Top headlines and news across the digital video industry, curated each week by JW Player
Why Video Ads Still Load Slowly (eMarketer, 2/26) Brian Rifkin, co-founder of video software company JW Player, spoke with eMarketer’s Ross Benes about the technical details that create latency with video ads.
Live by the algorithm, die by the algorithm: How LittleThings went from social publishing darling to shutting down (Digiday, 3/1) The business model was intrinsically risky. LittleThings decided early on to ride a tiger, in its case Facebook, only to have the tiger turn around and eat it. LittleThings only grew as big as it did because of Facebook — but it couldn’t find that audience elsewhere when Facebook choked off its reach.
Goodbye from LittleThings (LittleThings, 2/28) When we officially spun off from PetFlow and into LittleThings, I remember talking to Alex about creating original video. Six months after we agreed that it would probably be too expensive to try, we had a tiny and functional studio producing hands-only food videos.
Facebook and Google’s “duopoly” status might not be so safe (DigiDay, 2/28) Facebook earned notoriety for enabling the spread of fake news and for becoming a favored tool of influence for Russian agents. Google has come under fire for monetizing violent and extreme content on YouTube — including videos in which children appear to be endangered. And these issues produced an uproar among Facebook and Google’s true customers: the brands whose ads are appearing next to objectionable content.
Twitter is finally rolling out a ‘save for later’ feature called Bookmarks (Recode, 2/28) Twitter is rolling out a new feature that lets users save tweets in a private section of the app so they’re easy to find later on. The new feature, called Bookmarks, should let users easily save articles they want to read or videos they want to watch but might not have time for in the moment.