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