Year: 2019

It’s Oscar night! Do you care? If you’re me, and/or the statistically average watcher, the answer is: a whole lot less than you used to. Last year’s viewership hit an all-time low. Whither Hollywood, which just does not dominate the cultural conversation the way it used to?

Oh, at first glance it’s doing just fine — last year the total US box office hit almost $12 billion, the highest ever. But look a little deeper and the numbers are more troubling. Most of that gain is from higher ticket prices. The total number of movie tickets sold in the USA has fallen by more than 10% over the last 20 years, despite population growth.

“Netflix!” you say, and yes indeed, and even more than you think. “Hollywood is now irrelevant,” says no less an authority than onetime Hollywood mogul Barry Diller, now chairman of IAC. “Netflix has won this game.” Streaming is the future, despite the studios’ attempt to promote “cloud lockers” for movie ownership, one of which (UltraViolet) closed down last year, while others, such as Disney’s Movies Anywhere (disclaimer/disclosure: I did some ancillary work for MA at my dayjob a couple of years ago) have not exactly conquered the landscape.

In fact, perhaps the keenest-eyed industry analyst alive, Matthew Ball, former head of strategy at Amazon Studios, argues that Netflix has so transcended Hollywood that its real competition is another, and surprising, entity entirely:

He unpacks that in a fascinating piece which is then surpassed by his four–parts–and–counting deep dive into “Netflix Misunderstandings,” composed last summer and since then required reading for every armchair media analyst worldwide. Some highlights:

This cash loss only exists because Netflix is funding next year’s content against this year’s revenue. Netflix could have chosen to stabilize its 2018 content offering at 2017 levels … and had the company done this, it would have generated $700MM in cash, not lost $2B.
[…]
At a time in which most tech companies need to be bullied into admitting they’re also media companies, Netflix’s tech identity is often glossed over. It is as much a technology and product company as Google, Apple or Amazon.
[…]
Hastings knows that if Netflix falls short of, say, 250MM subscribers, his business will buckle. His spend is predicated upon achieving this degree of scale … Even at the low end, Netflix would have achieved greater dominance than the media business has ever seen.
[…]
The company boasts that it will launch 700 total original series in 2018 (or 14 per week) and offer more than 1,000 by the end of the year. This raises the question of what, exactly, is an “Original” … Understanding this difference is critical for any attempt to benchmark SVOD services

We can conclude that Netflix’s (and, to a lesser extent, Amazon Prime’s) reshaping of the visual media industry has only just begun; the repercussions of the first few tremors are still rippling through Hollywood, but we can expect ever bigger quakes in the years to come.

The saving grace is that the rest of the world is getting wealthier, and spending more on Hollywood … although the studios only pull in roughly 25% of what their releases in China gross, compared to 50% back home. Still, 25% of a huge number is still very large, and China is huge. Two of last year’s top 15 worldwide movies made essentially all of their money in China. It seems likely that The Wandering Earth, which has pulled in $557 million in only two weeks, will make more money in China this year than presumed 2019 #1 Avengers:Endgame will in the USA. (Infinity War earned $679 million domestically.)

So where does that leave Hollywood? Being slowly disrupted back home by technical superiors in the form of Netflix and Amazon Prime, and racing to make up their losses overseas. But it’s not like Netflix doesn’t have a robust international strategy. Hollywood’s studios aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, but, with the exception of Disney, they’ll soon have to get used to being mid-level players rather than the kings of the world they once were.

Traditionally, the Google Assistant always lived under the home button on Android phones, but as the company announced at MWC today, LG, Nokia, Xiaomi, TCL and Vivo are about to launch phones with dedicated assistant buttons, similar to what Samsung has long done with its Bixby assistant.

The new phones with the button that are launching this week are the LG G8 ThinQ and K40 and the Nokia 3.2 and 4.2. The upcoming Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 5G and Mi 9, as well as new phones from Vivo (including the Vivo V15 Pro) and TCL will also feature a dedicated Assistant button. With this, Google expects that over 100 million devices will soon offer this feature.

With a dedicated button, Google can also build a few new features into the Android OS, too, that’ll make it easier to bring up some Assistant features that were traditionally always a few taps away.

As expected, a single tap on the button will bring up the Assistant, just like a long tap on your phone does today. A double tap will bring up the Assistant’s visual snapshot feature that provides you with contextual information about your day and location (similar to the sorely missed Google Now of days gone by). A long press activates what Google calls a “walkie talkie feature.” This ensures that the Assistant listens to longer queries, which Google says is “perfect for emails or long text message.”

It’s interesting to see that the Android ecosystem is now building these buttons into phones (and we can probably assume that Google’s own next-gen Pixel devices or the fabled low-end Pixel 3 will have one, too). They will make it easier to discover the Assistant, of course, and maybe get people to use it more often, too — and that’s surely what Google is hoping for.

We’ve already known about the G8 ThinQ for some months now. And a few weeks back, LG made the whole camera rig official, announcing that the handset would be getting a ToF image sensor on its front-facing camera, bring, among other things, advanced face unlock technology.

The company did manage to save a few tricks for the product announcement, including a strange little biometric addition. LG says the phone’s Hand ID tech is the first to use “advanced palm vein authentication” — which could well be accurate. Certainly it’s not a mainstream feature yet.

And I’ll give it to LG, Hand ID is a much catchier name than “palm vein unlock,” which is one of the creepier sounding smartphone features in recent memories. Still, the underlying technology is actually pretty cool here, once you’re down shuddering from how weird the whole thing is on the face of it.

From the company’s press materials, “LG’s Hand ID identifies owners by recognizing the shape, thickness and other individual characteristics of the veins in the palms of their hands.” It turns out, like faces and fingerprints, everyone’s got a unique set of hand veins, so once registered, you can just however your hot blue blood tubes over the handset to quickly unlock in a few seconds.

The Z camera also does depth-sensing face unlock that’s a lot harder to spoof than the kind found on other Android handsets. LG’s also put the tech to use for a set of Air Motion gestures, which allow for hands-free interaction with various apps like the camera (selfies) and music (volume control).

I played around with the feature, and if I’m being totally honest, it takes some getting used to. You’ve got to train yourself to get things just right, which could well dissuade most users from any sort of long-term adoption of features that can pretty quickly with accomplished with a tap.

Other notable features for the new flagship include a 6.1 QHD+ OLED display and a new video portrait mode, which lets users adjust bokeh on the fly.

The handset will hit the States “in the coming weeks.” Pricing is still TBD, but I anticipate that it will cost around the same a previous LG flagships.

We’ve already known about the G8 ThinQ for some months now. And a few weeks back, LG made the whole camera rig official, announcing that the handset would be getting a ToF image sensor on its front-facing camera, bring, among other things, advanced face unlock technology.

The company did manage to save a few tricks for the product announcement, including a strange little biometric addition. LG says the phone’s Hand ID tech is the first to use “advanced palm vein authentication” — which could well be accurate. Certainly it’s not a mainstream feature yet.

And I’ll give it to LG, Hand ID is a much catchier name than “palm vein unlock,” which is one of the creepier sounding smartphone features in recent memories. Still, the underlying technology is actually pretty cool here, once you’re down shuddering from how weird the whole thing is on the face of it.

From the company’s press materials, “LG’s Hand ID identifies owners by recognizing the shape, thickness and other individual characteristics of the veins in the palms of their hands.” It turns out, like faces and fingerprints, everyone’s got a unique set of hand veins, so once registered, you can just however your hot blue blood tubes over the handset to quickly unlock in a few seconds.

The Z camera also does depth-sensing face unlock that’s a lot harder to spoof than the kind found on other Android handsets. LG’s also put the tech to use for a set of Air Motion gestures, which allow for hands-free interaction with various apps like the camera (selfies) and music (volume control).

I played around with the feature, and if I’m being totally honest, it takes some getting used to. You’ve got to train yourself to get things just right, which could well dissuade most users from any sort of long-term adoption of features that can pretty quickly with accomplished with a tap.

Other notable features for the new flagship include a 6.1 QHD+ OLED display and a new video portrait mode, which lets users adjust bokeh on the fly.

The handset will hit the States “in the coming weeks.” Pricing is still TBD, but I anticipate that it will cost around the same a previous LG flagships.

For a company with a two letter name, LG loves nothing so much as an unwieldy title. A form of overcompensation, perhaps? Whatever the case, the lengthening of LG phone names is one of this world’s few constants, and as such, it ought to be no surprise that the company’s first 5G handset happily continues the trend as the LG V50 ThinQ 5G.

The phone will be available for Verizon and Sprint customers “this summer”. As for price, I’d put that somewhere in the admittedly vague ballpark of “more expensive that a regular LG phone.”

The device looks to be pretty premium, sporting a 6.4 inch OLED display, Snapdragon 855 and a beefy 4,000-mAh battery. The company isn’t revealing how 5G will impact battery drain, but it’s pretty safe to say it will take a hit. On the upside, anyone who picks up a 5G phone in 2019 will almost certainly be spending a lot of their time still riding the LTE rails.

The phone could eventually be available to additional U.S. carriers.

For a company with a two letter name, LG loves nothing so much as an unwieldy title. A form of overcompensation, perhaps? Whatever the case, the lengthening of LG phone names is one of this world’s few constants, and as such, it ought to be no surprise that the company’s first 5G handset happily continues the trend as the LG V50 ThinQ 5G.

The phone will be available for Verizon and Sprint customers “this summer”. As for price, I’d put that somewhere in the admittedly vague ballpark of “more expensive that a regular LG phone.”

The device looks to be pretty premium, sporting a 6.4 inch OLED display, Snapdragon 855 and a beefy 4,000-mAh battery. The company isn’t revealing how 5G will impact battery drain, but it’s pretty safe to say it will take a hit. On the upside, anyone who picks up a 5G phone in 2019 will almost certainly be spending a lot of their time still riding the LTE rails.

The phone could eventually be available to additional U.S. carriers.

At its MWC keynote in Barcelona today, Microsoft promised to keep the HoloLens ecosystem open. That means third-party app stores and browsers, for example, with Mozilla already announcing its Firefox browser for HoloLens today.

“Developers will have the freedom to create their own stares as first-class citizens,” Microsoft’s HoloLens chief Alex Kipman said today and stressed that developers will also have the freedom to create great web browsers.

All of this should be obvious, but there have, of course, been times in Microsoft’s history where an open ecosystem was not exactly what the company focused on. And browser competition was surely not on the top of the company’s list during the browser wars. That cost the company dearly, both financially and in terms of developer goodwill. Maybe that’s why it is now making this announcement, too.

“We believe in an open API surface area and driver model,” Kipman said. “We will continue to participate in guiding open standards like OpenXR so anyone can innovate with our headset from the sensors that are being used to the differentiated experiences that are being created.”

Microsoft closed out today’s big HoloLens 2 debut with a surprise appearance by Epic Games CEO, Tim Sweeney. The gaming exec was clearly impressed by the technology’s future for both developement and consumer augmented reality.

“I believe that AR is going to be the primary platform of the future for both work and entertainment,” he told the crowd at the event.

The Fortnite creator is kicking things off on the development side, announcing that Unreal Engine 4 support will be coming to the headset. The move is part of a larger strategy for Microsoft to open the system up, as it looks to grow its key foray into the world of mixed reality.

For Epic, meanwhile, it’s part of a larger embrace of both Microsoft’s solution and all things AR. Sweeney noted that the company is not ready to announce any kind of consumer-facing AR offering, that they’re certainly on the way, and the company “will support HoloLens in all of our endeavors.”

Microsoft is really hoping to get down to business with the next version of the Hololens. In fact, the software giant announced a new customization program for the HoloLens 2.

How, precisely such customized versions of the XR headset will look remains to be seen, but the company’s first partner, construction hardware company Trimble, is offering a pretty interesting glimpse. The company joined Microsoft on-stage to debut a new collaboration.

The XR10 is a customized hardhat with a swiveling HoloLens 2 built-in, so construction works can get a heads-up display on site. This first partnership is a clear sign of where Microsoft hopes to go with this second generation of its headset, bringing the technology beyond the confines of the office and into real world site. 

Pricing is still TBD, but the headset will be available at the same time as the regular Hololens 2.

Today’s Mobile World Congress kickoff event was all about the next Hololens, but Microsoft still had some surprises up its sleeve. One of the more interesting additions is the Azure Kinect, a new enterprise camera system that leverages the company’s perennially 3D imaging technology to create a 3D camera for enterprises.

The device is actually a kind of companion hardware piece for Hololens in the enterprise, giving business a way to capture depth sensing and leverage its Azure solutions to collect that data.

“Azure Kinect is an intelligent edge device that doesn’t just see and hear but understands the people, the environment, the objects and their actions,” Azure VP Julia White said at the kick off of today’s event. “The level of accuracy you can achieve is unprecedented.”

What started as a gesture-based gaming peripheral for the Xbox 360 has since grown to be an incredibly useful tool across a variety of different fields, so it tracks that the company would seek to develop a product for business. And unlike some of the more far off Hololens applications, the Azure Kinect is the sort of product that could be instantly useful, right off the the shelf.

A number of enterprise partners have already begun testing the technology, including Datamesh, Ocuvera and Ava, representing an interesting cross-section of companies. The system goes up for pre-order today, priced at $399.