Where Digital Media is Heading in 2017 and Beyond
We discovered three fundamental shifts that will drive production and advertising budgets in 2017—the evolving definition of a content creator, the rapid innovation in video-capture technology, and how authenticity and mobility dominate our personal social feeds. Together these three trends gave rise to a new, hyper-realistic aesthetic that is rapidly becoming the new standard for digital video. Rewind even five years and the television industry along with large brands completely dominated demand for digital video. Since that time, YouTube has evolved from the king of UGC, to the heartbeat of influencer marketing – one of the fastest growing forms of digital spend. Tools like Squarespace and Wix have brought more and more small businesses online, creating a new wave of demand for digital video. And digital marketers everywhere now create content as part of their day to day – be it for a Facebook ad or customer education. As much as the evolving profile of content creators has influenced digital video demand, hardware innovation has changed the way we capture video, firmly cementing first-person as the perspective of choice. Searches for GoPro content exploded more than 1250% in 2016, with VR (+814%) and drone footage (+712%) not far behind. All of this new video technology enables us to more easily capture the world as seen through our own eyes, and to define and share our own version of reality with our friends and consumers alike. If you have a single social media account, you won’t be shocked by the assertion that first person content will drive content demand in 2017—we have been seeing that perspective dominate our personal feeds...Dirac Branches Out into Augmented/Virtual Realit
Dirac Research, the Sweden-based developer of the digital sound optimization technology—including the Dirac Live room-correction system used in pro and consumer gear from Arcam, Emotiva, Harman, Pioneer, Oppo, Theta Digital and others—says it will demonstrate a “breakthrough” in 3D audio for augmented and virtual reality. To make the AR/VR audio experience more realistic, the company’s Dynamic 3D Audio AR/VR platform uses patent-pending dynamic HRTFs (head-related transfer functions) that consider isolated movements of the head in relation to the torso, which is contrary to industry-standard HRTFs that assume the body and head always move in tandem. “Simultaneous visual and aural immersion is the linchpin of a true virtual reality experience,” explained Dr. Mathias Johansson, founder and CEO of Dirac. “It’s what separates reality, experienced virtually, from an obvious representation of such. Until today, the limitations of the 3D audio technology used in VR/AR programming have prevented this true immersion from being created, rendering a gaming, entertainment, or educational VR experience that is fundamentally flawed…With Dynamic 3D Audio, these limitations no longer exist… “If a phone rings to my left, its sound waves enter my left ear a fraction of a second before my right, and the sound bounces off my shoulders and head in various ways that allows my brain to localize the sound and instinctively rotate my head alone to face its source,” Johansson said, explaining how the development of dynamic HRTFs is central to achieving simultaneous visual and aural immersion. “The failure to accurately reproduce dynamic head movements in virtual reality is one of the reasons why existing 3D sound solutions don’t sound quite realistic.” But the torso-head...10 Digital Media and Marketing Predictions for 2017
As 2016 comes to a close Strategy Analytics thoughts begin to turn towards the coming year. In a new report “Top Ten Digital Media Predictions for 2017,” Strategy Analytics Digital Media Strategies (DMS) service highlights the trends and events that will shape OTT video, digital advertising and VR in 2017.
Cloud-based broadcasting, the future of TV?
Amagi Media Labs founders Baskar Subramanian, Srinivasan K. A. and Srividhya S.—the three engineer-entrepreneurs—have yet to find time to celebrate the new investment in their media tech firm. On 15 December, Emerald Media—the pan-Asian platform established by global investment firm KKR & Co. for investing in the media and entertainment sector