Issue 135  27th October 2017

Vine’s founders are back with HQ, a live trivia game show app

By combining the interactivity of gaming, the allure of live video and the production value of Hollywood, HQ feels more alive than most anything on your phone or TV.

HQ is important because it displays that interactive video can be so much more than streams of comments and reactions. It's a rapid-fire live trivia show that blurs the line between video and interactive content, not just in format but in production value as well. It broadcasts just twice a day, but the broadcasts are intensely paced and focused. In an era where apps are desperate to grab and keep hold of your attention, HQ's short and rewarding bursts of content are a breath of fresh air.

It'll be interesting to see if the current format and question pool has legs, but the lure of instant cash rewards will definitely help keep viewers returning.

At BuzzFeed, a Pivot to Movies and Television

The team at BuzzFeed are busy mining user articles, lists and video shorts for ideas that may be spun into feature-length movies or television series. Executives are expecting that partnerships with production studios may bring in a third of the company’s revenue in the coming years.

One such project is already on the way, a movie about a series of posts by a BuzzFeed staff member on his travels through China in search of his lost iPhone. With the working title “Brother Orange”, actor Jim Parsons from the CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” has signed to play the lead.

Amazon Fire TV (2017) review: everything but the content

By now you must've heard about Amazon's new Fire TV. It's big news, and will likely become a strong competitor to the Apple TV. But is it there yet? This review helped us dig into it a bit more, and understand its value beyond the list of attractive specs.

But none of [its specs] matter if the content isn’t there, and Amazon just doesn’t have a large enough library of 4K HDR movies, or anything at all that supports Atmos. It’s all the right specs without enough content that can take advantage of it, and you can make different trade-offs and get more stuff to watch.

Also notable to us is the ability to get the full Alexa experience. If you already own an Echo device, there's no TV setup needed. Just ask Alexa to play a show, and she takes over to pair, setup, and start playing your show.

This gives us an example of what the future of voice technology has in store for us. Pretty neat.

How Netflix Made Stranger Things a Global Phenomenon

Everyone at Rerun HQ is eagerly awaiting season 2 of the Emmy-nominated Stranger Things. In anticipation, WIRED has published an interesting piece on how Netflix has made this series a global phenomenon by investing in localising their content. The result? A show that went viral first in Canada, and gradually spread to find enthusiasts around the world. In one month, Netflix users in 190 countries watched Stranger Things, and viewers in 70 of those nations became devoted fans.

To ensure it transcended language barriers, Netflix dug into old Dungeons & Dragons materials to nail down how various cultures translated 'Demogorgon' in the mid-1970s. Similar efforts were made to track down decades-old marketing materials for, yes, Eggo waffles.