November–December 2015

Industry

• UK most advanced TV-watching country in world, research finds: 'more people using catch-up services and tablets to get their fix of television than in the rest of Europe, Japan, Australia or the US, according to Ofcom research'.

• Netflix now accounts for 37.05% of all Internet traffic in North America

• Thomson Networks to be acquired by Harmonic

• Measuring the Information Society Report: annual ITU report:

[The] least developed countries (LDCs) are making progress with their connectivity initiatives. However, in 2015, only 6.7 per cent of households in LDCs had Internet access compared with 46 per cent of households worldwide and more than 80 per cent of households in developed countries. The report also reveals that, globally, 46 per cent of men and 41 per cent of women are Internet users.

[The] number of mobile-cellular subscriptions approaches 7.1 billion and mobile network population coverage reaches close to 95 per cent. In LDCs, the mobile-cellular price basket continued to fall, down to 14 per cent of GNI p.c. by end 2014, compared with 29 per cent in 2010.

• The Communications Market Report: International from UK regulator Ofcom:

The communications sector’s total global revenues in 2014 were £1,190bn, growing by 1.5% year on year (incorporating the telecoms, television, postal and radio sectors). Global television industries had the largest increase in revenue in 2014, up by £12bn (5%), to £244bn. Telecommunications revenue, although the largest by a considerable margin, registered slow growth of 0.5% to reach £846bn.

• Reuters Digital News Report 2015 (from June — supplement added in October):

News accessed from smartphones has jumped significantly over the last year with average weekly usage growing from 37% to 46%. 

41% [use Facebook] to find, read, watch, share, or comment on the news each week

• Global broadband pricing study from Google: including mobile data from 157 countries

VR

• Google Aims to Make VR Hardware Irrelevant Before It Even Gets Going

• Gear VR: $100 Oculus headset for Samsung Galaxy

WebRTC, realtime, communication

• WebRTC in the 19th century

• WebRTC Japan Meetup (Justin Uberti's talk)

• WebRTC and browser fingerprinting in Chrome

• Face proximity detection

• Firefox unprefixing their WebRTC APIs and planning to drop support for unprefixed

• A virtual machine for WebRTC development: automates setup of the development environment for working on adapter.js

• talklessnow.com: Do I talk too much? Ingenious tool from Chris Koehncke. 

<video> and <canvas>

• HTML5 Video Compositor

Web Audio

• Monitoring audio volume in Web Audio: using FFT (not RMS)