BSkyB searches for Pluto

The Pluto UI in Minecraft action

BSkyB has managed to establish itself a fairly enviable reputation as a trend-spotter over recent years and, while this doesn’t always work out in its favour (stereo 3D for instance) it is prepared to invest to bring new technology to the market and onboard.

Its latest investment is $500,000 pushed towards LA-based online video aggregator Pluto.TV. Pluto.TV is an online television platform that aggregates video content from across the web (YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion, Funny or Die and more it says) and programs it into themed and curated TV channels.

It’s an eclectic mix. Out of the 100+ current free channels you’ll find plenty that wouldn’t find any room in a conventional broadcaster’s EPG — Channel 114 is currently dedicated to playing Pharrell Williams’ ‘Happy’ 24 hours a day, while 707 World of Minecraft does exactly what it says on the tin — but that is, you suspect, the whole point. A recent upgrade has included the ability to save programmes to a list of favourites for time-shifting.

While freely available everywhere through a browser, the app and connected TV functionality (so far Fire TV, Chromecast, and Apple TV via Airplay and an iOS device) is currently limited to North America. But it is something that you could easily see folded into a mainstream EPG — especially when Sky rolls out its Project Ethan STB — and it certainly has the potential to crack the insidious and ongoing problems with Connected TV UIs. Much will depend on how good the curation is and whether it can surpass the ‘watch this’ algorithms all the big video players already deploy.

Other investments made by Sky this year include $750k in Californian VR start-up Jaunt and a whopping £5m in US advertising technology firm Sharethrough, while streaming specialist Roku, and digital distributor 1 Mainstream benefitted from its investment largesse in 2013.

Sharethrough is billed as a world leader in native advertising (which, if you haven’t stumbled across it yet, enables publishers to monetise their sites and apps with adverts that are non-interruptive and stylistically similar to the surrounding content) and Sky has been using it on skysports.com. Expect to see much more of that onscreen as Sky’s advertising sales house Sky Media will offer its clients access to Sharethrough as well as utilising it itself.

And expect to see much more of all of this sort of thing too. Earlier this year, Sky opened up a dedicated office in San Francisco - an investment SkunkWorks if you will - to help it continue to forge new partnerships with tech startups. It will be fascinating to see how much of what it invests in is purely speculative and how much leads to actual onscreen innovation. Compared to the BBC R&D budget (the Corporation’s failed DMI project alone cost £98.4m) the amounts are relatively small but, like Pluto, it will all depend on how good the custodians of the conduits are.

Gender Equality 0 Internet 1

This from The Verge: Emma Watson nude photo threats were apparently a plot to kill 4chan.

In which, emmayouarenext.com is revealed to be a hoax and a mightily murky one at that. But the thing that gets me is this:

The organizer says that emmayouarenext.com reached 48 million visitors, 7 million Facebook shares and likes, and 3 million Twitter mentions.

As of 10:43 24/09/14, by comparison only 96,199 men (myself proudly included) have signed the #heforshe commitment.

These numbers are *seriously* out of whack.

Video killed the internet star

An interesting piece from The Verge.

What happens to literacy when the internet turns into a giant TV station?

Personally, I skip video in the same way that I used to skip jpegs on the web 20 years ago. It's far too slow a means of conveying information: I can skim read 200 words in about 10 seconds at a depth of understanding that's more than enough to know if I want to read any bits of it in more detail. Then I can lob it into Pocket or whatever. Video? Too clunky; too resistant to efficient archiving; too manipulative...too slow, frankly.

It's like 1995 all over again...

It's all repeats nowadays - online mindfulness

[Reposting this one from last year in lieu of having the time to write anything new at the moment. Normal service will be resumed in a couple of weeks after IBC...]

One of the things I've been increasingly puzzling about recently is the disconnect between our online lives and our real ones; the personas if you like that we present to people in the real world and the ones that we forge for ourselves online.

There's a tradition of this, of course. Back in the early days of the internet, it was possible to have an enormous amount of fun in the Usenet groups you frequented by pretending to be a 16 year old schoolgirl from Helsinki. Certainly fun when troll-baiting. But with the rise of social media and its interconnecting webs of likes and dislikes, follows and retweets, our online personalities are designed to be much more faithful extensions of ourselves. The problem is, we don't treat them that way.

Maybe it's because our online relationships are mediated via the keyboard, and even with the rich complexities of language - and the less subtle interventions of emoticons - we are always a step removed. But it seems that this is particularly the case when it comes to mindfulness. A quick quip, a sarcastic comment...it is all too easy for us to participate in conversations that we perhaps wouldn't chose to in real life. I've lost count of the times I've been within a button press of tweeting something or commenting on something on Facebook and then pulled back and run through the usual quick Buddhist mantra: is it kind? Is it necessary?

Often it's not, and at least online there is a delete button (depending on how Facebook is running its privacy policy that week). But, again in Buddhist parlance, right thinking and right speech should also lead to right typing and our online relationships - ephemeral sometimes though they may be - are poorer when this isn't so.

Allons-y-up

Despite having spent several years now writing about sports broadcasting's most prestigious events, I have never managed to write much about my personal favourite, Le Tour de France.

So, in the spirit of slight randomness, here's a picture of some sheep and a link to an article about Sony’s 4K World Cup Workflow instead which I wrote for the good people at Red Shark.

And with that, it's back to the IBC grindstone...

Slenderman and creepypasta

An interesting piece from The Verge that lifts the lid on the collision of memes and teenagers and the possible creation of a moral panic (let's see if the Daily Mail jumps on this one).

I dunno, we just had to make do with mashing up D&D and The Diceman in my day...

'Slenderman' is the new 'devil made me do it'

70 years on

Can think of few better illustrations of the difference that seven decades have made to Europe than this series of then and now pictures that the Huffington Post created…

More here: D-Day Landing Sites Then And Now: 11 Striking Images That Bring The Past And Present Together