philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

ARTICLE COMMENTS (0)RELATED CONTENTPRINT EMAIL North America households with Ultra HD TVs expected to pass 10% by end of 2018, says ABI Research

Asia-Pacific, notably, China, is expected to lead Ultra HD TV unit shipments. However, the North America market is anticipated to be the first region to eclipse 5% (in 2017) and 10% (by end of 2018) of TV households. Despite limited Ultra HD content, declining Ultra HD TV prices will facilitate the expansion of the installed base through normal upgrade cycles, according to ABI Research.

ABI Research practice director Sam Rosen added, "Unlike 3D, which required awkward glasses, Ultra HD has the legs to become an industry norm. This isn't a sprint, however, and it will take time for the necessary infrastructure, installed base of devices, and content to come together before Ultra HD becomes an integral part of how the typical TV household consumes video content.

Read the full story here: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20131114PR203.html

Rovi to Power TV Data on Xbox One

Driving digital entertainment innovation, Rovi Corporation (Nasdaq:ROVI) today announced Rovi Video, a leading database for global TV, movie and celebrity metadata, will supply data for the TV electronic program guide experience, OneGuide on Microsoft's Xbox One. The launch is a part of a larger initiative that is planned to include the use of Rovi Video on Xbox One in multiple countries, which is made easier by Rovi's ability to deliver a multi-region, multi-format data solution for TV, tablets and mobile phones.

"OneGuide gives users instant access to all TV shows and movies they love in one place -- no more switching between devices or TV inputs," said Martin Sacchi, General Manager, Content Acquisition, Media and Entertainment Group at Xbox. "We're so pleased to work with Rovi, one of the top TV data providers, to power this unique Xbox One experience and bring our vision for the future of the living room to life on Nov. 22."

Rovi's metadata, with deep, descriptive editorial data, images and multimedia, supports a full "six degrees of discovery" experience to encourage people to explore and find the show or movie to fit their mood. Rovi Video is a part of Rovi's entertainment data library that includes information on music, movies, games, books, television, and sports, as well as cover art, reviews, celebrity biographies, photos, rich multimedia and more. It currently has descriptive information on approximately 5 million programs, 27,000 different sources, and 560,000 movies and films, spanning classics to current box office hits. The database supports a variety of devices and is widely used by leading entertainment devices, pay-TV services, and popular video and music applications today.

See the full press release here: http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20131114-908523.html?dsk=y

Seeing Beyond Black and White (Art exhibit – history of color photography)

Philip Lelyveld comment: this story report on an art exhibit of the history of color photography is also a really good pocket-history of color photography.  This quote describes the dilemma faced by content creators and CE display manufacturers; "...there is a theoretical question as to whether pictures should be of color or in color; that is, is color what the image is about, or is the color simply additive."

See the full story here: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304402104579149492625911678

Google Relents on YouTube Ad Measurement

Nielsen to Begin Tracking Viewership of Videos

Marketers like Nielsen's service because it gives them a metric that is comparable to audience ratings in television which Nielsen has long supplied. Advertisers can make a similar comparison using comScore's metric, which is known as Validated Campaign Essentials, but some advertisers already have a relationship with Nielsen for other services and don't want to use two measurement firms.

Google's refusal to accept Nielsen's tags upset those advertisers, media buyers say, particularly as some marketers don't want to accept Google's own measurement of ads running on YouTube.

See the full article here: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303914304579192211449903486

A World Without Maps

Phil Lelyveld comment; I have always loved maps, GIS, and graphic representations of real world space.  This article reports on an art exhibit which describes the evolution of ancient maps from descriptions of global power relationships to representations of the real world.

See the full story here: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304106704579137923797635300

Hollywood Isn’t Adopting 48 Frames Per Second

There's no doubt in my mind that we're heading towards movies being shot and projected at high frame rates," predicted Peter Jackson in 2012 as The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first big movie made at 48 frames per second, headed to theaters. A year later, though, with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug due Dec. 13, Hollywood's interest in high frame rates, or HFR, remains unfocused at best.

For all of Jackson's proselytizing, at most, 1,000 screens out of the 39,056 screens in the U.S. will be equipped to show his new movie in the eye-popping new process. And while other filmmakers are intrigued, none, so far, has followed Jackson's example. Bryan Singer, who visited Wellington, New Zealand, for The Hobbit's premiere, says he found the look of Jackson's movie "really stunning." But for X-Men: Days of Future Past, opening May 23, he stuck with 24 fps because, he says, "I had concerns about how certain sequences would look, and there is also a cost factor in rendering the visual effects."

See the full story here: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hobbit-desolation-smaug-48-frames-655444

EXCLUSIVE: EXECS DISCUSS SECOND SCREENS AT BROADBANDTVCON

By Phil Lelyveld

November 12, 2013

The BroadbandTVCon broadband TV and multi-screen summit took place at Hollywood & Highland on November 5-6. Executives from a range of companies including AOL, AT&T, CBS, Dijit Media, Omelet, Ooyala, Unicorn Media, Watchwith and Yahoo! gathered to offer their impressions regarding the direction of second screen apps, the impact of mobile devices, the growing influence of millennials and the subsequent changes to content and advertising.

Ooyala’s Sudhir Kaushik noted that 67 percent of U.S. consumers get their content on devices other than TVs, and that advertising is considered content. Content that loses value when it is not watched live (for example: sports, news) is driving the audience to want to watch content across devices, he added.

Chuck Parker, Unicorn Media’s chief revenue officer, noted that smartphones are never shared, and tablets are rarely shared. As TV Anywhere and second screen apps proliferate, it will become increasingly easier to track individual viewing behavior.

Amazon gets 150 percent more revenue from customers after they sign up for Amazon Prime, explained Brent Imai, executive director of original content development at AT&T U-Verse. The winners in the content space will be a few players who use content to sell something else, he argued.

Ran Harnevo, who leads the AOL On Network, said that 70 percent of their content views come from collaborator sites and sources other than the AOL On site. You can’t do everything yourself, he said. The content must find the audience, not the other way around.

Regarding content licensing rules and restrictions, Omelet co-founder Steven Amato said that his staff of millennials works together to find the content that they personally want to watch, regardless of the source.

Harnevo also noted that Web content must be authentic and true to the medium. There is a new storytelling language emerging. No laugh tracks, he said.

Dijit Media CEO Jeremy Toeman said that millennials build relationships as a blend of offline and online interactions. That is why personal talking-head programs like “Young Hollywood” or “The Young Turks” can be wildly successful.

Adam Besserman, head of west coast development at Yahoo!, added that user behavior varies by platform. You must program differently for Yahoo!, Hulu and YouTube.

Celebrities must have their own digital footprints. Lifecaster and YouTube comedian iJustine (Justine Ezarik), with 16.3 million Twitter followers, is a new kind of celebrity. Nicole Richie has a committed audience of 4.5 million Twitter followers and 10 million Instagram followers, yet most mainstream media is not aware that she is more than Paris Hilton’s ex-BFF.

CBS Interactive’s Jeff Shultz made three points about second screens: 1) second screen supports engagement, 2) second screen has become the first screen for millennials, and 3) second screen interface makes content discovery easier. TV Guide Mobile is one of the most widely used apps in the world. Their data shows that most users make use of it more than 20 times a month. Because second screen apps like TV Guide Mobile provide additional information, they blur the line between augmenting content and discovery.

It is difficult for second screen development to keep up with the hype, added Zane Vella, CEO and co-founder of San Francisco-based Watchwith. Influential voices can amplify the impact of second screen successes and failures. The emergence of second screen needs to be looked at as the modern equivalent of the transition from radio to TV.

Second screen application development, like software development, is an iterative process. The app is released, consumer feedback — including A/B testing data — is gathered, and the app is modified. Vella said that ‘iteration’ is a hard concept for traditional media people to accept. They are used to ending their development cycle with a finished product.

For more information on the summit, visit the BroadbandTVCon site.

See the original post here: http://www.etcentric.org/exclusive-execs-discuss-second-screens-at-broadbandtvcon/#more-68098

Amazon’s new graphical cloud helps make desktops obsolete

Starting at $0.65 per hour you’ll be able to run in the Amazon cloud DirectX, OpenGL, CUDA, and OpenCL applications and services. The base g2.2xlarge instance comes with 15 gigs of memory, 60 gigs of local storage, an Intel Sandy Bridge processor running at 2.6 GHz (26 compute units) and a single NVIDIA Kepler GK104 graphics card with 1536 CUDA cores.

It’s pretty obvious to me that this graphical cloud will be useful for things like encoding and transcoding video and audio, especially for those who don’t need to do it very often, but the bigger question is whether it’s enough to kill most desktop computing? I suspect it is, though maybe not in exactly the way people expect.

Read the full story here: http://www.cringely.com/2013/11/06/amazons-new-graphical-cloud-helps-make-desktops-obsolete/

Four 4K TV facts you must know

With video on a TV, the difference between 4K/UHD and 1080p/HD resolution is really hard to see.

If you want the best picture quality in an LCD next year, you may have to buy a 4K TV anyway.

Despite the lack of content, 4K TVs will get inexpensive and popular very quickly.

4K TVs won't make 1080p TVs obsolete anytime soon.

Read the full story, which reviews some 4K TVs, here: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33199_7-57610862-221/four-4k-tv-facts-you-must-know/

The State of 4K

[Phil Lelyveld comment: this is a good state of the industry story, covering cameras, editing, displays, and distribution.]

In the U.S., you can buy 4K TVs for around $1,000 on eBay, or three or four times that price from manufacturers like Sony and Sharp. One note about 4K monitors: there’s a difference between cinema 4K, television’s UltraHD, and 4K computer monitors; the latter may come in several different aspect ratios. Also, there are new color gamuts including a Cinema gamut and Rec. 2020 that are much larger than Rec.709. Very few current monitors can do the high-end gammas: which may be a reason for hanging back on a 4K purchase.

Do consumers really need a 4K TV, and will they  buy one anyway? Is there a noticeable difference to HD? If you have a very large TV, and you’re sitting close to it, then yes?

See the full story here: http://filmmakermagazine.com/77119-the-state-of-4k/