Happy Friday! Welcome to Issue 65 of Rerun by Axonista!
Our Top Pick wonders how TV will be remembered and what future generations will learn about us from watching it.
Elsewhere, Facebook Live continues to dominate news. Gaming giant Blizzard announces a partnership with it, the BBC reveals its experience of it so far and Periscope says it's not worried about it. There are some great interviews with Mr Robot’s hacking adviser and Google’s UI engineer talking fantasy UI. There’s 360 degree video of The Met’s Temple of Dendur exhibit and, for something completely different and fun, some playful GoT metrics from Twitter.
Let's get straight to it!
Top Pick
The future of television
Mad Men cannot show us what life was like in the sixties. Mad Men can only show how life in the sixties came to be interpreted in the twenty-first century. Sociologically, Mad Men says more about the mind-set of 2007 than it does about the mind-set of 1967.
How will TV be remembered? Chuck Klosterman's latest book "But What If We're Wrong?" explores how and why society in the future might hold radically different views of the 21st century when compared to our beliefs today. He thinks about the present as if it was already the past. Here at Rerun we're always thinking about the future of TV, and looking through Klosterman's lens of the future of TV as a thing of the past is really intriguing.
Features
A conversation about fantasy user interfaces
Khoi Vinh, former Design Director for the New York Times, interviews Kirill Grouchnikov, a user interface engineer at Google and owner of Pushing Pixels. On Pushing Pixels Kirill has interviewed a number of designers behind the fantasy interfaces of movies like "The Hunger Games", "The Martian", "Avengers: Age of Ultron" and many more. Khoi and Kirill get stuck into what actually goes into the making of these interfaces, how they can further the narrative and storytelling, and what their future could be in virtual reality.
Future of TV
Blizzard will soon let you stream all of its games on Facebook Live
One of gaming's top studios and the creators of Warcraft, Blizzard, have announced a partnership with Facebook to add Facebook Live functionality to all their PC games. This means with the click of a button, you can stream live to your Facebook timeline from within your game. Blizzard are the developers of some of the biggest eSports games around, which already draw huge audiences on Twitch TV, so this really goes to show the allure of Facebook Live as a platform.
DJ Khaled fronts a Snapchat talk show in Droga5's first big push for T-Mobile
T-Mobile has been heavily promoting its Un-carrier (no contract, upgrade anytime) campaign and the latest strategy has the mobile service bank on the runaway success of Snapchat star DJ Khaled.
He’ll be promoting T-Mobile Tuesdays on a variety of digital channels, the most interesting of which is a Snapchat talk show called #GetThanked. Each ‘snapisode’- as they’ve been called- will centre on the giveaways and offers from T-Mobile.
This partnership reflects T-Mobile's wider strategy to attract customers and, while it’s hardly an original move, it does point to the continued efforts to differentiate itself from other carriers like AT&T.
Six months in: What the BBC has learned using Facebook Live
Like the NYT, the BBC are giving Facebook Live a real shot rather than just using it to supplement their other coverage. Audience engagement is key. Having an editorial plan is key. Facebook's metrics are not particularly useful yet so paying attention to audience engagement manually by eye is currently the most valuable metric, something that the NYT has also noted. The BBC have fed back to Facebook about its limited metrics and we're curious to see whether Facebook engages with the broadcaster.
Periscope CEO: ‘Facebook is shamelessly following us into live video. It’s flattering’
Facebook Live has undoubtedly stirred things up in the world of live streaming and, in this article, Periscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour tries to be philosophical about the challenges Periscope will inevitably face.
The first big challenge, Beykpour notes, was encouraging people to stop what they were doing and watch live streams. The next challenge is possibly a bigger one. Since the Facebook platform offers a whole host of features, services, integrations and audience reach, Periscope faces a battle to compete with what is a relatively self-contained experience.
Netflix studied your binge-watching habit. That didn’t take long.
Netflix has categorised viewers by binge level ranging from 'very fast' to 'more relaxed'. It's no surprise that Netflix is able to crunch the numbers like this, but is it skewing the numbers too?
Danette Chavez from the A.V. Club has taken a closer look at the small print in Netflix's press release and found that the binge scale has no relation to viewership! So it seems the widely reported press release is not so much the product of years of research and data crunching, but more the product of the hard working marketing team.
Storytelling
Meet the man who makes sure the hacking is accurate on 'Mr. Robot'
If you're in any way nerdy, you'll appreciate that outlandish science or technology featured in a TV show or movie can destroy all story credibility within seconds.
The world of hacking features prominently in Mr. Robot so it's important that this is conveyed in an authentic way.
Show writer (and former cyber security engineer) Kor Adana's job is to ensure this happens. In this interview with The Drum's Natan Edelsberg, he talks about how he initially landed the job and what it entails.
"I strive to make sure every single detail on those screens is perfect. I’m trying to satisfy the most technical and critical fans out there. I know that if I miss something, a screenshot of the mistake will end up on Reddit or Twitter."
Warning: This interview contains season 1 spoilers.
Virtual Reality
The Temple of Dendur: From the Nile to NYC in 360°
The Met Museum in New York used 360° video to capture the stillness and serenity of their Temple of Dendur exhibit, resulting in an otherworldly experience that feels like you've stayed at the museum long after the crowds have departed. Here's how they did it.
Briefs
- Getty Images dives deeper into VR with Olympics plan and more
- Authorities cracking down on Facebook users streaming movies through Live
- Major French TV channel Canal+ sponsors eSports team Vitality
- Snapchat beats Instagram in time spent in app
- Anticipating WWDC 2016: What's in store for Apple TV and tvOS
How every #GameOfThrones episode has been discussed on Twitter [spoilers]
Warning, there could be some spoilers for anyone not caught up on the latest episode!
This is a fun interactive visualisation of how every character has been mentioned on Twitter, with bubbles representing the extent of the mentions, lines to indicate which characters were mentioned together and emojis for the context in which they were discussed. Data nerds will love it, also it's really fun to look back at big moments from past episodes and see how people reacted via emoji!