Tag: media

Youtube Emmy

this is nice recognition for the outstanding engineering on the youtube team:

Since YouTube’s founding in 2005, the world is surprised on a daily basis by the creativity, inspiration and passion that the planet’s most creative people bring to the YouTube platform. Each month, 1B people watch more than 6B hours of video. Each minute, creators upload 100 more hours for the world to watch. To meet this fundamental engineering challenge, the YouTube team has created new, innovative ways to upload, store, manage and deliver all kinds of video programming to viewers the instant they want to watch it.

YouTube’s parallel media transcoding engine and media processing framework provide for massive media processing capability with extremely low latencies. YouTube’s streaming infrastructure is a unique achievement that operates at unparalleled scale, globally. In the last year alone, their new “live” platform delivered coverage of 1200 live events from the 2012 Summer Olympics and scaled to deliver over 8M concurrent streams during the Red Bull Stratos Mission. As the world increasingly comes to the internet for high-quality, original content, YouTube’s Content ID platform allows copyright holders to manage whether and how their content appears on YouTube, providing those rights holders with an automated way of protecting and managing their rights and monetizing their programming on a global scale.

Together, these achievements have fundamentally changed the way an entire generation thinks of and experiences television.

Canonical science writing

In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?

“Basically, this is a brief soundbite,” the scientist will say, from a department and university that I will give brief credit to. “The existing science is a bit dodgy, whereas my conclusion seems bang on,” she or he will continue.

The 4th estate? Please.

In many respects, the non-detection of these business frauds is far more alarming than failure to uncover governmental malfeasance. Politics is a partisan team sport, and it is easy to imagine Democrats or Republicans closing ranks and protecting their own, despite damage to society. Furthermore, success or failure in public policies is often ambiguous and subject to propagandistic spin. But investors in a fraudulent company lose their money and therefore have an enormous incentive to detect those risks, with the same being true for business journalists. If the media cannot be trusted to catch and report simple financial misconduct, its reliability on more politically charged matters will surely be lower.

Mars is brutal

Mars One wants to establish a human settlement on Mars, and fund this decade-long endeavor by involving the whole world as the audience of an interactive, televised broadcast of every aspect of this mission, from the astronaut selections and their preparations to the arrival on Mars and their lives on the Red Planet.

There are already over 80k applicants and there is only one way to get voted off the island: out the airlock.

2023-01-12: A cogent anti-Mars case

we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun.

Youtube subscriptions

Starting today, we’re launching a pilot program for a small group of partners that will offer paid channels on YouTube with subscription fees starting at $0.99 per month. Every channel has a 14-day free trial, and many offer discounted yearly rates.

if the economics work out, individual shows can escape the prison of being bundled with sports junk, and strike out on their own.

see also:

Lots of people want to break up the bundle — the economic model that keeps the TV Industrial Complex intact — but no one has been able to do it. Can Congress?

every cable subscriber pays $5 / month for sweaty guys in spandex whether they give a shit or not.