Tag Archives: Roku

Weekly output: Roku updates, targeted TV ads (x2), Instagram Reels, online-ad advice, TechBBQ startup pitches, Theranos whistleblower

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This week’s trip to Copenhagen for the TechBBQ conference was going to introduce me to two new countries, thanks to my connection in Iceland each way. And then I realized that I could duck over to Sweden for breakfast Friday morning, thanks to Europe’s longest road/rail bridge connecting Denmark and Sweden with frequent and cheap train service.

9/12/2022: Upcoming Roku interface changes nod to streaming complexity, Fierce Video

Another run of fill-in work at my video trade-pub client started with this writeup of upcoming Roku product releases.

9/12/2022: Fox enlists Comscore to help target local TV ads, Fierce Video

Fox is bringing on outside help to improve its ad targeting at its local TV stations.

9/12/2022: New Dish partnership to enable real-time programmatic TV ads, Fierce Video

Dish is enlisting similar assistance with its targeted ads.

9/13/2022: WSJ report: Instagram’s Reels is reeling in hardly anybody, Fierce Video

A few days after writing this, I finally had a Reel catch my eye–in the form of one my brother had posted.

9/13/2022: Advertising Group Urges Companies: Give Customers a Reason to Share Data, PCMag

I finished writing this summary of a report from the ad-industry group IAB while sitting at the gate for my flight from Dulles to Reykjavik.

The audience for my panel, a few minutes before it started. Attendees wear headphones provided by the organizers to cope with a noisy venue.9/14/2022: PR & Press Panel Pitch, TechBBQ

My contribution to this conference, alongside moderator Morgan Meaker of Wired and fellow judges Jordan French of Grit Daily News, Amala Balakrishner of DealStreetAsia and Niels Lunde of Børsen, consisted of quizzing a set of early-stage firms picked by TechBBQ’s organizers: Seaborg Technologies (cost-competitive nuclear power), FarmDroid (robotic agriculture), Stykka (eco-friendly interior construction), Atlant 3D Nanosystems (nano-scale additive manufacturing), and Blue Lobster (sustainable seafood). All five had to present with the unexpected disadvantage of the audio-video system preventing them from showing all but snippets of their slide decks.

9/15/2022: Theranos Whistleblower on Lessons Learned: I ‘Would Have Hired a Lawyer’, PCMag

I wasn’t sure if a conference focused on the Nordic tech ecosystem would yield a story for a U.S. audience, but Tech.eu editor-in-chef Robin Wauters’s interview of Theranos whistleblower Erika Cheung provided just that.

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Weekly output: streaming-video viewers, Facebook vs. Australia, ShowStoppers TV, password managers, Vint Cerf on 6G

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In addition to the stories below, my tweet about the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority’s board-meeting news of an American Express Centurion Lounge coming to National Airport in 2022 got picked up at Gary Leff’s View From The Wing travel blog. As a longtime reader of Gary’s, I had to smile about that.

2/16/2021: OTT providers acknowledge the challenge of holding onto viewers, FierceVideo

I wrote up this online panel about the issues involved in retaining viewers as we emerge from this pandemic. The panel itself suffered its own retention problems, in the form of the moderator dropping offline multiple times.

2/17/2021: Facebook Will Give You Less Koala Content, Among Other Problems With Its Australian News Ban, Forbes

The koala-content angle came to me early on as I wrote this post, so I had to find some file art of a koala to go with the piece.

2/18/2021: ShowStoppers TV, ShowStoppers

I emceed this round of gadget demos, introducing and quizzing the presenters:  Godonut’s smartphone/tablet mount, HoverCam’s eGlass remote-teaching system, and Wacom’s Chromebook-connected drawing tablet.

Screenshot of USA Today column as seen in the paper's iPad app2/18/2021: LastPass to limit its free password manager. Here are other options, including Apple, Google, USA Today

All the research I did about password-manager services at the end of last year for the U.S. News guide that ran in January made this an easier column to write. That work also helped me write a longer post about the relative merits of LastPass, 1Password, Bitwarden and Dashlane for Patreon readers.

2/19/2021: 6G internet? Internet pioneer Vint Cerf isn’t buying the hype, Fast Company

I wrote up an online event hosted by Mitre Corp. on Feb. 11 that featured this interview of Internet pioneer Vint Cerf (whom I previously wrote about for Fast Company when he spoke at a conference in Alexandria in late 2019). Much as Cerf had voiced some sensible skepticism about 5G broadband one winter ago, he declined to get too excited over 6G and instead pointed to the connectivity potential of low-Earth-orbit satellites and ever-cheaper undersea fiber-optic cables.

Weekly output: streaming-video aggregation, video customer acquisition, Jeremy Toeman, MLB video, “do not sell my personal information,” Strap Technologies

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Most of my work this week involved an event that was supposed to have me in Denver back in June–before FierceVideo’s Stream TV Show got pushed back to October and then moved online. After all that, management wound up not requiring me to moderate a panel as I did at this event last year–instead, they asked if I could write up some of the panels.

Patreon readers got an extra post from me Thursday unpacking my efforts to get AT&T to tell me where I might be able to test its millimeter-wave 5G signal.

11/9/2020: Industry execs share diverging opinions about aggregation, FierceVideo

The first panel I covered featured executives from Google, LG, Netflix and Vizio discussing how the pandemic had boosted their businesses (aside from killing many of their customers, something these guys did not acknowledge but should have) and how they were working to keep these confined-to-home viewers entertained.

11/10/2020: StreamTV panel discusses OTT customer acquisition, FierceVideo

This panel had Amdocs Media, Brightcove, Crunchyroll and Roku execs talking about their tactics to win and keep customers. One big takeaway: Disney+ and Netflix don’t have to play by the same rules as everybody else.

11/11/2020: WarnerMedia predicts second screens and synthetic smarts, FierceVideo

WarnerMedia innovation v.p. Jeremy Toeman–a guy I enjoyed meeting in San Francisco in 2012 when he was with a startup called Dijit–talked about how game-streaming services and artificial intelligence could change the state of TV.

11/11/2020: How big data can amp up fans’ experience of the big leagues, FierceVideo

The last Stream TV Show panel I wrote up covered Major League Baseball’s increasingly advanced fusion of statistics and video.

11/13/2020: Here’s A Hint About How Few People Click Those “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” Links, Forbes

A survey released at the end of a half-day online conference hosted Thursday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau suggested embarrassingly scant adoption of a key privacy measure mandated by the California Consumer Privacy Act.

11/14/2020: This startup wants to replace the white cane for blind people, Fast Company

After seeing the pitch of a startup called Strap Technologies for a sensor-equipped pod designed to let blind people navigate the world without a cane, I took a little more time to get the input of some independent experts on this Austin company’s ambitions.

Weekly output: TikTok (x3), Apple TV+, social-media satisfaction, AMC, TV metrics, NBCUniversal (x2), 5G flavors, Disney, Fox, tech journalism, Facebook and Twitter vs. Trump, Roku, Instagram Reels, election security, influence operations online

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This week was kind of nuts. I knew I’d be busy covering breaking news in the mornings for my trade-pub client FierceVideo while one of their reporters was on vacation, but I didn’t factor in how many entertainment and TV companies would be announcing their quarterly earnings. This put a dent in my ability to follow the now-virtual Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences that, were this a normal year, would have had me in Las Vegas this week. (Hacker summer camp friends, I miss you too and will try to catch up on your talks over the next few days.)

8/3/2020: Microsoft gets Trump green-light to buy TikTok, FierceVideo

I started this week by writing a bit about the biggest story in tech this week.

8/3/2020: Apple TV+ comes to American Airlines flights, FierceVideo

Writing about this addition to AA’s in-flight entertainment gave me an excuse to get a few quotes from one of my favorite avgeek bloggers, Seth Miller.

8/4/2020: Survey Shows Facebook Barely More Satisfying Than Comcast, Forbes

I got an advance look at the latest report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index, allowing me to have this post up right as the ACSI published these findings.

8/4/2020: AMC’s second-quarter earnings could have been worse, FierceVideo

This was the first of four earnings stories.

8/4/2020: Time spent on TV viewing soars, says Samba, FierceVideo

My editor at Fierce pointed me to this study and asked if I’d heard of Samba TV; I said I had, and that a friend had tried to connect me with their CEO at CES last year.

8/4/2020: Layoffs loom at NBCUniversal, FierceVideo

I wrote up a WSJ report about pending layoffs for my third post of Tuesday.

8/5/2020: Thinking of buying a 5G smartphone? Finding your carrier’s flavor of 5G requires a taste for investigation, USA Today

We had to correct this column because I said a study released in May came out last year, an error I could only laugh about once it was brought to my attention.

8/5/2020: After a disaster movie of a quarter, Disney bets on Mulan, FierceVideo

The big news in Disney’s earnings call: It will debut Mulan in September as a $29.99 extra for Disney+ subscribers instead of sticking to a theatrical release.

8/5/2020: Fox forges ahead despite ad-revenue shortfall in Q4, FierceVideo

The optimism Fox executives voiced on their earnings call about sports returning this fall seemed unfounded at the time.

8/5/2020: Tech journalism, Lobsterclass

My friend Rakesh Agrawal (aka rakeshlobster on Twitter) quizzed me about the state of tech journalism and how startup founders might improve their interactions with the media for the latest in a series of product-management classes he began in May. Our Zoom chat got interrupted a couple of times by incoming WhatsApp calls that I couldn’t answer with “sorry, can’t talk right now” messages because my phone was already in use as my Zoom camera.

8/5/2020: Facebook and Twitter suppress Trump coronavirus video, Al Jazeera

The reason behind those calls: AJ’s English-language channel wanted me to opine about the two social networks taking down Trump shares of a Fox News video in which the president said children are “almost immune” to COVID-19. So at 11 p.m., I put my phone back on the tripod for yet another video call.

8/6/2020: Roku Q2: 43 million active accounts, $43 million loss, FierceVideo

I wrapped up my earnings coverage for Fierce by covering Roku’s quarter.

8/6/2020: First take on Instagram’s Reels: Yes, it’s a TikTok clone, FierceVideo

In addition to gathering quotes from a couple of analysts, I cobbled together my own art for this story by taking screenshots of Instagram’s new TikTok-ish feature.

8/7/2020: What becoming a poll worker taught me about securing the 2020 election, Fast Company

Security researcher and Georgetown Law professor Matt Blaze’s Black Hat keynote gave me an opportunity to share my own experience as a poll worker with a larger audience than this blog ever gets. We had to correct one error after posting; the National Vote At Home Institute, a non-profit whose CEO I quoted in the piece, is based in Denver, not D.C. as listed in its Twitter bio.

8/7/2020: From Russia With Lure: Why We’re Still Beset By Bots And Trolls Pushing Disinformation, Forbes

Stanford Internet Observatory researcher Renée DiResta gave an excellent keynote on day two of Black Hat about influence operations online and how China and Russia’s efforts compare.

8/7/2020: Trump issues executive order to ban business with TikTok, FierceVideo

I scrambled to get an explanation of what, exactly, Trump’s order would ban U.S. companies and users from doing with TikTok, and Public Knowledge’s telecom-law guru Harold Feld came through.

8/7/2020: NBCUniversal reshuffles entertainment leadership, FierceVideo

My week filling in at Fierce wrapped up with this recap of a reorg at NBCU.

8/9/2020: TikTok’s suitors, Al Jazeera

I usually don’t shave on Sundays but had to for this appearance on AJ’s Arabic-language channel to talk about why Microsoft and, reportedly, Twitter, might want to buy TikTok.

Weekly output: OurStreets, ATSC 3.0, innovation in 2020, 5G meets retail, connected-TV privacy, Last Gadget Standing, Korean smart-city tech, best of CES

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Yet another CES is in the books. It was a tiring week, but once again I got an enormous amount out of the show. And it is nice to think that less than two weeks into the year, I’ve already finished the year’s toughest business trip.

Earlier this evening, I put together a Flickr album of my pictures from the gadget show; at some point in the next few days, I will write up the more interesting bits from my notes for Patreon subscribers.

1/6/2020: This app helps pedestrians and cyclists wage war on terrible drivers, Fast Company

The second-to-last piece I filed in 2019 ran a week later–a look at an upcoming app that will help pedestrians and cyclists report bad behavior by drivers.

1/8/2020: ATSC 3.0 draws selective, if not scant, support at CES 2020, FierceVideo

Industry support for a long-awaited upgrade to broadcast-TV technology is a somewhat wonky topic compared to, say, robots bearing toilet paper, but that’s why it’s handy to have a trade-pub client that deals in wonky stuff all the time.

1/8/2020: What’s Next for Innovation in 2020?, VentureFuel

I debated fellow tech journalists Eric Savitz and Rick Limpert in a panel discussion hosted by this New York-based consultancy before a small audience of investor and founder types.

1/8/2020: 5G Meets Retail, CES

My contribution to the show’s high-tech retailing track was this talk with Nokia 5G market-development director Jason Elliott and Verizon connected-solutions managing director Arvin Singh about what 5G could do for the retail experience–in a shop and along its supply chain.

Yes, this was my second manel of CES. I should have said something about that when I was asked to join each panel but did not, and feeling strung out by December’s cognitive overload is a weak excuse.

 

1/9/2020: CES: Your smart TV is watching you. Will Samsung, LG, Vizio do more to protect privacy?, USA Today

Think of this column as a sequel to the one I wrote for USAT from Google I/O in May. Where Google showed it could speak in detail–if not as much as I’d like–about adopting such data-minimization techniques as federated learning, TV manufacturers at CES appeared to be grossly unready for that sort of privacy discussion.

1/9/2020: Last Gadget Standing, Living in Digital Times

Once again, I helped judge this competition and then introduced two contenders on stage Thursday: the Octobo connected toy and the Flic 2 programmable smart button.

1/9/2020: A Look At Korea’s Smart-City Ambitions At CES, Ubergizmo

Friends at this gadget blog asked if I could help with their coverage by writing up one set of exhibits in the Eureka Park startup space. They offered a suitable rate, so I said that would be fine.

1/9/2020: CES 2020: Our best of show, USA Today

I contributed a paragraph about Hyundai’s air-taxi venture with Uber that ended with a contrary comment from an aviation-safety professional who’s understandably skeptical about the odds of this and other attempts at urban air mobility. If you’re not in the mood to read that much, you can also hear my spoken-word rendition of this piece (recorded on a Vegas sidewalk Wednesday night) on Jefferson Graham’s Talking Tech podcast.

Updated 1/16/2020 to correct the spelling of Elliott’s last name; updated 1/29/2020 to add a YouTube embed of the panel.

Weekly output: Amazon Fire TV, Roku TV, social-media propaganda, IFA

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I’m back from Berlin and my eighth IFA is in the books. I feel more wiped out than usual from jet lag, maybe because my five-hours-late departure Monday left no time for me to walk around the city Wednesday afternoon and get some sunshine into my head. I had better be recovered in three days, when I’ll be back on a plane for the Online News Association’s conference–this year in New Orleans, one of my favorite travel destinations.

If you need more gadget pictures in your life, there’s a slideshow of photos from this year’s IFA waiting after the jump.

9/5/2019: Amazon bids to spark new markets for Fire TV, FierceVideo

I wrote this from an Amazon event in Berlin Wednesday night, at which I had the advantage of being able to quiz a couple of analyst friends who had watched the same sales pitch.

9/7/2019: Roku expands Roku TV program to Europe, FierceVideo

Roku CEO Anthony Wood gave an uncommonly concise keynote at IFA Saturday morning–it ran only 24 minutes.

9/7/2019: Social-media marketing for Sudan’s military, Al Jazeera

I offered my perspective on a weird case of social-media propaganda via Skype from my hotel room.

9/8/2019: 2019 IFA Trade Show Recap with Rob Pegoraro, Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast

I shared my thoughts on this year’s IFA with Moor’s Mark Vena from a semi-quiet table at a restaurant in our hotel; I hope the background chatter from other guests isn’t too distracting.

Continue reading →

Weekly output: Apple Park, forced-redirect ads, net neutrality, tech trends, Tech Night Owl, media-player tips

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I would add up how many weeks this year have involved me writing about net-neutrality issues, but that would be too depressing.

12/11/2017: Why doesn’t Apple make its devices as carefully as it’s making Apple Park?, The Washington Post

After seeing Jony Ive’s talk at the Hirshhorn Museum last month, I tweeted out a line from him about how people should shut up about Apple Park’s perfectionist design–which then irked a great many people. I decided there was a story in this and, after striking out at two other places, found a home for it at the Post. Once again, I enjoyed confusing people who hadn’t seen my byline there in years.

12/11/2017: How to stop rogue ads that can set you up for malware, Yahoo Finance

When my mom asked how to dispel an obnoxious “forced-redirect” ads–the kind that take you off whatever you’re reading and then break your browser’s back button–I figured the problem was widespread enough to be story fodder.

12/14/2017: Here’s what you can expect now that the FCC has killed net neutrality, Yahoo Finance

The anger I’m seeing about this–not to mention the 3,767 comments this has drawn so far–suggest that FCC chair Ajit Pai’s PR strategy of laughing off fears is not calming anybody down.

12/16/2016: What’s Up With Tech?, PATACS

In my first talk to this user group since 2010, I talked about why I’m not sold on a handful of much-hyped technologies–4K TV, smart speakers, drones, virtual reality and Bitcoin. I brought a bag full of random trade-show swag to give away, and now I have that much more room in my home office’s closet.

12/16/2017: December 16, 2017 — Rob Pegoraro and Jeff Gamet, Tech Night Owl Live

I talked to host Gene Steinberg about the demise of the service once known as AOL Instant Messenger, net-neutrality politics, and my decision to replace my MacBook Air with a Windows laptop.

12/17/2017: Cord-cutting tips for setting up your new Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV, USA Today

The advice about using an Ethernet connection instead of WiFi should be obvious, but I’ll bet a lot of people don’t think about using Plex’s apps to play music and videos stored on their PCs or using a media player’s remote-control app to avoid having to type passwords by clicking at letters on the TV’s screen with the player’s regular remote.

 

 

Weekly output: switching from Mac to Windows, Comcast Roku app, malware study, Super Bowl vs. “Big Game,” Chromebook security

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So, got any favorite Super Bowl ads? I guess all of us, even crestfallen Atlanta fans whom nobody can rightfully expect to show up for work tomorrow, can take some comfort that no advertisers sank to a Nationwide-kid level of awfulness.

Screenshot of Consumer Reports story as seen on an iPad1/30/2017: 5 Things to Know About Switching From Mac to Windows, Consumer Reports

Interesting thing in the comments on this: Readers defended Apple’s software but didn’t mention its hardware, which is one of my primary gripes with the company these days. This explainer got republished on Yahoo later on Monday.

1/31/2017: Comcast now lets you watch cable on your Roku, Yahoo Finance

What I thought was going to be an overwhelmingly positive development turns out to be much less attractive, entirely thanks to Comcast’s Kafkaesque pricing. I didn’t even realize how bad it was until a last round of fact-checking e-mails–with the result being that we didn’t have this story up when Comcast’s 1 p.m. embargo expired, but we did have the numbers right in it.

1/31/2017: Malware study shows people still falling for old tricks, but there’s hope, Yahoo Finance

The most surprising and dismaying part of this Malwarebytes study: That Microsoft Office macro viruses have made a comeback.

2/3/2017: Why the NFL makes companies call the Super Bowl the ‘Big Game’, Yahoo Finance

The NFL’s control-freakery about not just the trademarked name “Super Bowl” but even variations of it is something I should have covered a long time ago.

2/5/2017: How safe are Chromebooks from malware?, USA Today

A reader asked about this on my Facebook page, and I thought it was a good question… especially after my editor passed on a couple of other column ideas.

 

Weekly output: streaming-media players

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For the first time since June, I only have one posted story to my name. I filed two others, but I also tried to set aside work from Wednesday afternoon through this evening. Aside from some e-mail that I had to attend to Friday afternoon, I mostly succeeded.

pegoraro-streaming-media-players-post11/23/2016: How to figure out which streaming media device to buy, Yahoo Finance

My original copy tried to explain Apple and Amazon’s conduct by throwing around some references to multilateral diplomacy and balance-of-power theory, but my editors may have thought that description was a little too much Georgetown School of Foreign Service for a guide to buying gadgets. If so, I can’t exactly blame them.

There’s something weird with how Google indexed this–searching for keywords or the exact phrase of its headline finds nothing at finance.yahoo.com, while Google has no trouble locating the copy posted to Yahoo Tech. At least the original got picked up on Reddit, I guess.

 

2008 called, and it wants its PR pitches back

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The other week, I engaged in a futile exercise to avoid having to pay for extra storage in my Google Apps account by getting a few years’ worth of old pitches out of my PR folder. It would have been a quick process if I’d just dragged those thousands of e-mails off the server and into a local folder, but I had to glance over them first to see if I’d filed any important interviews there by mistake… and so went many hours stumbling down memory lane.

2008 calendar closeupBeyond my surprise at how many PR pros can still stand to deal with me (thanks for the continued tolerance, Jesus, Brooke, and Steve), I was also amused to see the PR pitches I’d blown off or misunderstood in just one year, 2008.

For instance, what if I’d known then that I actually would make this app my external brain?

Writing with a company called Evernote— not sure if you are familiar with them, but they have a fascinating story around how consumers can capture their memories in a completely unique and innovative way. The company has already been seeing a lot of buzz around their Web beta and we’re excited to finally be opening the product to the general public. Evernote’s CEO, Phil Libin, will be in DC June 4-6 and I wanted to see if you’d be interested in taking a meeting with him to get an introduction to Evernote and how it can become a user’s external brain?

I ignored the following because, I sniffed at the time, I don’t cover accessories. Look, anybody can ignore a story that becomes a $3 billion acquisition!

Monster, the leader in audio/video accessories, along with legendary artist and producer Dr. Dre and Interscope Geffen A&M Chairman Jimmy Iovine have teamed up to develop a brand new level of headphones, Beats ™ by Dr. Dre ™. The headphones were created to reproduce the full spectrum of sound that musical artists and producers hear in professional recording studios.

I actually did review the gadget offered in the following pitch. But I passed on the CEO interview, and my writeup spent too much time whining about the slow speeds of broadband and the limited availability of streaming movies (even if that remains an annoyance).

Good Morning Rob:

We’re happy to introduce The Netflix Player By Roku.

Please let me know if you would like additional information, JPEGS of the product or would like to speak with Anthony Wood, founder and CEO.

And then there were all the pitches I got for Yahoo sites and services, even after setting aside all the announcements and commentary about Microsoft’s unsuccessful attempt to buy Yahoo. Maybe I should have paid more attention to them?