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YouTube redesign gives long-form videos, Shorts and Live videos their own tabs on channel pages

YouTube is rolling out a change impacting how videos appear on its platform. The company today announced a redesign that now splits video content into three different tabs on all channel pages — one for YouTube’s traditional long-form content, another for YouTube Shorts only and a third for Live videos, including past, current and upcoming livestreams.
The changes will allow users to more easily access the types of YouTube videos they want to watch — a move YouTube says it made based on user feedback. In an announcement, the company said it heard from viewers they wanted to be able to navigate to the kinds of content they were most interested in when exploring a creator’s channel page, leading to this makeover.

you heard correctly we’re beginning to roll out Videos, Shorts, and Live tabs so you can easily explore these different kinds of content on YouTube
more info here: https://t.co/BaXQnQVUcR https://t.co/8XCdpr7HAH
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) October 27, 2022

The update also means that Shorts content and Live streams will no longer be found in the main Videos tab on the channel page — something that could appeal to longtime YouTube viewers who haven’t appreciated the infiltration of YouTube’s short-form content into their favorite channel’s video feed in recent months.
However, for those who do like watching Shorts, the redesign gives YouTube a way to direct them to more short-form videos. Now, when users are watching Shorts videos in the Shorts feed in the main YouTube app, then navigate to the creator’s channel, they’ll be sent directly into this new Shorts tab to watch even more Shorts content. This could help YouTube boost its views for Shorts as those users will no longer be immediately lost to the creator’s long-form content, as before.
Initial feedback from users on Twitter responding to YouTube’s post about the changes has been positive, as users are expressing their appreciation for giving each type of content its own separate category.
Image Credits: YouTube
The redesign follows another major update to YouTube this month which introduced, at long last, YouTube handles in the @username format. These usernames will now allow creators to identify their channel and interact with their viewers across YouTube Shorts, channel pages, in video descriptions, in comments and more.
YouTube says the tabbed redesign is rolling out starting today and will be available to all users across all devices in the weeks ahead.
 
YouTube redesign gives long-form videos, Shorts and Live videos their own tabs on channel pages by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
YouTube redesign gives long-form videos, Shorts and Live videos their own tabs on channel pages

Is MrBeast actually worth $1.5 billion?

Whenever YouTube superstar MrBeast crops up in business or tech headlines, you’re guaranteed to find a slew of bewildered comments: Who is this guy, and why is a YouTuber such a big deal? Am I old if I don’t know who this is? Why is he younger than me, yet makes so much more money? Is this dude actually giving people free islands, or is he full of it?
If you don’t know who MrBeast is, that’s fine. That just means you probably aren’t on YouTube that often, or that you’ve never wondered what happens if you put 100 million Orbeez in your friend’s backyard. But let me ask you this: Have you heard of Cribl, Snapdocs, Sayo Bank or fabric? I haven’t either, those are just some names of companies worth more than $1 billion that I pulled off Crunchbase.
According to Axios‘ sources, MrBeast — the 24-year-old whose name is Jimmy Donaldson — is trying to raise $150 million for his business, valuing it at $1.5 billion. It might seem hard to imagine how a content creator’s business can be worth that much, but the North Carolina resident has built an impressive empire. With 109 million YouTube subscribers, MrBeast runs the fifth most subscribed channel on the platform, and he’s the top earner among U.S. YouTubers. Across his five other channels, he’s amassed another 82 million subscribers — and that’s not even counting his three Spanish language channels, which have about 33 million subscribers combined.
YouTube is one of the most profitable platforms for creators, because you can earn 55% of ad revenue as a member of YouTube’s partner program. But MrBeast has expanded his business beyond the realm of social media — he has leveraged his brand to open up MrBeast Burger, a ghost kitchen food chain, and a snack company called Feastables, which raised $5 million this year at a $50 million valuation from 776, Shrug Capital and Sugar Capital.
But MrBeast’s business model isn’t as straightforward as making videos and raking in ad revenue. His uploads, which center on extreme stunts and competitions for cash prizes, cost an obscene amount of money to make. Last year, his 25-minute “Real Life Squid Game” video required a whopping $3.5 million to produce, including more than $456,000 in prize money. For comparison, the nine-episode “Squid Game” series cost Netflix a total of $21.4 million, averaging out to about $2.4 million per hour-long installment.
A few weeks ago, MrBeast said that he spends $8 million per month on his businesses. Just last September, MrBeast told the creator-focused YouTube channel Colin and Samir that he spent $4 million every month. That’s a big jump.
Some companies reach unicorn status (a valuation above $1 billion) before even turning a profit. Yet Forbes estimates that MrBeast made $54 million in 2021, so he’s already proven to VCs that they can bet on him to return their investment.
“The videos get views even if I don’t upload, so if I really wanted to, I could just live off of the money that the views made,” MrBeast told Insider. But if the 24-year-old wants to grow even more quickly and turn a larger profit, then venture capital funding might actually make sense.
MrBeast has already taken funding on a smaller scale from companies like Jellysmack and Spotter. Jellysmack uses AI to maximize top creators’ cross-platform growth in exchange for a revenue cut; Spotter gives YouTubers large sums of upfront capital in exchange for revenue from their back catalog. But as one of the most successful content creators in the world, MrBeast can go even bigger with venture capital.
But is going bigger always better? MrBeast’s business model is like a snake eating its own tail — no one is making money like he is, but no one is spending it like him either. He described his margins as “razor-thin” in a conversation with Logan Paul, since he reinvests most of his profits back into his content. His viewers expect that each video will be more impressive than the last, and from the outside looking in, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before MrBeast can no longer up the ante (and for other creators, this has led to disaster). So, if MrBeast’s business really is a unicorn — I’d wager it is — then he has two choices. Will he use the cushion of $150 million to make his business more sustainable, so he doesn’t have to keep burying himself alive? Or will he keep pushing for more until nothing is left?

MrBeast explains YouTube’s algorithm

MrBeast’s ‘Real Life Squid Game’ and the price of viral stunts

Is MrBeast actually worth $1.5 billion? by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
Is MrBeast actually worth $1.5 billion?

Watch Draymond Green discuss investing, media and mental health

The final day of Disrupt kicked off in style with a conversation featuring four-time NBA All Star Draymond Green. It was a spirited chat, covering the power forward’s push into media, including his podcast “The Draymond Green Show” and deals with channels like TNT. Green also spoke at length about investing, managing mental health as a professional athlete and discussed how he and the team are working through the recent highly publicized altercation with fellow Golden State Warrior Jordan Poole.
Watch Draymond Green discuss investing, media and mental health by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
Watch Draymond Green discuss investing, media and mental health

OnlyFans CEO says adult content will still have a home on the site in 5 years

OnlyFans has been putting a lot of effort into upcycling its image from an adult content subscription platform to a Patreon-like home for all kinds of creators, but it’s far from moving away from them as users. Today CEO Ami Gan of the platform confirmed that adult content will still have a home on the site in five years, and those creators can continue to make a living on it.
The confirmation, made today on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, is notable because of the rocky relationship OnlyFans has had with adult creators. Last year, the company announced it would ban adult content on the site after pressure from card payment companies and efforts it reportedly was making to raise outside funding. Then it abruptly suspended the decision less than a week later after an outcry from users.
Now it’s also starting to see some new fronts of potentially formidable competition: TikTok earlier this week announced that it would be introducing adult-only livestreams as it raised the age requirement for TikTok Live.
OnlyFans has at the same time been making an effort to position itself as more than just a platform for NSFW content and that NSFW is being ring-fenced in a more responsible way. Its top execs like to use the more general euphemism of “spicy” these days to refer to the work you find on there, and they like to talk about emerging categories on the platform like cooking and fitness. Gan also noted that it’s working with the wider community of lawmakers and others to ensure that adult content is only being viewed by those who are legally allowed to do so.
Yet it hasn’t made a firm assurance in how it plans to serve the adult market longer term. Today’s comments quietly confirm that it will.
The area remains a sensitive subject though. Execs at the company remain guarded on any specifics that speak to how lucrative that business is. On stage today, Gan and strategy head Keily Blair skirted questions on just how much the company makes from adult content creators.
“We’d have to look at every single transaction on the platform and assign it,” explained Gan, “and we’re not collecting [that] data.” Gan was previously the company’s CMO.
“Like, the better question is, why is that important to people?” snapped Blair, who joined the company in January 2022 and comes from working in “contentious data privacy law” and related legal areas.
The company operates on an 80/20 revenue share model, where creators get 80% and OnlyFans takes a 20% cut. In any case, it’s not clear it needs to worry about outside funding.
OnlyFans is based out of the U.K., and earlier this year, it reported that usage of the platform exploded in 2021. Creators on its platform now number 2.1 billion while “fans” number 188 million. The audience of fans is growing at a faster rate, 128% versus 34% for creators. Those creators earned $4 billion in that year, and OnlyFans’ profit was $433 million, up from just $61 million the year before. Revenues were $932 million, up 160%, over the year.
Figures (via PitchBook) estimate that the company is on track to make $2.5 billion in revenues this year.
Update, 10/19/22, 6:20 pm et. There are 2.1 million creators, not billion. 
OnlyFans CEO says adult content will still have a home on the site in 5 years by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
OnlyFans CEO says adult content will still have a home on the site in 5 years

Deep Render believes AI holds the key to more efficient video compression

Chri Besenbruch, CEO of Deep Render, sees many problems with the way video compression standards are developed today. He thinks they aren’t advancing quickly enough, bemoans the fact that they’re plagued with legal uncertainty and decries their reliance on specialized hardware for acceleration.
“The codec development process is broken,” Besenbruch said in an interview with TechCrunch ahead of Disrupt, where Deep Render is participating in the Disrupt Battlefield 200. “In the compression industry, there is a significant challenge of finding a new way forward and searching for new innovations.”
Seeking a better way, Besenbruch co-founded Deep Render with Arsalan Zafar, whom he met at Imperial College London. At the time, Besenbruch was studying computer science and machine learning. He and Zafar collaborated on a research project involving distributing terabytes of video across a network, during which they say they experienced the shortcomings of compression technology firsthand.
The last time TechCrunch covered Deep Render, the startup had just closed a £1.6 million seed round ($1.81 million) led by Pentech Ventures with participation from Speedinvest. In the roughly two years since then, Deep Render has raised an additional several million dollars from existing investors, bringing its total raised to $5.7 million.
“We thought to ourselves, if the internet pipes are difficult to extend, the only thing we can do is make the data that flows through the pipes smaller,” Besenbruch said. “Hence, we decided to fuse machine learning and AI and compression technology to develop a fundamentally new way of compression data getting significantly better image and video compression ratios.”
Deep Render isn’t the first to apply AI to video compression. Alphabet’s DeepMind adapted a machine learning algorithm originally developed to play board games to the problem of compressing YouTube videos, leading to a 4% reduction in the amount of data the video-sharing service needs to stream to users. Elsewhere, there’s startup WaveOne, which claims its machine learning-based video codec outperforms all existing standards across popular quality metrics.
But Deep Render’s solution is platform-agnostic. To create it, Besenbruch says that the company compiled a dataset of over 10 million video sequences on which they trained algorithms to learn to compress video data efficiently. Deep Render used a combination of on-premise and cloud hardware for the training, with the former comprising over a hundred GPUs.
Deep Render claims the resulting compression standard is 5x better than HEVC, a widely used codec and can run in real time on mobile devices with a dedicated AI accelerator chip (e.g., the Apple Neural Engine in modern iPhones). Besenbruch says the company is in talks with three large tech firms — all with market caps over $300 billion — about paid pilots, though he declined to share names.
Eddie Anderson, a founding partner at Pentech and board member at Deep Render, shared via email: “Deep Render’s machine learning approach to codecs completely disrupts an established market. Not only is it a software route to market, but their [compression] performance is significantly better than the current state of the art. As bandwidth demands continue to increase, their solution has the potential to drive vastly improved commercial performance for current media owners and distributors.”
Deep Render currently employs 20 people. By the end of 2023, Besenbruch expects that number will more than triple to 62.
Deep Render believes AI holds the key to more efficient video compression by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Deep Render believes AI holds the key to more efficient video compression