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