Saturday, July 28

The rise of ‘binge viewing’

The “binge viewer” compulsively views whole seasons of drama series in marathon sessions lasting a day or more, using new technologies like on-demand TV, digital video recorders, and streaming websites. Netflix says TV shows now account for 60 percent of its streaming volume, and has even introduced a feature that automatically plays the next episode of a series. TV networks aren’t happy, because binge viewers bypass advertising vital to their business, but the increasingly popular practice is “changing the economics of the industry.”

Read more here

Thursday, July 26

Send a draft of your story to a source? Some journalists do it — but be mindful of the risks

A Washington Post reporter’s decision to share a draft of a story with his sources is provoking a healthy discussion in newsrooms about when, if ever, it’s wise to circulate unpublished material for comments.While it’s difficult to say “never, ever,” a story should never — ever — be sent to anyone outside the newsroom without careful consideration of the legal and ethical perils.

The main one is this: Once a reporter establishes a certain fact-checking protocol, then any deviation from that fact-checking protocol risks appearing, to a judge and jury, like a lapse in diligence. Lapses in diligence are, under the law of defamation, a bad thing.

Read more here

Social Media Revs To Reach Nearly $17 Billion

Advertising will contribute $9 billion to social media global revenue of nearly $17 billion this year, up from $12 billion in 2011, estimates Gartner. The approximate 43% uptick supports stronger social signals that find their way into search, mobile and premium display ads.

Read more here

Tuesday, July 24

Tech News and Analysis Events Books Research Home Apple Cleantech Cloud Europe Media Mobile Video gigabarb: #Box embraces #Windows Phone (half heartedly) http://t.co/4lZLS8oJ Could Kickstarter be used to crowdfund journalism?

Under increasing financial pressure from the web and the decline of print advertising, newspapers and other traditional media outlets have been laying off staff and trying to fill the gap with services such as Journatic — the hyper-local aggregator that uses offshore workers — or simply doing without things like copy editors. But are there other solutions to that reporting gap? Crowdsourcing journalism through sites like Reddit could be one, but crowdfunding could be another: one journalist in Michigan has raised funding through a Kickstarter campaign so he can travel around the U.S. interviewing people about the upcoming election. Could crowdfunding allow other journalists to do investigative or in-depth projects as well?

The idea of crowdfunding journalism isn’t a new one: journalist and entrepreneur David Cohn started a company called Spot.us in 2008 to do exactly that, and had some notable successes, such as a feature on the “garbage patch” in the Pacific Ocean, a joint project with the New York Times. Earlier this year, the company was acquired by American Public Media and merged with the Public Insight Network, and the website says it has more than 15,000 contributors and 110 publishing partners (Cohn has since moved on to a new project, a media startup called Circa). Crowdfunding might work better for individuals

Read more here

Monday, July 23

The NYT’s & WSJ’s Push To Online Video

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times often disagree, at least in their editorials, but both are in agreement that the future of the newspaper will involve a healthy dose of video.

It’s not surprising that the leading newspapers are branching out to video. The Web is clearly moving in a less static direction, and big brand advertisers will pay more for sight, sound and motion. Both sites have produced video over the years, and lately it’s starting to pay off in numbers that aren’t exactly YouTube, but aren’t anything to sneeze at either.

According to ComScore, the Times had 561,000 viewers and 1.6 million video views in June. The WSJ had almost 1.3 million viewers who accounted for 4.2 million video views that month.

Read more here

Sunday, July 22

Synchronizing Crowdsourced Movies

Vyclone (is a) free program debuted in Apple’s App Store (that) lets two or more people in close proximity shoot video with their iPhones, upload the clips, and view a movie automatically spliced together from different angles. To recognize that multiple users are filming the same scene, Vyclone tags each video with the location where it was shot using GPS. To synchronize the clips, it lines them up by the date and time they were shot, regardless of when they were uploaded. A simple-to-use video editor lets users play director, toggling from one angle to the next with the tap of a finger.

Sumner and Lassman see Vyclone as a tool for citizen journalists, allowing them to weave together a documentary of a live news event. Lassman hopes it will become a killer app for home movies: “I can film the kid blowing out the candles and I can have my buddy filming my wife, who’s sobbing, and I can have somebody else filming grandpa and grandma with their arms around each other enjoying the moment,” he says. “I get Vyclone to stitch that together in a multi-angle movie that tells the full story of the moment.”

While the app is free, Vyclone may begin charging for extras, such as longer movie times and higher resolution.

Read more here

The phone and tablet wallet

Perhaps you've read how smartphone payments, already popular in parts of Asia and Europe, are coming to the U.S. in a big way. These are telltale signs that the mobile-payments revolution has arrived.. (but changing) the way Americans pay for stuff is going to be really hard work. Merchants don't want to upgrade pricey point-of-sale terminals so that they can work wirelessly with smartphones unless e-wallets become mainstream, and e-wallets won't become mainstream until consumers can use them just about everywhere.

Not only will the phone or the tablet become a wallet for consumers, but it will also turn into a credit card reader and a register for merchants. Shoppers will use their mobile device as a coupon book, a comparison-shopping tool, and a repository of those unwieldy loyalty cards they carry from everyone from giant retail chains to the corner bakery. And your smartphones will serve as beacons that will alert a retailer when you walk into its store so that it can recommend products, show you reviews, or direct you to aisle five, where that beanbag chair you didn't buy last week still beckons -- and you can now have it for 10% off. You won't even need a few singles to tip the valet or pay the dog walker, because they'll take mobile payments too.

The problem with Square's utopia -- and those of its rivals -- is that it is a bit of a walled garden, for now at least. "You have a potential situation where consumers are confused into doing nothing," says Drew Sievers, CEO of mFoundry, the company that helped Starbucks develop its mobile app.

Read more here