Bloomberg: Amazon wants live sports streaming rights
Bloomberg believes that Amazon is considering buying the rights to a variety of live sporting events as a way of bringing more people into Prime. According to the site’s anonymous sources, the firm has made discreet enquiries about picking up licenses for global sports including tennis, golf, soccer and car racing. The company is believed to have a beady eye on domestic sports like baseball and basketball, although knows that traditional broadcasters have that sewn up for the next few years.
The report explains that Amazon hired a former Sports Illustrated executive, James DeLorenzo, to head up a sports division earlier this year. In addition, the company poached a former YouTube executive, Charlie Neiman, to look into partnering with sports companies and build new business opportunities. Amazon has refused to make a public comment, but these preliminary negotiations could be the start of a whole new broadcasting platform.
One of the existential problems that both Amazon and Netflix suffer from is that their audience has to make an effort to reach them. If you’re not that interested in highbrow dramas about the modern family, classical music or the political machinery in a bizarro-world White House, you won’t bother signing up. Netflix and Amazon have taken two very different routes to broaden their appeal beyond a hardcore audience — since both are believed to have around 50 million subscribers.
Netflix, for instance, is going for pure populism, and has broadened its outreach beyond blue-chip consumers who enjoy shows like Orange is the New Black. Shows like Fuller House and the deal it signed with Adam Sandler demonstrate how Netflix is attempting to move beyond its traditional customer base. Amazon, meanwhile, is hoping that bundling its own platform with Prime means that its retail customers are, invariably, going to want to check out its more populist original shows.
The rights to live sports broadcasts are likely to be the most lucrative, and expensive, things that broadcasters can buy. For instance, each of the big three networks spends around a billion dollars each year for the right to air NFL Games. In return for that outlay, they can expect audiences of between 18 and 21 million, which would be eye-gougingly high for a company like Amazon.
It’s not just Amazon or Netflix which are looking to sports to help break its apparent ceiling in subscriber numbers, either. Twitter signed a deal with the National Football League to stream 10 Thursday night games that are currently broadcast on NBC and CBS. Facebook, meanwhile, has considered joining the fray for sports rights, and has experimented with showing live soccer games on its own video platform.
Admittedly, every hurdle between audience and channel reduces that figure — so ESPN, which requires a cable subscription to access, only gets audiences of 13 million. Given the current extra layer of complexity required for consumers to get Instant Video on their TVs, it’s likely that the potential audience would be less that than ESPN can expect.
Of course, the big three networks can afford to spend billions on sports because they make that money back with ads. Amazon doesn’t air commercials, and would probably have to charge a pretty penny for an ad-free sports tier on Prime. Then again, if it did air commercials, it’d suffer a similar backlash to the one Netflix suffered at the mere rumor that it would bring ads into its shows.
Millennials, unfortunately, hate ads, and this has even affected NBC, a show that relies entirely upon promotional spots for revenue. Earlier this year, it conceded that such breaks are hostile to users and will reduce the amount of marketing clips in Saturday Night Live to win back younger audiences.
Source: Bloomberg
Twitter just turned DMs into a chat app
Twitter has been implementing some important updates to protect its users lately, but its most recent change could help foster better conversations. The social network today tweeted (duh) a video showing off its latest additions to the Direct Messages feature that basically turns it into a chat app.
The new features include read receipts, live typing indicators and native URL previews to foster a better sense of real-time conversations. Twitter hasn’t said when the update will roll out, but it will most likely be hitting your DMs within the next few days.
A full-fledged chat app will make Twitter a lot more similar to that other social network, which has a far more advanced, and totally independent messaging app. But since Twitter personalities often have far larger, and generally more anonymous, followings than they do on Facebook, this update could foster more intimate conversations between a lot more people who don’t really know each other IRL. When this rolls out, I’ll be actively reading and ignoring your DMs, so feel free to keep looking at those read receipts.
Source: Twitter
Periscope makes it harder to creep on your friends’ broadcasts
Periscope has rolled out a tiny update that alerts streamers when people they follow join their broadcast, taking all the fun out of secretly creeping on your friends’ digital lives. When streaming, the names and icons of people you follow will pop up on the left side of the video as soon as they start watching.
The company today tweeted a GIF of the new feature in action, though the update isn’t detailed in a blog post. Sometimes, all you really need is 140 characters (plus an emoji and a moving picture).
See who’s watching live! Now you can see when people you follow join your broadcast 👋 pic.twitter.com/Qf0zhbwYNt
— Periscope (@periscopeco) September 8, 2016
Source: @periscopeco
Hackers temporarily reactivate suspended Twitter accounts
When Twitter takes an offensive account offlinen it usually stays down for good, but a hacking group now claims that it’s discovered a way to reactivate and take control over inactive and suspended accounts. A group called “Spain Squad” briefly reactivated banned accounts like @Hitler, @DarkNet, @1337, @Hell and @LizardSquad — hoping to sell them to users seeking valuable screenames.
Akma, one of the users behind the exploit, told Business Insider that the group can do a lot more than just recover old accounts. Apparently the new exploit allows Spain Squad to change to suspend active accounts, change a user’s Twitter handle and even take control of active accounts. So far, the group has only demonstrated the ability to recover officially suspended accounts — though all of those have already been re-suspended by the social media company.
The details of how the group managed this aren’t clear, but if the hacker group can still perform the trick, it could be extremely lucrative for them. Unique or short Twitter names have been known to sell for thousands of dollars, and hackers have gone to absurd ends to illegally obtain these usernames in the past. It’s not clear yet if the exploit has been patched, or if the reclaimed accounts were merely re-suspended. Either way, we’ve reached out to Twitter for more details.
Source: Business Insider
Twitter shuts down ISIS accounts but lets white nationalists stay
Twitter’s previous laissez-faire policy of letting free speech reign on the social network earned ire for their failure to curb hate speech and harassment. But letting terrorist groups freely use it to gather followers and spread their messages was too much. After vowing to ban accounts linked to extremism in mid-2015, they proceeded to shut down over 360,000 of them. But according to a report, Twitter is focusing on countering ISIS-promoting tweets while letting white nationalists run rampant on the service. Which is worrying, since Americans have committed 80 percent of terrorist attacks in the US since September 11th, 2001.
At the end of the day, ISIS supporters seem to be under far more scrutiny than white nationalists on Twitter, according to the report by J.M. Berger of George Washington University. While Twitter continues scrubbing Islamic extremist material off its network, followers of the major white nationalist movement have risen 600 percent since 2012, from just over 3500 accounts to beyond 25,000. Whether Twitter’s policies significantly curb extremist recruiters — which the UK Parliament doesn’t believe — the report insists that other groups have learned from ISIS’ tactics both on and offline, including how to promote their messages and secure a following.
Users are reporting Islamic extremist content more than white nationalist activity, according to the report, and the social network is spending more effort quashing the former. During the data collection period between April and August 23rd, 2016, only 288 white nationalist accounts of the 4,000 Berger examined had been suspended — and that’s only after the social network instituted more procedures for reporting abuse. In that time, 1,100 ISIS supporters were temporarily banned.
The comparative leniency exists despite far more frequent activity from white nationalists and Nazis, which Berger tracked separately. Those two groups had more followers overall and tweeted more frequently than those for the Islamic State, while the latter only came out on top with better consistency in hashtag use, reflecting their far more disciplined social media strategy. The poorer performance of ISIS-linked content and accounts is partly due to Twitter’s aggressive suspension campaign, and extremist network’s metrics have nosedived accordingly since 2015.
It’s possible that Islamic extremist recruiting is more visible and reported because it follows a rigidly programmatic model. First, supporters promote educational material, the ISIS social network flocks around would-be recruits and isolates from their pre-existing communities before urging them to commit terrorist acts. In contrast, white nationalists are split by factions without a dominant institution or guiding authority, making their actions and recruitment appear more like those by grassroots activists.
It also doesn’t help that some white nationalist or Nazi-supporting content is spewed by trolls hoping to rile up sensitive tweeters, disguising actual supremacist outreach. But bonding over negative reactions toward minority inclusion and cultural change is part of their recruitment strategy, according to the report. This is in stark contrast to the ISIS playbook, which has supporters surround potential recruits as a community that expresses positive, warm opinions of the extremist group.
If there’s any silver lining, it’s that white nationalists haven’t really monetized their fanbase, the report said. For all their success compared to supporters of the Islamic State, white nationalists haven’t been able to move past social support into securing material support from their new recruits. This is partially due to how fragmented and factionalized the movement is: When trying to stage rallies last spring, barely a handful of people showed up at about a dozen locations, according to the report.
Via: Gizmodo
Source: George Washington University
Apple’s Five-Year-Old Twitter Account Gets Active Ahead of September 7 Event
Created five years ago in September of 2011, Apple’s official twitter account, @Apple, has begun stirring today. The company updated the page with a new logo — a classic black Apple image on a white background — and the same teaser art for next week’s September 7 event that was included on invites earlier this week.
Although Apple appears to be preparing a new section of its social media presence, the account has yet to tweet anything to its more than 110,000 followers. With the timing of the reactivation, and the similar art, it seems likely that Apple will begin using the account to share news and updates from its event in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, California.
Apple hasn’t been completely averse to social media, since over the past few years the company has created Twitter accounts for iBooks, Apple Music, iTunes, and just this year began bolstering its presence on Twitter with Apple Support and Apple News. Apple was recently rumored to be working on a social media app of its own for launch in 2017, with similarities tying its video-heavy features more to Facebook and Snapchat than to Twitter.
(Thanks, James!)
Tag: Twitter
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Apple activates its Twitter account ahead of iPhone event
Apple has activated its Twitter account and redesigned the Newsroom just days ahead of its iPhone 7 event on September 7th. The company has had a Twitter account since September 2011, but has never tweeted anything and, until now, had a generic “egg” avatar. That’s now been replaced by the Apple logo and a background with the same design as its event invitation. It still has only 50,000 followers, but that will change very quickly if it starts to tweet regularly.
My guess as well: they’ll live tweet the event. https://t.co/XBbhk3ptZM
— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) September 2, 2016
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who has broken numerous Apple stories in the past, suggested that Apple activated its Twitter account in order to live Tweet next week’s event. The company has live-blogged events before, to accompany its video streams, but doing one on Twitter would be new.
Apple also redesigned its Newsroom press relations site. Articles are now much larger, feature images, and have been arranged in a “Storify” style with a card for each. The company recently added three “Apple Original” articles about how to use Siri. At the bottom of each article, it now includes the direct contact information for PR personnel, something it has never done before. The changes wouldn’t be that big a deal for most companies, but Apple hasn’t changed its approach to the press since, well, forever.
Source: Apple (Twitter), Apple
PewDiePie’s Twitter temporarily suspended after ISIS joke
Yesterday, popular YouTube personality PewDiePie made minor headlines for losing his Twitter verification checkmark. Today, he was briefly suspended for the service. “I did this yesterday as a joke,” he explained on Youtube, teasing users who view Twitter verification as a status symbol. “But then America woke up and that’s when shit got stupid.” Overnight, Kjellberg says an account parodying Sky News posted a fake news story claiming he lost his verification status for having “suspected relations with ISIS.” Later, the YouTuber referenced the article on Twitter, joking that both he and JackSepticEye had joined the terrorist organization. Later, his account Twitter account was suspended.
We reached out for Twitter for details, but got back the usual: “We don’t comment on individual accounts for privacy and security reasons.” Since then, PewDiePie’s Twitter presence has been restored — albeit in a reduced capacity. At the time of this writing, the account’s million followers has been reduced to mere hundreds, and Kjellberg’s timelines is missing thousands of Tweets. Maybe it can be taken as a lesson: Don’t Tweet about being a terrorist. Even in jest.
Via: We The Unicorns
Twitter’s making it easy for content creators to show you ads
Twitter’s finally giving creators a good reason to upload videos to its platform rather than YouTube by allowing individuals to monetize content.
The move is an extension of its existing Amplify program, which previously allowed only registered media outlets to display ads before videos. It’s also a direct push to try and grow its video platform in the same way that YouTube attracted millions of creators.
Without offering paid incentives to upload content, there was no reason not to upload to YouTube and then just share that video to other networks.
Whether Twitter will deliver on that ambition is another question. It already struggles to retain users and is still working out ways to monetize its products. Making it easy for creators to show ads before videos is great for them, but could potentially upset the network’s users.
You do still need to be an approved user before you get the option to tick the box for pre-roll ads, but there are non-exclusivity options that also let you monetize the same content on other networks without penalties. It’s a smart move on Twitter’s part, asking creators to leap to a new platform would be a tough sell, but offering an additional revenue stream shouldn’t be.
Creators will also get the option to work with brands on specific campaigns in some cases, using the expertise it acquired with its purchase of Niche last year.
Source: Twitter Blog
Twitter’s promoted stickers invade UK feeds
Playing its part in the ongoing game of shameless social network feature copying, Twitter launched stickers for all users last month. These let you spice up your pictures with emoji and other cartoony overlays before posting them, and you can also search by sticker to see what others are doing with them. It took all of five minutes for Twitter to suck the fun out of the feature, though, as Pepsi became the first brand to shell out for promoted stickers. And now Brits can feature in quarterly ad revenue statistics, too, with the launch of promoted stickers in the UK.
Warner Bros. is the first company to take advantage, releasing a selection of stickers to drum up interest for its new film Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them — in case you’ve ever wondered what you’d look like as an American Harry Potter.
Via: Campaign
Source: Twitter
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