Happy Friday!
This week the folks at Trendwatching released a fantastic webinar on "The Future of Retail" that we highly recommend. We believe video is the new store front, so if that interests you too, make sure to reach out to us here.
Let the scrolling begin!
Top Pick
The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one
There's never been a better time to start live streaming, the barriers are lower than ever before. But when it's easily accessible to everyone, and everyone starts doing it, who ends up being the audience?
For many streamers on platforms like Twitch, getting that audience can turn out to be a long and lonely affair. Some popular games like Fortnite can contain over 15,000 live streams, sorted by popularity, which is a tough nut to crack for new streamers. This feature by The Verge shares some of their stories.
Thankfully, this is an issue that Twitch is aware of. It recently published this public roadmap in an effort to engage the community on the issue of discovery.
Features
What lost (and made) on Amazon Prime Day
Amazon Prime Day was eventful this year with widespread technical glitches in the first few hours of going live. The cost to the e-commerce giant was an estimated $1.2 million a minute according to Spencer Millerberg, the One Click Retail founder.
In some cases, people could not access Amazon Prime Day for over 75 minutes, which could have a loss of over $90 million. Amazon don't disclose Prime Day figures but they did reveal that they had more sales compared to Cyber Monday, Black Friday and the previous Prime Day with sales exceeding $1 billion. The added revenue this year may have been due to the press coverage they received for the technical errors. A total of 84 % of brands extended their discount to more than one item, compared to just 67 percent last year.
Future of TV
Snapchat is launching a news partnerships initiative - Axios
People are overwhelmingly turning to social media and messaging for news, adversely impacting traditional publishers' bottom lines. As a result, platforms are under increased pressure to create symbiotic relationships with publishers and journalists.
Snapchat is forging the way by partnering with four news discovery platforms, NewsWhip, Storyful, SAM Desk, and TagBoard. This is an effort to give journalists access to better tools that will help them uncover Snap pictures and videos during breaking news. But modernizing journalism is not the only reason Snapchat is interested, this could also be a very lucrative opportunity for the platform.
Walmart is reportedly planning a video streaming service to compete with Netflix and Amazon
Walmart has been spending big money in recent years to ensure it remains competitive with Amazon, including acquiring Jet.com for $3.3 billion and Flipkart for $16 billion.
Now it's reportedly considering launching its own streaming service, under the Vudu brand. It sees middle America as being underserved by existing services and could undercut them on price.
Virtual Reality
VR and power tools: What could go wrong?
We've all seen it, those videos where professional sports people try VR for the first time and quickly prostrate themselves on the nearest available floor. Heck, perhaps even a few of us have fallen into the uncanny valley ourselves from time to time.
These embarrassing (and hilarious) moments usually arise in the gap between expectation and reality, VR provides a convincing surrogate of an experience we've already had and we fall — hook, line and sinker. But what happens if VR moves beyond emulation and begins conditioning our expectations about future real world experiences.
Well, this is the premise behind hardware store Lowe's latest VR initiative, called Holoroom Test Drive, which aims to provide laypeople with the opportunity to try out power tools in VR before purchase (where the limb-loss potential is significantly lessened).
Lowe's estimate that $70 billon in home improvement projects are stalled because homeowners can't visualise the end result. So the investment in VR makes sense, enabling consumers to experience a product and gain reassurance in its use before committing to a purchase.
Apple replaced its executive portraits with Memoji - The Verge
Apple got a little creative for World Emoji Day - they replaced all of their executives’ headshots with Memoji versions of their faces. Good for them! At Axonista, everyday is Emoji day...
🌈☀️🍔⚽️ Have a wonderful weekend! 🌎🌍🌏😁
That's all from the Rerun team at Axonista. We look forward to sharing more news from the future of TV and interactive video next week.