Hulu has decided to make recently cancelled “The Mindy Project” one of its exclusives, it has been announced. Following its cancellation by Fox, the series has been picked up by Hulu which has ordered a fourth season of episodes — 26 episodes to be exact, which is actually about two seasons’ worth. Regardless, the show will continue where it has … Continue reading
Cyberattacks are in the news seemingly every day, and today’s announcement comes from a university here in the States. Penn State announced that its College of Engineering was targeted in a pair of “sophisticated cyberattacks,” and investigators disc…
You dirty Windows pirates will have to live with a constant reminder of your crimes come Windows 10. Pirated versions of the new operating system will be stuck with a desktop watermark reminding users of their non-genuine status, Microsoft EVP of ope…
On this week’s AppleCast, we discuss the overblown reaction to the news (gasp!) that people might steal your Apple Watch. There’s also more news coming in about potential Apple TV features, and the rumor mill in general is heating up ahead of WWDC, so we make some predictions about what we’ll see there, in terms of Apple TV, WatchKit and other potential developments.… Read More
Watch as the guys discuss their risks and regrets in the fourth episode of HIV Equal Online’s web series, Unzipped. From condoms breaking to anonymous sex, Zakh, Eric, Ronnie and Anthony talk about what sometimes keeps them up at night and what the actions they can never take back.
Unzipped is a new web series about love, sex and HIV. What are your thoughts about the series so far?
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
LAS VEGAS — As the over-the-top business grows quickly, Adobe has added additional delivery tools to improve speed and reliability, says Jeremy Helfand, VP of Video Solutions at Adobe, in an interview with Beet.TV.
That includes higher speed video starts, which means videos are launching four times faster. “We want to make sure consumers can engage with content and that Primetime is delivering the most efficient delivery playback,” he tells us. In addition, Adobe can now authenticate two million users per minute. “If users want to tune into a sporting event of a premiere of episodic content, we can deliver that very effectively and reliably,” Helfand says. “Over the top services are growing in popularity and services like HBO are pushing the innovation and experience for viewers,” he says. The benefit of those positive experiences in streaming is that it lifts the industry. Media companies like Sony and MLB are also moving the industry forward in over-the-top, he adds.
Over-the-top also got a boost from CBS’ expansion of its streaming service.
We interviewed Helfand at the NAB Show. Beet.TV’s coverage of the show was sponsored by Akamai. Please find more coverage from Las Vegas here.
You can find this post on Beet.TV.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
In his career, Tom Rogers has overseen countless TV channels, hundreds magazines and thousands of websites. Now he just wants to run one channel – your channel.
Ask the TiVo CEO and president to see the future of media and he’ll tell you clearly – personalization, something which will forever break the editorial control of Big Media and the tyranny of choice.
“That control has developed over time from a handful of broadcast networks, to some cable channels, to a ton of cable channels and video on demand, to TV Everywhere, to streaming services, to the wild world of web video,” Rogers tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“But it’s going to go much further than that. The piece of that I think’s going to become a much bigger factor … is the personalization through filtering of relevance from all kinds of data inputs.”
Media personalization has been talked about for years. In 1995, digital media soothsayer Nicholas Negroponte described what he called “The Daily Me“: “Imagine a future in which your interface agent can read every newswire and newspaper and catch every TV and radio broadcast on the planet, and then construct a personalized summary.”
In truth, personalization, even in digital media, has not come very far, with most consumers still reading or watching packages of channels or stories curated for them by providers.
Rogers sees a sea-change coming, however. “We’ll know what you’re viewing habits are, what critics you most follow, what your friends and family recommend to you, what you’re specialized hobbies and interests are, and we’ll know what’s buzzy in the areas your care most amount,” he says.
“We capture all that data and are able to put together a highly filtered dashboard of all the things you would care about in a world of infinite choice, filtered down to your personal choice and tastes. Any time that you’re interested in watching television … the personalization of that experience will give you something complete control.”
Trained as an attorney, Rogers was once senior counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Telecommunications, Consumer Protection and Finance Subcommittee, where he drafted telecoms law including the 1984 Cable Franchise Policy and Communications Act.
Later an NBC executive for several years, he founded CNBC and the MSNBC joint venture, as well as helping to form National Geographic Channel and Court TV. After that, Rogers was CEO of diversified targeted media group Primedia.
Now he hopes to bring the world of TV and video, no matter what the source, together. “Infinite choice meets personalisation, and the ability to tame exactly what you want to get your arms around,” he says.
“That’s an exciting thing for your people to get involved with. Everybody thinks we’ve hit the new frontier and that it’s going to stabilise. It’s never going to stabilise. It’s constantly going to be in motion. New innovators will constantly change the approach to how this is done.”
This is segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.
Rogers was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.
You can find this post on Beet.TV.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
As the upfronts draw to a close, and TV networks take stock of the annual presentation fest, the role of “audiences” will likely have played a larger role in TV buying, says Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and Founder of Furious Corp. Despite concerns of a flat market, there is still money flowing in. “There is as much money being spent net new. We just need to find the audience, and that is what is coming to bear in the upfronts. Everyone is talking about their audience, their data platforms,” she says in her predictive analysis of the upfronts for Beet.TV.
As examples, NBC has come to market with multiple products to mine audiences that might previously have been missed, while Univision and others are doing the same. This trend suggests that the audience approach of programmatic buying is having an impact on the TV market. “The ecosystem providers of data and technology…are going to the buy side first because they are writing checks first,” she explains. This shift is occurring in part because of the down trends in viewership in the first quarter of 2015. “Audiences are moving from TV,” she says, and that’s why networks are applying tech tools to help find them.
“[With] the dynamics around programmatic, private exchanges and trading desks…we are becoming more video neutral. All that does is reinforce the fact that we need the upfronts….The upfronts are alive and thriving and we are seeing more and more reinforcement around integrated sales, productization and one currency,” Swartz says. “And we will see convergence between premium video and TV in the upfront.” The net effect over time will be delivering to audiences what they want and driving to a more efficient P&L.
You can find this post on Beet.TV.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Parents count on the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to tell them how much media consumption, or “screen time,” is safe for their kids. The AAP’s long-standing recommendation has been that kids’ entertainment screen time be limited to less than one or two hours per day, and for kids under 2, none at all. But in a world where screens surround us — in restaurants, gas stations, grocery store lines, as background ambiance at home (heck, even in pediatricians’ waiting rooms) — this recommendation is becoming nearly impossible to follow. And that’s not even accounting for all the tiny screens on mobile devices within easy grasp of nearly every kid without a paper bag over his or her head. A new survey presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) meeting in April finds,
“Infants just six months old were already logging half an hour a day on mobile devices. And they were not just watching cartoons. A third were swiping and tapping the screens; and a quarter of the babies were actually making calls — although probably by accident. By age two, nearly all the kids were reported to be using tablets and smartphones — sometimes while glued to the TV.”
Understandably parents want, and need, immediate guidance on how to raise happy and healthy kids, yet rigorous scientific studies of how technology affects the development of young children typically take many years to complete. With technology still in its infancy (the iPad is, after all, only five years old) there is no easy answer to the question of “how much.” So maybe parents need to start asking two new questions: “what” and “when.”
What
One thing is indisputably clear — kids learn from media, and the fact that they now have 24/7 access to screens nearly anywhere and everywhere means they’re learning more than ever. So “what” they’re watching — content — matters. Digital Lifestyle Expert David Ryan Polgar calls this the Kafka vs. Kardashian dilemma saying,
“Our aspiration is to sit down and read Kafka, but the cold hard reality is that we consume Kardashian. There is nothing wrong with watching a show about the Kardashian clan, just like there is nothing wrong with eating a cookie — but at the end of the day, you are what you eat. In order to have media diet that is rich in higher quality information we need to be cognizant of what we (along with our kids) are watching.”
Of course kids aren’t going to read Kafka, but the point is they are what they eat and looking at media as a diet that sustains them is a wiser strategy than counting the minutes they consume.
“Quality content matters” says Dr. Chip Donohue, Director of the TEC Center at Erikson Institute, “What they watch is more important than how much” and children learn what to watch by watching the watchers around them — us. According to Donohue, “How adults use media in front of young children is important.”
So instead of catching another episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians our healthy media diet might include co-viewing (or co-playing) a stimulating online game (like Minecraft) with our preteen, or “Skyping” grandma with a toddler on our lap, or asking a teenager to show us how to use Snapchat or Instagram.
When
Deciding when certain content is appropriate to a child’s age and stage of development is important too. For the very young child, research still supports in-person social interactions over screens, as time spent with screens detracts from the face-to-face contact, creative play, hands-on activities, and the physical movement that are the building blocks of healthy brain development. According to Donahue, “‘Early childhood essential experiences’ matter to child development, relationships matter.”
It turns out that relationships matter well past early childhood too. In a recent study conducted by researchers at UCLA, sixth-graders who went five days without glancing at a smartphone, television or other digital screen and had to look at one another instead did substantially better at reading human emotions than sixth-graders from the same school who continued to spend hours each day looking at their electronic devices.
But finding a sixth-grader willing to give up a digital screen for five days is like finding a needle in a haystack, so alternatively adults are saddled with the task of figuring out when certain media is suitable for them… and there are not a lot of places to turn for help (i.e., half of all video games contain violence, including more than 90 percent of the games rated appropriate for children 10 years and older). This makes a good case for co-viewing or, a far a possible, pre-viewing and/or educating ourselves as best we can about what media is developmentally right for our kid.
A Magic Pill?
“This is a lot of work.”
I hear this a lot from parents, and they’re right. Keeping track of the what, when, how much… plus the whole co-viewing thing… it is a lot of work. Parenting was much easier on my parents who could just scream, “Turn off the TV!” from the kitchen when they wanted us to go outside to play.
So I think pediatricians could make it easier on us by prescribing a magic pill for kids. One that boosts their immune systems in order to protect them from all the ills of media use — cyberbullying, addictive behaviors, sexting, predators, etc. — while providing healthy vitamins that empower them to use all media (television, mobile devices, computers, etc.) positively and productively.
We have that pill. It’s called digital literacy, or digital life skills, and it could be administered to kids, as online safety expert Ann Collier says, “the moment a connected device is placed in their hands.” Making this a priority, in school, is a recommendation I’d like to see come from the AAP. Soon.
Because if the doctor orders it, maybe adults will listen.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
No one’s ever accused progressive political activists of being insincere. But no one’s ever accused them of having too much fun, either.
What would happen if someone offered liberal activists a meet-up in a fun setting? Well, a dozen years ago in back of a dive bar in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, what happened was Drinking Liberally. Now sleepy suburban Chicago is into the action.
Drinking Liberally Evanston meets every Monday night at the same restaurant/bar for what the national organization calls “promoting democracy one pint at a time.”
“At first there was huge energy from angsty liberals during the Bush administration,” remembered Organizer-Host John Welch, a 47-year-old computer programmer who develops software for the IOS platform at a small Chicago downtown start-up. “But a lot of that energy sort of left, so they had to step up in order to keep people engaged.”
The extra boost came in the form of an umbrella LLC called Living Liberally that administers to a veritable colorwheel of spin-offs including Drinking Liberally, Laughing Liberally, Screening Liberally, Eating Liberally, Talking Liberally and Reading Liberally. Each subgroup of the volunteer organization produces networks by offering community encounters built around the activities the names suggest. “Progressive action through social interaction” is their motto.
According to Welch, the opportunity for political engagement has led to collaborations with other groups, environmental clean-ups, animal rescue support, spicy conversations on global issues, board service with the Democratic Party and introductions to political candidates who have ended up in office. One such elected official is Illinois Senator Daniel Biss who attended Drinking Liberally meet-ups during his campaign. “A good friend of mine even met his wife at Drinking Liberally,” he chuckled.
Attendees vary week to week, but the huddles consist mostly of educated professionals in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s with a few outliers who come and go.
“Everyone’s welcome. People show up when they show up,” Welch said. The size of the crowd is determined by what’s going on in the political world. “Back during the 2008 election cycle, we had tremendous numbers of people.”
Drinking Liberally Evanston clinks every Monday at 7:00 p.m at Prairie Moon Restaurant in Evanston, Il.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
