Amazon’s pilot episodes are now free on YouTube and Facebook
If you don’t have a Prime subscription but want to check out some of Amazon’s original series, you’re in luck. The company has made ten pilot episodes from some of its best dramas, comedies, and kids’ series free to watch on YouTube and Facebook for the first time ever. The lineup includes Amazon’s most-streamed show, The Man in the High Castle, as well as Mozart in the Jungle and Transparent, both of which have won multiple Golden Globes.
This new promo is an attempt by Amazon to make its video content a bigger incentive for people to sign up for Prime at $99 per year. By putting free episodes on YouTube and Facebook, the company is better able to generate buzz and encourage viewers to comment and share their opinions on its best shows.
Not that people need that much convincing: Prime has seen some strong momentum recently, with membership growing over 50 percent in 2015. Naturally, Amazon wants to keep that growth going. It’s now working on exclusive Jack Ryan and Woody Allen series, and is partnering with former Top Gear hosts Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond for a new car show. Whether or not these new series and free pilots are enough to entice you to pay for Prime, you can’t doubt Amazon’s effort.
Via: Deadline
Source: Amazon Studios (YouTube), Amazon Studios (Facebook)
Oculus Rift will hit UK and Canadian retailers on September 20th
Now that Oculus has caught up with the pre-order backlog for its VR headset, the Facebook-owned company has decided it’s time to make the Rift available in more places. In an announcement today, Oculus announced that its VR solution will be available in a number of European and North American retailers from September 20th. In fact, consumers in the UK, France and Germany and Canada can pre-order the Rift today and have it ship late next month.
The company has lined up a long list of partners in the UK, including Amazon, John Lewis, Curry’s PC World, GAME and Harrods. It’ll also be available from Amazon in France and Germany, as well as Best Buy and Microsoft Stores in Canada, with a suggested retail price of £549 (€699). Some retailers will also let customers book in a demo, like HTC is doing at some Curry’s PC World stores.
If you do decide to take the plunge, Oculus will bundle VR platformer Lucky’s Tale, hundreds of 360-degree videos and movies and localized manuals and software. The company says it’s also working with developers to ensure games and VR experiences are relevant for global customers too.
Source: Oculus Blog
The best tech for honor students
Look, not everyone is cut out for late nights of drinking and playing DJ for groups of frat kids. Some would prefer to campout in the library until the wee hours of the morning studying and pouring over notes and lectures. Of course, the days of pen, paper and microfiche are pretty much over at this point. You need powerful, digital tools like an Evernote subscription to help organize all your notes from class. And there’s nothing like a solid voice recorder to document all those early morning classes before you’re fully caffeinated. Of course you’ll also need the basics, like a backpack and a laptop. But, you might also want to invest in a portable energy light to help keep you awake and fight off bouts of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) when you’re spending 90 percent of your day indoors. Check out the gallery below for all our best bookworm picks and make sure to check out our full Back-to-School Guide right here.
Source: Engadget’s 2016 Back-to-School Guide
Recommended Reading: How Netflix is changing storytelling
Netflix and the
future of entertainment
Ben Bajarin,
Techpinions
Since Stranger Things debuted on Netflix, I’ve seen a number of articles and heard a few podcasts discuss the merits of an 8-episode season over the usual 13. When you think about shows like Daredevil and Jessica Jones, there can be some filler that helps meet the quota. In this piece, Ben Bajarin takes a look at how Netflix and the concept of binge watching is changing how writers and directors tell stories. Bajarin makes the case that the future of entertainment is in fact storytelling as a service through things like original content and posting an entire season at once.
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Apple Music’s Bozoma Saint John: It’s about passion, not algorithms Apple Music’s head of global consumer marketing offers a glimpse at what makes the service unique and why human curators are better than algorithms. |
This ‘Daily Beast’ Grindr stunt is sleazy, dangerous, and wildly unethical In case you missed it, a reporter from The Daily Beast used Grindr to lure gay Olympic athletes in Brazil for no real purpose and then outed many of them in the article. The piece has since been pulled, but Slate offers some perspective as to why this was so insane and its potential to ruin lives. |
Amazon chronicles Hugh Hefner’s life in upcoming original series
Like Hulu and Netflix, Amazon continues to add to its library of original content. Today, the online retailer announced a 13-episode show that will chronicle the life of Hugh Hefner. American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story will span the media mogul’s six-decade career at the helm of Playboy magazine. The show will take on a documentary-style approach, starting with the founding of the iconic publication in 1953. Using 17,000 hours of never-before-seen footage from the magazine’s archives and content over 2,600 of Hefner’s personal scrapbooks, there’s sure to be a wealth of info for the series to pull from.
90-year-old Hefner says he’s been looking for someone to tell the story of Playboy and now he feels like he’s working with “the right partners.” Stephen David Entertainment will handle the production duties with Stephen David (The Men Who Built America, The World Wars), Peter Jaysen (You Me Her) and Dick Rosenzweig (The House Bunny, The Playboy Club) as executive producers. The series is set to debut in US, UK, Germany, Austria and Japan sometime next year.
“Although Hugh Hefner is an iconic figure known worldwide, most people may not be aware of the impact he has had on some of this country’s most important social revolutions,” said Amazon Studios head of unscripted Conrad Riggs said in a press release. “We are excited to bring Prime members the untold story of Mr. Hefner’s remarkable life and his contributions to modern American history.”
Playboy has made some interesting moves over the last year. The magazine announced that internet porn had forced it to go PG-13, which meant that it would no longer feature fully nude models. It also launched a new model app last fall to feature its articles instead of its photography. Perhaps Amazon’s new show will chronicle the media landscape that led to those changes. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait a while to find out.
Walmart buys Jet.com to better fight Amazon
Walmart has officially acquired Jet.com for $3 billion, a purchase that will significantly enhance its online retail presence. The US retailer didn’t pitch it as such, but the deal — leaked on Friday — will help it compete with its fiercest online rival, Amazon. “Walmart.com will grow faster, the seamless shopping experience we’re pursuing will happen quicker, and we’ll enable the Jet brand to be even more successful in a shorter period of time,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said in a statement.
The US retail giant is acquiring Jet.com in part for its rapid ascent; it hit $1 billion in sales and 12 million stocked items in just a year. Walmart, by contrast, has seen online sales growth decline in five consecutive quarters. It adds that the acquisition will bring “fresh ideas and expertise, as well as an attractive brand with proven appeal, especially for millennials.”
Walmart.com [will focus] on delivering the company’s everyday low price strategy, while Jet will continue to provide a unique and differentiated customer experience with curated assortment.
Jet CEO Marc Lore knows Amazon well, having sold his last company, Quidsi, to Jeff Bezos’ firm for $545 million in 2010. Lore owns 25 percent of Jet and will continue to lead it under Walmart, according to reports.
Jet will operate separately from Walmart’s online business. “Walmart.com [will focus] on delivering the company’s everyday low price strategy, while Jet will continue to provide a unique and differentiated customer experience with curated assortment,” according to the release. Lore points out, though, that Jet will obviously benefit from Walmart’s “purchasing scale, sourcing capabilities, distribution footprint and digital assets.”
Source: Walmart
Woody Allen’s Amazon series arrives September 30th
Amazon’s had its day on stage at the Television Critics’ Association press tour, and this fall will be a big one for the streaming video firm. It’s revealed that a raft of shows will debut across September and October, including Woody Allen’s Crisis in Six Scenes, which drops on September 30th. The bigger news, however, is probably dedicated to the return of the award-winning Transparent, the third season of which kicks off on September 23rd.
But those aren’t the only shows that’ll come to the service as the leaves begin to fall from the trees and float downward. Tig Notato’s semi-autobiographical show One Mississippi will take its bow on September 9th. BBC show Fleabag, based on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s play of the same name, arrives on September 16th. Rounding out the releases is the Billy Bob Thornton-fronted Goliath, that arrives on October 14th, while Good Girls Revolt appears on October 28th.
Amazon has also let slip when two of its other sacred cows will return, with Mozart in the Jungle coming back for a third year on December 9th. That should serve as an appetizer for the second season of The Man in the High Castle, which’ll drop on December 16th, just in time for the holidays.
Source: EW
Amazon will stream show pilots on Twitch for 24 hours
Amazon is no stranger to showing you series pilots to gauge your interest, but it’s trying a different strategy this year. The internet retailer will stream its version of The Tick and two other pilots on Twitch for 24 hours on August 31st, roughly two weeks after their Amazon premiere on August 19th. That may sound like an odd move when Amazon-owned Twitch is still primarily known for gaming, but it makes sense considering the service’s broadening horizons. There are plenty of people watching content on Twitch besides games, and it could attract viewers who otherwise wouldn’t bother to visit Amazon to watch.
The question, as you might suspect, is whether or not the Twitch audience will play a big role in deciding the fate of these pilots. Is this a major factor in the decision, or a sideshow? If it does play a significant part, though, you can expect Twitch streams to become a regular part of show selection.
Source: Deadline, Mike Malone (Twitter)
Target starts selling Kindles again after a four-year break
Years ago, visiting a Target was one of the best ways to check out Amazon’s Kindle products in person before plunking down your hard-earned cash. But in 2012, Target stopped selling Kindles both online and in its stores. That’s changing, however — as of today, you can buy the Kindle Paperwhite and standard Kindle from Target online. And a report from Bloomberg indicates that you’ll soon be able to buy them in Target’s physical retail stores, as well.
Bloomberg also says that Target will sell Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets and Fire TV devices, but those aren’t on the website yet. And it’ll be a few months before you can go pick these items up in the store, as they’re expected to return in October, just in time for the holiday shopping season.
Target didn’t publicly say why it pulled Amazon’s products back in 2012, but analysts believed it was because the company’s e-readers and tablets serve as portals into Amazon’s shopping experience. In one regard, Amazon rid itself of Trojan horse — but now, it seems that Target expects the devices to help provide its electronics sales with a boost. And while Amazon has opened a few brick-and-mortar stores, it’s still rather difficult to see its products in person before buying. This renewed partnership could end up proving mutually beneficial to both retail giants.
Via: The Verge
Source: Bloomberg
Amazon makes it easier to build audio adventure games for the Echo
If you grew up in the early age of computing, you likely encountered text-based adventure games. That ancient form of gaming got a new lease on life thanks to the Amazon Echo — you can play some audio-based adventure games (including a Batman one) in which you talk to the Echo to move forward in the narrative. Amazon is now making it easier for developers to build more interactive audio games by releasing a tool that lets you graphically design audio adventures for the Echo.
The tool provides a graphical interface to let you map out the various decision trees and narratives that you’ll need in making such a game work with the Echo; it also contains a handful of templates to make it easier to get started. Those templates work for trivia games or ones with a decision tree, and you should be able to just plug in questions and edit the sample to get a simple game going without much fuss.
Amazon’s blog post has plenty of more in-depth detail for interested developers. While these types of games are probably never going to be a major use case for Echo, Amazon has clearly shown over the last year or so that it wants to add a huge variety of features to capture the attention of buyers — this one might do the trick if you want to distract your kids for a few minutes here and there.
Source: Amazon
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