Author: Douglas McLennan

Get Ready For The Streaming Wars. We’ll Look Back Wistfully At What We Had

Nearly every company that makes video is finding its way into the streaming media business. Disney is planning its own Netflix competitor for 2019, backed by content holdings like Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar. AT&T plans to launch its own Time-Warner focused equivalent around the same time. Similar competitors from Amazon and Comcast are already taking shape. With the streaming subscription business growing this fast, everyone wants a piece — and they’re ready to fight for it.

YouTube CEO Says New EU Law Will Be Devastating For Creators

“The proposal will force platforms, like YouTube, to prioritize content from a small number of large companies. The burden of copyright proof will be too high for most independent creators to instantly demonstrate. There is a better way forward for copyright online but it’s critical you speak up now as this decision may be finalized by the end of the year.”

Chicago’s Glittering Redevelopment Plan That Became A Bellyflop

The deal was simple: The city would let developers build tall at Cityfront Center, Chicago’s largest real estate development of the 1980s. In exchange, there would be beautiful buildings, streets, parks, plazas and a riverwalk. Yet the architecture, with rare exceptions, is mediocre. The public spaces were supposed to be vibrant and interconnected. Instead, they are unfinished, underachieving, largely disjointed and even, in one case, off-limits to the public.

The Amateur Ethnomusicologist Who’s Spent A Life Capturing The Music Of A Remote Culture

Laurent Jeanneau is an amateur ethnomusicologist who has traveled across the Zomia collecting sounds. In an update to the old colonial ramblers, under the name Kink Gong, Jeanneau is also a composer who incorporates his sound recordings into live performances. Between 1996 and 2014, he amassed a huge collection of field recordings, totally nearly 160 CDs of raw sound.

The World’s Biggest Arts Center Just Opened In Taiwan

By turns galumphing and graceful, the roughly £260m hulk contains an opera house, concert hall, theatre and recital hall, seating up to 7,000 people within its curvaceous shell. As Taiwan faces ever more pressure for assimilation from mainland China, whose cultural building boom has led to a new museum or concert hall open practically every week in recent years, the National Kaohsiung Centre for the Arts, AKA Weiwuying, is a monumental statement that this plucky nation means business on the international cultural stage.

An Alternative History Of The Mythologies Of Silicon Valley

It is only now, a decade after the financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction—of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.

A Fascinating Test: An Algorithm That Can Predict Artistic Success?

The idea is simple. Within these algorithms, notes are treated like the DNA of music. It all starts with an initial population of ‘songs’– each a random jumble of notes stitched together. Over many generations, the algorithm breeds from the songs, finding and rewarding ‘beautiful’ features within the music to breed ‘better’ and ‘better’ compositions as time goes on. I say ‘beautiful’ and ‘better’, but – of course – as we already know, there’s no way to decide what either of those words mean definitively. The algorithm can create poems and paintings as well as music, but – still – all it has to go on is a measure of similarity to whatever has gone before.