I Want My I Want My I Want My Live Streaming

I’ve hated the characterization of the web as “TV 2.0” for as long as it’s been a trope, which is sadly about as long as the web’s existed. It’s just so tempting to categorize the new thing in terms of the existing thing and the ideas have been intertwined for going on twenty years now. Still, despite the lazy categorization and my own desire to see the web as somehow purer than the crude old idiot box, it’s clear the convergence has mostly happened, and even criss-crossed.

This so-called “golden age of television” we’re so privileged with right now owes as much to the web as it does to Hollywood. The abundance of shows, with a longtail-like distribution, is a lot of what the web promised. And the consolidated web today increasingly looks like television of old, with just a few channels hoarding most of the spectrum.

Facebook and Snapchat are fighting over which one gets to “replace TV for millennials” with Snapchat making the surprisingly stronger case. Zuckerberg will fight this hard and spend serious money to bring media partners on board. (If you were wondering what Snapchat needs two and a half billion VC bucks for, there you have it).

On the backend, television has maintained it’s hold of brand advertisement by being precisely what advertising on the web can’t be: ubiquitous, immersive, and vague. This last feature sounds like a bug and calls to mind the old adage “I know half of my ad budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half” but television’s lack of web-like precision tracking is a boon to the kind of large scale advertising the Coca-Colas, Nikes, and Procter & Gamble’s of the world still need to establish recognition. No one google’s “what kid of soda should I consume at this moment” and receives an ad perfectly tailored to their search history, they just grab a Coke because an ad they don’t even know they saw told them to.

It’s this hundred billion dollar a year pile of money that Snapchat wants, either directly from television or by expanding brand advertisement from highly targeted keyword buys to simply owning the most desirable demographic.

Facebook will continue to duke it out with Snapchat, mostly via their Messenger App, while also focusing on live video. Live events are powerful — hypnotic even — and fairly well suited to Facebook’s aesthetic. This video of Zuckerberg’s first global Q&A is pretty painful to watch, even more so when Jerry Seinfeld crashes at about the 40 minute mark (why are they sitting so close? Who forgot to turn on Zuckerberg’s emotion chip? Why is there a straw coming out of Seinfeld’s crotch?) but found an audience of nearly 10 million people.

Drive Like a Bot

As a biking, walking, transit-riding, non-car-owning urbanite, no one wants the driverless future to arrive more quickly than me. And yet, I remain a bit skeptical of this world of chauffeur-bots, not necessarily because I think the tech is far off, but I’m fairly sure the hardest part is going to be the social engineering that has to happen. Taking old cars off the road or telling people they can’t drive exactly how, when, and where they want is going to be difficult, especially since far too many of our fellow citizens will see this as a struggle for capital-F Freedom.

So I was intrigued to read about Nexar, an Israeli company that has built a fairly popular dashcam app. Like so many free consumer apps, though, the app itself is actually less interesting than the network behind it. Nexar uses the data from the camera, and all of the other sensors built into a mobile phone these days, to build a fairly sophisticated real-time data model of traffic. They crowdsource a tremendous amount of data from a relatively small number of users and then use the standard set of modern computing tools — machine learning, computer vision, AI — to profile a surprisingly large number of drivers in metropolitan areas. They claim that if their app is in just 1% of cars in a city, they’d be able to profile 99% of the drivers.

Which, naturally, raises plenty of questions about what they do with this data. Do they automatically alert local police if they detect a drunk driver? Could law enforcement subpoena video footage after a crime is committed? Or during a chase? Or before a crime is even committed if the data suspects one is in progress? Could a private individual pay Nexar to track, say, a spouse suspected of infidelity?

Apps like Nexar and Waze, not to mention the apps that Uber and Lyft drivers have running, present another possibility: can surveillance tech force drivers to behave more like bots while we wait for driverless cars to arrive? Usage-based insurance is already using tracking devices to offer lower premiums to people who don’t drive much. As the amount of data from all kinds of surveillance increases, it makes sense that drivers could be incentivized to be on their best behavior.

It’s not hard to imagine this being fed to municipal governments as a way to automate traffic cops. Roll a stop sign? That’s an automatic $25 ticket, in your email before you get home. Send a tweet from the highway? $200, Venmo your payment within 30 days please. Uber parked in my bike lane? Driving privileges suspended for a week. In this admittedly fantasy world, we’ll beg for robots driving 5mph below the speed limit.

Sidebar

A gaggle of entertainers, from Taylor Swift to U2, are asking Congress to amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to get rid of the safe harbor provisions. Safe harbor is the clause that says a website can’t be held liable if one of their users uploads copyrighted material, provided they take it down when asked. Getting rid of safe harbor is, of course, a terrible idea as it would mean that the entire web would collapse under the weight of endless litigation.

Microsoft open sourced Monaco, the web-based editor that powers their (quite good!) VS Code app.

Erin McKean has a great step by step on how to build a free Twitterbot with AWS Lambda and Node.

How Yahoo derailed Tumblr. Is it Freudian that I typed “twitter” when I meant “tumblr”?

Twitter Engage is a terrible idea, badly executed.

It’s easy to laugh at Rhapsody, the streaming music service spun off of the perpetually product plagued Real Media, as a pathetic also-ran. Which it very much is! But you can’t deny that they’ve been trying to make the “celestial jukebox” idea work longer than anyone. So the news that they’re rebranding Rhapsody as Napster, which they acquired (from Best Buy!) in 2011, is just another sad, if not fascinating, chapter in a story you thought had ended a long time ago.

The 22 most influential women in podcasting. This started as a cheeky send up of another very male-centric list and ended up being the more interesting of the two.

This wide ranging interview with Louis CK is, of course, great. He has some really smart things to say about how media gets made these days, too.

Anil Dash writes the history of PM Dawn you never knew you wanted. I really loved this because it highlights a kind of writing that’s all too rare — personal, deeply knowledgeable, respects the readers intelligence, probably without huge mass appeal (especially at just under 5,000 words!) but a perfect bullseye for the target audience. This was what the internet and blogging was supposed to deliver, remember?

I was hooked on the idea of Real Life magazine from the first sentence of the introduction post: “Videodrome is the best film ever made about the internet.” And then I got to the reveal that it’s being fully funded by Snapchat and it gave me pause. And then I took a rare moment to consider why this made me queasy and I don’t have a great answer other than a personal distaste for Snapchat. So I’m going to keep my eye on it because I’m fairly sure it’s going to be great.

ProPublica data editor Jeff Larson: “My first successful FOIA appeal, unfortunately the story I was working on never went anywhere. Hopefully this list of federal .gov domains is useful for someone.”

Why “Transcending Race” Is a Lie. A powerful piece by Greg Howard that captures fundamental truths of race in America.