Media – Page 127 – Product Management Confabulation

February 3, 2020

Apple News adds coverage of 2020 U.S. presidential election, including guides to candidates, issues & news literacy

As it has done in previous election years, Apple today has added special coverage of the 2020 US presidential election to its Apple News app. The coverage includes curated news, information, and data related to the election from ABC News, CBS News, CNN, FiveThirtyEight, Fox News, NBC News, ProPublica, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, TIME, USA Today and others.

The Apple News editorial team has also put together a series of curated guides, special features and other resources for readers from both sides of the political spectrum, Apple says. And the app will be updated with election information throughout the year and will track major election moments, including the debates, Super Tuesday, Democratic and Republican conventions, election night, and the 2021 presidential inauguration in real-time.

Apple had announced in December it was working in close partnership with ABC News on 2020 presidential election coverage within the Apple News app, which it said would begin on Feb. 7, 2020, with a live stream of the Democratic primary debate. It also said it would feature ABC News videos, live streams, and FiveThirtyEight polling data, infographics, and analysis during key moments of the 2020 election. It wasn’t clear at the time if Apple was working exclusively with ABC for this year’s election coverage, but today’s announcement indicates it is not.

Apple confirms today that ABC’s coverage will begin on Feb. 7, as promised, with live-streaming video, starting with the debate, plus FiveThirtyEight’s analysis, and real-time updates from various outlets.

The Feb. 7 debate will also be live-streamed through the Apple TV app, available for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, and select Samsung and LG smart TVs.

In the Apple News app starting today, users will be able to track real-time election results from the Associated Press for each state primary, giving county-by-county results, a national map tracking candidate wins by state, and a delegate tracker that shows candidates’ progress toward securing the nomination.

As before, Apple News offers a guide to each presidential candidate, which includes their biography, experience, notable moments and quotes, and their current position on key issues. These guides will also include photos, videos, and links to recent media coverage.

In addition, the Apple News team has put together dedicated guides to important topics and issues, including foreign affairs, income inequality, trade, immigration, education, health care, and others, as well as a news literacy guide that help readers identify misinformation online. This guide, developed in partnership with the News Literacy Project, will provide tips about how to seek out accurate and reliable information.

Apple has been developing guides to U.S. elections for several years now. The company began to push its own election coverage after the 2016 election controversies that saw large tech companies, including Google, Twitter and Facebook, facing congressional inquiries and investigations regarding the Russian interference with elections that took place across their networks. Since then, Apple News rolled out its own guide to the U.S. midterms, followed by a real-time election results hub on November 6, 2018. It also added a guide to the 2020 Democratic candidates and debates.

[gallery ids="1940892,1940893,1940894,1940895,1940896"]

To access the new 2020 election coverage available via the Today tab in Apple News in the U.S., users will need to update to iOS 13.3, iPadOS 13.3 or macOS 10.15.2.

February 2, 2020

Original Content podcast: Netflix’s ‘Cheer’ provides a gripping, painful look at competitive cheerleading

“Cheer,” a new documentary series on Netflix, may be singlehandedly changing the way many people think about cheerleading.

The show follows the competitive cheerleading team at Navarro College in Texas as they prepare to compete once more in the national championships, and it quickly becomes clear that this is a physically demanding sport, requiring extraordinary strength and coordination — and resulting in serious injuries when things go wrong.

Those injuries have spurred a broader conversation about whether or not coach Monica Aldama, along with the organizations and institutions that behind competitive cheerleading, are doing enough to protect the cheerleaders. We had very different opinions on the issue, and on Aldama herself, leading to an extended debate on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast.

One thing that we all agreed on, however, is that the documentary offers an illuminating look at a world that most of us only knew through the teen comedy “Bring It On.” It’s filled with compelling characters — not just Aldama, but also many of the students on her team, with the show taking the time to sketch out their often difficult or even tragic childhoods.

Before our review of “Cheer,” we also discuss a report that Netflix laid off part of its marketing team as part of a broader shift in promotional strategy.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:

0:00 Intro
0:43 Netflix marketing news
8:27 “Cheer” spoiler-free review
43:27 “Cheer” spoiler discussion

February 2, 2020

Watch this year’s tech-themed Super Bowl ads from Amazon, Google and more

Many of the companies spending big bucks on today’s big game have already released their ads (or teasers for those ads) on YouTube. So if you’re curious about what how tech companies will be promoting themselves tonight, this is the roundup for you.

Some of these ads come from tech giants like Amazon and Facebook, who have hired big stars to promote their products. Meanwhile, Dashlane found a fun way to remind viewers of the nightmare of life without a password manager, while Squarespace enlisted Winona Ryder to build a website on the platform.

The Super Bowl also provides an opportunity for automotive companies like Hyundai to put new technology front-and-center in their marketing, and for SodaStream to take viewers into space. And while voice assistants don’t seem to be as big a theme as they were last year, at least we’re getting a killer robot, courtesy of Pringles and “Ricky and Morty.”

You can watch the ads in alphabetical order below. And I’ll update this post as more ads become available online.

Amazon

Audi

Dashlane

Facebook (teaser)

Google

Hyundai

Microsoft

Pringles

SodaStream

Squarespace

T-Mobile

TurboTax

January 30, 2020

Publisher engagement startup Insticator bets on commenting with Sqwuak It acquisition

Insticator, a startup helping publishers add elements like polls, quizzes and suggested story widgets to their content, has made its first acquisition — a commenting platform called Sqwuak It.

Insticator CEO Zack Dugow said his platform benefits online publishers by keeping audiences engaged and bringing in new ad revenue (which is split between Insticator and the publisher). And he sees commenting as a natural next step towards his goal to become “the main monetization and community engagement solution for publishers.”

While “don’t read the comments” remains one of the most reliable pieces of advice you’ll get online, Dugow said Sqwuak It (yes, that’s the real spelling — it was formerly known as Solid Opinion) stands out from other commenting platforms because of its reliance on “100 percent human moderation,” with moderators working in three shifts to to monitor partner sites 24 hours each day.

“Anybody can game an algorithm,” he said.

And when I brought up the concern that so much of the discussion has moved out of the comments section and onto social media, Dugow responded that “merging social commenting” so that it feels like everything is part of the same conversation is “in our roadmap.”

Like other Insticator products, Sqwuak It comments (which you can see below the article here) are monetized through advertising. But Dugow noted that the ads run above the comments, rather interrupting or distracting from the comments themselves.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Dugow said the entire 13-person Squawk It team (headquartered in New York but with an engineering team in Kiev) has joined Insticator, and that the product has already been rebranded as Insticator Comments.

Insticator raises $5.2M to help publishers make their stories more interactive

January 30, 2020

Why Sony’s PlayStation Vue failed

Sony’s PlayStation Vue, one of the first services to offer streaming live TV over the internet, is shutting down today. The service launched in March 2015, offering live and on-demand content from more than 85 channels, including many local broadcast stations, to select U.S. markets. Over the years, Vue expanded across the U.S. as it added more channels, more local stations and features like multi-channel viewing on the same screen, among other innovations.

But Vue failed to catch on with a broader audience, despite — or perhaps, because of — its integration with Sony’s PS3 and PS4 devices.

Sony’s decision to name the service “PlayStation Vue” didn’t do it any favors from a branding perspective. Many consumers, if they heard of it at all, assumed it was something only available to PlayStation console owners.

The company also took too long to expand the service to include popular platforms many cord-cutters were using at the time to watch streaming services. It added support for Amazon Fire TV by November 2015, but full support for Google Chromecast, as well as Apple TV and Roku — the latter of which grew to become the most popular connected TV platform in the U.S. — didn’t arrive until the following year. That limited Vue’s availability at a time when people were beginning to look for new streaming options.

January 30, 2020

AWS partners with sports leagues to change how we watch games

Since the inception of professional sports, fans have sought statistics about how their favorite teams and players are performing. Until recently, these stats were generated from basic counting, like batting averages, home runs or touchdowns.

Today, sports leagues are looking to learn more about players and find a competitive edge through more advanced stats. Beyond that, they want to engage fans more with tools like AWS NFL’s Next Gen Stats and MLB’s Statcast, software that uses compelling visuals to illustrate statistics like the probability of receiving a catch in the end zone or a runner’s speed between home and first base.

AWS counts Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the German Bundesliga soccer league, NASCAR, Formula 1 racing and Six Countries Rugby among its customers. How, exactly, are advanced cloud technology and machine learning helping change how we watch live sports?

Building on Moneyball

January 30, 2020

AWS partners with sports leagues to change how we watch games

Building on Moneyball

January 29, 2020

HBO Max investment hits AT&T’s revenue in Q4 to the tune of $1.2B

AT&T’s revenue took a hit in the fourth quarter as the company gears up for the launch of WarnerMedia’s new streaming service, HBO Max, due to arrive this May. The WarnerMedia division, which includes HBO as well as Turner and Warner Bros., saw revenue decline 3.3% to $8.92 billion — a drop that was in part attributed to WarnerMedia’s decision to not license shows and movies to other services in advance of HBO Max’s debut. The HBO Max investment, which includes these “foregone WarnerMedia content licensing revenues,” totaled $1.2 billion.

WarnerMedia also saw a 9.5% decline in fourth-quarter operating income to $2.4 billion, related to the HBO Max investment.

Among the shows which WarnerMedia decided to keep in-house ahead of HBO Max were Friends and Big Bang Theory, which in the past have been sold externally.

These impacts, along with the loss of subscribers to AT&T’s pay-TV business and other streaming services, also helped pull AT&T’s overall revenue down in Q4. The company reported total fourth-quarter revenue of $46.82 billion, down 2.4%, and profit of $2.39 billion (or 33 cents per share), down from $4.86 billion (or 66 cents per share) in the same period a year ago.

The company saw significant losses in streaming and its pay-TV business. It lost 945,000 pay-TV subscribers across DirecTV and U-Verse, as well as 219,000 subscribers for its over-the-top streaming service, AT&T TV Now. AT&T’s streaming service has lost subscribers throughout the year, noted The Hollywood Reporter, with a loss of 83,000 subscribers in Q1, 168,000 in Q2, and 195,000 in Q3. By the end of the year, AT&T TV Now ended up with 926,000 subscribers. That’s less than half the estimated subscriber numbers for Hulu’s live TV streaming service (not its VOD product).

On the pay-TV side, the company ended the year with 19.5 million customers, again following a stream of quarterly losses that peaked in Q3, when the businesses lost a combined 1.2 million subscribers.

On the earnings call, AT&T acknowledged that HBO Max would be “critical” to the company’s success going forward. WarnerMedia CEO and AT&T COO John Stankey said the service would be the “highest-quality premium SVOD [service] in the market with a great experience, better curation, and higher percentage of culturally relevant offerings than competing products.”

Stankey noted the company would have some “pretty aggressive promotions” for HBO Max at launch, including some wireless customers who will get it for free on some unlimited plans. It’s doing deals with potential distribution partners, including both digital platforms and pay-TV companies. And HBO’s over 10 million customers on AT&T’s existing distribution platforms will be offered access to HBO Max immediately at launch, to give it a fast start.

In the meantime, however, the HBO Max investment will continue to impact near-term revenues, AT&T warned.

“In the first part of the year, we expect pressure from heavy HBO Max investment, which you saw begin in the fourth quarter,” said AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens. But the company remains hopeful that HBO Max will do well.

“In the second half of the year, you will see our momentum build…HBO Max will have launched leading to strong subscriber growth. The run rate benefits of our cost reduction plans will be clearly visible. And 5G combined with HBO Max will drive more upgrades and stronger wireless revenue growth later in the year,” Stephens added.

Of course, HBO Max’s success is not guaranteed. AT&T may be bundling the service and offering it to existing HBO customers, but it still needs to grow its subscriber base with new sign-ups. And this year, there’s a lot of new competition in streaming, thanks to the recent launches of Disney+ and Apple TV+ as well as the soon-to-arrive new services including NBCU’s Peacock and Quibi.

January 29, 2020

Google’s Area 120 launches Tangi, a short-form video app focused on creativity and DIY

The latest project to emerge from Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120, takes the newfound interest in short-form video and focuses it on the DIY space. The company today is launching a short video platform called Tangi, initially on the web and iOS, that allows creative types to share how-to videos on subjects like crafting, painting, cooking, fashion, beauty and more.

Unlike apps like TikTok or newly-launched Byte, which are more focused on entertainment, Tangi aims to help people learn.

“We only focus on DIY and creativity content,” explains Tangi founder, Coco Mao. “Our platform’s goal is to help people learn to craft, cook, and create with quick one-minute videos. We designed Tangi to make it easier for users to find a lot of high-quality how-to videos,” she says.

Mao was inspired to create Tangi after going home to visit her parents in Shanghai. She found they were watching a lot of how-to videos on painting and photography on their phone, even though she had always believed they were “smartphone challenged.”

“My mom has always had a creative side, and I was surprised to learn that she’s now an amateur oil painter thanks to these niche communities with quick how-to videos,” Mao says. “I, too, joined some of these vibrant creative communities that make videos around cooking and fashion. I noticed something magical in these videos: They could quickly get a point across—something that used to take a long time to learn with just text and images,” she notes.

While Tangi’s vertical videos can be up to one-minute long, most average around 45 seconds. That means it’s not necessarily the place to be walked step-by-step through a complicated recipe as you could be on YouTube, for example. Instead, the videos might show you a quick cooking trick or inspire you to try a new idea in the kitchen.

Another difference between Tangi and other short-form video apps is a feature it includes called “Try It.” This encourages users to upload photos of their re-creation of the video as a way to interact with other community members, says Mao.

For example, one of the most re-created videos is this one of making guacamole in the avocado shell.

The creator might leave an actual recipe in the comments, however, even if they don’t show you each individual step in detail. (And it’s arguably a lot easier to follow a recipe on Tangi than on most of today’s recipe sites which are overrun with ads and SEO-driven “personal stories.”)

Already, Tangi is being used by a number of creators including DIY and lifestyle blogger Holly Grace, portrait artist Rachel Faye Carter, baker and food creator Paola D Yee, beauty vlogger Sew Wigged Out, art and DIYer TheArtGe, cooking and DIYer JonathanBlogs, and others.

Also unlike other social video apps, uploading to Tangi isn’t currently open to all. Instead, creators need to apply to be a part of the video platform. This allows Tangi to ensure their videos remain focused on creativity and DIY activities.

As a viewer, you can search Tangi for whatever it is you want to learn or filter videos by category, like art, cooking, DIY, fashion & beauty, and lifestyle. Or you can simply scroll down the home page until something catches your interest. To save a video or show your support for the creator, you click the heart icon to like the video. This saves it to your “Liked” section under your profile.

Tangi ends up having a sort of Pinterest-y vibe due to its content.

At launch, Tangi is available everywhere except the E.U., initially on the web and on iOS. The app is a free download, is ad-free, and isn’t currently being monetized in other ways.

January 29, 2020

Whip Media Group, parent to TV show tracking app TV Time, raises $50M

In the streaming era, data on a show’s viewership and popularity is harder to come by. It’s no longer as simple as setting up a Nielsen box to get data on a show being watched across TVs, phones, tablets, and the web. One company solving this problem for content owners, broadcasters and streamers alike is Whip Media Group, parent company to the TV and movie tracking app TV Time. The company announced today it’s raised $50 million in Series D funding to continue to grow its business.

The round was led by asset management firm Eminence Capital and includes participation from Raine Ventures. To date, Whip Media Group has raised $115 million from Raine Ventures, Eminence, IVP and others.

Whip Media Group has a varied history. TV Time began as WhipClip, a source for a legal collection of GIFs from favorite shows. But following the company’s acquisition of French startup TVShow Time in December 2016, it pivoted to become a social TV community. The TV Time app allows users to track their favorite shows by marking episodes as watched, as well as join in the show’s community on the app where users discuss the episode; share photos, screencaps, and memes; take polls; and more. Its recommendations feature also helps users find more things to watch.

The company rebranded as Whip Media Group to reflect that it’s now home to a handful of businesses, including the TV Time app, as well as TheTVDB, an entertainment database for TV and movies and, more recently, the content value management platform, Mediamorph.

Though consumers only interact with the TV Time app, those engagements help to fuel Whip Media Group’s larger business.

Today, the TV Time app has anywhere between 800,000 and a million active users per day. And 50% of users contribute some sort of data — for example, following a show, creating content, liking another user’s post, reviewing an episode, commenting, and so on. To date, TV Time has tracked over 15 billion episodes.

Initially, TV Time was using this data was being used to develop a new type of ratings system for the cord-cutting era. But TV Time learned that a show’s ratings don’t matter to video-on-demand services that don’t sell advertising. Instead, what TV Time could provide was emotional data on how users responded to shows.

“By collecting [this data] we can build these models to not only say what people are watching, but also start to predict what they’re going to watch next,” said Whip Media Group CEO Richard Rosenblatt. In addition, the engagement data can help streamers find out things they never could before — like which moment in an episode had huge spikes of user interest, i.e. “the most memed moment.” This data can help them to better market the show as well help them think about the show’s direction for future seasons.

Now, with the acquisition of Mediamorph, Whip Media Group can also help to value content. This allows buyers and sellers to make determinations about where to sell shows and for how much.

This data is highly valuable to Whip Media Group’s clients, which include more than 50 of the biggest names in entertainment — like Disney, Warner Bros., Hulu, NBCU, Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate, BBC, HBO, AT&T, T-Mobile, Liberty Global, Discovery and United Talent Agency. (There are other large, household names in streaming that also use the company’s data, but can’t be disclosed due to NDAs.)

When a content owner sells a show to a modern-day streaming service, they often have no way of knowing how it performs.

Whip Media Group, starting at the end of Q1, will be able to start making predictions about where a particular piece of content available for sale should go, says Rosenblatt.

“We will be able to roll out, starting in the first quarter, an ‘engagement score,’ where [content owners will] actually be able to look at how one piece of content engages a certain demographic or a certain geography differently than another piece of content,” Rosenblatt explains. “If you think about how ad networks got started 20 years ago — and you were trying to match the right consumer with the right ad, and all the matter was if they clicked. Nothing else mattered. Google won because they had the best data, the best models…that’s what we want to do,” he continues.

“We want to put the right piece of content on the right platform, in the right country, to the right demographic. And we don’t think that there’s anyone else in this position like we are — that has all of that between Mediamorph and TV Time,” he says.

This data is more important than ever in an era where core classics are selling for as much as half a billion (like the “Seinfeld” sale to Netflix or “Friends” to HBO Max) or even more (like the billion-plus-dollar deal for “Big Bang Theory,” which also went to HBO Max.)

More broadly, global online television episode and movie revenues will reach $159 billion in 2024; more than double the $68 billion recorded in 2018, according to Research and Markets.

Whip Media Group’s new round of funding is being used, in part, to help pay for the Mediamorph acquisition, which was a combination of cash and stock. But the majority is being used to grow the business, including by expanding the company’s sales and data teams and accelerating product development.

The company has already hired 20 people so far and expects to hire 50 by year-end, mostly on the data and engineering sides.

“Whip Media Group is building software and data solutions that will transform the way content is being bought and sold throughout the global entertainment ecosystem,” said Ricky Sandler, Chief Executive Officer of Eminence Capital, in a statement. “We believe in their vision and their exceptional leadership and technology teams and are excited to partner with them as they rapidly expand their business.”