Taking a Look at Binge Times

Reading this book, quite good so far, can it be used as a predictor of future times and Technologies?  Predictably just a 'black swan' event, or more?  More to follow.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix  By Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski

Their intro: 

The first comprehensive account of the biggest wake-up call in the history of the entertainment business: the pivot to streaming. Go inside a disparate group of media and tech companies—Disney, Apple, AT&T/WarnerMedia, Comcast/NBCUniversal and well-funded startup Quibi—as they scramble to mount multi-billion-dollar challenges to Netflix.

After spotting Netflix and the deep-pocketed Amazon Prime Video a decade’s head start, rivals from the tech and start-up realm (Apple, Quibi) and traditional media (Disney, WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal) all decided to move mountains to enter the streaming game. At a cost of billions, each went after their own piece of the market, launching five new services in a seven-month span. And just as the derby was heating up, the coronavirus pandemic arrived, a black-swan event bringing short-term benefits but also stiff challenges.

The battle for streaming supremacy may end up having more than one winner, but the cost and disruption to decades-old business models have also produced a lot of losers. Binge Times reveals the true costs of the vision quest as companies are turned inside-out and repeatedly redraw their org charts and strategic plans. Stretching from Silicon Valley to Hollywood to Wall Street, it is a mesmerizing, character-rich tale of hubris and ambition, as the fate of a century-old industry hangs in the balance. ....  '

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.   .... 

Amazon Acquires MGM

News to me, would seem to lead to less creativity.  The native streamers are very non creative.

MGM’s Amazon Era Begins With Big, Unanswered Questions  by Alex Weprin

As the $8.5 billion deal closes, insiders debate how autonomous MGM operations may be, how quickly Amazon will mine its IP and how soon its vaunted library will make its way to Prime Video.  by Alex Weprin

In the summer of 1981, MGM coveted Rocky and James Bond. The studio, formed in 1924 through the merger of Metro Pictures Corp., Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions, had an eye for expansion. And it liked what it saw in the intellectual property of United Artists. UA, a Hollywood icon itself, was behind films like Some Like It Hot, Raging Bull, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and, yes, the Rocky movies and the Bond franchise.

So MGM acquired UA, and its films, for some $380 million ($1.2 billion adjusted for inflation), with Frank Rosenfelt, MGM’s chairman, telling The Washington Post at the time that UA’s library would be critical as Hollywood transitioned “from the movie business to the entertainment software business.”  ... '

New YouTube Navigation Capabilities

The virus also got us to look at YouTube more closely, contains some good adaptations that are worth understanding  Worth looking at.

New YouTube features to help you navigate the streaming boom
Debbie Weinstein in The Google Blog
Vice President, Global Video & YouTube Solutions
Published May 7, 2020

Viewer attention is shifting dramatically as we spend more time at home–and we’ve heard directly from many advertisers that are working quickly to adjust their creative and media strategies, especially to orient toward streaming platforms.

Today, we are sharing new advertiser insights and accelerating the launch of a number of tools–including Brand Lift measurement on the TV screen and more flexible formats for content casted onto the TV screen–to help advertisers navigate this rapidly changing environment.1

People are streaming on TV screens more than ever
As people spend more time at home, we’re seeing major shifts in streaming viewership. A recent Comscore report highlighted that over 70 million US households are now streaming content on their connected TV screens.

Nowhere is this shift more pronounced than on YouTube and YouTube TV. According to Comscore, YouTube has the highest reach and viewing hours among ad-supported streaming services, and represents a quarter of all streaming watch time across both subscription and ad-supported platforms in the US.2 Stay at home directives have amplified this shift to the TV screens, as overall watch time there has jumped 80 percent year over year in March 2020.3

Diversity of viewer passions and interests is what inspires people to stream YouTube on their big screens–from tuning into their favorite health and fitness videos to leaning back with a creator sharing a bit of their world to watching more traditional media outlets reinvent their content for this new reality.

Below, we’ve shared just a few of the top content growth areas across both YouTube and YouTube TV on TV screens during this time. While people are enjoying movies and shows to unwind, they are also watching live content from their favorite creators and cultural moments.  ... "

Wal-Mart Vudu Competes with Shoppable Ads

Had actually forgotten about the Wal-Mart streaming service Vudu.  Interesting experiment to understand what evokes interaction and get related data.  Buying directly from integrated product in video has long been a holy grail, is that what this is?  Also competes with Youtube.

Will shoppable ads help Walmart’s Vudu compete with Amazon and Netflix? in Retailwire  by George Anderson with further expert opinion.

Walmart’s Vudu video streaming service is following Amazon and Netflix in creating original programming to attract viewers. Unlike its rivals, however, Walmart will continue to offer Vudu as a free, ad-supported service rather than seeking subscription income. Management believes it can do this because of “new advertising technology” that will enable viewers of the shows to buy the products they see on the screen.

Bloomberg reports that Walmart has already lined up “tens of millions of dollars in upfront advertising” as brands look to cash in on the shoppable content opportunity.   .... " 

Streaming Applications

Streaming applications, the only system I have worked with that does this is Splunk.  Also well known is Flink.   Usually large scale. Many other approaches exist.  Streaming is a means of processing arriving requests as they arrive.  Very successful in systems like Netflix.

Patterns of Streaming Applications  in InfoQ
Monal Daxini presents a blueprint for streaming data architectures and a review of desirable features of a streaming engine. He also talks about streaming application patterns and anti-patterns, and use cases and concrete examples using Apache Flink.

Bio
Monal Daxini is the Tech Lead for Stream Processing platform for business insights at Netflix. He helped build the petabyte scale Keystone pipeline running on the Flink powered platform. He introduced Flink to Netflix, and also helped define the vision for this platform. He has over 17 years of experience building scalable distributed systems.  .... " 

Low Power Video Streaming for IOT

Ultimately could be a very big thing.   Opens video sensor streaming, and IOT very broadly.  Tie it to video pattern recognition advances.    It further could also have many security implications.

Researchers’ low-power video streaming breakthrough could boost the IoT    By  Maria Deutscher

University of Washington researchers have developed a method of transmitting video using up to 10,000 times less power than existing techniques that could enable the development of much more capable connected devices.

To demonstrate the breakthrough, the team built a prototype implementation (pictured) that was announced on Wednesday. They also shared details about the system’s power saving approach, which is based on a communications method known as backscattering.

Named after the physical phenomenon it’s designed to harness, backscattering involves using transmissions from an external source to send data. One or more antenna on a backscatter device receive the radio waves and reflect them, modifying them in the process to send different information. The fact that the system doesn’t have to generate the signal by itself drastically reduces power requirements. ... "

Dealing with a Big Stream of Analytics Data

An interesting piece that deals with the process of working with large data streams.   The particular solution experience is useful.

By Alban Perillat-Merceroz in Medium
Software Engineer @Teads
Give meaning to 100 billion analytics events a day    Analytics pipeline at Teads

In this article, we describe how we orchestrate Kafka, Dataflow and BigQuery together to ingest and transform a large stream of events. When adding scale and latency constraints, reconciling and reordering them becomes a challenge, here is how we tackle it. ... "

New Algorithm for Stream Data

Almost every business deals with streams of data.   Determining patterns in a stream is essential, one of recent clients makes most of their profit in it. here in Quanta Mag, some new methods for addressing the problem. Not technically deep, but takes some thought.   How do we test this today?

 Best-Ever Algorithm Found for Huge Streams of Data by Kevin Hartnett in Quanta Mag

To efficiently analyze a firehose of data, scientists first have to break big numbers into bits.

' .... “We developed a new algorithm that is simultaneously the best” on every performance dimension, said Jelani Nelson, a computer scientist at Harvard University and a co-author of the work with Kasper Green Larsen of Aarhus University in Denmark, Huy Nguyen of Northeastern University and Mikkel Thorup of the University of Copenhagen.

This best-in-class streaming algorithm works by remembering just enough of what it’s seen to tell you what it’s seen most frequently. It suggests that compromises that seemed intrinsic to the analysis of streaming data are not actually necessary. It also points the way forward to a new era of strategic forgetting.  .... ' 

" ... Trend Spotting  ... Streaming algorithms are helpful in any situation where you’re monitoring a database that’s being updated continuously. This could be AT&T keeping tabs on data packets or Google charting the never-ending flow of search queries. In these situations it’s useful, even necessary, to have a method for answering real-time questions about the data without re-examining or even remembering every piece of data you’ve ever seen. ... " 

Every Possible Song Has Some Non-Zero Streaming Value

When looking at the streaming concoctions of smart speakers. I quickly noticed the increase of so called 'mood' music playlists, aimed at providing backgrounds for sleeping, studying, working, concentrating, cooking, vanity, etc.   Unclear if any of this works.  But the user, including myself, is quick to bite and try.  And a slightly manipulated search can quickly get you there.   I was not the first to notice this.  Even giants like Spotify can create such 'fake' music.

One company is already commissioning  a version of 'Happy birthday to your name', for every possible given name.  Starting with the most common.  The one for 'Matthew' has already been included in 400,000 playlists.  What is 'fake' is debatable.  Perhaps written by machine and performed by studio artists.   Or created out of bits and snippets of real music.  Or created in its entirety by AI.   Regardless, cheaper to license than music by real artists, and much less expensive than from real, famous composers and artists.   Will we ultimately have to specify detect and specify 'real' music?

The accusation against Spotify in particular is written about in the NYT.  And an article about related efforts in Vulture.

Amazon Streams New Engagement

Despite all the other aspects of the Amazon Echo,   I believe delivering music easily by voice command is the thing that gets most people interested.   It has flipped me to a near continual music and information listener.  I had all the tech to do this before, but there was slightly too much friction. And that friction was removed in the last year.

The other assistant features are fascinating, both technically and useful, but are still very much in the evolving state.   Kitchen timers and alarms, Vocal search, OK.  But think of this as a way to engage millions of people, use it in the home, (which migrates to the office) train them with expectations, and when you finally have powerful assistants, you can deliver and test them.  Lets see if Amazon retains hold on the reins here. Are they ready?

The latest move in continuing the engagement.  Their own inexpensive music streaming linking them to the echo.  In CNET:

Amazon breaks out streaming music in a duet with Echo
The Spotify-style service packs a price few can beat: full-fledged streaming tunes for $4 a month, if Echo is the only way you play. .... " 

Complex Event Processing

I was reminded of complex event processing (CEP).   The WP has a good overview:

" ... Event processing is a method of tracking and analyzing (processing) streams of information (data) about things that happen (events),[1] and deriving a conclusion from them. Complex event processing, or CEP, is event processing that combines data from multiple sources[2] to infer events or patterns that suggest more complicated circumstances. The goal of complex event processing is to identify meaningful events (such as opportunities or threats)[3] and respond to them as quickly as possible.

These events may be happening across the various layers of an organization as sales leads, orders or customer service calls. Or, they may be news items,[4] text messages, social media posts, stock market feeds, traffic reports, weather reports, or other kinds of data.[1] An event may also be defined as a "change of state," when a measurement exceeds a predefined threshold of time, temperature, or other value. Analysts suggest that CEP will give organizations a new way to analyze patterns in real-time and help the business side communicate better with IT and service departments.[5]

The vast amount of information available about events is sometimes referred to as the event cloud.... " 

Note potential interaction with Business Process Management (BPM), And uses with IoT applications.

An incomplete list of related vendors and packages:

Apama by Software AG  
Informatica RulePoint  
Microsoft StreamInsight Microsoft CEP  
Oracle Event Processing  
BRMS - A rules management engine  
SAP ESP  
SQLstream SQLstream’s stream processing platform 
TIBCO BusinessEvents & Streambase  
WebSphere Business Events 
Splunk  ... " 

New Enterprise Splunk

Splunk, A package that I used for an application some time ago, for datastream analysis, but is relatively little known, reports their enterprise version 6.4.   Adds new visualization capabilities.

Understanding Data Streams

Good straightforward piece from the SAS Institute.  You may have to register.

Understanding Data Streams in IoT
The large array of connected devices, often referred to as the "Internet of Things" (IoT), is delivering an array of new data from the sensors they contain. This data offers the promise of new services, improved efficiency and, possibly, more competitive business models. ... " 

Real Time Data Analytics at Pinterest

Short case study of the use of analytics on streaming data, using Spark.  " ... Pinterest, the company behind the visual bookmarking tool that helps you discover and save creative ideas, is using real-time data analytics for data-driven decision making purposes. It’s experimenting with MemSQL and Spark technologies for real-time user engagement ... " 

Real Time Analytics is Critical

Says Cisco. I agree.  I would slightly alter it and say 'as real-time as necessary'.   But what is necessary is changing  rapidly.  Not too long ago data would available weekly, now that is not fine enough.  But we never knew what the better detail could provide us.  That can be provided by exploratory data mining today.

Stream Computing

Systems, devices, and people now generate vast streams of data.  How do we understand that data in real time?

" ... Remember the blackout during Super Bowl XLVII in February 2013? Nabisco certainly does. The company that makes Oreo cookies made history “winning the super bowl blackout” with its tweet, “You can still dunk in the dark.” That tweet resulted in tens of thousands of likes and retweets in real time—not bad considering that most advertisers pay approximately USD4 million/commercial slot during this event. Visit the Big Data & Analytics Hub to read the blog posting, “Reflections and Predictions for Stream Computing in 2015,” to see what Kimberly Madia, worldwide product marketing manager, InfoSphere Streams, at IBM, has to say about the impact that real-time data can have in today’s world. ... " 

Fast Track Back to Kanban

It has been a considerable time since I have worked with Kanban, the lean,  just in time manufacturing process.   This InfoQ piece outlines what it is and a workshop that addresses how to achieve it.  Even including a Kanban game to teach the concepts.

" ... So you are considering getting started with Kanban, but where do you start? In this article we describe the approach we used in Danske Bank to get teams off to a good start with Kanban. You are free to use the material and content to get started yourself and the purpose of the article is to explain the what and how of the workshop to enable you to use it. .... " 

This also makes me think of electronic or e-Kanban, which has been integrated into corporate systems such as ERP.   I often thought of Kanban as 'activated' business process models.   Now with more data and better analytics, might we take e-Kanban further, analyzing the streams of data now created in the enterprise to create new kinds of Kanban intervention?   What might that look like?  Thoughts?

Stream Data Processing

In Infoq:

The demand for stream processing is increasing a lot these days. The reason is that often processing big volumes of data is not enough. Data has to be processed fast, so that a firm can react to changing business conditions in real time. This is required for trading, fraud detection, system monitoring, and many other examples. A “too late architecture” cannot realize these use cases.

This article discusses what stream processing is, how it fits into a big data architecture with Hadoop and a data warehouse (DWH), when stream processing makes sense, and what technologies and products you can choose from. .... "

Future of Analytics

In CIO Insight:

The future of analytics Is Streaming in the Cloud:

" ... Business analytics is becoming more prescriptive and making information available in real-time so it can be directly applied to a specific transaction or event.

Business analytics, as it is applied in most organizations, is about to be utterly transformed. Traditionally, analytics have been the realm of a few high priests in an organization looking to divine trends by discovering new patterns in historical data.

But as analytics continues to rapidly evolve, a fundamental shift is starting to occur. Rather than trying to intermittingly optimize a process based on historical data taken from a large number of applications, analytics is getting more prescriptive and making information available in real-time so that it can be directly applied to a specific transaction or event. .... " 

Google Wonderlabs

Happened to be in an Apple Store today that was packed with people and it seems as many consultants.  This is a growing development. In CWorld:

Google wants you walkin' in its Winter Wonderlabs
Computerworld - Google opened gadget showrooms in six U.S. cities as the holiday shopping season quickly approaches. ... Dubbed the "Google Winter Wonderlabs," the showrooms are designed to be interactive spaces where potential customers can get their hands on Google products ranging from the Nexus 7 to the latest Chromebooks and Chromecast video streaming devices. ... "