Microsoft has been hinting at several different original television projects for months – including an upcoming project with Steven Spielberg to make Halo a television series – and today gave us a look at how Microsoft’s original content would shake out. The plan is to launch the newly-minted Xbox Originals with the previously-announced live, interactive stream of Bonnaroo Music Festival on June 13th. Xbox owners will be able to switch vantage points and take part in Skype calls with artists backstage; this degree of user control and interactivity will be a prime feature of many of Xbox Original series as well. On that front, Microsoft promised a host of non-event-based content, including “Every Street United,” hosted by international soccer personalities Thierry henry and Edgar Davids, “Signal to Noise,” focused on the influence of technology on directors, and the promised “Halo” series. After looking at how cautiously Netflix and Amazon have eased into original content, Microsoft’s broad lineup is certainly the most ambitious off-the-bat launch in some time. It also is a fantastic ploy to keep living-room consumers off of their cable boxes and on their Xbox’s as much as possible.
Category: Percolate
Pinterest Launches New Mobile Search
Pinterest today debuted a new search feature with mobile utilization at its core. To search through the over 30 billion pins on the site can be a chore, particularly if users are looking for something specific – and indeed, those individual pins are now loaded with links to purchase, location tags, related pins and other information. In the interest of facilitating discovery, and thereby clickthroughs on those links, Pinterest has launched “Guided Search” for Android and iOS. A user enters a topic, and pins appear with suggestions for how to narrow the search. The goal is to facilitate natural discovery throughout the search process; if a user wants hair styles, they’ll be suggested things like bangs, hair length, and the like. With Pinterest looking for ways to prove that its platform drives revenue, guiding users to what they’re looking for on mobile is, and now will continue to be, a key feature of the platform.
PayPal Makes the Smartwatch Smarter
As if Starbucks needed to make it easier to part with $6 for a latte, the coffee giant has volunteered its San Jose location, on PayPal’s campus, to become a pilot tester for PayPal’s new wireless payment system built for the Samsung Galaxy Gear line. The process sounds simple – the user’s name and photo pop up on the computer at the register, a push notification is sent to the watch when the sale is rung up, and the user confirms payment with a tap. Bluetooth LE technology is already making our lives easier and more exciting, and this payment system is a realistic vision of a potentially very near future.
Facebook Buys Fitness Tracker Moves
Facebook is making a big push into the tracking space – both in terms of tracking user data, and now in terms of tracking users’ movements. Today, Facebook announced that it purchased Moves, a fitness tracking app that records daily activities using smartphone. The goal, of course, is to record more data and to continue to target users in increasingly specific ways to make consumers’ lives more quantifiable – as well as to provide advertisers with a much wider range of ways of serving ads to specific instances. For now, Facebook intends to keep the apps independent much like it presently does with Instagram and Whatsapp. Nonetheless, it presents Facebook with the way to continually store increasingly personal data about its users.
Facebook Launches FB Newswire
In its attempt to become the one ubiquitous homepage for the Internet, Facebook is pandering to news networks in its latest creation, Facebook Newswire. In cooperation with Storyful, FB Newswire promises journalists a constantly updating repository of realtime breaking, trending news stories. And with Storyful in cooperation, journalists can be sure that these trending stories are actually verified. The Newswire will collect “newsworthy” stories being shared across the network publically – including media like photos, videos, and status updates from places where stories are breaking. As Facebook looks to position itself against Twitter as the place to go for breaking stories and trending topics, the Newswire will attempt to lure journalists away from the now-traditional breaking news center that many consider Twitter to be.
Instagram Personalizes Explore Tab
Instagram has been struggling to make the app a more user-friendly experience off of the home feed that most users stay in. Now, the explore tab has been tweaked slightly such that the tab now displays photos and videos suggested for each individual user. Before, the section was for posts that were popular amongst all Instagram users. It also only posts photos and video from public accounts – there are no private feeds appearing in that section at all (and no direct messages, either). The replacement for the Popular section has yet to entirely catch on, but by making the app more broadly tailored to individuals means that, at least in theory, more users will use more features within the app and ideally stay glued to the app for longer periods of time.
HBO Shows Now Available On Amazon
In a move that signals their intention to cater to cordcutters, this May Amazon Prime Instant Video will offer some of HBO’s reporting. This represents a pretty significant shift for HBO, who previously touted their exclusive HBO Go service as the only way to find their shows. That said, the new library does not include any new series until three years after they air. And much of HBO’s coveted bak catalog of shows like “Sex and The City,” and “Entourage,” are still stuck in syndication webs. Nonetheless, if you don’t want to pay for cable and still want HBO, your options are vastly expanding. And for cordcutters, it means that their options for getting quality program beyond the traditional cable networks are expanding daily.
Google Touts +Post Ads
Google has, for some time, wanted to make the entire web a part of their larger social scheme. Google is seeing this thought process through to fruition with +Post ads, which gives advertisers the ability to display advertising via Google+ posts throughout Google’s display network. The program is now available to any Google+ page with at least 1,000 followers. The posts are fully interactive, allowing users with G+ accounts to comment, share, and +1 without leaving the page. Google says that the ads have had incredibly high engagement numbers; Toyota USA experienced a 50% higher engagement rate than the industry standard for rich media ads, for instance. It’s a way to broaden horizons across the digital space for planners in the rich media space.
Time Warner Cable Will Sell Streaming Fan TV Box
Last summer Fanhattan showcased a Fan TV box that would put cable TV in direct competition with Internet streaming services, while simultaneously allowing cable TV providers to sell the box itself. Now, Fanhattan has officially found a partner in Time Warner Cable, who will sell their streaming boxes for $99 to subscribers – and they’re already available for pre-order. The box will have live TV and video on-demand streaming from TWC, plus services like Redbox Instant, Target Ticket, Crackle, and Rhapsody. There are more plans to add services over time, but for now the big names like Netflix and Amazon have been left off of the list. Those omissions will allow some breathing room for Roku, Apple TV, and the Amazon Fire TV, but it seems likely that Time Warner will try to break into the cordcutter market as swiftly as possible to keep its customers paying for cable.
Tumblr Has More Social TV Activity Than Twitter
According to a new study that looks at an 11-day window to compare live TV chatter on Twitter and Tumblr, the volume of social-TV activity on Tumblr far exceeds that of Twitter. The study, conducted by the U.K.-based Pulsar, pulled data from Datasift and looked at activity around four episodes from TV shows in the fall and winter of 2013: “Sherlock,” “Supernatural,” Pretty Little Liars,” and “Sleepy Hollow.” Pulsar found that 70% of those social mentions within 11 days of the show happened on Tumblr, with the other 30% on Twitter. Twitter mentions spiked whilst the shows were actually on TV, but Tumblr mentions had more longevity after the shows were off of the air, sustaining their momentum for days. So while Twitter might, in fact, rule the real time social mentions, Tumblr seems like the place to go immediately afterwords for the social afterlife.
