Xander Bogaerts #2 and Eduardo Rodriguez #57 of the Boston Red Sox join NESN anchor Tom Caron on set during a team workout on February 15, 2020 at jetBlue Park at Fenway South in Fort Myers, Florida. Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox via Getty Images
An first reported by The Streamable, an email just went out to subscribers notifying them of the change, saying “Unfortunately, we were unable to reach a new agreement to continue offering you this network. Starting Saturday, October 31st, 2020, NESN will no longer be available on YouTube TV, and you will no longer have access to any previous recordings from NESN.”
In a statement posted to Twitter, NESN described its side claiming that “Despite offering our most favorable rates and terms for carriage, YouTube TV chose to deny fans our top-rated programming on October 30th.” NESN notes that the options for internet TV access to the network are now limited to AT&T TV Now or Fubo TV, as it also doesn’t have a deal with Sling TV or Hulu.
It’s the latest tough break for subscribers who want those channels, particularly after YouTube TV raised its prices this summer. However, with most of the sports in between their seasons, there’s time for a new agreement to be reached before the leagues figure out when and where they’ll play next.
Spotify might be adding real-time lyrics to its app, again. Dozens of Twitter users around the world have reported that lyrics are now popping up as they listen to Spotify. A user with beta 8.5.46.848 confirmed the feature to Android Police. But, this seems to be server-side enabled, as not all users with that beta can see the lyrics.
But this isn't Spotify's first karaoke. The lyrics showing up today are provided through Musixmatch, the same company Spotify partnered with to deliver lyrics in the past. In 2016, the companies ended their partnership.
"It was a great partnership and there is mutual respect between both companies as our business strategies move us each in different directions," a Spotify spokesperson told Engadget at the time. It's unclear what changed, but hopefully this time around the partnership will last.
Today, a Spotify spokesperson offered the company's standard canned response:
"At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve our user experience. Some of those tests end up paving the way for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning. We don't have any further news to share at this time."
You can now search for videos with your voice on YouTube mobile even while you're casting to a bigger screen. The Google-owned platform has announced the feature, which works on both iOS and Android devices, along with the revelation that it's now possible to watch YouTube in HDR on the PS4 and the PS4 Pro. YouTube's post also talked about the other capabilities it rolled out over the past year. Those include "Who's Watching," a feature that lets you switch between the profiles linked to the device you're watching on, as well as YouTube's debut on Amazon Fire TV devices.
The platform has more cast-related features in the works, as well. German site SmartDroid (via Android Community) has spotted what seems to an experimental feature rolling out to select Android users, which turns the mobile YouTube app into more of a bona fide remote control while you're casting.
At the moment, you can only pretty much use the app to pause, play and adjust the volume while you're casting to a TV. The updated controls, however, show a directional pad that makes it easier to browse videos, and include quicker access to captions and playback quality settings. You'll be able to access those new elements through the volume panel that pops up when you tap on the cast button -- that is, so long as you're one of the users lucky enough to get the feature.
The Verge offers some first impressions of the first EV that runs Android Automotive: Google’s tech that controls things like air conditioning, navigation, the radio and more. Fancy smarts aside, it turns out the Polestar 2 offers a great driving experience as well.
This is the incredible story of a game from THQ Studio Australia that was set to release around the time of the first Avengers film from Marvel and Disney. A multitude of factors colliding at the same time would ultimately lead to the project being permanently shelved and the studio being shut down. CNET’s reporting includes previously unseen game footage as well, so this one is certainly worth your time.
Christopher Nolan may believe that nearly inaudible dialogue makes his films more immersive, but it can be frustrating for viewers. The Guardian discusses how this isn’t just a problem with one director, it’s an issue with a lot of modern films.
Streaming services are keen to prevent regulators from censoring their content, and they’re willing to police themselves to ensure that artistic freedom. Variety reports that Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar and 12 other companies have signed a self-regulatory code to stay on the good side of India’s regulators. This includes common approaches to age labels and content descriptions as well as a way to report any violations of the system. Streaming services have to set up complaint departments, internal committees or both to deal with any issues.
The code was created by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (disclaimer: Engadget’s parent brand Verizon Media is a member) and is already in effect.
The Indian government has been hesitant to censor streaming services and would rather they keep themselves in check. This theoretically keeps officials happy — they don’t have to worry as much that parents will inadvertently play inappropriate movies for their kids, or that there will be no way to report a TV show.
Services like Netflix already honor age ratings in other countries. However, it’s rare for these internet-focused outlets to unite on a rating system — they’ve clearly determined that it’s easier to work with each other than to have the government step in.
Streaming has completely reshaped the face of the music industry over the last decade, with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music proving to be overwhelmingly popular with music fans. The Recording Industry Association of America has revealed some stats that underline the mammoth sea change. The organization says streaming accounts for 80 percent of the US music market, compared with seven percent in 2010. Streaming subscriptions rose from about 1.5 million to around 61 million between 2010 and the first half of 2019, according to the RIAA.
Spotify landed in the US in 2011 and Apple Music debuted in 2014. There are many other streaming options around, including Tidal, Pandora, YouTube Music and Amazon Prime Music to name a few. Around 81 percent of Americans now have a smartphone, compared with about 35 percent in 2010. Since it's much easier to use a streaming service than buy digital albums or load MP3s onto a phone (or carry around a separate music player), smartphone adoption has played a key role in the streaming shift.
In 2010, physical sales accounted for 52 percent of the US music market and digital sales 38 percent. Both are now down to a nine percent share. The market share of synch (i.e. licensing music for use in other media) hasn't changed over the last nine years at three percent. But while people aren't buying CDs so much anymore, vinyl's back on the up. Sales rose from a little over $50 million in 2009 to almost $450 million in 2018.
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift (who famously pulled her music from Spotify for a while), Adele and Drake claimed eight of the top ten selling albums of the decade between them. It's not quite clear how their sales figures break down between streams and digital/physical album sales. However, given some of their songs have hundreds of millions of plays on various services, streaming certainly played an important factor.
Streaming musicstill has a lot of room to grow, it appears. Counterpoint Research hasdeterminedthat paid music subscriptions jumped 32 percent in 2019 to reach 358 million thanks to a mix of exclusives,phone service bundles, regional price cuts and extended trial periods. Not that the services will want to get complacent -- competition is heating up, according to analysts.
Spotify still had a solid lead at the end of 2019 with 35 percent of subscriptions. However, its rivals are growing fast. Apple Music's listener base grew 36 percent to give it 19 percent of streaming, while Amazon's share grew by half to hit 15 percent. This put them comfortably ahead of rivals like Tencent (11 percent) and YouTube Music (6 percent). The remaining 14 percent of tended to be split between regional giants like India's Gaana and Russia's Yandex Music.
It's not certain how much more headroom there might be. Counterpoint predicted that streaming music would grow another 25 percent in 2020, but it also warned that the COVID-19 pandemic might hurt. Habits are unsurprisingly skewing more toward radio and TV news, and that leaves fewer people willing to subscribe to services meant chiefly for entertainment.
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Fortnite won its chicken dinner in 2019 by grossing $1.8 billion in sales, more than any single-year sales total in videogame history. While the game itself is technically free-to-play, Epic Games offers a $10 per month Battle Pass as well as myriad in-game item purchases -- from clothing and weapons to dance moves and player reactions -- to keep the game's 125 million active players coming back for more. Combined with heavy marketing tie-ins to the year's biggest blockbusters, including both Avengers and Star Wars, as well as the debut of Chapter 2 in October and a marquee eSports circuit in August, it's little surprise that the game remains a cultural touchstone.
Overall the gaming industry did well for itself in 2019. Nielsen notes that the industry as a whole grossed $120 billion in sales, a four percent increase over its 2018 totals. A lion's share of that total can be credited to mobile gaming with $64.4 billion in sales, followed by PC gaming with $29.4 billion, and consoles bringing in $15.4. VR/AR games and game-related videos constituted the remainder of the industry total for 2019.
Earlier this week, Facebook finally released its latest attempt at a TikTok rival. It’s calledInstagram Reels, and as its name suggests, it’s actually a feature that lives inside Instagram, without an app of its own. While incorporating Reels directly inside an already popular app gives it a good chance at succeeding, it also adds clutter and bloat to the Instagram experience, and after trying it out, risks confusing users.
At first glance, Reels looks and feels extremely similar to TikTok. The username, caption and audio track are displayed on the lower left, and the way you flip through videos feels identical as well (you swipe up to scroll to the next video). It doesn’t hurt that Instagram has done a good job in seeding early access to influencers who are also big on TikTok; most of the early Reels’ content has the same kind of dances and amusing lip sync memes, if not direct copies of the videos that were already previously posted on the rival video app.
Creating Reels will instantly be familiar to anyone who has used TikTok. You can speed up or slow down your videos, add AR effects and, of course, add audio tracks. If you want, you can also use the audio of someone else’s Reel to create your own video, which is an important element on TikTok that has helped make songs like Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ go viral. Reels also has an align or “ghost” tool that is useful for making video jump cuts, a popular TikTok technique.
But there are a few important differences between the two. For one thing, Reels are limited to 15 seconds, while TikTok videos can be as long as 60 seconds when you string four 15-second videos together. Additionally, you can’t post “Duets” -- which are side-by-side video responses -- on Reels like you can on TikTok. TikTok also has a few features that are designed for newbies, like templates that let you create photo slideshows and prompts to add text to your video. TikTok can even sense what it is that you’re taking a video of and offer an audio track suggestion to match. Another neat feature is that you don’t actually need to be a TikTok user to watch TikTok videos; you can just launch the app and view them without signing up. You can’t do that with Reels; you need to have an Instagram account to view the videos.
Perhaps the most standout difference, however, is that Reels doesn’t really, well, stand out. The feature is not at all apparent when you launch Instagram. Instead, you have to head on over to the Explore tab, where Reels is given its own dedicated section at the top. From there you have to then tap it again to watch the videos. That’s at least two more taps needed to get to your video feed, compared to TikTok where the main feed is there the second you launch it.
In a way, it makes sense that Reels is tucked away in Explore; after all, you don’t want it to mess up the main feed of photos. But this also makes it a little harder to access. It’s this kind of strange juxtaposition that highlights one of the biggest problems with Reels: it feels like an interloper in the already-cluttered Instagram experience.
The way that Reels implements its feed is an example of how it doesn’t really quite fit inside Instagram. With Reels, there is only one main Explore feed, which is generated via a combination of curated videos, popular reels across a variety of topics, plus ones that are based on your interests and the content you’ve liked and commented on. On TikTok, however, there are two feeds; one is the “For You” page, which is algorithmically-generated and personalized, and the other is for the people you’re Following. With Reels, there is no “Following” tab. Following a user on Reels just makes their photos show up on your main feed, the same as it would be if you followed anyone on Instagram.
That means that if you “followed” somebody on Reels because of their cool dance moves, you would then see the rest of their photo/video content on your main feed. But just because you want to see somebody’s cool dance moves doesn't mean you want to see their vacation photos. Sure, you can mute their posts, but that’s yet another step you need to take to customize your feed. You can also just tap on an individual user account to see their collection of Reels in a separate tab, but again, that’s yet another action you have to take.
One of the reasons for this awkwardness is that, fundamentally, TikTok and Instagram have slightly different purposes. TikTok is mostly known for sharing funny and fashionable memes with a strong entertainment element. Instagram, on the other hand, is largely known as a photo-sharing platform, which tends to have a more personal feel. For a regular user, the marriage of these two concepts doesn’t quite work.
Of course, there are outliers such as brands and wannabe influencers, and for them, Reels could be their ticket to Instagram stardom. As Engadget Senior Editor Karissa Bell said on TikTok, its aforementioned “For You” feed is one of the reasons that unknown personalities can gain a huge following just from a single video going viral. If Instagram were to implement a similar algorithm for its own Reels feed -- therefore surfacing lesser-known users with potentially viral content -- then this could result in the same thing. In fact, Instagram’s VP of Product Vishal Shah has said that the recommendations in Reels will be “separate” from the rest of Explore, with the idea that “Reels is a way for [new creators] to get discovered.”
Instagram has tried something like this before with IGTV, to mixed results. It was supposed to take on YouTube, with longer original content mixed in with your usual Instagram photos and videos. Unlike Reels, Instagram gave IGTV its own app, and is experimenting with commercials to bring ad revenue to influencers. But it doesn’t seem to have taken off the way that Instagram wanted, seeing as the company removed the IGTV button from its main interface this year because “very few” people used it. It’s safe to say that IGTV hasn’t exactly become a huge YouTube rival.
Perhaps the biggest reason Facebook is incorporating Reels into Instagram is that it worked so well with Stories. After all, Stories is a copy of Snapchat in the same way that Reels is a copy of TikTok, and Stories turned out to be a huge success for Instagram. Plus, Facebook did try to do a standalone TikTok clone called Lasso, but it just didn’t get enough users. Why not just tack on these extra features to an app that already has over a billion users instead of trying to get people to use a standalone one?
But Snapchat and TikTok are very different apps. The reason Stories worked so well is that Snapchat back then was a little obtuse and difficult to understand, while Stories was easier to grasp. Plus, Stories have that aforementioned intimate feel that tends to be familiar to a lot of Instagram users who are already used to sharing personal photos and videos.
Reels, on the other hand, feels very different; almost as if it were a clone of an entirely different app shoehorned into an existing one (which obviously it kinda is). Together with other elements like Stories, IGTV and a dedicated shopping hub, Reels is making Instagram feel as confusing and bloated as the Facebook app.
Also, while Stories is located front and center in Instagram, Reels is tucked away in a separate tab and is harder to find. It also lacks key features like Duets and is not all that friendly to newbies. Already, there is some confusion among Instagram users as to where the feature is and how to use it. While that’s not uncommon with new features, this is a sign that Reels might not be at all intuitive and therefore not all that welcoming to TikTok users.
If TikTok does end up being banned from the US, it’s entirely possible that users in the US will end up switching to Reels as a reasonable alternative. But social media is a fickle world, so nothing’s a sure bet. And if TikTok sticks around (in whatever form), then Reels risks being seen as a poor imitation, plus a confusing add-on to Instagram, thus alienating users of both platforms.
