February–March 2016

WebRTC
• WebRTC for WebKit now 'In Development'
• Roadmap update for Real Time Communications in Microsoft Edge
• Plugin-free Skype on the Web a step closer with Edge support
• Google confirms Hangouts will now use peer-to-peer connections to improve call quality and speed
• WebRTC Explained
• Snapchat Chat 2.0
• Holoportation: RTC + 3D capture and recording (thanks Peter Thatcher)
• No matter how you slice it, Apple and WebRTC need each other
• WebRTC Is Not Losing Steam: response to (linked) articles stating the opposite
• Lip-sync Issues: When a Chrome Update Fixes your Application: detailed account of how a complex bug got fixed.
• WebRTC 1.0 now 'under consideration' for Edge (h/t HTML5 Weekly)

Web audio and video
• DASH video player Shaka Player v2.0.0-beta
• Intent to Implement: Storage Quota Estimation API

'Web apps using storage for offline or caching purposes need to answer questions like: Do I have enough storage available to let the user save this media file for for offline use?'

• Unified Media Pipeline on by default in Chrome for Android from version 51:

• Cache audio and video with service workers, since media delivery is now implemented directly within Chrome rather than being passed off to the Android media stack.
• Use Blob URLs for audio and video elements.
• Set playbackRate for audio and video.
• Pass MediaStreams between Web Audio and MediaRecorder.
• Cross-platform development and debugging is easier, since media works the same on desktop and Android.

• Chrome Media publishes white paper on migrating from Flash to HTML5 video

VR and 360°
• YouTube Announces 360-Degree Live Streaming, Spatial Audio
• Mark Zuckerberg Samsung talk at MWC
• a16z Podcast: Mapping the Future of Virtual Reality

Codecs & services

• A Progress Report: The Alliance for Open Media and the AV1 Codec
• BBC R&D: Highest compression efficiency for professional applications now available with H.265/HEVC extensions
• Live Video Encoding and Transcoding Techniques
• VP9 support announced by multiple vendors:
   • WebM, VP9 and Opus Support in Microsoft Edge
   • Amazon Elastic Transcoder Adds Support for VP9
   • VP9 Specification Live on Bitstream
   • Netflix Working on VP9 in an MP4/BMFF Container for MPEG-DASH
   • Brightcove Announces VP9 Support
   • Sorenson Squeeze Announces VP9 Support
   • Media Excel Hero Enables Live VP9 Video
   • Telestream Sets VP9 Coding For Vantage Multiscreen
   • Ittiam Systems Demonstrate VP9 Solutions at NAB 2016
   • Elecard Adds VP9 Support to Stream Eye
   • castLabs adds VP9 support

EME, DRM, protected content

• Mozilla To Test Widevine CDM In Firefox Nightly

Industry

• UK viewers doubled amount of time spent streaming TV in 2015

• BBC and ITV in talks to launch a Netflix-style streaming service
• Chromecast 35% of 2015 Set-Top Box Market
• A Faster YouTubeInternet up, Television down (h/t @BenedictEvans)

January 2016

Industry
• Can upstarts like Vice and Buzzfeed keep their cool?
• Beatles on Amazon Prime, Apple Music, Deezer, Google Play, Groove, Rhapsody, Slacker, Spotify and Tidal
•  SoundCloud in licensing deal with PRS: SoundCloud (175m monthly active users) will now pay royalties to songwriters, composers and publishers; ads and subscriptions for European users in 2016
• Yahoo Screen shut down
•  Netflix in 130 countries (but not China)
•  Netflix launches in India, plans start at 500 rupees (about US$7.50)
• Netflix proxy detection (thanks @slac!)
• Netflix re-encoding all titles at multiple bitrates (from December)
• Al-Jazeera America to shut down after less than three years on air
•  How often do people watch online videos via their smartphone?: from Google Barometer (thanks @gurupanguji!)

WebRTC, realtime, messaging
• The Rise of WebRTC Broadcast and Live Streaming
• Facebook Wants to Kill Phone Numbers Forever
• Skype to provide group chat
• Chrome 49 release notes

Plugins
• Facebook moves from Flash to HTML5 video

Codecs, containers, compression
•  Video Compression: 2015 Year in Review: 4K HEVC streaming services, 4K HEVC patent issues, AOMedia, HEVC Advance revise licensing terms, Microsoft and Facebook support for VP9:

'So we can conclude that VP9 has secured a stronger position in 2015, and is likely to gain additional ground in 2016, driven mostly by the remaining HEVC royalty uncertainties, and the desire to view YouTube videos at the highest quality possible.'

VR and 360°
• Oculus Rift available for pre-order: $599
• Oculus Rift Inventor Predicts Virtual Reality's Future: ' If you're interested in VR, it's going to be an awesome year. But it's not going to be the year that everyone gets interested in virtual reality … .' Oculus Touch controllers coming in 2016
•  The Rise of VR and 360° Video, and why Adaptive Bitrate Streaming is a perfect fit: Bitmovin player (from HTML5 Weekly)

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)

October 2015

Industry

• Happy Valley or House of Cards? Television in 2020

• Facebook video page

• PewDiePie: how the YouTube king clocked up 40m fans and 10bn views: 

'Television is just another promotional channel ...'

• Faster, smoother, safer videos on Chrome
• DASH or HLS?

WebRTC, realtime, communication

• Audio Testing: Automatic Gain Control: in depth technical discussion by Google WebRTC engineer Patrik Höglund 

• MediaDevices: enumerateDevices() flagless in Chrome 47

• The Skype That I Wanted

• What's Next for WebRTC?: article from Chad Hart

Web Audio

• 2015 Music China contest

Video on <canvas>

• Canvas 'videos' made of multiple JPEGs (ht HTML5 Weekly)

Chrome

• Media controls in Android: for notifications, Android Wear and lock screen 

Plugins

• The future of plugins in Firefox: 'Because Adobe Flash is still a common part of the Web experience for most users, we will continue to support Flash within Firefox as an exception to the general plugin policy.'

September 2015

Better late than never! Lots of big stories this month.

Codecs, compression, containers
• StreamingMedia survey: 10% of responders plan to support VP9 by 2020 (vs 1% today)
• HEVC Advance reconsidering pricing strategy

Industry
• BBC to open up iPlayer to other broadcasters
•  'Any half-remembered bit of TV or radio findable in 30 seconds or less'
• Facebook 360 video
• Beta HTML5 BBC iPlayer for desktop (using dash.js)
• video.js 5.0: major update
• FOMS 2015 and Demuxed 2015 in SF
• chromiumdev-slack.herokuapp.com: chromiumdev on Slack #media

WebRTC, realtime, communication
• Kranky Geek SF: 14 excellent sessions
• Delay Agnostic AEC turned on for all Chrome users
• WhatsApp Hits 900M Monthly Users, Edges Closer To An Actual Business Model
• First ever call between Chrome, Firefox and Edge

Hardware
• Video of hummingbird in 240fps slomo on Nexus 6P

Web Audio
• Cat purr synthesiser (you may or may not also want to sample the bagpipes)

<video>
• Exploring the Crossorigin Media Attribute in HTML5 (from HTML5 Weekly)
• chrome://media-internals: debug media playback

August 2015

Codecs, compression, containers
• Google partners with Amazon, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix on the Alliance for Open Media. Commentary: TechCrunch, The Verge, Developer Tech, Android Police, Mozilla, Streaming Media
• Microsoft Edge to support WebM Standard
• JavaScript WebM encoder: webm.js
• HEVC Advance wants 0.5% of gross revenue for HEVC


WebRTC, realtime, messaging
•  When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China: 549 million monthly active users, over one billion registered users:

The way it achieves this goal is through one of the most unsurfaced aspects of WeChat: the pioneering model of “apps within an app”. Millions (note, not just thousands) of lightweight apps live inside WeChat, much like webpages live on the internet. 

This makes WeChat more like a browser for mobile websites, or, arguably, a mobile operating system — complete with its own proprietary app store.
...
I cannot emphasize the importance of this Wallet enough. It’s the Trojan horse that allows WeChat to quickly onboard user payment credentials that then unlock new monetization opportunities for the entire ecosystem.

• WebRTC for 911: 'The software addresses two major weaknesses within most 911 systems: location accuracy and situational awareness.'
• WebRTC in Safari?

Adaptive streaming, DASH, HLS...
• DASH in JWPlayer 7:
   jw7.jwplayer.com/dash.html
   support.jwplayer.com/customer/portal/articles/2020482-about-dash-streaming
support.jwplayer.com/customer/portal/articles/2020483-using-dash-streaming
• Google Shaka Player v1.4.1 released
   changelog: github.com/google/shaka-player/blob/v1.4.1/CHANGELOG.mdhosted
   demo: shaka-player-demo.appspot.com

Industry
• Amazon reportedly paying $250M to snag former Top Gear stars
• Amazon turned on the HTML5 player (using MSE/EME) on Chrome globally
• Two-thirds of UK's Netflix and Amazon users don't watch their original shows
• Pay TV rate of decline is acceleratingNetflix US not to renew deal with distributor Epix (Hunger Games, Transformers, etc.)
• Sony Xperia Z5 Premium: 4K screen, 23 megapixel UHD video camera with position sensor
• Elemental acquired by Amazon Web Services (TechCrunch)
• Fox UK to launch free-to-air channel YourTV targeting female viewers

July 2015

EME
• Please stop using Microsoft Silverlight, says, err, Microsoft: 'We encourage companies that are using Silverlight for media to begin the transition to DASH/MSE/CENC/EME based designs … .'
• Replacing Flash: Adaptive Streaming and DRM in HTML5

Codecs, compression, containers
• Thor: new codec from Cisco announced at IETF93
• New Patent Pool Wants 0.5% Of Every Content Owner/Distributor’s Gross Revenue For Higher Quality Video
• HEVC Advance: What Do the Royalties Mean for Video Publishers?
• New fees cast shadow on next-gen high-quality streaming video

Adaptive streaming, DASH, HLS...
• Hulu's Move to DASH (though not recommended for desktop)
• BBC Video Factory: Updating the creation and distribution systems for on demand video: they provide 30 (!) video delivery variants and are beginning DASH distribution.
• New version of Shaka Player: switching representations faster, live stream seek ranges more accurate, multilingual encrypted content fixed
• High performance video for the Web with Shaka Player
• An Unhappy Surprise: MPEG LA Is Forming a Patent Pool for DASH

Chrome video
• Buttery smooth video rendering in M44 — The design doc for Project Butter

Web Audio
• Building a Realtime Music Sync Collaboration App With PubNub

WebRTC
• Official Chrome extension to limit IP addresses used by WebRTC: extension, announcement
• GarageBand is great but SoundTrap is a collaborative music app for everyone
• Select output audio device, two demos:

   webrtc.github.io/samples/src/content/devices/input-output

   webrtc.github.io/samples/src/content/devices/multi
• Capture a canvas to a MediaStream with captureStream() in Firefox 41: release notes, bug (thanks Christoffer Jansson)
• Groupama 'social network' that connects Auvergne farmers with potential customers (thanks Tsahi)
• Wiresharking Wire — guess who :)

3D

• Microsoft streaming live capture video

• Panasonic 3D modeling with 120 cameras

Industry
• Netflix Is the #3 Broadcaster in the U.S., Will Be #1 in 2016
• How public service broadcasting shapes up worldwide (not exactly worldwide: France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, US)
• Pearson sold the FT to Nikkei for $1.3bn. Benedict Evans: 'Remember how paywalls wouldn't work? They do if you have good enough content.'
• This Chart Shows Why Comcast Would Be Interested in Vice Media and BuzzFeed: the massive drop in traditional TV viewing
• OTT Could Grow to $12B Industry by 2018, Says Ooyala Report:

Netflix will continue to dominate the field, although its market share will diminish as competitors find an audience. What will emerge, however, is room for niche OTT services. It predicts that 15 to 20 specialized services will acquire 100,000 or more paying customers by 2018. Many other niche services will get by with smaller subscriber bases. Key areas for niche growth include sports, kids, anime, foreign shows and movies, ethnic content, and services created by a single celebrity, such as a politician or comedian.

June 2015

VR
• How to Avoid Real Objects While in a Virtual World

Web Audio
• A Brief History of Synthesis with the Web Audio API

Web MIDI
• Making Music in the Browser – Web MIDI API

WebRTC, realtime, communication
• FaceTime analysis from @HCornflower
• The new Android M App Permissions
• $1999 Chromebox for meetings: hardware support for up to 20 people
• Everyone in Buenos Aires Is Communicating by Voice Memo Now

MSE
• Building A Media Source HTML5 Player With Adaptive Streaming: four part series:

[MSE is a] significant leap forward for media handling in the browser, far superior than the standard HTML5 video tag and, in many ways, an improvement on anything Flash could handle.

 • Media Source Extensions for Audio: gapless playback!

Codecs, compression, containers

• Consumer Reports top 3 must haves in a new smart TV include VP9 support
• Live streaming VP9 with Wowza!
• Allegro VP9 streams

Industry
• Ericsson Mobility Report:

Three quarters of global subscription growth came from Africa and Asia in Q1 2015. This pattern is forecast to continue to 2020. 

By 2020, 70 percent of the world's population will have a smartphone, with an estimated 26 billion connected devices. 

Mobile data traffic in Q1 2015 was 55 percent higher than in Q1 2014.= 

Video continues to be the key growth factor, with 60 percent of all mobile data traffic forecast to be from online video by 2020.

• Apple unveils streaming service Apple Music and 24-hour radio stations
• Google Play Music launches curated music 'radio' service in US: ad-supported, based on Songza.
• News outlets face losing control to Apple, Facebook and Google: 46% access news weekly on mobile (37% 2014) but only 6% have paid for news: 'although 70% of smartphone users have downloaded a news app, only a third actually use them on a weekly basis'.
• Google calls for anti-Isis push and makes YouTube propaganda pledge:

Isis is having a viral moment on social media and the countervailing viewpoints are nowhere near strong enough to oppose them … . The power of community is not lost on Isis and they are using it to great effect. Right now the voice of that community is a lot larger than ours, a lot louder, there’s more out there on the web.

• James Foley: How social media is fighting back against Isis propaganda
• Using the Web from Nairobi:

Twitter is being served from ATLANTA. Georgia. Which it might be worth noting is really really far away from Kenya. Like 300ms distant. HTTPS handshakes mean three full round trip exchanges must be completed before you can even begin your request to a server, so nearly a full second passes before your client is even starting to send its request. DOMContentLoaded is 2.95s, and page load only finishes at 12.85s. Facebook, served from London, has a 4s DOMContentLoaded. 

Google.com has a more reasonable 636ms to DOMContentLoaded due to 'cheating' using a special protocol called QUIC that's different from HTTPS and doesn't require any round trips to initiate communicate once a session has ever been established, which makes latency hurt less. It's clear these kinds of low-overhead protocols could have high impact in these markets. 

… from an end user perception of speed, it only matters somewhat how sophisticated the Kenyan domestic backbone gets or even how many new fiber ports the country gets – as long as peering is poor, content caches are distant, and sites require lots of round trips to build a meaningful experience for users. The Internet will still be slow here. And clearly if some of the most sophisticated startups launching products targeted to the local market aren't doing well at this, it's structurally hard to do.

• Broadly: Vice channel 'For women who know their place'.
• Adobe Online Video Viewing and Browsing Trends – Q1 2015:

• iOS grew its share from 43% to 47% year-over-year.
• Game consoles and over-the-top (OTT) devices saw the biggest jump in share from 6% to 24% YoY – surpassing Android, which remained flat at 15%.
• Browser viewing sank to a new low – now 14%.

• Cell coverage map (Check out India v Australia in relation to potential media consumption on mobile — we're not expecting cell towers in the Simpson Desert, but rural coverage in many countries is terrible.)
• Media is exploding (literally)

May 2015

Industry
• Internet Customers Surpass Cable Subscribers at Comcast: 'At the end of the first quarter, Comcast counted 22.375 million video customers and 22.369 million high-speed Internet customers.' However, video is still much more profitable: ' Video revenue was $5.3 billion for the quarter, compared with $3 billion for high-speed Internet.'

• Verizon Will Acquire AOL for $4.4B, Mobile Video a Central Reason: 'Advertising is central to the deal, as Verizon and AOL will combine to create a scaled, mobile-first platform for ads, Verizon reports. AOL brands include The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget, Makers, and AOL.com.'akers, and AOL.com.'

• Ofcom (UK media regulator) report on audience attitudes to the broadcast media: 

• Four in ten adult viewers feel there is ‘too much’ violence and ‘too much’ swearing on television, while three in ten feel there is ‘too much’ sex. 
• Forty-four per cent of UK adults have used connected TV at home in the past 12 months … Broadcaster catch-up services are the most commonly viewed connected TV content. 
• Almost a fifth of UK adults have used other broadband-connected devices to watch TV live as it is broadcast in the past 12 months, while 29% have used it to watch broadcaster catch-up services.
• 54% of UK households have a tablet device, 11% of 3–4-year-olds have their own

• Cisco Visual Networking Index: IP video traffic will be 80 percent of all IP traffic (both business and consumer) by 2019
• Deloitte Digital Democracy Survey: 

U.S. consumers age 14-and-older spend only 45 percent of their TV viewing time watching live programming. For younger millennials (age 14 to 25) that number is 28 percent. That same group spends almost 60 percent of its viewing time watching content on computers, tablets, or smartphones.

• Spotify short-form video and podcasts for US, UK, Germany and Sweden – deals with Comedy Central, ESPN, Adult Swim, BBC and NBC.

Codecs, compression, containers
• 60fps Live Streaming on YouTube in HTML5: 720p60 and 1080p60, 30fps on devices where high frame rate viewing is not yet available.
• Bigasoft Total Video Converter: convert VP9 WebM to MP4, AVI, WMV, ASF, VOB, MOV, FLV, SWF, MKV, RM, WTV, MXF, MVI, F4V, Apple ProRes and other formats – and vice versa.
• Allegro DVT adds VP9 support to its multi-format hardware encoder IP
• Marvell Introduces ARMADA 1500 Ultra SoC for 4K STB with Viviane GC7000XS GPU

Audio
• Synthesising Drum Sounds with the Web Audio API: detailed article by Chris Lowis, WG invited expert.
• Intent to implement: per-tab audio focus on Android.

EME
• Firefox 38 support for DRM with Adobe Primetime: Windows 32-bit Firefox only, Vista and above. This the fourth major browser to launch EME (with the fourth DRM system) and the second to launch an unprefixed implementation of the latest version of the spec. Commentary: The Register.

WebRTC

• Facebook Messenger likes WebRTC: Wireshark analysis shows use of webrtc.org libraries, audio codec depends on platform and peer (Opus, iSAC or iSAC LC); VP8 used on Web, iOS and Android.
• Streaming file transfer over WebTorrent
• getUserMedia() now in Microsoft Edge
• Viber for Chrome OS
• Periscope for Android: Periscope for Android: 'I was streaming for about 11 minutes on 4G and I used up in the blink of an eye 250MB'.
• WebRTC could make a better Periscope: it's the latency, maaan...

• WebRTC update from Justin Uberti at impromptu SF WebRTC Meetup

Web Audio 

• Practical Web Audio: ' you should be considering audio when designing your web application user interface'.
• Web Audio for Microsoft Edge

And finally... 

• Mayweather-Pacquiao fight: box office took $74m on 15,000 tickets, total earnings (just from the event) >$400m, but Periscope and Meerkat may have scuppered pay-per-view.
• Facebook Instant Articles: fast-loading autoplay video.
• Snapchat is 75% of Vodafone UK messaging app traffic
• ITU report on global ICT: 

• 3.2 billion online (2 billion in developing world)
• Broadband affordable (less than 5% GNI) in 111 countries
• 69% 3G coverage
• 7 billion mobile device subscriptions

• fallen.io/ww2: interactive WebGL infographics synchronised with media playback.

April 2015

WebRTC
• Why WhatsApp's new voice call feature is bad news for networks:

Calls are robust and the sound quality is genuinely fantastic – better even than the HD audio you get on an intra-network phone call. But while this is great news for us, it's surely bad news for the mobile networks and will likely be the first step in a cosmic shift in the way they structure our tariffs.

• Periscope launches: free iOS app to share live video, Android version in the works. They were acquired by Twitter for $100m.

• Facebook Messenger now does video calls: Facebook announcement, TechCrunch.

• SocketPeer: 'as its name suggests, a combination of WebSockets and RTCPeerConnection. This node.js library abstracts away the common pattern of using WebSockets as a signalling server to instantiate a DataChannel over WebRTC.'
• Archive and play back video comms: TokBox tools.
• Twilio Video for iOS, Android and 'JavaScript apps' (first time I've heard that phrase).
• Wire for Web: messaging platform with a tasty UI.
• WebRTC market expanding and maturing, but in unexpected ways: 6.7bn devices forecast to support WebRTC by the end of 2019.

• TADHack London: check out the Pi-powered WebRTC robot
• Why WebRTC Will Drive the Next Billion Dollar Company: 'the contextualisation of communications', WebRTC enables communications integrated within other apps, not just standalone.
• Die SIP Die

Web video
• The State of HTML5 Video: JW Player report updated.
• Shaka Player 1.3.0 released: easy-to-use JavaScript DASH client now provides offline playback and live streaming, updated EME support, improved buffering, bug fixes.

Codecs, containers, compression
• VP9: Faster, better, buffer-free YouTube videos (Reddit)
• New HEVC Patent Pool: What Are the Implications?
• VP9 v HEVC/H.265: tests of encoding quality, encoding time and playback CPU. VP9 scores well, but 'While the actual performance of the two codecs is a consideration, it’s generally not the deciding factor—certainly it wasn’t with VP8 and H.264'.

And finally...

• Why Vice is shaking up news broadcasting

• ...and if you like food, you'll love Vice's magnificent Munchies.
• SnapChat launches Local Our Story: video compilations only visible to Snapchatters at a specific event or location

• Messaging services are moving beyond online chat

• From YouTube to Vice – 10 trends that are changing how we watch TV

• Facebook embedded video player

• TV industry faces its ‘ketchup’ moment: ‘Mobile is now the first screen’ (Eric Scherer, director of future media at France Télévisions):

Among the trends picked out by Scherer was the emergence of “a new syntax, a new grammar, a new vocabulary” for news, particularly when delivered through “the new kids on the block” in the form of apps including Instagram, Snapchat and Periscope.
“They are always mobile, they are always social, they are always interactive … and it is more and more live,” he said, before turning his attention to YouTube and the growth of multi-channel networks (MCNs) like Maker Studios, which was bought by Disney in 2014.
“These are the people who are the new big players,” said Scherer, showing a slide of fresh-faced YouTubers. “These are the kids now ruling the entertainment, and it’s just the beginning of it. Again, new grammar, new syntax, new vocabulary.”
...
“You better have a good relationship with your end users. Trust and transparency are considered as new services.”
...
Virtual reality headsets are also on his radar. “VR is a total immersion inside the content, inside the fiction, inside the news, inside the documentary. Of course now it’s often in a very huge and very ugly helmet … but Samsung, Google, Sony, the big guys are all working on that,” said Scherer. “This immersion is the big new media of the next few years.”

• EE offers wi-fi call back-up service
• 75% of Viewers Leave Poor-Quality Video in 4 Minutes: Conviva
• Netflix plans Netflix Global
• Jay Z promotes 'artist-owned' music streaming brand Tidal: estimated combined net worth of the eighteen artists who signed the Tidal pledge is $2,043,000,000
• Media consumption: laptop and desktop still dominant
• How Nigerian blue collar workers use their phones: survey of 6,285 Nigerian blue collar workers with a monthly income of ₦20–40,000 (around US$100–200):

• More than half (51.4%) use mobile internet with monthly data spend between ₦1,000–2,000.
• Nearly two thirds (62.7%) spend ₦100–500 weekly on phone credit bought in ₦200 denominations.
• 61.8% indicated phone calls as the most frequent activity on their phones. Others indicated browsing (19.3%), texting (9%), chatting (7.1%) & gaming (2.8%)

• US IPTV revenues up, cable and satellite down
• Microsoft Azure Media Services: 'upload, store, encode and package video or audio content for both on-demand and live streaming delivery to a wide array of TV, PC and mobile device endpoints', with support for EME and MSE
• Akamai State of the Internet report for Q4 2014 released:

12% of unique ip addresses connecting to Akamai globally had average connection speeds of 15 Mbps or above, up just 0.6% from the third quarter. South Korea remained the country with the highest level of 4k readiness, despite a 7.7% decline to a 61% readiness rate. The remaining countries/ regions in the top 10 all saw quarterly increases, with Lithuania showing the largest jump at 50%. The other increases were more modest, ranging from Latvia’s 1.4% to Romania’s 12%.

March 2015

VR
• Google making Android for virtual reality
• To Bring Virtual Reality to Market, Furious Efforts to Solve Nausea
• Magic Leap VR game play

MSE & DASH
• Shaka Player 1.2.1 released: a JavaScript library which implements a DASH client with EME support.

Plugin deprecation

• Developer's Guide

Codecs, compression, containers

• BBC Audio Factory project: turning off all Windows Media Audio on demand services
• IETF Begins Standardization Process For Next-Generation 'NETVC' Video Codec (Daala):

Just as the IETF took Google's SPDY protocol and turned it into the HTTP/2 standard, IETF seems to be trying to do the same with Daala and turn it into the NETVC video codec standard. Much like Daala, NETVC seems to have largely the same main goals. The IETF wants it to be:
• Optimized for real-time communications over the public Internet
• Competitive with or superior to existing modern codecs
• Viewed as having IPR licensing terms that allow for wide implementation and deployment

• HEVC Advance pool formed
• Today's WTF Moment: A Competing HEVC Licensing Pool
• Next-gen high-res video faces new fees and uncertainty
• libvpx 1.4.0 - Indian Runner Duck - release candidate announced
• The State of Video Codecs 2015: 

we’ve seen the first deployments of HEVC and VP9, and heard aggressive claims (“technical performance superior to H.265”) from Xiph and Mozilla about the open source ultra HD (UHD) codec Daala. Out of nowhere, RealNetworks demonstrated its RMHD codec, with “HEVC-like image quality” at CES 2015.

WebRTC
• Building a Raspberry Pi 2 WebRTC camera (using the Janus WebRTC Gateway)
• Chrome 42 release notes
• WebRTC & mobile battery consumption: why phone power is optimized for voice communications – and what should happen when you get a phone call during a WebRTC call
• MeshCentral: WebRTC data channel stack built by Intel

• Kranky Geek London, 15 April, 12:30–17:00

Android Audio
• Unified Music Player: 'implement an audio media app that works across multiple form factors and provides a consistent user experience on Android phones, tablets, Android Auto, Android Wear and Cast devices'

Web Audio, audio on the web
• Motion sensing using the doppler effect: control scrolling by moving your hand
• Adding Audio to Web Apps
• Multi-Device Timing – synchronised playback on multiple devices, built to handle flakey connectivity: for example for radio playback or music collaboration:

As people consume and interact with more and more content, using any number of devices, providing a coherent experience is increasingly challenging. The traditional way of media - bundle everyting in a pre-synchronized container for high quality sync translates badly to the Web and multi-device scenarios … a new HTMLTimingObject, suggested to handle both local and online timing for both media elements, web animations and any other linear data.

• YouTube just put the final nail in the Loudness War’s coffin: YouTube is now the most important online music discovery source – and loudness levels on YouTube are low and consistent
• Streaming sets off a painful debate in the music industry: 'From a near standing start in 2008 [Spotify] subscriptions brought in $2bn in 2013 against the $5.1bn consumers spent on downloading tracks from digital stores such as iTunes … .'
• Universal wants Spotify to cap free streaming to encourage users to opt for paid-for services

And finally...
• 360-degree videos on YouTube
• BuzzFeed to stream live David Cameron interview

• 3D scanning with drone imagery

• Buyer's Guide to Education Video Platforms 2015: more questions than answers

• How Nvidia Plans to Be the Netflix of Gaming: Shield console streams games at high resolution with less than 150ms latency

• The State of Media & Entertainment Video 2015
• Mobile video market will be 13 times larger in 2019 than it was in 2013
• Ooyala Global Video Index Q4 2014:

34% of all video plays in Q4 were on tablets and smartphones, rising to 38% in December, up 114% from preceding December.
Tablet users watched long-form video for 70% of the time they spent viewing on their device.

For broadcasters, 76% of ad impressions came from PCs.

For publishers, almost half of all ad impressions were non PC during December 2014. Mobile made up almost 35% and tablets 14%.

February 2015

Codecs

• YouTube now HTML5 by default

EME

• The Changing Face of DRM: Where Do We Stand in 2015?
• Akamai: How MSE, EME, and WebCrypto Will Join to Kill Flash

VR
• SFHTML5 MeetUp: Browser-Based Virtual Reality in HTML5
• How to make films for VR
• Magic Leap

• Project HoloLens: holographic goggles from Microsoft

<track>
• Dynamically adding text tracks to HTML5 video

WebRTC
• WebRTC 1.0 Becomes a W3C Working Draft
• Screen Capture Working Draft
• Hello in Firefox 35 stable. Lots of coverage, e.g. from pcworld.com:

As the Web transitions from a place for reading pages to a platform for running apps, browsers such as Firefox must evolve into a new kind of framework.

… now that WebRTC technology has proven its worth, it’s being perceived by some manufacturers as the key to making mobile devices that are not telephones competitive with smartphones. A device running the new Firefox OS, for example, could be sold by everyday retailers without the need for carrier contracts … . 

So there’s a chance that Hello, or any future Firefox OS-based device that supports it, may appeal to a new generation of 'cord cutters.' 

• AT&T is the first US carrier to support WebRTC

• Tim Panton's summary: The worst WebRTC demo yet.

• Kim Dotcom will soon launch an encrypted video call service
• Radio via Data Channels
• bemyeyes.org: app (currently iOS only) to enable blind person to request help from a sighted person
• Embed video chat in your blog or site in five minutes (using appear.in)
• Video calling in Facebook via WebRTC
• WebRTC Leaks Local IP Addresses (bug)
• WhatsApp for the Web 
• The WebRTC Race Begins Today

• The myth of "Telcos winning back revenue from OTT players"

• WebRTC samples moved to github.com/webrtc

And finally...
• Privileged Contexts draft: HTTPS to be mandatory for features such as getUserMedia and EME
• State of Connectivity 2014: report on global internet access from internet.org:

... the rate at which the world is connecting to the internet is slowing down and is estimated to decline for the fourth year in a row. In 2008, the number of people using the internet grew by 12.4%.
By 2014, the growth rate was down to 6.6%.

At present rates of decelerating growth, the internet won’t reach 4 billion people until 2019.
…
100 MB is “entry-level” internet, sufficient for text-heavy applications. 500 MB is a “maturing” internet experience, sufficient for basic multimedia content. 2 GB and above represent a “fully connected” internet experience. 

In India, for example, market forces and competition have driven the cost of data to a price point at the bottom quartile of global prices, at $2.40 and $0.80 ($PPP), for prepaid data plans of 250 MB and 100 MB per month, respectively, which isaffordable by 59% and 94% of the Indian population, respectively.

• Accessible and responsive video player

• Responsive video poster images
• From YouTube to Facebook – will video be the one to watch in 2015?
• The revolution wasn't televised: The early days of YouTube
• YouTube Kids app launch
• Rs5,700 (US$92) Z1 Tizen smartphone released in India by Samsung: 'The smartphone market in India is rapidly evolving with many consumers using their device as their screen of choice for content including videos, television programmes and video games.' Review from Ars Technica: 'Tizen doesn't offer any innovative ideas. It's just Android with worse design, no direction, no hardware support, and no apps.'
• Apps and Mobile Web IAB report: 12% of time on mobile devices is spent using a browser, but only 18% of mobile users say they spend 'significantly more time using apps than browsing mobile websites'.
• Digital radio overtakes analogue in UK
• Reuters TV launches 'Netflix for news': iOS app with live feeds and news programmes
• How Mail Online, National Geographic, Cosmopolitan, Vice and others use Snapchat Discover for media delivery
• New York Times becomes a video hub
• The New York Times Shows How to Build a Chromecast Application
• 10x WiGig wifi in consumer devices by end 2015
• US$200 eye tracker
• Amazon moves into film production
• Netflix shares up on strong earnings
• Music on Snapchat
• Samsung Smart TVs forcing ads into video streaming apps
• Xiaomi Mi Note (prices from 2,299 yuan, about US$370):

Apple would have the layman believe it engineered every component itself, but Xiaomi speaks of its sourcing with pride — it's heavily emphasizing the 1080p screen from either Sharp or Japan Display, the Sony camera sensor, the Philips two-tone flash, and the Sony or LG battery. Xiaomi is one of the first Chinese brands to successfully engender a sense of homegrown cool … .