smartphone and first tablet with 4K video capture. The smartphones and tablets run Android and feature 4G LTE. Both are promoted as being waterproof.

The 4K tablet and smartphone, part of the premium Xperia series, are the company’s first with built-in noise-cancellation technology, which is promoted as reducing ambient noise by up to 98 percent when used with a compatible wired noise-canceling headset from Sony. The 4K phone and tablet will be available globally in March. The mid-tier Android phone and the smart band will be available in April. Prices weren’t disclosed.

The 4K smartphone is the Xperia Z2 with FullHD 5.2-inch Triluminous display, 20.7-megapixel camera, 2.3GHz quad-core Qualcomm CPU, Adreno330 GPU, 3GB RAM, 3,200 mAh battery, 8.2mm depth, dedicated camera button and optional plug-in stereo microphone. It is rated at IP55 for dust resistance and carries an IP58 waterproof rating.

See the full story here: http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/sony-unveils-k-shooting-smartphone-tablet/268966

Apple Gives Disney a Juicy New Bite

Film preservation 2.0

The most commonly used format for digital archiving is Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology, a magnetic tape format that is most commonly used for enterprise data backups. LTO tapes are more stable than hard drives, which are subject to mechanical failure, but they’re far from ideal. Although it’s estimated that they have a 15-to-30-year lifespan, most studios assume a practical lifespan of five years. ...

Worse still, if the studio’s copies of a Digital Source Master are lost, another copy isn’t likely to appear. The Digital Cinema Packages that are distributed to theaters are encrypted with keys that will only work for a limited period of time—after the key expires, the data is irretrievable. So the days of a pristine print being found in the basement of a small-town theater are over—at best, trash-pickers would find hard drives with files they couldn’t play back. ...

No one is ever going to tell the story, years from now, of the tape-copy operation that gave The Wolf Of Wall Street five more years. But digital cinema—our cinema—won’t survive for some future Howard Carter to find generations from now. It will be saved, if it is saved, by an older kind of archivist: monks in scriptoria, loading tapes into drives, painstakingly transcribing old data to new media, outrunning history.

See the full story here: http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/429-film-preservation-20/?curator=MediaREDEF

Data privacy, machine learning and the destruction of mysterious humanity

We can think of advances in ad targeting as increases in image resolution.

So where does this increasingly realistic picture of the consumer go from here? This data inevitably has gaps. And while many of those gaps will be filled by better and more varied sensors (mobile data, connected automobiles, Jawbone, Nest, etc.), there’s another tool for filling them in: machine learning.

Data left online and in the real world form anchor points in the photo of you, from which machine learning algorithms can project the rest of your image. And as machine learning models grow in accuracy and sophistication, particularly at companies with an incentive to target ads, so does the interpolated image of exactly who you are.

This is where Facebook and Google are investing huge amounts of dollars. Recruiting directly from the professor pool, these companies are grabbing up the top machine learning minds in the world, such as Facebook’s recent hire of Yann LeCun to lead a new AI lab.

The famous neurologist Viktor Frankl once said, “A human being is a deciding being.” But if our decisions can be hacked by model-assisted corporations, then we have to admit that perhaps we cease to be human as we’ve known it. Instead of being unique or special, we all become predictable and expected, nothing but products of previous measured actions.

...

And these echo chambers can reinforce societal problems. This is a concern with Chicago’s crime hotspot targeting model. What happens when a model shits where it eats? Police focus in on a hot spot and generate more arrests there. Those hotspots become hotter. The neighborhood gets less desirable. Education and jobs suffer. Those hotspots become hotter. The model sends more police. And on and on the death spiral goes.

This past year Mark Zuckerberg attended one of the big AI conferences called the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference. This is kind of like David Bowie stopping at your house to catch up on some Game of Thrones with you.

Why’d Zuck go to NIPS? To learn, to recruit, to cozy up to the machine learning community. Because Facebook is invested in the dismantling of its users piece by piece, using data and machine learning, to process humans into a segmentation-ready data slurry that’s more palatable to its customers, the advertisers.

Read the full story here: http://gigaom.com/2014/02/22/data-privacy-machine-learning-and-the-destruction-of-mysterious-humanity/?curator=MediaREDEF

Anti-Gravity MX3C-Metal 3D Printer Prints in Mid-Air

[Phil Lelyveld comment: Combine this metal welder/rebar printer with the concrete-squirting building 3D printers and you've got the possibility of some pretty interesting structures.]

The ‘anti-gravity’ MX3C-Metal 3D printer from the Joris Laarman Lab is able to print lines of metal in mid-air, enabling it to create complex metal shapes with irregular surfaces.

Developed by the same company that gave us the outer space-friendly MATAERIAL, the MX3C-Metal can print lines of copper, stainless steel, aluminum or bronze. Described as a combination of a 3D printer and a welding machine, the printer extrudes the molten metal through a robotic arm, which can form the metal lines in mid-air without the need for extra support structures.

Read the full story here: http://www.ideaconnection.com/new-inventions/anti-gravity-mx3c-metal-3d-printer-prints-in-mid-air-08050.html

Google’s “Project Tango” Prototype Phone Tackles 3-D Sensor Tech

Google announced a new initiative on Thursday that aims to bring 3-D sensor technology into a new series of prototype Android smartphones.

Dubbed “Project Tango,” the new venture involves a Google-built five-inch phone that includes sensors that track the movement of the device while modeling the space and landscape around it. In essence, it builds 3-D renderings of its surroundings that, perhaps one day, could be used in the mapping of building interiors, according to Google.

Google isn’t the first company interested in the 3-D sensor tech space. Late last year, Apple completed its acquisition of Israeli 3-D sensor startup Primesense for about $360 million. Similarly, Intel has shown off reference designs for laptops that could incorporate 3-D camera technology, much like Microsoft’s Kinect device.

See the full story here: http://recode.net/2014/02/20/googles-project-tango-prototype-phone-tackles-3-d-sensor-tech/

More info is here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/20/inside-the-revolutionary-3d-vision-chip-at-the-heart-of-googles-project-tango-phone/?ncid=tcdaily

Media Groups Launch Task Force on File Format and Media Interoperability

The launch of the Joint Task Force on File Formats and Media Interoperability was announced today by its sponsors, the North American Broadcasters Association, Advanced Media Workflow Association, Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, International Association of Broadcast Manufacturers, American Association of Advertising Agencies, and Association of National Advertisers. The European Broadcasting Union is participating as an observer.

Bringing together manufacturers, broadcasters, advertisers, ad agencies, and industry organizations serving the professional media market, the Task Force has an ultimate goal to create greater efficiencies and cost savings for exchange of file-based content. The group's initial focus will be to gather and analyze requirements for a machine-generated and readable file interchange and delivery specification — including standardized and common structured metadata — for the professional media industry. Use case examples include promo, spot, and program delivery from a provider to a broadcaster.

“We believe that, by improving the specification and exchange of professional media between organizations, we can enable new and more efficient file-based workflows,” said Clyde Smith, senior vice president of new technology, Fox Network and a member of the NABA technical committee that initiated creation of the joint task force. “The task force represents a diverse group of sponsor organizations with an extensive global reach, and together we will gather and analyze information not only about user requirements, but also about current standards and specifications. With this information we can rationalize the complexity of the current media landscape and make useful process and technology recommendations that improve workflow interoperability while reducing the attendant costs of file-based operations.”

Read the full story here: http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/media-groups-launch-task-force-on-file-format-and-media-interoperability/223700

Metadata takes leading role in social entertainment

This massive amount of entertainment data can be used to form frameworks to pinpoint cast members in episodes, guest stars and episode descriptions.

As a result, metadata helps organise social conversations and maximise the information people really want. It makes search more powerful and enables more meaningful interactions between viewers, content creators and brands.

Social media sites understand the power of metadata for helping connect to conversations and targeting specific interests. Facebook for example uses entertainment metadata to improve the search and discovery process across its network. Its new social graph search tool allows users to search for interests such as “TV shows my friends are watching”, and gather results based on answers collected from their social connections’ shares on the network.

See the full story here: http://www.iptv-news.com/2014/02/report-metadata-takes-leading-role-in-social-entertainment/

TMS and aioTV Sign Entertainment Metadata Agreement

TMS' On® Entertainment Metadata Will Enable aioTV to Deliver Advanced Content Search and Discovery to Cable Operator Customers

TMS, the international leader in entertainment navigation, and aioTV, a global provider of OTT middleware to cable operators and other video service providers, today announced that TMS' world-class On Entertainment metadata will enable advanced search and discovery of aggregated live TV, VOD and online video content in the multi-screen UIs aioTV creates for domestic and international customers.

aioTV will use the full range of TMS' On Entertainment metadata for Europe and Latin America.

aioTV will demonstrate its OTT video platform featuring TMS' On Entertainment data at the National Cable Television Cooperative's Winter Educational Conference taking place on February 17 and 18 in Tampa, FL.

TMS data reaches millions of consumers in 40 countries through clients including Microsoft, Yahoo!, TiVo, Time Warner Cable, Verizon FiOS TV, IMDb, Virgin Media UK, Com Hem, DIRECTV Latin America and Cablevision Mexico. In addition, this comprehensive metadata is used extensively for media measurement and analysis.