June 2015

VR
• How to Avoid Real Objects While in a Virtual World

Web Audio
• A Brief History of Synthesis with the Web Audio API

Web MIDI
• Making Music in the Browser – Web MIDI API

WebRTC, realtime, communication
• FaceTime analysis from @HCornflower
• The new Android M App Permissions
• $1999 Chromebox for meetings: hardware support for up to 20 people
• Everyone in Buenos Aires Is Communicating by Voice Memo Now

MSE
• Building A Media Source HTML5 Player With Adaptive Streaming: four part series:

[MSE is a] significant leap forward for media handling in the browser, far superior than the standard HTML5 video tag and, in many ways, an improvement on anything Flash could handle.

 • Media Source Extensions for Audio: gapless playback!

Codecs, compression, containers

• Consumer Reports top 3 must haves in a new smart TV include VP9 support
• Live streaming VP9 with Wowza!
• Allegro VP9 streams

Industry
• Ericsson Mobility Report:

Three quarters of global subscription growth came from Africa and Asia in Q1 2015. This pattern is forecast to continue to 2020. 

By 2020, 70 percent of the world's population will have a smartphone, with an estimated 26 billion connected devices. 

Mobile data traffic in Q1 2015 was 55 percent higher than in Q1 2014.= 

Video continues to be the key growth factor, with 60 percent of all mobile data traffic forecast to be from online video by 2020.

• Apple unveils streaming service Apple Music and 24-hour radio stations
• Google Play Music launches curated music 'radio' service in US: ad-supported, based on Songza.
• News outlets face losing control to Apple, Facebook and Google: 46% access news weekly on mobile (37% 2014) but only 6% have paid for news: 'although 70% of smartphone users have downloaded a news app, only a third actually use them on a weekly basis'.
• Google calls for anti-Isis push and makes YouTube propaganda pledge:

Isis is having a viral moment on social media and the countervailing viewpoints are nowhere near strong enough to oppose them … . The power of community is not lost on Isis and they are using it to great effect. Right now the voice of that community is a lot larger than ours, a lot louder, there’s more out there on the web.

• James Foley: How social media is fighting back against Isis propaganda
• Using the Web from Nairobi:

Twitter is being served from ATLANTA. Georgia. Which it might be worth noting is really really far away from Kenya. Like 300ms distant. HTTPS handshakes mean three full round trip exchanges must be completed before you can even begin your request to a server, so nearly a full second passes before your client is even starting to send its request. DOMContentLoaded is 2.95s, and page load only finishes at 12.85s. Facebook, served from London, has a 4s DOMContentLoaded. 

Google.com has a more reasonable 636ms to DOMContentLoaded due to 'cheating' using a special protocol called QUIC that's different from HTTPS and doesn't require any round trips to initiate communicate once a session has ever been established, which makes latency hurt less. It's clear these kinds of low-overhead protocols could have high impact in these markets. 

… from an end user perception of speed, it only matters somewhat how sophisticated the Kenyan domestic backbone gets or even how many new fiber ports the country gets – as long as peering is poor, content caches are distant, and sites require lots of round trips to build a meaningful experience for users. The Internet will still be slow here. And clearly if some of the most sophisticated startups launching products targeted to the local market aren't doing well at this, it's structurally hard to do.

• Broadly: Vice channel 'For women who know their place'.
• Adobe Online Video Viewing and Browsing Trends – Q1 2015:

• iOS grew its share from 43% to 47% year-over-year.
• Game consoles and over-the-top (OTT) devices saw the biggest jump in share from 6% to 24% YoY – surpassing Android, which remained flat at 15%.
• Browser viewing sank to a new low – now 14%.

• Cell coverage map (Check out India v Australia in relation to potential media consumption on mobile — we're not expecting cell towers in the Simpson Desert, but rural coverage in many countries is terrible.)
• Media is exploding (literally)