Happy Friday!!
This week, a new report from Strategy Analytics forecasts global consumer and advertising spend on TV and video will grow from $490 billion in 2017 to $559BN by 2022, largely driven by Over The Top services.
A cool $69 billion dollars over 5 years. 💪
Let the scrollin' begin!
Top Pick
‘Stories’ was Instagram’s smartest move yet
This is a nice long read from Recode. Some impressive charts showing the impact of Instagram's Stories on Instagram user growth.
Stories was originally a Snapchat innovation. It filled people's desire to share personal moments from their day. Without the pressure of delivering a carefully composed image with a permanent record.
The same cannot be said for IGTV, yet. As nicely summed up by Kurt Wagner below.
Instagram’s version of this “new TV” is called IGTV. And despite a nagging electric banner at the top of the app to promote new videos, it seemingly hasn’t caught fire in the immediate way Stories did. Some have criticized it as a feature that’s been added to Instagram because it’s a corporate priority — not something users want or need.
Interactive Media
HQ Trivia downloads spiral downward as it hits Apple TV
We are big fans of HQ at Rerun HQ, so much so we once even created our own game show app as part of a lab day.
Recently it has emerged that the trivia gameshow's downloads have started to decline. Will the launch of their Apple TV App help grow player numbers?
According to App Annie’s app store ranking history, on iOS HQ has fallen from the No. 1 U.S. trivia game to No. 10, from the No. 44 game to No. 196, and from the No. 151 overall app to No. 585. It’s exhibited a similar decline on Android.
Despite the lower ranking in the charts, we must not forget that HQ changed an old and dated gameshow format. Introducing a new interactive experience with daily audiences of over 500,000 players.
CEO of HQ, Rus Yusupov, weighed in on the decline letting people know that they are "developing new game formats, one of which we think is really special and complements Trivia nicely".
With the release of their Apple TV App enabling HQ to enter the living room experience we predict it will move back up the charts soon.
Virtual Reality
The future of live sport: Heightening the experience for those attending events
REWIND's Redbull Flight Deck has applied Microsofts Hololens to one of the words fasted sports, air racing. REWIND is attempting to merge realities to change the fundamentals of the sport. At the moment air racing is essentially a spectacular time trial, one plane at a time will fly a lap and at the very end, the team with the best time wins.
Enter REWIND, which is using Redbulls impressive telemetry from the race to merge each time trial so you can till in real time who is winning. They have already shown off this tech during the San Diego AI race but their ambitions for the tech and sport don't stop there.
How Aphex Twin’s “T69 Collapse” video used a neural network for hallucinatory visuals
You'd expect nothing less from a man who once encoded his own face into the audio signal of a track but this new video from Aphex Twin is pretty mind-bending, and the story behind it is pretty fascinating.
Aphex Twin's music rarely feels anything other than utterly digital and the visuals created here by Wierdcore celebrate the outer-limits of computer generated video.
the artist introduces various cityscapes and terrains into the mix, as if the viewer were experiencing a virtual reality collapsing into a black hole.
It's technically sophisticated stuff making use of machine-learning and photogrammetry techniques, the end result melding beautifully with Aphex Twin's psychadigital concoctions.
Haptic feedback is making VR surgery feel like the real thing
VR has been helping various industries and skills for years, but could surgery be the next to benefit?
London startup, FundamentalVR, launched their training services in the US this week. VR surgery comes with various benefits, trainers are available, the tech provides haptic feedback and the pricing is affordable to hospitals.
Can it be as beneficial to surgeons as VR has been to pilots? Only time will tell.
Briefs
Old Spice - Boardroom meeting
Old Spice invited fans into their new monthly boardroom meeting, welcoming live input on important decisions.
Prepped before the live stream, viewers got access to an Old Spice Google Docs folder allowing access to view their financial accounts, marketing ideas, and even an impressive Old Spice presentation "Old Spice, New Spice who dis"🤔.
Throughout the 2 hour live video, consumers helped the team with 'charts & graphs, lunchtime choices, how to market the products', and were even joined by "insta-famous influencer" Toddy Smith to discuss the power of influencers.
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.