July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Screen Media Ventures is adapting the free-to-play business model from games to its streaming movie service in a partnership with mobile monetization firm Tapjoy.

Free-to-play has fueled the growth of gaming on social and mobile platforms. Tapjoy hopes that its companion business model, free-to-use, will help fuel the rise of other apps. With free-to-use, consumers can enjoy free content in movies, communications, sports, or other kinds of apps without paying money. But they wind up paying for it by performing an action such as watching a video ad or signing up for a service.

So far, free-to-play has worked best in games. But Tapjoy, under the leadership of new chief executive Steve Wadsworth, seeks to expand its reach into other kinds of entertainment. So Screen Media Ventures and Tapjoy are launching PopcornflixGold, a free-to-use app for Android mobile devices where you can watch 400 high-quality movies.

Digital entertainment companies are still struggling to make money on mobile. Last month, Pandora announced a cap on listening to songs from a mobile device, limiting consumers to 40 hours per month with a charge of 99 cents thereafter.

Starting today, PopcornflixGold viewers can download movies on Google Play and earn virtual rewards, dubbed FlixPoints, by engaging with the in-app advertising of their choice from the Tapjoy Marketplace. Tapjoy enables companies to make money from offers, or special ads where a viewer gets something in exchange for taking an action such as watching an ad. That earns the user virtual rewards that they can spend on watching more feature-length movies.

Rob Barnett, the head of publisher development at Tapjoy, said the Tapjoy model, dubbed the Tapjoy Mobile Value Exchange, will translate well from its proven ground in games to the new premium content such as movies.

Gary Delfiner, the president of Screen Media Digital, a division of Screen Media Ventures, said he hopes the new model will kick-start a new way for people to watch better movies without paying money outright.

With PopcornflixGold, fans can search movies by genre, actor or director, select from the latest in new arrivals, choose from the site’s most popular films, or browse all of the movies. Each month, PopcornflixGold will add 30 to 40 movies.

PopcornflixGold was jointly developed by Curious Brain, Screen Media Ventures, and Tapjoy.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Editor’s note: Keynote Systems’ Startup Shootout Index provides some insight into the three-screen challenge now facing anyone with a web presence. We’ll be bringing you a fresh set of data from Keynote every month. Check out previous Startup Shootout results.

We will hazard a guess that over the holidays, a lot of people will receive brand new smartphones and tablets. And while they are relaxing during the vacation, chances are they will check out some of the latest digital entertainment sites.

At Keynote, we love how digital entertainment sites are bringing a wide range of music, video and podcasts to the device of your choice and that they are adding social media capabilities to recommend more content that you might like and connect you with like-minded people.

We track a number of companies in the digital entertainment category of the Keynote Startup Shootout Monthly Index and thought this would be an opportune time to see how they are performing. Let’s see how successful these startups are at delivering the best practices across three screens – desktops, smartphones and tablets.

We test our startups using IE9 on a desktop machine, and across the Apple iPhone 4 and the Apple iPad 2 connected to live mobile networks.

First, It’s All About the Page Loads

Keynote recommends the industry best practice for page loads on a smartphone be under five seconds. Among the startups in the Keynote Startup Shootout index, only Spotify and rdio manage to deliver that. Project Playlist took a whopping 36.4 seconds on average in November!

Even on the desktop, where a response time of two to three seconds is the norm, the Spotify home page takes a sluggish 9.62 seconds on average. These entertainment sites clearly have a lot of work to do in order to improve their mobile performance and strengthen their competitive position in the market.

We decided to take a closer look at SoundCloud, as it offers some great examples of what to do and what not to do for the smartphone environment. Overall, we found that SoundCloud has a site optimized for a smartphone screen (good), but not optimized for the mobile 3G networks (bad). Let’s take a look at what some of these examples look like.

One of the ways that the SoundCloud smartphone site follows good practices is loading image elements using data URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier). Data URIs let the website include images as encoded text strings directly in the HTML for the page, avoiding extra HTTP requests for the image content. This enables the display of multiple images from one download. It’s a very nice move – a much better use of bandwidth, removing the need for about 10 external requests on the mobile home page.

Another way SoundCloud reduces the number of network requests on the mobile home page is with a technique called CSS sprites. CSS sprites combine several small images into one large image and rely on CSS rules to display portions of that larger image where they are needed on the page. A little more complicated than Data URIs, CSS sprites have some advantages for images that need to be cached and re-used on other pages on the site. These are all good examples of optimization.

 Second, It’s All About the Page Loads

Now let’s look at some areas in need of improvement on the SoundCloud smartphone site. A key issue is redirection from the initial page request to the base page HTML call. The first redirection is to an (unnecessary) secure domain and then once it recognizes the visitor as a mobile user, on to a non-secure mobile domain. These are the type of steps that can add a full second to the delay that users experience before the page begins to load.

Another interesting item which affects response time is analytics tags, such as Google Analytics. At SoundCloud we see that analytics tags are being loaded before some critical page content is requested. Not only does this add to the delay, but also adds to the risk of causing a problem. If a third party service has any performance or availability issues, it could actually block the page from loading. Better to load these third party services after the critical page content has loaded.

It also seems SoundCloud has made a conscious decision to display a large amount of content on the mobile home page – a total of 25 thumbnail images are displayed in a list. The amount of dynamic content on that opening page slows response time down with 25 round trips required over the low-speed, high-latency 3G network. This would be acceptable for site visitors on WiFi connections, but on 3G mobile network connections it can have a big impact. Although SoundCloud has optimized the non-dynamic image content on the page for mobile performance, the decision to send so much dynamic image content on top of it results in slow page loads for the 3G mobile site visitor.

By contrast, we see that competitor Spotify has very limited dynamic content on its home page– and hence its nifty 4.67 second smartphone response time, or better still rdio at 3.9 seconds.

In Conclusion

Some of these startups will no doubt get a visit over the holidays, so let’s hope they can deliver a satisfying, initial customer experience – across multiple devices – before the consumer moves on to faster or easier to view sites. Obviously our advice is to do testing scenarios on a variety of mobile devices and across different provider networks, and then monitor end user experience for better decision making, competitiveness and growth.

See you back in 2013!

Ken Harker is the mobile evangelist at Keynote Systems.

HP streamed the live video in 3D to a huge screen in a room across the way where VIP guests watched. I was impressed with all of the effort HP went to in order to broadcast the event. It took a lot of expensive technology, but it didn’t quite live up to the quality I’d expect from all of that effort. There were ghosts, or secondary images, when I viewed the screen with $3 passive glasses. When I looked with $120 glasses made by Gunnar Optics, it looked much better. But the occasional ghosts were still there.

To date, that is the problem with 3D viewing. As I’ve noted before, 3D is a lot of effort for only a little bit of gain. In a handful of examples, it has paid off. Films like Avatar look stunning in 3D in a movie theater, but are less impressive on home TVs. Nvidia 3D Vision looks cool when you’ve got a three-monitor set-up on a relatively expensive gamer’s computer. The Nintendo 3DS and MasterImage 3D glasses-free solutions look great on very small screens. But the rest of the efforts are falling short. Toshiba’s glasses-free 3D report didn’t really look good at CES.

HP’s Phil McKinney (above), vice president and chief technology officer of the HP Personal Systems Group, said there was enormous potential for 3D in consumer and commercial markets, and it makes sense for HP to develop the technology to make it happen. Researchers from HP Labs have set up a big screen in a lab to test their gear, and they spent a lot of time putting together the large theater-sized screen for the Earth Wind & Fire concert. Over time, McKinney believes that HP can build a “triple wide” screen that is three times as large and can capture all of the action on televised basketball game, from hoop to hoop, in a single wide camera shot. That kind of video could prove very immersive for sports fans, McKinney said.

Henry Sang, an HP Labs researcher (right), showed off a wide-lends 3D camera that captured the concert from the back of the ballroom. The camera (pictured at bottom) had 19 imaging engines to capture the data. It fed the video images to some HP workstations that processed the images live. They sent the images to a dozen projectors, which were synchronized to display a single image on the big movie screen. Users could pretty much see the show from anywhere in the room.

Sang acknowledged that the ghost images were present but he said that HP could improve on its efforts at the show. The answer was to spend about $100,000 more on computer gear to process the 3D imagery to get rid of the ghost effect.

If HP can pull it off and make it tolerable to watch, the applications could be plentiful. Carlos Montalvo, an executive who works for McKinney, said the applications include medical imaging, oil and gas exploration, financial services and other visual data analysis applications.

To get there, HP has to develop a solution that is flexible and can superimpose images on top of each other in real time. It has to scale up to large numbers of projectors and make trade-offs in brightness and sharpness, and it has to have redundancy to deal with failures. Today, the process of taking imagery from a concert and making it 3D is laborious. So HP also has to figure out ways to automate that.

For your enjoyment, here’s a YouTube video of Earth Wind & Fire that I took in old-fashioned two-dimensional video. Hopefully by next year’s concert, HP will have better quality live 3D viewing.