Tag Archives: Xumo TV

Weekly output: online-video churn, Trump vs. social media, online-video UX, Tim Cook’s App Store history, Saudi Twitter spies, online-video ads, online-video lessons, Trump vs. TikTok

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My biggest regret about this busy news week: I didn’t get to follow Access Now’s RightsCon digital conference. Having spoken at its real-world predecessor in Toronto two years ago–and knowing that friends were on this year’s panel schedule–I can only hope that I can catch up in my non-existent spare time this week.

7/27/2020: Sling’s ex-chief Warren Schlichting is content with churn, FierceVideo

My occasional trade-publication client signed me up to cover their OTT Blitz Week virtual event. I started that by writing up former Sling TV head Warren Schlichting’s observations about running an over-the-top video service.

7/28/2020: Here’s Trump’s Plan To Regulate Social Media, Forbes

Writing about the Trump administration’s proposal to have the Federal Communications Commission rewrite a law allowed me the unexpected pleasure of approvingly quoting experts at the left-leaning think tank Public Knowledge and the right-leading Charles Koch Institute, both of which said this plan seems nuts.

7/28/2020: There’s no UX without ‘you’, FierceVideo

My second post about OTT Blitz Week covered a panel that saw executives from Discovery, Sling, Pluto TV, Xumo and other online-video firms offering their insights on making their user experience feel comfortable for viewers.

7/29/2020: What Tim Cook Left Out Of His Version Of App Store History, Forbes

Apple’s CEO’s prepared statement for Wednesday’s tech-CEO hearings came close to erasing the history of online software distribution before the 2008 debut of Apple’s iOS App Store, and that bugged me. I wrote a correction of Tim Cook’s testimony, and I was flattered to see this post get a “Highly recommended” shout-out on Apple raconteur John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog.

7/29/2020: New charges for Saudi moles at Twitter, Al Jazeera

Stories involving Saudi Arabia behaving badly online often result in appearances for me on this Qatar-based news network. In this case, the news peg was a set of new charges against Saudi spies allegedly burrowing into Twitter.

7/29/2020: We’re not Facebook, OTT ad execs emphasize, FierceVideo

The executives on this OTT Blitz Week panel on addressable (read: targeted) advertising on streaming TV emphasized how they don’t want or need behavioral data that gets too close to individual viewers’ tastes.

7/31/2020: There’s no one template for over-the-top video success, FierceVideo

I wrapped up my coverage of Fierce’s virtual event with a recap of this lessons-learned panel, featuring CEOs from the rhymable firms Fubo, Xumo and Philo.

8/1/2020: Trump’s threat to ban TikTok, Al Jazeera

I made a second appearance this week on the Arabic-language news network to discuss President Trump’s possibly-idle threat to ban TikTok. As I wrote last week at Forbes, the fact that the U.S. isn’t China leaves Trump out of options to banish that social app from American screens.

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Weekly output: Xumo, AT&T TV, Roku Kids & Family, Disney+, Apple TV+, wireless video throttling

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I spent the first two mornings of this week wearing a single client’s hat, thanks to my trade-pub outlet FierceVideo asking if I could cover breaking news for them Monday and Tuesday of this week. I was a little worried that I might get swamped, but I soon realized that I still enjoy the uncomplicated craft of quickly writing 400-word pieces in inverted-pyramid structure.

But this exercise also exposed the shallowness of my “analysts who can deliver value judgments quickly” list–as in, all the people quoted in these pieces are men.

If you signed up for my Patreon page, you would have seen one other item from me this week: a post I wrote Saturday about the kind of freelance rates I make and the kind I’d like to make.

8/19/2019: Xumo comes to Comcast’s X1 as well as Android TV, FierceVideo

Xumo, if you weren’t familiar with the name, is a free-with-ads streaming-video service with a channel lineup that features a striking number of established media brands.

8/19/2019: AT&T launches AT&T TV streaming service in 10 markets, FierceVideo

AT&T’s latest streaming-video service–there have been quite a few in the last few years–does not look likely to stop that telecom giant from bleeding TV subscribers.

8/19/2019: Roku launches ‘Kids & Family’ section on Roku Channel, FierceVideo

Roku announcing a human-curated video-for-kids section sure looked like an answer of sorts to YouTube’s unreliable algorithms, but after publication their publicist asked that we clarify the story to indicate that they did not mean to diss Google’s video service in particular.

8/20/2019: Disney+ poised to launch absent Amazon Fire support, FierceVideo

The absence of an announced Disney+ app for Amazon’s Fire TV platform seems odd, but history suggests both Disney and Amazon will find some compromise that lets each company make a little more money.

8/20/2019: Apple TV likely to debut at $9.99 a month in November, FierceVideo

TV-industry analyst Alan Wolk made an excellent point to me in this piece: The Apple that knew it had to ship the iPad nano would have figured out that it needs a cheap streaming-media stick to compete in the online-TV business.

8/20/2019: Wireless video throttling pervasive but pointless, FierceVideo

I wrote up a new study that found that the big four U.S. wireless carriers all curtail the resolution of streaming video–but they don’t throttle all such sites equally, nor do they necessarily need to do that to ensure a quality connection.