Monat: September 2016

Apple Music Exec Shuts Down Rumors Of A Tidal Deal

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Apple's appetite for acquiring music streaming services, and the agonies and ecstasies that come along with them, has apparently been satisfied. Squelching reports that have persisted since June, a member of Apple Music&039;s senior leadership said the company has no current plans to acquire Jay Z&039;s Tidal or any other rivals.

“We&039;re really running our own race,” Jimmy Iovine, who heads Apple Music, told BuzzFeed News in an interview. “We&039;re not looking to acquire any streaming services.”

The comment was in response to a question about a Wall Street Journal report from late June that Apple was “in talks” to acquire Tidal, which has fiercely competed with Apple Music for exclusive access to A-list artists. Until now, no one from Apple has commented publicly on the alleged talks. Iovine did not deny that such discussions had taken place, but said that no acquisition deal was currently in the works.

Following the June report, some suggested that picking up Tidal could help Apple shore up its bid for dominance in the streaming world, in which the two companies&039; mutual competitor Spotify has a head start.

Apple Music currently has around 17 million paid subscribers, compared to Spotify&039;s 40 million, according to the companies&039; latest announced figures. In addition to being a boon to its subscriber base, acquiring Tidal, which has said it has around 4.2 million subscribers, would have potentially helped Apple&039;s relationships with some of the biggest names in pop music. Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kanye West, and Madonna are among several high-wattage equity partners in Tidal that may have been incentivized to work with Apple on future releases. In late July, West urged Apple to move forward with a deal, saying that it should “give Jay his check.”

For now at least, Apple says it will pass.

On its own, Apple Music has picked up two million subscribers over the past three months, and a revamped, more streamlined version of the service was launched on Tuesday as a part of the new iOS 10 release. Since Jay Z acquired Tidal&039;s parent company Aspiro AB for $56 million in March of 2015, it has struggled to find its footing, churning through three chief executives in less than a year. Earlier this week, it reported a net loss of $28 million for 2015, more than double its losses from the year before.

When reached by BuzzFeed News, a representative for Tidal did not have a comment.

Quelle: <a href="Apple Music Exec Shuts Down Rumors Of A Tidal Deal“>BuzzFeed

LeBron James Haunts My Dreams, And This Week He Haunted My Virtual Reality

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I haven&#039;t watched a single second of the 2016 NBA Finals since the night of June 19th, when LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, and the rest of the Cleveland Cavaliers completed the biggest comeback in basketball history to defeat the Golden State Warriors — and break my fragile Northern Californian heart.

But that&039;s not to say that I haven&039;t seen the NBA finals since then. Watching occurs in the eyes, but sight happens in the brain. For about three hours after the end of Game 7, well into early Monday morning, I lay on my back, trying to sleep. But every time I closed my eyes, I saw the same thing: LeBron James striding across the court, Andre Iguodala swinging the ball around his hips, raising it to the rim, and then LeBron swatting it away.

I was able to repress every other memory from those cursed Finals — Kyrie&039;s go-ahead three pointer to win it all, Draymond Green&039;s series altering nut-shot. But LeBron still haunts my dreams, even though I haven&039;t watched a moment of that game, or The Block, ever since.

Until Tuesday, that is. I was invited, along with many other reporters, into the bowels of the NBA store in midtown Manhattan to see FOLLOW MY LEAD: The Story of the 2016 NBA Finals, a roughly 25-minute virtual reality documentary produced by the NBA, Facebook-owned VR company Oculus, and the production company m ss ng p eces (it&039;s really spelled that way). I strapped on a Samsung Gear VR and returned to my darkest hours, this time in full, immersive virtual reality.

It wasn&039;t pretty.

Matthew Zeitlin / BuzzFeed News

The film, which its creators say is one of the longest continuous-narrative VR videos to be made using video footage, will be released for free by Oculus Wednesday.

It&039;s style will be familiar to anyone who&039;s watched HBO&039;s 24/7 series, ESPN&039;s 30 for 30, or an NFL Films documentary: a pseudo-heroic narrative from a celebrity (Michael B. Jordan) that relentlessly dramatizes the circumstances of a sporting event. The NBA and Oculus got lucky in this case, because the 2016 Finals had one of the most compelling sports narratives in years: the league&039;s greatest player trying to vanquish its best ever team, in a rematch that also pitted the most culturally and economically ascendant region in the country — if not the world — against Cleveland.

“We wanted to prove you could do longform sports documentary in VR,” Eugene Wei, the head of video at Oculus, told me. “We wanted to prove you could do longform in VR period. A lot of people say VR has to be short, so let&039;s do something that&039;s storytelling versus experiential.”

Afp / AFP / Getty Images

The experience tends toward the cinematic — Wei said that the typical shot lasts six to eight seconds, which might be a little long for a traditional broadcast, but relatively short for VR.

So while Oculus, which sells its own VR gear, wants to see the virtual reality documentary evolve to compete and eventually surpass traditional video, the NBA wants people to get a new and exciting way to see a game. The league has already experimented with a VR broadcast, and the documentary is a way for tech-equipped fans “to have an opportunity to attend an NBA game,” said league media executive Jeff Marsilio.

To film games, they had cameras behind the rim, on the scorer&039;s table on the sideline, in the crowd, and cameras on the court to catch the post-game pandemonium.

So what does the Oculus version of the sonorous sports documentary give you, a virtual spectator there in the stadium? At first glance, you can look around and see a lot of people holding cell phones. And because for the most part, all the action is taking place on the court right in front of you, there isn&039;t much benefit to turning your head left or right and peering into the stands.

But when you do, it&039;s a sea of cell phones, photographing and filming the action. When you see Steph Curry or LeBron James being interviewed after the game, you can look around to see members of the sports press, filming it on their cell phones.

And when you see LeBron walking off the court (the camera sits around his collarbone level, so you look down on Kyrie Irving and up at Timofgey Mozgov), you again see everyone with their cell phones filming. The irony is that thanks to the very technology that helps enable VR, the NBA will try to get fans to be as engaged as the fans actually at the games…looking at their phones.

But being able to pan to, say, Jay Z and Beyonce sitting courtside, provides the tantalizing prospect of just being able to turn your head and watch them during the lulls in the game.

Wei said this effect is typical, and what people actually tend to expect from a VR broadcast — a simulation of really being there. “The endpoint of VR is the sensation of reality,” Wei said. “Anything that breaks the fourth wall accelerates your sensation of being there.”

So even when a Warriors fan yells right into the camera, it&039;s good for the experience — it&039;s a way of avoiding what Wei calls the “Ghost Effect,” named for the Patrick Swayze film where a man dies and comes back as a spirit who is physically present but is invisible to humans who aren&039;t Whoopi-Goldberg.

Pool / Getty Images

When it comes to filming game action with the VR cameras, there are shortcomings for the time being: The cameras can be big and stationary, and the lenses are wide and don&039;t zoom. It means the action can appear blurry if it&039;s farther from the cameras.

These shortcomings are also barriers to having regular VR broadcasts of what Marsilio calls the “crown jewel” of the NBA: the live game. While they were able to get a lot of access for the special VR broadcast, the cameras would compete with space that&039;s already taken up by regular TV cameras and photographers.

“It&039;s like snowboarding in the early day of the medium, the learning curve is very steep,” Wei said.

But at closer distances, issues like the blurriness are overcome by how thrilling it all is — the sensation of being there, the oohs and ahhs of the crowd, its silence and explosion right into your ears, with the shock of LeBron dunking right at you. If you could watch live games this way, it would blow traditional TV out of the water, and the NBA knows it.

“If we can bring the world truly courtside, live at the game, it would be the greatest thing we could achieve in VR,” Marsillio said.

Afp / AFP / Getty Images

Quelle: <a href="LeBron James Haunts My Dreams, And This Week He Haunted My Virtual Reality“>BuzzFeed

Ted Cruz Is Picking A Big Fight Over The Internet, And Top Republicans Are Backing Him

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Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has a new battle to fight in the Senate: trying to block the long-planned transfer of the internet&#039;s technical management from the US government to an international body. Cruz is calling the move an internet “giveaway” and warns that it will open the Web to Russian, Chinese, and Iranian manipulation. But experts say blocking the transition would actually accomplish what Cruz fears, by undermining the stability and credibility of the internet’s current, long-standing stewardship model.

The internet is a complex network beyond the control of any one country, but one part of it — its global domain naming system, which allows you to type one unique Web address that takes you to the right site no matter where you are in the world — is technically under the control of the US Commerce Department. Since 1998, the Commerce Department has been contracting out this responsibility to an international nonprofit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). However, the internet’s creators envisioned it as a space free from the interventions of governments — including the United States. So that vision led to plans for the Commerce Department to remove itself as the middleman and cede its management role to ICANN entirely on Oct. 1.

“No one controls the internet.”

Sen. Cruz and his allies in Congress are arguing that if the domain name system switches to new management, antagonistic foreign governments might censor what people see online, undermining the openness of the Web. But during a contentious hearing in the Senate Wednesday, a top Commerce Department official and the President of ICANN dismissed Cruz’s concerns of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian manipulation of the Web.

Cruz has led been at the center of quixotic quests to block Obama Administration efforts before — including in 2013, when efforts to defund Obamacare led to a government shutdown — but he often did it to the chagrin of party leadership. This time, however, he’s been quite successful gathering support on Capitol Hill. Cruz counts more than two dozen lawmakers as allies in opposition to the transfer of management to ICANN, including Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, whose office told BuzzFeed News that Republicans are working on a provision to block the transfer by attaching a provision to a short-term spending bill that must pass by Sept. 30th for the government to remain open.

“Imagine an internet run like many Middle Eastern countries, that punish what they deem to be blasphemy,” Cruz said, predicting what might happen if the transition happens. “Or imagine an internet run like China or Russia, that punish and incarcerate those that engage in political dissent.” To illustrate his point, Cruz hypothesized that ICANN, if it was no longer answerable to Commerce Department, could take down a website for political purposes. But Lawrence Strickling, a high-ranking official in the Commerce Department who testified at the hearing, rejected Cruz’s line of argument. “You’re not positing a realistic scenario,” Strickling said. “ICANN would never be involved.”

Representatives from ICANN say that Cruz and his allies’ concerns about a loss of internet sovereignty or political manipulation stem from a misunderstanding of what internet management means in practice. “No one controls the internet,” said ICANN president and CEO Göran Marby during the same hearing. The stewardship of the domain name system has “nothing to do with content or freedom of expression,” he said. While forms of internet censorship like government filtering, blocking, and traffic monitoring occur in many parts of the world, these practices operate on a different layer of the internet, not in the naming system that ICANN manages.

“We don’t determine … what can or cannot be on a website,” Theresa Swinehart, a senior advisor to Marby, told BuzzFeed News. “We don’t play a role in anything other than making sure the addressing function actually works, so that you can get to a certain website.”

A Commerce Department rep argued that Cruz&039;s plan to block the transfer of internet stewardship would actually be “a gift to Russia.”

Proponents of the transfer say that the transition to a multi-stakeholder model has been decades in the making. ICANN’s stewardship, they say, will continue the inclusive, globally oriented framework of the Web.

The Commerce Department’s Strickling also argued that blocking the transfer of internet stewardship would actually be “a gift to Russia,” emboldening it and other countries who are vying for a government-controlled management system, rather one overseen by ICANN. “If this transition doesn’t go forward, our credibility as a power in terms of supporting the multi-stakeholder model will be shot,” he said. “There will be people who say that the United States has reneged on its promises, and [this] will be exploited by these foreign governments.”

But Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, insisted that the Obama administration has not properly vetted the transition. He said significant questions remain about the transition, including the possiblie unconstitutional transfer of US government property, as well as human rights and free speech issues.

“It’s clear that the administration hasn’t conducted a thorough legal analysis of many issues outstanding,” he said. Congressional debate on the spending bill that may include the provision to defund the ICANN transition is expected to begin later this week, as lawmakers continue to hammer out the details of a short-term government funding package.

Quelle: <a href="Ted Cruz Is Picking A Big Fight Over The Internet, And Top Republicans Are Backing Him“>BuzzFeed