MARK COATNEY - NEW CONTENT TYPES FOR TOMORROW
- 1. The Internet, Unboxed New content types for tomorrow
- 2. The End of the Box • Since the internet began, digital content has been delivered inside a box. At first that box mainly only showed local content—software you loaded directly onto your machine. This produced an era of specialized boxes, machines designed to do a limited range of tasks. • The Internet changed that. Now the box is a door, a machine that can do any number of tasks as long as it can get information from the network. Now you have a single device that you carry with you everywhere that lets you do an amazing array of things. It plays movies while you wait for the bus. It plugs into your car stereo and plays podcasts. It’s an atlas, health monitor, a babysitter. • But the next step is to break down that box. Voice/Audio interfaces, AR/VR, Wearables and Ambient/Microlocal content distribution will all combine to make content something that is all around you, all the time.
- 3. Audio: Voice Interfaces • Voice interfaces have been around for a while now, with Siri and then Alexa. But 2017 is the year that Alexa hit the mainstream; today a large number of U.S. consumers access content through voice commands. • The Amazon Alexa Skills marketplace has brought on a new era. More than 3,000 skills already exist. • By 2023, 50% of the interactions consumers have with all computers will be using their voices.
- 4. Audio: Search/Discovery • Audio discovery has long been a pain point for publishers. A traditional text-based search model that returns links isn’t particularly helpful. • The new voice interfaces let consumers speak directly to a search assistant that helps them find a podcast, a news report, or that song who’s name you can’t quite remember. • Audioburst uses AI to index audio broadcasts. The company uses natural language processing to discover meaning and surface the right content.
- 5. Ambient Interfaces: Proximity News • “Beacons”—devices that can push information to and from mobile phones in close proximity to the device—have been used by marketers for a while now. But that same technology can be used by media companies to provide personalized information to people who enter a certain physical space. Think, for instance, of a local media outlet using this to provide relevant information to readers it knows are at a ballgame, concert or city council meeting. • Beacons currently work using Bluetooth, which means a person must be quite close to the beacon to work. We’re not far, however, from being able to use WiFi signals to locate individuals in a room based on our unique shape and movement patterns, which would allow media companies to precisely target content to people based on where they are and what they’re doing.
- 6. Wearables and Thinkables • Head-mounted displays like VR headsets are becoming smaller and easier to use. • Apple’s Ear Pods are just the first of a coming wave of in-ear interfaces driven by voice commands. • Further afield, startups like Neurable and the Elon Musk-backed Neuralink are working on brain-machine interfaces.
- 7. AI: Stories that Write Themselves • Natural language analysis/generation systems have been around for a while from companies like Narrative Science. • You’ll see an increasing use of these tools as content creation aids. The autocomplete feature you see in search and email systems will be applied to content creation systems. Rather than creating a whole story, AI aids will supply the framework for a story that a human writer can quickly finish. • Further afield: AI companions that tell you stories based on your own interactions with it. See, for instance, Replika.
- 8. AI: Real-Time Fact Checking • The current news environment requires a radical improvement in the speed of fact-checking. Orgs like the Washington Post are experimenting with systems to do this. • Over the next few years expect Google, Facebook and Twitter to experiment with AI systems that in real-time help readers understand sourcing, context and biases in information.
- 9. Mixed Reality • Mixed Reality is a term describes varying degrees of digital information overlaid the physical world. It includes Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, 360- degree video and holograms. • Though VR is the most hyped, and holograms are particularly cool, AR and 360-degree video provide the best immediate opportunity for content creators in terms of ease of production.
- 10. 360 Video and AR • 360-degree video allows viewers to watch video from any angle. YouTube, Facebook and Vimeo all offer 360- degree videos. Because it doesn’t require separate hardware to view, it has a lower barrier to entry for your audience compared to VR. • AR requires some sort of screen, whether it be glasses like Google Glass or your phone. The biggest AR success so far?
- 12. Holograms • Researches at the University of Rochester earlier this year unveiled a projection system that can display 3-D holograms inside a glass sphere. • Also in 2017 Microsoft released its developer kit for its much- hyped HoloLens platform. • 3D content creation will be a big opportunity over the next few years.
- 13. One to Some Publishing • Email newsletters have experienced a renaissance in the past few years, driven by the ease of use of Tinyletter. • SuperPhone/Hustle: Content management systems for allowing a single start to interact with fans via SMS. • Purple: Subscription model to deliver content via SMS.
- 14. Blockchain • Though most of the attention around blockchain technology is focused on crypto currencies like bitcoin, the applications for media are fascinating. • Because a blockchain ledger contains all the information from every transaction associated with it, the blockchain allows for real authentication of content, making it easier, for instance, to determine the authenticity of information from internet sources, to verify the identities of whistleblowers or to parse out fake news. • Blockchain technology also potentially allows for a different media business model, since each bit of content could potentially be locked and only opened after payment. It also allows people to participate in “trustless” transactions between people—ones that don’t require a third party like a bank to validate the exchange. • This is still a long way off. No one has yet created a real, mass user-friendly blockchain media platform; Steem, a blockchain-based social network, is probably the closest. But over the next 10 years the technology has the potential to revolutionize how information is shared—and paid for—on the Internet.