December 2016 – January 2017

Industry
• Following 'free' 4G from Reliance Jio in India, Airtel offering 3GB free on top of 1GB paid (2GB for Vodafone)
• WeChat data: 768m daily active users, 35% year-on-year growth
• Growth in online video in India (according to UC News): video drives increased engagement
• The Future of Faking Audio and Video: quicker and easier
• 2016: The Year Social Ate Media and Telcos: in 2016 social and messaging apps grew by 394% whereas music, media and entertainment were up only 1%, and gaming is down 4%: 'communitainment' is winning
• Oscars: Amazon Nabs Streaming's First Best Picture Nomination With 'Manchester by the Sea'
• Facebook using AI to search images and videos: for example, searching for 'blowing out candles' in a video of your child, a politician in old news footage or a hotel in a travel documentary
• Mass entertainment in the digital age is still about blockbusters, not endless choice:

'Of the thousands of films released worldwide in 2016 (including well over 700 in America alone), the top five performers at the box office were all made by Disney.' 

'By last year the tail had become yet longer but even thinner: of 8.7m different tracks that sold at least one copy, 96% sold fewer than 100 copies and 40%—3.5m songs—were purchased just once.' 

Hardware
• Logitech $200 4k webcam

Codecs, compression, containers
• Huge gains for 3D graphics data compression with Draco open source library from Google (ZDNet article)
• VP8 in Microsoft Edge as part of support for WebRTC (Microsoft blog post)
• Netflix using VP9 for more efficient mobile delivery (Netflix blog post)
• Better video encoding with experimental Content Hints: speech or music, motion or detail (demo)

<video> and <audio>
• Intent to Ship: Fullscreen Media Orientation
• Intent to Ship: MediaSession API
• Media Session API now in Chrome for Android, in development for Safari: enables web apps to create media notifications (title, artist, album name, artwork) and respond to media related events such as seeking or track changing (sample app here)

Progressive Web Apps

• Follow Paul Lewis’s video developer diary series as he builds a Progressive Web App for Media (code here)

Flash, plugins...
• In case you missed it: Flash roadmap

WebRTC, messaging, live streaming
• WebRTC in WebKit: Apple is implementing WebRTC in Safari
• WebRTC 1.0 in Microsoft Edge (Microsoft blog post)
• What do the parameters in webrtc-internals really mean?
• WebRTC M56 Release Notes: RTCPeerConnection is now un-prefixed, new RTCPeerConnection.getStats, hardware encode for H.264 on Windows
• Slack announced video support, how did they do it?
• Google brings RCS, the next-gen upgrade to SMS, to Android phones on Sprint (from November)
• 400M people use Facebook Messenger audio and video calling each month

Adaptive streaming
• MPEG-LA announces launch of patent pool and licensing terms for MPEG-DASH.

Encrypted Media Extensions
• HTTPS streaming will be required as indicated previously (starting with Chrome 58).
• Audio and video capabilities must be specified (from Chrome 58).

Audio and Web Audio
• Jake Archibald plays with Web Audio (from November)

• In Apple-Spotify World, SoundCloud Can’t Find Room: 'It is virtually impossible to run a streaming-music service as a profitable business'

• State of music streaming:

'In the next ten years, China may well become the world’s largest recorded-music market' — Jonathon Dworkin, Universal SVP

'If we can tell a band from Glasgow that they’re big in Portland, Oregon, you don’t have to be an economist to realise they can play a bigger theatre with less risk attached ....' — Will Page, Spotify

'Streaming is the dominant revenue stream for all the major labels and many of the indies' — Karim Fanous, Music Ally

October–November 2016

Flash, plugins…

• Chrome will rewrite embedded YouTube Flash players with HTML5 video
• YouTube Flash Embeds rewrite in Safari Technology Preview 13 for Mac OS : "Replaced YouTube.com Flash embeds with HTML5 equivalents on macOS (r205274)"

• Challenges of HTML5 media playback at the BBC: 'IE11... thinks it doesn't support AVC3, but does ... Safari <= 9 ... thinks it supports AVC3, but doesn't'
• Moving Beyond Flash: The Yahoo HTML5 Video Player

Industry
• Comscore 2016 US Mobile App Report:

Word-of-mouth nearly as important as app store discovery for native smartphone apps (and rising); total-minutes-spent-in-apps beginning to decline ... 

[M]obile audience growth is being driven more by mobile web properties, which are actually bigger and growing faster than apps ...But mobile web audiences also tend to be a mile wide and an inch deep. As audiences increase, average time on mobile web declines.

Many of the fastest growing apps are services that improve existing real-world behaviors, such as hailing cabs, exercising and dating.

• Vine discontinuing mobile app

• The internet has been quietly rewired, and video is the reason why: Increasing proportion of video internet traffic means CDNs are taking over: 'The internet today is no longer tiered ..: it’s the flattening of the internet.'

<video>, <audio>, <canvas>, <img>

• Videos of talks from Demuxed

• Apple and Google Browser Tweaks Could Boost Mobile Video: WSJ article expressing concerns at data usage.

• Intent to Implement: Shape Detection API: hardware-accelerated detection of image features (human faces, QR codes, etc.)

• Min Vid Firefox Test Pilot experiment: watch videos in a small window over other tabs

• ImageCapture (API for taking photos — demo at simpl.info/ic): Intent to Experiment, Enable ImageCapture origin trial experiments

• Intent to Ship: Remote Playback API: this will enable audio and video elements to load, play and control media on a remote playback device

• MSE (an API for constructing media streams in JavaScript) is now a W3C Recommendation

• Media Capabilities API: 

• Given its properties, can a specified piece of media content be played at all?
• Will playback have high quality (smoothness)? Will it be power efficient?
• Do output capabilities (e.g. color gamut, dynamic range, audio channels) match content?
• Are security requirements (e.g. encryption, HDCP, etc) supported or playback-impacting?
• Given multiple possible media formats, which is preferable?

EME

• DRM and Web security: Ian Hickson article calling on W3C members to endorse a proposal 'to require each company working on the EME specification to sign an agreement that they would not sue security researchers studying EME'.

WebRTC, messaging, realtime, live streaming

• WhatsApp can now make video calls on Android

• Skype's WebRTC Linux app remains in alpha, but it now has video calling

• WebRTC: From The Ground Up: Nick Chadwick talk at Demuxed2016 (ht @tsahil)
• Facebook Messenger Lite launched: <10MB, 'starting to roll out to people in Kenya, Tunisia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Venezuela. Look for Messenger Lite in other countries in the coming months.'

• Line made $271 million from stickers in 2015 up 38 percent from 2014 (article from a few months back)

• Audio interview: Mozilla's Nils Ohlmeier about Firefox and WebRTC

And finally...

• Browser media capabilities: Bitmovin page that tests your browser for CDM/codec support, and provides information about MSE, codec, CDM and adaptive streaming support for major browsers on desktop and mobile

• Detailed study by UK telecoms regulator Ofcom: Children and parents: media use and attitudes

August–September 2016

WebRTC, messaging, live streaming
• Google Duo released: Google Play, iTunes
• Less jitter and delay in Chrome 52: sleuthing from Philipp Hancke
• Skype announces new WebRTC alpha version for Linux, Chromebook users can now make voice calls too
• Microsoft acquired Beam: for Xbox, for low latency video streaming (h/t @tsahil)
• Working around WebRTC bugs: from Philipp Hancke at appear.in

<video> & plugins
• New <video> Policies for iOS: iOS 10 supports autoplay for muted video once visible (and video with no audio tracks), likewise for the play() method — which now returns a promise if playback is successful.
• Muted video autoplay for Chrome on Android: see previous item :)
• 'Flash Is Dying in December: Long Live HTML5 Video Player': MSE + HLS
• The End of Flash: eBook from Monotype, pitching HTML5 ads

VR, AR, 360º
• Copresence in WebVR: WebAudio + WebRTC + WebVR = ❤
• The future of stories:

... when you look at Avatar and you look at any movie from the 1950s, it’s essentially the same…. It's a sequence of rectangles, one after another after another. … Right now, cinematic VR is a sequence of spheres that you’re inhabiting. That's not gonna be the case in even a couple of years. So, what's exciting for us is not just trying to figure out what the Citizen Kane of cinematic VR is, but finding out what the alternative is.

• Videos of the future
• Qualcomm plots cheaper VR with all-in-one headset

Web Audio
• Omnitone: Spatial audio on the web: immersive audio for VR from the Chrome WebAudio team

Industry
• Japan begins the world's first regular 8K television broadcasts: in time for Rio Olympics
• Six months in: What Sky has learned from VR (h/t Benedict Evans)
• Time Warner is buying 10 percent of Hulu for around $600 million (h/t Benedict Evans)
• UK regulator Ofcom Communications Market report: record broadcast TV revenues of £13.6bn last year, pay-TV income £6.2bn, online TV up 23% to £976m
• Guardian interview with Netflix's Reed Hastings: 'I joke with Larry Page that his vision is of making the world more productive ... and mine is making it in some ways less productive ...'
• Twitter wins deal to live stream NFL: around $10 million to stream 10 games, with only some ad inventory exclusive (Facebook had wanted to sell all ads). Twitter has other live-streaming deals with Wimbledon, the NBA, CBS News, etc.
• Pinterest starts to sell video advertising
• Imaging, Snapchat and mobile: 'rather than thinking of a ‘digital camera', I’d suggest that one should think about the image sensor as an input method'
• 50m watched Olympics on Snapchat (h/t Benedict Evans)
• Vice’s founder thinks television is failing young people
• YouTube live video views jumped by 80% over the last year
• Using the BBC iPlayer now requires a TV licence
• Jio launches 4G network with unlimited free voice calls: data tariffs starting at 1GB of data at Rs 50 (75 cents), 'the largest 4G LTE deployment anywhere in the world'

And finally...
• Single-pixel cameras

July 2016

Adaptive streaming
• For HLS on iOS 10, an HLS manifest is still required, but you can use DASH-compatible ISO BMFF/CMAF streams:
  • HLS Now Supports Fragmented MP4 Making it Compatible With DASH
  •  CMAF: What it is and why it may change your OTT future

Plugins
• Safari 10.12 will require click-to-use Flash
• The Agonizingly Slow Decline of Adobe Flash Player

VR, AR, 360º
• VR Cinematography Studies for Google: VR Cinematography Studies for Google
• Project Tango: Lenovo Phab 2 Pro phone has depth and motion tracking cameras, with AR processing incorporated in Snapdragon chip.
• Twitter AR/VR team (from Benedict Evans)

Offline media
• Facebook will test video downloads for offline viewing

Industry
• Tribune (publisher of LA Times and Chicago Tribune) has rebranded as Tronc, which will serve as a 'content curation and monetization engine'.
• Rupert Murdoch to invest millions in video for Sun and Times: News UK plans to make thousands of videos a year for papers’ websites, including advertising and live content
• Alicia Keys latest artist to enforce no cell phone policy at concerts
• Vice to launch in more than 50 new countries
• Nielsen ratings for online viewing: younger audiences than traditional TV (for same shows), viewing figures comparable to cable
• Google acquires Anvato: platform for video encoding, editing in the cloud, publishing and distribution
• Ofcom report: for 16 to 24-year-olds, live TV viewing has fallen by more than a quarter and a third of all TV watching is via on-demand online services. 'Ofcom said, on average, individuals in the UK watched three hours and 36 minutes of measured broadcast TV a day last year, 26 minutes fewer than five years ago'.
• YouTube increasingly popular with children: 35 of the top 100 YouTube channels are aimed at children.
• IBM Cloud Video report: Many 'passive cancellations' (16% of total) because of credit card expiration; Netflix least cancelled service. 'When it comes to churn, too many ads and high costs are the most common reasons that subscribers cancel an SVOD service. Not enough content to watch and technical problems are next on the list ….'
• How technology disrupted the truth

Web: audio and video
• Intent to ship: Media Capture from <audio> and <video>
• Muted video autoplay is supported by Safari 10 and Android Chrome 53 and above (and autoplay is already supported by UC Browser and Firefox on Android)
• react-vidz-player: a simple video player built in React, using vidz

WebRTC, messaging, live streaming
• Intent to implement and ship: Unprefixed getUserMedia
• WhatsApp: 100 million calls per day
• Do 12% of WebRTC calls really fail?
• Live streaming in China: one-year-old live-streaming app Ingkee hits #1 on Apple’s China app store (from Benedict Evans)

Image Formats
• Partial WebP support in Safari Beta (WebM project)
• WebP adoption growing on mobile: Yelp, Dollar Shave Club on iOS, King Games aka Candy Crush

April–June 2016

WebRTC, live streaming, messaging
• IOC to control live streaming from Olympic events:

Videos of Olympic events and competitions can be taken by accredited persons but must not be shared or posted without the consent of the IOC. Broadcasting images using live-streaming apps such as Periscope is also prohibited.

• WeChat’s global expansion has been a disaster
• M51 WebRTC release notes
• WebTorrent + MediaRecorder

• New codelab: Realtime communication with WebRTC

Codecs, compression, containers
• Firefox 47 support for VP9
• AOMedia signs up two more encoding guys for royalty free video
• The Decline of the Standards-Based Codec—and Good Riddance

Web audio and video
• New codelab: High performance video for the mobile web

Plugins
• A fond farewell to Flash: 'if it weren’t for Flash there would most likely be no Netflix, no Meerkat or Periscope, no YouTube, no Facebook Live'.

APIs
• The Data Plan API: allows applications to learn about the user's mobile data plan and adapt behavior accordingly

Adaptive streaming
• QoE for DASH streams:

Interestingly, the start-up delay does not necessarily influence the QoE but buffer under-runs or stalls will definitely and also significantly impact the media experience and, thus, shall be avoided at all.

Industry
• Netflix Introduces New Cellular Data Controls Globally
• Netflix to make first original series in India
• VPNs no match for client-side geo-blocking
• Vidyo joins Alliance for Open Media
• In five years time Facebook "will be definitely mobile, it will be probably all video … .The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video" — Facebook EMEA VP Nicola Mendelssohn.
• England’s 2-1 Euro 2016 win over Wales was watched live on the BBC Sport website by a record 2.3 million people.

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.