Arcade Fire map out the future of videos
Coded in html5 and starring your childhood home, Arcade Fire have breathed new life into the medium. After all, why sit and watch when you can play?
If you’ve got a fancy computer – and don’t mind being reminded of your childhood home – chances are you have spent the morning mucking about with thewildernessdowntown.com. It’s described as a “musical experience made specifically for Google Chrome” that takes the Arcade Fire song We Used to Wait and pits it against scenes of your childhood home, rendered by Google maps. It’s got techy types in a tizz – not least because it’s a neat demonstration of some of the cooler tricks offered by html5, the next evolution in coding.
It’s an equally impressive piece of viral marketing too. I can’t stand Arcade Fire, but I’ve already shared it with hundreds of my friends. Thanks to making the website’s animated hoodie run around the grounds of Doncaster Rovers Football Club, my old school, and (don’t ask me why) Battersea power station, it’s forced a tune I would otherwise have little desire to hear into the recesses of my brain.
Admittedly the experience is a little buggy – if your screen isn’t big enough you might find certain pop-up windows lost in the depths of what you’re looking at. But if you look at the idea as a sketch of what might come next, it certainly suggests an evolution is on the cards for music videos. It also poses the question: why watch when you can play?
Arcade Fire have previous history with this sort of thing. Earlier this month their live-streamed YouTube concert directed by Terry Gilliam was watched by 3.7 million viewers. In putting The Wilderness Downtown online this weekend, they have once again proved they are a band willing to embrace the internet and the possibilities it brings (rather than moaning about lost revenue sales like pretty much everyone else). Better still, they’ve made someone who can’t stand their music genuinely excited about what they might do next.
Tech Weekly: What next for music?
Join Aleks Krotoski, Jemima Kiss and Charles Arthur as they tackle the latest news from the world of technology. On this week’s programme, they look at the evolution of the online music scene. Apple launches its new iPod on Wednesday in the face of the lowest quarter of sales since 2006, and the device appears to be in terminal decline. How will it maintain its influence as artists and publishers increasingly turn from iTunes downloads to streaming services such as Spotify and We7 and music apps?
Charles exposes the problems inherent in the software patent system in light of the lawsuits served up against companies like Google, Facebook and eBay from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Interval Licensing and the team look at the problems and the benefits of open source for local government.
Finally, gamesblogger Keith Stuart speaks with Tim Clark from Firstplay.co.uk about the innovations in marketing and distributing digital content that the games industry has been perfecting in the past few years, and what this could mean for the wider digital media sector.
All this plus a healthy dose of opinion – and outtakes – on Tech Weekly.
Scott Pilgrim fails in its gaming ambition
Edgar Wright’s intriguing attempt to align film-making with more fidgety media suggests that the task is hopeless
Cinema is very much a “sit-back” medium. It insists on entrapping you in a darkened space, force-feeding you a pre-assembled product and monopolising your attention for up to a couple of hours. Once, that would have been no problem. People were happy to sit through hour-long sermons or even stand through three-hour speeches when nothing more amusing was on offer. Then things changed.
Empowered by new opportunities, the vulgar herd sought to seize control of their entertainment experience. Comic books, which could be read at the bus stop or under the schoolroom desk, zapped the three-volume novel. Now, people select their own Twitter feeds and compose their own tweets. They organise their own viewing on YouTube, and create much of it, too. Videogaming, perhaps the archetypal sit-up, take-control medium, enables the consumer to become the hero of his or her own narrative.
Cinema still has its attractions. At least it offers a refuge from your partner’s prattle if you have to go out on a date. Increasingly, however, conversation can be combined with texting or Facebooking, so a beloved’s blather is no longer quite so irksome. Understandably, film-makers have begun to fear for the big screen’s future. For a while now, they’ve been looking to more fidgety media to see what they can purloin.
Thus, plot and character have increasingly made way for incessant action and frantic cutting; but direct pilfering from competitive territory has also become routine. Comic-book and videogame protagonists have been pressed into the big screen’s service. Yet up till now, the essence of the plundered media has not been successfully translated. Conscripted heroes have been teleported into traditional movie formats; the singular environments on which their appeal depended have had to be left behind. Because of this, the benefits of these transfers have been limited.
Scott Pilgrim Vs the World is different. It eviscerates a comic-book series, but seeks to achieve much more than nick its characters. In addition, it tries to import its source material’s methods; then, it aims to mate them with those of the videogame. The plan’s ambitious, and the result’s striking.
Here are the captioned Brrings, Blams, Ding-dongs and Kerpows of the comic-book frame. So are the levels, points and sound-effects of old-style gaming. The atmosphere of both worlds is lovingly evoked, with endless knowing allusions in both sound and vision. The film’s certainly different. In a way, it’s delightful. Sadly, in America, it’s also been a bit of a flop.
It’s not too hard to see why this might be. The approach taken has required the banishment of the traditional staples of movie-making. There aren’t really any characters, since no one can be more than a comic-book cut-out. There isn’t much of a story. All that really happens are seven hand-to-hand fights. These are allowed no more relationship to physical reality than a videogame would permit. The humour drains them of threat. All they can be is balletic spectacles, their appeal dependent solely on their choreography.
That isn’t really enough. After the second fight, the knowledge that there are five more to come induces mild panic. Comic-book and gaming fanboys may enjoy the witty references, but even for them the joke must surely wear thin.
Games work because the player controls the action. No film can deliver this effect. As a spectator sport, splattering deadly exes doesn’t cut it: this pursuit demands participation. It’s not only the gaming element that’s in the end a letdown: so too is the comic-book dimension. Bryan Lee O’Malley’s six-volume epic (let’s start calling it a graphic novel) is full of subtlety and insight. Yet crunching its story into a quasi-videogame has managed to squeeze out most of its genius.
The moral seems clear. Traditional movies may tax the patience of ever more scatterbrained filmgoers. Captivating new media may threaten to lure them away. Nonetheless, film-makers shouldn’t try to steal their rivals’ clothes. It just won’t work. They’ll stand or fall by the strengths of their own trade.
You ask, they answer: Dell
Post your questions on the computing giant’s green track record – it will be online until 5pm Friday to answer
Bamboo boxes, low-energy PCs and tree-planting are just three of the ways computing heavyweight Dell says it is limiting its ecological footprint. This week, Dell joins us on You ask, they answer to answer your questions on its eco-credentials – just post yours below.
Want to know more about its recycling scheme for PCs and peripherals? Got a query about which the energy efficiency or green record of its laptops and desktops? (It even has an entire online “green store”). Or do you want to quiz Dell about its controversial-in-some-quarters Plant a Tree programme, where customers pay to offset the carbon emissions of new machines? (As Charles Arthur pointed out eight months after the scheme’s launch, only 99% 1% of customers took the offer up).
Whatever you want to know about Dell, computing and the environment, post your question below and the company will do its best to answer until 5pm on Friday. Please note anything not related to the environment will be marked off-topic.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange questioned by police
Police question WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on suspicion of molestation after complaints by women
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been questioned by Swedish police over allegations of molestation, his lawyer said today.
Leif Silbersky said police questioned Assange in Stockholm for about an hour last night and formally told him of the allegations against him.
Silbersky said his client denied the accusations and hoped the prosecutor would drop the case.
Police started investigating Assange this month after two Swedish women accused him of rape and molestation, but the prosecutor later closed the rape investigation.
Molestation is not a sex crime under Swedish law, but covers offences such as reckless conduct or inappropriate physical contact. It can result in fines or up to a year in prison.
Assange has suggested that the accusations are linked to Wikileaks’s release of secret US military documents on the war in Afghanistan, which were published in collaboration with the Guardian and two other newspapers.
He wrote on Twitter: “The charges are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing.” He said the website had been “warned to expect ‘dirty tricks’. Now we have the first one.”
US authorities criticised the leak, saying it could put the lives of Nato troops and Afghan informants at risk.
Assange has said that Wikileaks intends to release a further 15,000 documents – a pledge condemned by the Pentagon, which has demanded the deletion of the files from the website.
Digg users revolt after redesign
Social news site Digg endures another user revolt as redesign leaves ‘Diggers’ at a loss
Digg’s August redesign was always going to be a totemic moment for the “social news” site. And so it came to pass, as users stage a high-profile revolt against some of the site’s changes.
Protesting at the removal of the upcoming news page, the default setting of “My News”, deleted favourites, the apparent front page domination of a handful of publishers, and the removal of the “bury” button (for voting down stories), Digg users flooded the front page with links to rival aggregators and pleaded with chief executive Kevin Rose to turn back the clock.
Less than a week since the covers were taken off the new Digg – complete with many a bug and sans small but significant features – Rose was prompted to write a blog post addressing the outrage.
Under a headline (and mantra) of “release, iterate, repeat”, Rose tackled 16 complaints, pledging to make changes to suit the feedback. He also pointed out that there were thousands of new registrations, and accentuated the positive. “Our top priority is to stabilize the site, then we’ll look at the data/feedback and make decisions on what to change going forward,” he commented.
However, social media site Soshable graphed 118 stories on the once-fabled Digg front page in three days after the new iteration’s release. Six publishers and one influential technology pundit control the lion share of Digg’s most important space, it shows.
This gets to the nub of the anger, says Media Caffeine. In a barbed post calling Digg a “broken covenant”, MC cites this 2004 quote from the Digg founder talking about then-of-the-moment social news site slashdot: “Hundreds of people every single day are submitting content to slashdot. Tons of stories, but an editor chooses about 15 or 20 of them to display to the world. Now the only problem with that is you’re relying on whatever the editor thinks is really cool, so it doesn’t really give the power back to the people.”
MC writes:
“This was the premise behind Digg. It was the promise. It was the covenant. Digg V4 breaks that covenant. Despite what Rose, his team, and their beloved mainstream celebrity buddies believe, the people do not have the power right now. The power has been given to corporate level blogs and Kevin’s select-few buddies who, for some strange reason, Rose feels he needs to appease to be successful.”
The “bury” button – giving users the ability to vote a story down the popularity rankings – is gone, replaced with a moderated “hide” button, aimed at combating “the bury brigades“, as Rose calls them.
Ian Eure, an engineer who worked for Digg between 2008 and May 2010, said that reverting back to the previous iteration, version 3, is “simply not going to happen” – it’s an infrastructural change, Eure says, not just a host of feature adaptions:
“Digg v4 is not a redesign, not a reskin, it is a 100% rewrite. It’s completely new design, code, architecture, and infrastructure. It has almost no relationship to the v3 system whatsoever.”
What’s more; of the “core” team of 12 people that made the legacy Digg code work, Eure says, only one is still at the company.
It’s already been quite a summer for Digg. Small but significant feature changes, a rewiring of Google’s algorithm and a cabal of conservative conspirators teed up this summer’s redesign as a(nother) fork in the road – it would either galvanise the site’s waning influence or be the straw that broke the camel’s back for its users.
This isn’t the first Digg revolt in its six-year history, as Rose is at pains to point out on Twitter, but it might be the most consequential. The clock is ticking for the Digg bug fixers. New features are being resurrected – but many “Diggers” may prefer running over to momentum-heavy Reddit (where plucky moderators have posted a 101 for new recruits).
Previous user revolts over changes in the Digg promotional algorithm, new comment systems, the introduction of the browser-framing DiggBar, and the HD-DVD encryption key debacle, have made their impact and subsided. “Release, iterate, repeat”, as intended.
But never has a revolt come at such a critical time for the company, competing with the exponential growth of Twitter to become more social and keep its millions of influential, well-organised members engaged. At the same time, predicting the demise of the site has become something of an annual sport for Digg watchers.
But, to you; how are you finding the new Digg? Have you jumped ship?
Gmail launches ‘priority inbox’
Gmail’s latest feature is arguably the biggest innovation since the service launched in April 2004.
‘Priority inbox’ learns from your email usage patterns and begins to prioritise messages that it thinks you’ll be most likely to read. Your inbox is divided into three sections: important and unread, starred and everything else.
The classification should improve, because you can mark messages with ‘less important’ or ‘more important’, and Gmail will learn to reclassify accordingly. It’s like the inverse of junk mail filtering.
Software engineer Doug Aberdeen on the official Gmail blog described this as “a new way of taking on information overload”.
“Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over).”
Priority inbox is slowly rolling out across Gmail services. It hasn’t appeared in my personal account yet, but will in the next few days along with Google Apps users (if their administrator has opted to ‘Enable pre-release features’).
Drag and drop, launched in April, helped a little. Filters help, for those that can be bothered to set them up. But priority inbox could make a significant difference, and if Wave wasn’t quite the right format for centralising and streamlining messages, then this is a more usable step in that direction.
Streaming music, AppleTV updates: what to expect from Apple on Wednesday
Plus some more detail on why the music business needs iTunes – and the iPods/iPhones – to get streaming to help revenues build
First, very quickly, let’s revisit what’s going on with iPods, iPhones, and digital revenues.
As I pointed out in this article, the music business isn’t seeing the rapid takeoff of digital download sales that it might have hoped for. The fact is that iPod sales (that is, devices Apple classes as “iPods”, which includes the iPod Touch but excludes the iPhone and iPad) are falling both year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter. And the iTunes Store is the biggest single retailer of music in the US. (That doesn’t mean it’s the majority, but it has a significant influence.)
Plus, the numbers show that digital download sales follow the sales of iPods + iPhone rather closely. On this basis, people have therefore been saying “so what’s the problem? iPod sales might slow down, but iPhone sales are going great! iPhone play music too! So no problem!”
Two problems actually. One is about the “installed base” of iPods. The other is about the alternative ways in which people can get music. Either or both point to problems for the industry. (Here’s the table of data, so you can see why. Sales figures for the iPod/iPhone are given in thousands; revenues for the music business in billions of dollars.)
First: installed base. Steve Jobs said in a presentation recently that 50% of iPod buyers are new to them. Obviously, that means that 50% are replacements in some way. That means the installed base of functioning iPods is bigger than just the headline per-quarter sales figures. Yet it doesn’t matter what sort of replacement cycle you choose for iPods + iPhones (two years in which half of the old ones get thrown away, for example), you still find that the digital downloads follows iPod sales very closely… but tails off latterly.
“Pah!” some people say. “iTunes isn’t the download business. You’re ignoring all the services such as Comes With Music and Amazon and all the other ways in which people can download music.”
Perhaps. But if that’s the case, then things are even worse for the music business, because it’s got all these new ways of getting revenues, but it still isn’t growing faster than the total number of iPods + iPhones out there. And if iPod sales slow (given that iPods, optimised for playing music, despite some incursions into video, were for some years the ideal repository for downloaded tracks) then the music industry has to find other outlets.
Yes, “performance” revenues (from streaming services such as we7, Pandora and Spotify) are growing rather well, up to $800m worldwide last year. They don’t – indeed can’t – work with iPods, except for “iOS” devices such as the iPod Touch. Happily for those services, that’s where the growth is for Apple – selling iOS devices, including the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
And so we come to the rumours about what’s coming up tomorrow. John Gruber of Daring Fireball is quite sure the iPod Touch is in for a major revision:
“I expect a new iPhone 4-caliber iPod Touch (retina display, dual FaceTime-ready cameras), new iTunes TV show rentals, and a new iOS-based Apple TV. The wildcard is whether there’s going to be an App Store for the Apple TV.
“Readers are asking about iOS 4.1. I expect that, too, along with the official debut of Game Center, which is part of 4.1 and will help reinforce the image of the iPod Touch as a mobile gaming device (and the App Store as a gaming platform) going into the holidays. Look for a bunch of Game Center demos during the event.”
Other suggestions we’ve seen all over the place:
- “classic” iPods (shuffle, nano, “Classic”) won’t receive any sort of update at all. Personally don’t think that’s likely – they’d get a tweak on storage or price, surely.
- new “iPod Touch mini” with a 3″ screen on the way. Again, can’t see that that’s likely: imagine trying to type anything on it. An iPod with a touch-only interface is just about conceivable if you had loads of playlists already set up, but it would be no good at all for apps. Can just about imagine an iPod nano with a touch interface, but it’s hard to think it would be much of an improvement on the scroll wheel.
- “social streaming” coming to iTunes. This looks very likely, given Apple’s $85m purchase last year of Lala.com, which it closed in May. Why purchase it to close it? Lala would stream music to users’ PCs, for a price. And for years people have been talking about the likelihood of iPods getting streaming, or some sort of Napster-style subscription service. But while selling iPods was a good business, subscriptions weren’t (witnessed by the failure of so many companies that tried to offer it). It’s only now, as those other streaming services have started to make it into a viable business – one enabled by apps on phones and computers – that Apple seems interested. After all, at present the money paid to those services goes to Spotify or we7; why, you can see the Apple execs reasoning, shouldn’t Apple get a slice?
- revised AppleTV running iOS. This is quite likely because Apple is now going to have to think about how it competes with Google TV and similar “app”-based models for getting TV to you. The existing AppleTV is a bit pointless, so it would make sense to have an in-between device. Here’s the problem, though: iOS is a touch-based OS. How do you set up a remote so that you can control a screen that was designed for touch? That is the only fly in the soothing ointment for those wishing that Apple would “fix” TV (I’m not one, to be honest – and don’t really think that Google TV sounds like it has the answer either).
But if – big, though promising if – you get a new generation of iPods which are suddenly enabled to stream music from Lala (or whatever Apple calls it) then the music industry might be able to feel that at least the “performance” slice of its income is going to grow nicely… even if the “digital” one isn’t.
And what are you expecting, if anything, from tomorrow’s announcement?
HTML5 jumps into mobile gaming with SPIL Games
One of the world’s largest casual gaming companies today unveiled HTML5 versions of 47 of its games websites, proclaiming that it will be the new standard for gaming devices within three years.
SPIL Games has thrown its considerable weight behind HTML5 and the upward trend in casual gaming, with users now able to play its games on mobile browsers supporting HTML5 (ruling out devices running Android pre-2.0).
Previously, mobile visitors would have been taken to the full browser window displayed in Flash – but that would be slow to render with most phone browsers, and incompatible with Apple devices.
But close to a million mobile users try accessing a SPIL gaming website every month, a company spokesman tells us. More than half (52%) of these visits are from Apple devices, 15% from Android, 15% from Symbian (ie Nokia and/or Sony Ericcson) and 6% from BlackBerry devices.
The company, which currently has more than 4,000 games in its portfolio, is offering developers prizes totalling up to $50,000 (£41,000) for the best HTML5 game, encouraging the potential it says is “hampered by different protocols, operating systems, and platform-approval processes within the mobile world”.
An aside: Nick Jones, Gartner analyst, has an interesting take on that very subject:
“Native platforms will certainly become less important relative to the web platform because HTML5 supports a wider range of applications than the last-generation web.“But native platforms can stay ahead by evolving faster than HTML5, and in different directions to HTML5, it’s not hard to outrun a snail driven by a committee. So although HTML5 will be important the native platform will retain a big edge if you want to develop clever apps. And the native platform owners want it to stay that way.”
“Openness is at the core of everything we do,” says Peter Driesson, chief executive of the Netherlands-based company.
“We are aware that HTML5 is still at an early stage, but already developers can use it to make great games, and we are confident that the industry will quickly embrace it. Within three years we expect HTML5 to be the standard in gaming devices.”
Analysts at Forrester predict the Western European mobile gaming market to grow from €746m (£616m) at the end of 2010 to €1.46bn (£1.2bn) by the end of 2015, due to the growth in paying mobile gamers (31 million to 45 million over the same time frame, Forrester predicts) and a growth in smarphone adoption.
Mark Watson, chief executive of mobile internet specialists Volantis, suggested that the significance of SPIL’s move should not be underestimated.
“With one of the largest providers of mobile video – YouTube – and now one of the largest providers of mobile gaming on board, the endorsements for HTML5 are rolling in,” says Watson. “Judging the right moment to move with these trends is always difficult, but our own consumer research, which found that gaming is going to be one of the top drivers of mobile internet take-up in the next 24 months, suggests that SPIL are taking the initiative at the right time.“Crucially, SPIL’s decision to launch HTML5 versions of their sites shows that the barriers to running mobile games through mobile browsers which existed in the past are now well and truly broken. It is also becoming clear that Flash is only a stop-gap technology when it comes to online gaming – the adoption of HTML5 over Flash is part of a larger developer movement away from proprietary towards open technology.”
• Another noteworthy HTML5 development: Ephemeral rockers Arcade Fire have teamed up with Google Chrome to put together a personalised music video. Nice.
BT signs up 15 millionth customer
With three-quarters of UK homes and business using broadband, the market is seen to be maturing
The drive to create Broadband Britain has hit another milestone, as BT signed up the 15 millionth user to its high-speed network last week.
Ten years after broadband was first launched in the UK, it has now been taken up by around three-quarters of the UK’s homes and small businesses. With Virgin Media serving another 4.2 million customers over its cable network, Britain boasts a higher take-up rate than other developed nations such as Germany and the US.
“Broadband Britain has been a success story with widespread availability, low prices and high take-up,” Olivia Garfield, BT strategy director, said.
Virgin’s predecessors, NTL and Telewest, offered the first broadband services in Britain in early 2000. BT itself only got serious about the technology in 2002, when former chief executive Ben Verwaayen slashed prices and speeded up the process of installing broadband equipment in its local telephone exchanges.
BT said it has been signing up around 5,000 new customers a day since 2002. That rate has slowed in the last couple of years, despite competition between rival operators, in a sign that the market is maturing. “There has been a price war in the fixed broadband market in the last two years, with the average price of a connection falling,” Charlie Davies, analyst at Ovum, said.
“The speed of broadband penetration is starting to slow, and some markets are nearing saturation,” he added. There are around 22m homes in the UK, and some 4m small businesses, so there should be plenty of potential customers for broadband providers to target. Data released last week showed 9 million people have never used the internet.
“Usage is closely linked with a number of socio-economic and demographic indicators, with those less educated and on lower incomes less likely to access the web,” said Mark Williams from the Office for National Statistics. Worryingly for the industry, the reason given for not going online is typically a lack of interest.
BT’s retail arm has slightly more than 5 million broadband customers. Nearly two-thirds of the 15 million customers on its network are choosing a rival internet service provider, such as TalkTalk or Sky, which use BT’s infrastructure.
The UK lags behind other nations when it comes to broadband speeds. BT’s largely copper-based network means that customers suffer lower speeds, depending on the distance they live from their exchange.
BT said its planned rollout of a fibre-optic broadband network over the next 18 months would deliver much faster speeds, although one-in-three homes will miss out.
“BT is now investing a further £2.5bn to roll out fibre broadband to two-thirds of the UK. This will help the UK climb the league tables for speeds, one of the few areas in which we don’t lead the world,” Garfield said.
Communications regulator Ofcom reported this month that retail revenues from internet and broadband services has been effectively flat since 2006, despite the rise in broadband users. Services such as TV-on-demand or faster services could drive revenues higher in the future, although Davies predicted that competitive pressures may keep bills down.