Spoiler warning! This neural network spots dangerous reviews before you read them

It’s hard to avoid spoilers on the internet these days — even if you’re careful, a random tweet or recommended news item could lay to waste your plan to watch that season finale a day late or catch a movie after the crowds have subsided. But soon an AI agent may do the spoiler-spotting for you, and flag spoilerific reviews and content before you even have a chance to look.

SpoilerNet is the creation of a team at UC San Diego, composed perhaps of people who tried waiting a week to see Infinity War and got snapped for their troubles. Never again!

They assembled a database of more than a million reviews from Amazon-owned reading community Goodreads, where it is the convention to note spoilers in any reviews, essentially line by line. As a user of the site I’m thankful for this capability, and the researchers were too — because nowhere else is there a corpus of written reviews in which whatever constitutes a “spoiler” has been meticulously labeled by a conscientious community.

(Well, sort of conscientious. As the researchers note: “we observe that in reality only a few users utilize this feature.”)

At any rate, such labeled data is these days basically food for what are generally referred to as AI systems: neural networks of various types that “learn” the qualities that define a specific image, object, or in this case spoilers. The team fed the 1.3 million Goodreads reviews into the system, letting it observe and record the differences between ordinary sentences and ones with spoilers in them.

Perhaps writers of reviews tend to begin sentences with plot details in a certain way — “Later it is revealed…” — or maybe spoilery sentences tend to lack evaluative words like “great” or “complex.” Who knows? Only the network.

Once its training was complete, the agent was set loose on a separate set of sentences (from both Goodreads and mind-boggling timesink TV Tropes), which it was able to label as “spoiler” or “non-spoiler” with up to 92 percent accuracy. Earlier attempts to computationally predict whether a sentence has spoilers in it haven’t fare so well; one paper by Chiang et al. last year broke new ground, but is limited by its dataset and approach, which allow it to consider only the sentence in front of it.

“We also model the dependency and coherence among sentences within the same review document, so that the high-level semantics can be incorporated,” lead author of the SpoilerNet paper, Mengting Wan, told TechCrunch in an email. This allows for a more complete understanding of a paragraph or review, though of course it is also necessarily a more complex problem.

But the more complex model is a natural result from richer data, he wrote:

Such a model design indeed benefits from the new large-scale review dataset we collected for this work, which includes complete review documents, sentence-level spoiler tags, and other meta-data. To our knowledge, the public dataset (released in 2013) before this work only involves a few thousand single-sentence comments rather than complete review documents. For research communities, such a dataset also facilitates the possibility of analyzing real-world review spoilers in details as well as developing modern ‘data-hungry’ deep learning models in this domain.

This approach is still new, and the more complex approach has its drawbacks. For instance, the model occasionally mistakes a sentence as having spoilers if other spoiler-ish sentence are adjacent; and its understanding of individual sentences is not quite good enough to understand when certain words really indicate spoilers or not. You and I know that “this kills Darth Vader” is a spoiler, while “this kills the suspense” isn’t, but a computer model may have trouble telling the difference.

Wan told me that the system should be able to run in real time on a user’s computer, though of course training it would be a much bigger job. That opens up the possibility of a browser plugin or app that reads reviews ahead of you and hides anything it deems risky. Though Amazon is indirectly associated with the research (co-author Rishabh Misra works there) Wan said there was no plan as yet to commercialize or otherwise apply the tech.

No doubt it would be a useful tool for Amazon and its subsidiaries and sub-businesses to be able to automatically mark spoilers in reviews and other content. But until the new model is implemented (and really until it is a bit better) we’ll have to stick to the old-fashioned method of avoiding all contact with the world until we’ve seen the movie or show in question.

The team from UCSD will be presenting their work at the Association for Computational Linguistics conference in Italy later this month; you can read the full paper here — but beware of spoilers. Seriously.

AT&T’s new streaming service HBO Max arrives in 2020, will be the exclusive home of ‘Friends’

AT&T’s acquisition of HBO goes beyond just offering premium TV programming – the company revealed on Tuesday that it’s going to call its new streaming service HBO Max, and that this will launch next spring, with over 10,000 hours of content available to subscribers.

It’ll have ‘Friends,’ dear readers, which is all that matters in the modern streaming wars where weirdly services compete for dominion over a couple of decade-plus-year old TV shows including ‘The Office’ and this highly-unrelatable 90s NBC sitcom.

HBO Max won’t offer exclusively HBO content, as you can probably tell by the availability fo Friends, but the Wall Street Journal reports that the naming is meant to indicate how important HBO as a TV brand is to consumers. In other words, they’re going to make the most of that purchase, even if it dilutes the actual HBO brand in the process. It’s beginning to become much more clear why HBO CEO Richard Plepler resigned in February.

The new service enters a teeming field of competitors, including Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Netflix and many more I can’t even remember off the top of my head. It’s also not launching until after Apple puts live its own Apple TV+ service, and Disney+ comes online in November, and per the WSJ, it’ll cost “slightly more” than HBO’s currently $14.99 per month pricing for Go alone.

AT&T is spending on content, however, including the high purchase price for ‘Friends’ rights, as well as development deals with a number of top talents from the film and television industry, including Reese Witherspoon, Greg Berlanti and more. Future CW shows will also reside in HBO Max instead of on Netflix, which is bad news for my habit of bingeing subpar DC superhero TV including ‘Arrow’ and ‘The Flash.’

Stranger Things 3 racks up most viewers in first four days for a Netflix show ever

Netflix’s most recent season (serialized sequel might actually be more accurate) of Stranger Things is breaking records: The streaming company shared that 40.7 million accounts have been watching the show since it became available on the service on July 4. That’s more than any other Netflix show or movie in its first four days of availability on the service.

It’s also been deemed bingeworthy by a large number of those viewers, since Netflix also said that over 18.2 million accounts (this means households, Netflix is keen to note, so actual viewer numbers could be much higher) have actually already finished the entire third season.

That means just about half of the accounts that have started the season have already finished all eight roughly hour-long episodes, just four days after it became available. I am among those people, in fact – though I was doing that in part because it was the topic of discussion for our most recent episode of Original Content.

For comparison’s sake, consider that HBO’s Game of Thrones finale managed about 19.3 million viewers for its first day, including live viewers, early time-delayed streams after the airing and replays.

The News Project’s publishing platform goes live with its first customer, CALmatters

CEO Merrill Brown says he founded The News Project to address one of the big problems in the journalism business: “It costs too much to launch and operate news sites.”

It’s an issue that Brown knows well — he’s a former journalist, journalism executive and educator who served as the founding editor in chief of MNSBC.com. He announced earlier this year that The News Project has raised a six-figure investment from WordPress VIP, and now it’s actually launching with its first customer, the nonprofit site CALmatters, which offers news and analysis around California politics.

Last week, Brown and The News Project’s product lead Miguel Ferrer walked me through what the the company does, both for CALmatters and more generally. The company’s pitch, in a nutshell, is to provide a “news business in box.”

Ferrer explained, “Not only is it what you need for a news business in a box, it’s also understood to be more than a technical toolset, more than a CMS, even as the CMS is ultimately the core of everything.”

Put another way: The News Project has stitched together a publishing platform by working with a number of different partners, offering content management and hosting from WordPress VIP, website development by 10up, reader engagement tools from Piano, design by Charming Robot and ads by Google Ad Manager. (TechCrunch works with a number of these companies, including WordPress VIP, 10up and Piano.)

CALmatters

News organizations can get access to all of that by paying $25,000 to get on the platform, followed by a monthly subscription fee.

It’s exactly not a small investment, but Brown said that normally, “Unless all you’re going to do is hire a couple of kids, $25,000 not going to get you competing in the complicated news ecosystem we’re working in today.” So instead of seeing a newsroom spend $250,000 or more on a website launch or redesign, “We want to see that money spent against words on the screen.”

When the new CALmatters website goes live, the obvious change will be a fresh look, but Ferrer said that’s just scratching the surface. For one thing, The News Project has built templates to support more sophisticated article formats, like feature stories that are driven by images and videos.

“We never forget that UX and designs have to be performance-oriented,” Ferrer added. By that, he means that when The News Project works with partners to create a website, a great deal of “care and attention” are given to “how are we giving [content] space in a design to breathe, how are we assuring that there’s opportunities for recirculation, and we’re equally attentive to opportunities around messaging or advertising that’s ultimately so important to the business side of the equation.”

Brown noted that these tools support a variety of businesses models and forms of reader engagement, but they’re built around “the belief that reader revenue is the future.”

CALmatters

When asked about the broader issues facing the journalism business, Brown acknowledged that the industry is “going through a very significant restructuring” — but he suggested that this doesn’t mean newsrooms are going away.

“It isn’t about large daily metropolitan newspapers, it’s about sites in important vertical categories getting developed at the right scale, with the right kind of overhead — smaller and regional sites solving the problem of local news,” he said. “Certainly, the future of local news is not about newsrooms with 200 people in it, it’s about newsrooms with 20 people in it.”

And naturally, those are the kinds of newsroom that The News Project has been built to serve.

Facebook will start taking a cut of fan subscriptions in 2020

Facebook will take a cut of up to 30% on fan subscriptions, beginning on January 1, 2020.

The social network is revealing its plans as part of a broader slate of monetization-related announcements this week at VidCon. The news confirms a TechCrunch report earlier this year that Facebook would be taking a 30% share of subscription revenue.

Facebook first started rolling out fan subscriptions in early 2018, allowing creators to charge their fans $4.99 per month in exchange for access to exclusive content and a fan badge. During this initial testing period, Facebook didn’t keep any of the subscription revenue for itself, allowing creators to take everything, minus the fee collected by Apple and Google on mobile subscriptions.

Director of Media Monetization Kate Orseth told journalists at a briefing last week that Facebook is committed to allowing creators to keep 70% of subscription revenue (minus “applicable taxes and fees”). So when the mobile platforms collect their 30% fee on first-year subscriptions, Facebook won’t take a cut. Then, as the platforms lower their share to 15% in the second year, Facebook will take the other 15%.

Again, that’s all on mobile, which Orseth said represents the majority of subscriptions thus far. On desktop, Facebook will be able to take the full 30% from the start. (This compares to a 5% subscription fee collected by Patreon, a 30% fee collected by YouTube and a 50% fee collected by Twitch.) And Orseth noted that all of this only applies to new subscribers starting in January — Facebook won’t be taking a revenue share on subscribers who signed up before then.

Facebook Fan Groups

In addition, Facebook says it’s allowing creators to launch exclusive groups for subscribers. And it’s expanding the Facebook Stars program, the virtual currency that allows users to tip game streamers — it’s now testing the feature with non-gaming video creators. The company says creators should earn 1 cent for each Star a fan sends to them. And yes, Facebook is also taking a cut here, though it says its share decreases as fans buy larger packs of Stars.

Facebook is also making  a number of ad-related announcements. Among them: creators will be able to limit ads on a video to “non-interruptive” formats like pre-roll and image ads, so there are no ad breaks inserted. In addition, they’ll be able to share their audiences with advertisers in the Brand Collabs Manager for ad targeting. And they can start viewing their Instagram data in Facebook’s Creator Studio.

Orseth said the company’s goal is “to create suite of monetization products that can be used individually” or in a bundle. She suggested that while ad breaks work best for creators with a broad audience, subscriptions are better for those with a “hyperloyal audience” and brand collaborations “work well across the board.”

As part of the briefing, Orseth introduced journalists to Mark Ian Hoyle and Roxanne Hoyle, the parents behind the popular LadBaby Facebook Page, where they share videos of their family and children. The Hoyles said that by using the full suite of Facebook monetization tools, they’ve been able to focus on making videos (Mark still works as a freelance graphic designer as well), and to afford trips to make more videos.

Given the broader controversies over who gets to make money on major online platforms, Orseth and the Facebook team were also asked about eligibility for monetization. The company says that each product has its own eligibility requirements, and that for now, humans are reviewing each application to participate in the Brand Collabs Manager and Fan Subscriptions.

Spotify Lite for Android gets an official launch in 36 countries

Spotify’s Lite app is now official. The app has been in beta since last year, and now Spotify is officially releasing it in 36 countries worldwide.

The app is designed to work on patchy or weak internet connections and, at just 10MB, it is small enough to cater to lower-end devices that have limited storage or older phones. Spotify Lite is limited to Android devices running version 4.3 or newer, and it is open to both paying and non-paying users. For those worried about maxing out their data plan, the app comes with an optional limit that can tell you when you are close to hitting that buffer.

Spotify claims that 90 percent of the features of the main app are available in Lite, in particular areas around multiple — including video and cover artist — are omitted as they are not critical to the core experience.

A spokesperson told TechCrunch that, as of now, there are no plans to bring the Lite experience to iOS. That makes sense as the majority of people who would benefit from the stripped-down experience would be Android owners.

The overall goal here is to expand Spotify’s reach beyond the current user base by focusing on emerging markets or older users. The company currently claims 217 million users, of which 100 million are paying customers. For comparison, Apple Music passed 60 million users in June.

India is likely to be a key focus. Spotify introduced Lite in India in June, months after the full service went live in the country in February.

spotify

Cecilia Qvist, Global Head of Markets, Spotify (left) announced the release of Spotify Lite on stage at Rise in Hong Kong (Photo By David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

According to Google Play Store data, Spotify Lite has been downloaded more than one million times. Expect that numbers to rocket as the company goes to town promoting Lite as an alternative entry point for its service.

Lite apps have been popularized by services such as Facebook, Messenger and YouTube which have tapped demand, particularly in emerging markets where data speeds tend to be inconsistent and lower-end devices are more prevalent.

Warframe promotional stunt brings a video game gun to the real streets of New York

To promote the free-to-play console game Warframe, director
Michael Krivicka brought a little taste of video game mayhem to New York City.

In the video above, you can see bystanders asked to pose for photos with a model of the Opticor, an elaborate gun from the game. They’re warned not to pull the trigger — but what they don’t know is that a nearby police car and mailbox have been rigged to explode. That’s exactly what happens on-camera, leading to shock and embarrassment from participants and bystanders.

I spoke Krivicka earlier this week to learn more about how the video was staged. He explained that the props, created by custom design and fabrication firm A2ZFX, were all synchronized, with a remote control that could set off the gun, car and mailbox at the same time.

The exploding effects use compressed air, with a small team taking about 15 minutes to reset everything between each take — which also provided the time needed for bystanders to move on, so that there’s always a fresh set of eyes who have “no idea what’s going to happen.”

Director Michael Krivicka, Producer Chris Yoon

Director Michael Krivicka, Producer Chris Yoon

He also noted that this was a “very controlled environment,” with New York City police officers off-camera: “I suggest through editing that it was a lot more rogue than it really is.”

Although this is Krivicka’s first game-related video, he’s made a number of other viral marketing videos in the past, including ones where the spooky girl from the “Ring” movies actually crawls out of a TV and a “Cobra Kai” video where casual karate moves can split motorcycles in half. The common goal, he said, is to “always bring the sci-fi to life in the real world.”

This is also the first major video produced by Krivicka’s new agency WhoIsTheBaldGuy, but he said his aims haven’t changed: “I want to really create things where people are going, ‘Oh my God, what the fuck!’ I just want to go bigger and bolder. That’s the stuff that performs really well online.”

Original Content podcast: ‘Stranger Things 3’ has more monsters and more nostalgia

While “Stranger Things” is one of Netflix’s biggest hits, we’ve remained immune to some of its charms.

On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we review the third season of the series — a.k.a. “Stranger Things 3” — giving us an opportunity to hash out our general feelings about the show.

Darrell, in particular, embraced the first season’s mix of ’80s horror and nostalgia, only to feel that season two was little more than a repeat. (There was an episode that branched out, but we’ve all kind of forgotten about the hour devoted to gang of telekinetic teens.) In many ways, “Stranger Things 3” continues that trend, with the residents of Hawkins  forced once again to confront a malevolent being from another dimension.

To be fair, the villain known as the Mind Flayer isn’t just doing the same stuff this time. He has a whole new evil plan. But “Strange Things 3” feels freshest when it’s less focused on the sci-fi plot, and more when it’s dealing with the rapidly maturing cast, as many of the younger characters find themselves becoming angsty teenagers.

And yes, we enjoyed all those scenes in the town’s new mall. It seems like an obvious ploy for nostalgia, but the nostalgia works.

In addition to our review, we also discussed Netflix’s plans for a big-budget “Sandman” show, and Jordan shared some of her latest TV recommendations.

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!)

If you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:35 Sandman on Netflix
13:28 Are You The One
22:35 Years and Years
26:29 Stranger Things review
54:19 Stranger Things spoilers

‘Apollo: Missions to the Moon’ brings the history of space exploration to life

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, National Geographic has plans for an entire Space Week of programming, kicking off Sunday night with the premiere of a new documentary called “Apollo: Missions to the Moon.”

It’s a story that’s been told many times, including in last year’s Neil Armstrong biopic “First Man.” And of course, there’s a whole slate of new documentaries and specials airing in the next few weeks — something that “Apollo: Missions to the Moon” director Tom Jennings acknowledged with a rueful laugh when we spoke on the phone.

But Jennings brought his distinctive approach to the project, one that he’s employed in previous documentaries like “Challenger Disaster: Lost Tapes” and “Diana: In Her Own Words.” The idea is to rely entirely on archival audio, video and photos, so that viewers can experience the story in the present tense, rather than hearing about it from talking heads 50 years later.

In this case, National Geographic says the film draws on 800 hours of audio, 500 hours of film and more than 10,000 photos. That includes previously unheard audio from Mission Control.

“In documentaries in the past, whether it’s the Moon landing or any of the Apollo missions, when you would hear audio in Mission Control, it’s a single line open line — that was the guy called CAPCOM,” Jennings said. “[But] there were hundreds of people there, and many of them are wearing headsets.”

Apollo Missions to the Moon

Flurry of handshakes erupts after successful launch of Apollo 11. (NASA)

So by incorporating this new audio, the film can give a fuller picture of what was happening in Mission Control, and how the Earth-bound team was responding to events in space.

Also worth emphasizing: The film tells the story of the whole Apollo program, not just Apollo 11. It spends more time on some missions than others, but the idea is to give viewers the full context of how we got to the Moon, and what happened after.

That includes tracing the program’s Cold War roots, although Jennings said that over time, it became “less and less about the space race and the Russians” and more about “doing the impossible.” Or, as he summed it up, “It became more about the expedition and less about the politics.”

One of the big elements in the story is the breathless way the media followed the initial missions. (“The media was a character.”) After all, Apollo 7 featured the first live television broadcast from a crewed space mission, and one of the most striking scenes shows how people around the world were watching Apollo 1.

“How much the world stopped was unprecedented,” Jennings said. “I don’t think that it’ll ever happen again.”

Apollo Missions to the Moon

Aerial view of spectators around their campsites awaiting the Apollo 11 launch. (Otis Imboden/National Geographic Creative)

Indeed, you can see that in the film itself, as public interest in the program begins to wane after Moon landing. Jennings speculated, ” “It was about the quest. Once that quest was completed, it was like: Now what?”

In fact, he said some of the footage cut from the film made that point as well, with “NASA spokespeople wandering around the press room after 11, before 13 got into trouble, basically saying, ‘For Apollo 11 this place was standing-room only, and now it’s just vacant.'”

And while the film doesn’t skimp on the triumph of Apollo 11, by tracing the full arc of the program, it ends on a melancholy note, as Apollo ends and NASA officials predict correctly that we won’t return to the Moon in their lifetimes. “Apollo: Missions to the Moon” doesn’t directly address what’s happened in more recent decades but you can’t help but see an implicit critique of NASA’s scaled-back ambitions.

“I felt like we needed the film to properly acknowledge what we’ve lost,” Jennings said. He recalled talking to Frances “Poppy” Northcutt, who worked as an engineer for the Apollo program, and she told him, “You know, everything was there. We were ready to go farther into deep space. If we had kept going we would have had people on Mars 30 years ago.”

Still, recent developments, like the work Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, have made him hopeful for the future: “I think we will go back to the Moon. Something will be set up on the Moon.”

“Apollo: Missions to the Moon” will air on National Geographic on Sunday, July 7 at 9pm (8pm Central time).

Mozilla readies launch of news subscription service

Way back in February, Mozilla announced an upcoming collaboration with Scroll aimed finding a way to help fund news outlets. The organization appears ready to finally launch to the service, sending users a survey, along with invites to an upcoming beta launch of what it calls “Firefox Ad-free Internet.”

The service is one of countless third-party platforms aimed at helping ailing publications find a way to better monetize in an an era of defunding, when journalistic voices are more important than ever. Apple News offering is probably the most notable in the category, but Mozilla’s offering provides an interesting alternative to a standalone app.

The Firefox version essentially provides a way to bring users ad-free access to their favorite publications by paying an upfront fee of $5 a month. Per Mozilla,

The service enables web users to pay for an ad-free experience on their favorite sites, across their devices. By enabling more direct funding of publishers, Scroll’s model may offer a compelling alternative in the ecosystem. We will be collaborating with Scroll to better understand consumer attitudes and interest towards an ad-free experience on the web as part of an alternative funding model.

Buzzfeed, Gizmodo Media, Slate, The Atlantic, USA Today all seem to be onboard with the offering, ahead of launch.