Vevo To Bring Virtual Reality Music Videos To Your Living Room

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By Jessica Klein

Vevo is going 3D. Thanks to the upcoming worldwide launch of Vevo on Samsung Gear VR, all 100,000 plus HD music videos and original shows on the platform will be viewable in a virtual reality experience.

Vevo will play on Gear VR through its app. In a blog post, the company’s product leader John Li describes the experience as akin to “finding yourself transported to the Apollo Theater in New York City, where Pharrell is performing live in front of you.”

US and Canadian viewers will also be able to experience Vevo TV in 3D, which entails constant music video content on the platform. In other countries, Vevo watchers can see customized local programming of their own.

As of now, there’s no exact release date for Vevo on Gear VR and in the Oculus Store, where it will also become available upon launch. However, we should expect it before the end of 2014.

This article was originally posted on VideoInk and is reposted on [a]listdaily via a partnership with the news publication, which is the online video industry’s go-to source for breaking news, features, and industry analysis. Follow VideoInk on Twitter @VideoInkNews, or subscribe via thevideoink.com for the latest news and stories, delivered right to your inbox.

Magnum’s Virtual Social Ice Cream Experiences

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I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream. And now, Magnum wants to make the experience of an ice cream social virtual. Sure, it won’t be the same as actually eating ice cream, but it could be the next best thing.

A new app called the M-Pulse allows the use of beacon technology to pinpoint where friends and family members are when it comes to finding the nearest shop that carries Magnum ice cream products. Though the app does require permission in terms of using location services, it’s a snap when it comes to finding where you are, and then tracking down one of the delicious chocolate bars in the vicinity.

With the help of U.S. proximity platform NewAer and Unilever’s agency Karmarama, development on “the ultimate app for connecting and reimagining the ice cream social” was made. The project involved the use of StickNFind beacons, which were placed on a number of fridges in WH Smith stores throughout the London area. From there, the app interacts to provide an “enhanced ice cream experience” to consumers, even if they aren’t physically holding it.

The app is a tie-in with Magnum’s 25th anniversary, and is meant to provide social interaction by sending a message to meet a friend or family member where, obviously, there’s ice cream to be eaten, via the NewAer engine.

The campaign is an innovative way to take on marketing without hammering the message home via advertisements and unneeded messages…plus it totally makes people hungry for ice cream. “We’re thrilled to pioneer an innovative technology such as beacons to deliver a mobile experience which can really strengthen Magnum’s promise of delivering pleasure and connect thousands of pleasure seekers in the city. The app is a pilot initiative and is the first set of projects supported by The Unilever Foundry, an initiative to bring tech orientated startups and brands together,” said Neil Gledhill, Magnum’s global brand director.

So, go eat ice cream!

Source: PSFK

Yo Has Harnessed The Power Of Push Notifications

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Anyone with a smartphone can tell you that push notifications– even the informative kind– can be kind of annoying. It’s little wonder then why an app that poked fun of them rose so quickly to prominence.

As a joke app, Yo gained 1.7 million users and got those users to send about 50 million Yo’s. The concept was simple: you send your friend a Yo, they get a push notification. It removed the hassle of the labor-intensive process it takes to construct a text. It toyed with the concept of push notifications as they were probably never meant to be toyed with.

It was so simple, it was easy to dismiss. Marketers everywhere went from “What is this thing called Yo “ to “OK. That’s simple.” to “What in the world could this possibly be used for “

It seems that the people behind the Yo app went through much the same process and in doing so, made Yo secretly more awesome. Yo is a sleeper.

A new update to Yo has added IFTTT integration, now allowing anyone to use Yo to trigger actions made with IFTTT “recipes.” You can essentially set up a social campaign to automatically trigger Yo’s to followers. There are also link attachments. There are also hashtags.

“This version shows the real power of the Yo platform which is, at its most basic, a 2-way communication platform between people, websites, brands, businesses and virtually anything that can connect to the internet,” said Yo in a blog post on Medium.

Yo has accomplished these changes without throwing a wrench into the core functionality and simplicity of the platform. At the same time, Yo is becoming more helpful to users. With new developer access, marketers can create their own Yo service and be added to the index. RSS feeds can also send automatic Yo’s.

Looking for metrics Yo counts how many Yo’ers have used your hashtag and you know exactly how many Yo’s you receive back.

The stupidly simple platform has finally shown it is really a veritable iceberg of complexities. Yo’s time has come.

Top 100 YouTube Channels Show Growth

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We’ve touched on the subject of popular YouTube channels before, talking about how users like PewDiePie and others have managed to make a tremendous living setting up videos for the channel and interacting with their fans. However, it appears that their popularity is growing higher than anyone could’ve anticipated.

A new report from online video industry site Tubefilter and analytics firm OpenSlate indicates that the video channel still attracts more than one billion viewers a month, watching six billion hours of video. 40 percent of that traffic comes from mobile devices as well.

Out of those, the top 100 YouTube channels have managed to grow over 80 percent in viewership over the last year. A chart for July 2014 shows that the videos have collectively gathered 9.46 billion views for that month alone, up over 5 billion from July 2013.

Leading the pack is PewDiePie, also known as Swedish game personality Felix Kjellberg. For the year spanning from July 2013 to 2014, he’s managed to increase from 221.6 million views to 438.9 million views, and has nearly tripled his subscriber base from 11.75 million to 29.47 million.

Closely behind are DisneyCollector with 268 million views for the month, Stampy with nearly 200 million views, and The Diamond Minecart with 186.1 million views.

Out of all the videos features, it seems that music, games and comedy continue to be tremendous draws. TubeFilter’s report shows that the top 100 gaming channels by themselves managed to generate 4.34 billion views for July 2014 alone.

With the competitive video market set to grow from new offerings by Amazon (with its recently acquired Twitch services) and Yahoo!, it’ll be interesting to see where YouTube goes from here. One thing’s for sure – no matter what the competition may throw its way, it’s bound to keep a very large audience.

Source: The Guardian

Twitter Exec Speaks On Twitter’s Latest Revamp

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Twitter wants to revamp its platform and is aiming to give users a more rewarding experience, starting with its homepage.

After tweaking the way its timeline works and opening up integrated analytics tools to all users, execs at the social network have decided to change the welcome process that greets new users, saying it’s the company’s “first major update in 3 years,” according to Re/code.

The front page at Twitter.com features a continuous rotation of images tweeted by users, while the process of finding people to follow from scratch has been improved, with the emphasis being split between people you might actually know and wellknown celebrities.

“People are consuming tweets as media a lot more now that we have photos that are pre-expanded in the platform,” said Twitter’s director of brand strategy Ross Hoffman regarding Twitter’s recent design changes and how they have affected user behavior. “On the trends side, we’ve seen interesting things. We’ve been seeing for some time certain memes that are now mainstream and baking them into campaigns.”

Hoffman’s job is to assure brands that Twitter remains valuable, even as recent questions involving slowing user growth are starting to be raised, according to Digital Trends.

“[It’s] that open, public exchange of information where you can see amazing things that are happening all over the world, whether it’s the world that you curated or the creative world,” said Hoffman explaining Twitter’s distinction from other platforms. “We’re real-time, we’re conversational, we’re distributed and we’re public.”

Additionally, in response to claims that the platform is difficult for first-timers to grasp, Twitter now begins its signup process by asking users about their interests, rather than trying to explain how the timeline works.

 

Source: Digital Trends

Brands Get Excited About Facebook’s New Ad Rollout

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Facebook has a new ad format for Pages looking to promote their Events on the platform. The social network will now allow brands to create ads for the desktop and mobile News Feed, as opposed to the traditional right-hand column format on desktop.

The new installment is called Event response ads and is accessible in both the Ad Create tool and Power Editor. It’s also already available to all Page owners around the world, unlike most of Facebook’s advertising efforts.

Event hosts can now view analytics directly in the right-hand column of an event page, including data on the number of people who have seen a link to the event on Facebook, who has viewed the event, as well as the number of “joins,” “saves,” and “maybes” the event receives.

These are all insights that are considered “the first step” to help Pages understand which event promotions are working and which aren’t, according to Facebook.

If Facebook can increase its number of users through these ads, from an already astonishing 400 million, it will not only generate more revenue for itself, but will get even more of its user base to rely on the platform, which is always a plus in Facebook standards.

 

Source: The Next Web

Legendary And YouTube Team Up for Spooky Content Competition

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By Jessica Klein

Beginning on September 22, YouTube will embark on a horrifying endeavor with a man who truly knows the genre, Guillermo del Toro. The writer/director/producer will serve as a mentor for YouTube creators as they work to impress Legendary Entertainment with short-form horror films.

The Legendary/YouTube collaboration will work as a contest in which the YouTube creator with the best horror short wins a development deal with the film studio. To create the best work possible, contestants will be allowed to work out of one of the YouTube Spaces to produce their content.

For “YouTube House of Horrors: A Legendary Halloween” (the competition’s punny title), YouTube Spaces, currently located in Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo, will offer sets for creators that look like those from del Toro’s own work. New York’s YouTube Space is set to open in the city in November, too late for the Halloween-inspired event.

Del Toro will ultimately choose which creators’ work reigns supreme from each YouTube Space. Creators will have to produce their films by October 28.* Meanwhile, del Toro has a new horror film of his own coming out in 2015. On October 16 of that year, Universal will release his “Crimson Peak,” which was previewed at San Diego Comic-Con this past July.

All of the horror shorts will debut on the creators’ individual YouTube channels in addition to the channel of the YouTube Spaces they produced from and Legendary’s channel.

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* This article has been updated to include the correct deadline for filmmakers to produce the films: October 28, instead of October 27 as it was originally stated.

This article was originally posted on VideoInk and is reposted on [a]listdaily via a partnership with the news publication, which is the online video industry’s go-to source for breaking news, features, and industry analysis. Follow VideoInk on Twitter @VideoInkNews, or subscribe via thevideoink.com for the latest news and stories, delivered right to your inbox.

 

Red Bull’s New Series Delves Into Video Game Music History

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It’s no secret that some of Japan’s greatest and most influential musical exports came in the form of video game music. Its influence, both direct and indirect can be seen in a lot of electronic-based music today. Red Bull talks to some of today’s biggest acts and major players in Japan’s video game music history to bring together a story yet untold.

The documentary series is going to be on Red Bull Music Academy’s YouTube channel and continues in the same vein of content that the channel was previously producing, juxtaposing the old and the new. You can watch the series trailer below for a heady dose of nostalgia and also get a bit giddy to see who they’ve snagged to talk about their video game music faves.

Your Weekend #MustReads For August 29

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We sort through quite a bit of the fluff out there on the Internet on a daily basis and we’ve found what we think are the most interesting, funny and overall, informative, reads for your weekend.

Have something else to share Feel free to comment with your contribution below.

Life Beyond Amazon: Live-streaming Twitch Alternativees: When Amazon bought Twitch, there were some mixed reactions from its userbase, but other live-streaming sites thrive.

Facebook’s Events Ads Take Aim at Mobile and Local Sales: Events marketers, Facebook is rolling out a new ad unit just for you.

Hollywood’s Big-Money YouTube Hit Factory: Bloomberg’s feature story this week is all about the rise of MCN’s and how Hollywood is going YouTube.

Google’s Ad Boss on Overseeing YouTube Sales and Glass Ads: This is the ad bosses’ first interview since moving to the post early this year.

Everybody Relax, Helly Kitty is Indeed a Cat: Hello Kitty, Sanrio’s biggest brand mascot, is a cat after all. Why did you think she wasn’t

10 Billion Reasons Why Snapchat Can’t Afford to Screw Up Its Advertising: So maybe not 10 billion, but Wired’s Issie Lapowsky definitely makes the point that it is super, super important that they get this right.

The Netflix Case Against Comcast, in One Chart: The latest in the battle between the new and old guards of media.

Gander.tv Launches Weekly Shows With Vine Stars: Shows are national, paid and timely as Vine stars and other influencers are garnering a lot of attention.

Some iPhone and wearables announcements are coming from Apple on Sept. 9. We’ll be providing live coverage of the event, but until then– read up here, here, here and here.

 

Quiznos Makes New ToastyTV Featuring Jimmy Fallon And Justin Timberlake

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Quiznos has released a new episode of #ToastyTV, {link no longer active} this time parodying The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon.

Published on Quiznos’ “QuiznosToaster” YouTube channel, the video features two Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake look-alikes who provide a spinoff on Fallon’s Evolution of Dance skits, titled “History of Bromance.”

The two actors are seen dancing and singing onstage to iconic tunes like “California Love,” “Gold Digger,” and even “Crank That” by Soulja Boy, all while subtly advertising for the toasted-sandwich food chain.

After nearly going bankrupt several times, Quiznos is in the mists of trying to revamp the company’s image to publications and consumers alike, including a menu change a few months back. Along with a change in ownership, the new #ToastyTV campaign is achieving just this.

Quiznos has a complete ToastyTV website that features everything from YouTube videos, to Gifs, to Instagram posts, either created by Quiznos personal or its customers, all publicizing the restaurant in a particular fashion.

Most of the content is labeled, “curated entertainment, straight from the toaster,” with the main logo reading, “Toasty TV serves up the latest in music, film, art and entertainment – all with that special Quiznos awesomesauce.”

So far, the company’s new approach to branding itself seems to be working. Several videos ToastyTV has cooked up have garnered at least half a million views, with some even pushing past a million, proving that Quiznos’ effort to make a change for the better could be paying off.