Netflix has just released the trailer for the highly anticipated 4th season of Arrested Development, back after a seven-year hiatus, and it's looking like the Bluth family is returning to form with quirky antics, traded barbs and sharp wordplay.
All 15 episodes of the new season will be released simultaneously on Netflix on May 26th. Watch below.
Stephen Shankland of CNet writes: Google plans to finish defining its VP9 video codec on June 17, providing a date on which the company will be able to start using the next-generation compression technology in Chrome and on YouTube.
"Last week, we hosted over 100 guests at a summit meeting for VP9, the WebM Project's next-generation open video codec. We were particularly happy to welcome our friends from YouTube, who spoke about their plans to support VP9 once support lands in Chrome," Matt Frost, senior business product manager for the WebM Project, said in a blog post Friday.
Kelly Faircloth of BetaBeat writes: YouTube has just debuted an entertaining feature on its Trends page: a map where you can see which videos are the most popular by city and region. It is a K-hole without parallel.
For example! Did you know that while Alan Jackson’s cover of George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” is unsurprisingly popular in the Southeast, Blake Shelton’s latest redneck anthem pops up more often in the Midwest? The True Blood season six trailer, on the other hand, practically outlines the shape of the country–apparently raunchy vampires aren’t as popular in the flyover states.
Splatf writes: At the end of March, almost 2.7 million people still subscribed to AOL service, the company reported this morning. That’s about where Netflix stood at the end of 2004.
Since then, Netflix’s subscriber base has grown — 29 million at the end of March — and AOL’s has declined at a remarkably parallel rate. But that makes perfect sense: Nothing says “dialup” more than AOL, and few services have benefited more from the growth of broadband than Netflix. (The paths cross in early 2008, just as Netflix’s streaming video service was starting to take off.)
Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg of The Atlantic writes: You'll find wonderful things surfing the pages of the Internet Archive, an online library of millions of books, films, audio recordings, web pages, and more. You can watch what might be the oldest "cat video" of all time -- an 1894 reel from Thomas Edison's movie studio.
Caroline O’Donovan of Nieman Lab writes: Rebecca Howard occupies a unique position at The New York Times. She came to the paper with experience from the AOL/Huffington Post video department and Fox Digital Studios, where she has worked on both branded and original content. Now she holds one of very few positions at the Times — and maybe in the industry — that reports to both business and editorial managers: general manager of video production. Right now, Howard says that means her number one priority is distribution — making sure, as her boss Denise Warren, put it, that the Times transitions from “a place you just read to a place you just watch.”
Mat Smith of Engadget writes: In an effort to give some visual pizazz to the often dry world of regional metrics, Google has announced a new trends map for its YouTube viewers. While the top video (True Blood's season six teaser, if you're asking) currently dominates across the (for now, US-only) map, there are some Walking Dead fans that can't get enough bad lip-reading in the North-West. An upgrade from YouTube's Trends Dashboard, the Trends Map can be tweaked for gender and age profiles, with scrollable bars showing the number of regions in which a video has claimed the top spot. While we're still not sure how YouTube is assigning the regions just yet, take a look at what's popular in your locale at the source below.
David Talbot of Technology Review writes: If you want to watch video on your phone or tablet, you’ll find that many networks can’t always serve up the data fast enough. So your choices are either to find a Wi-Fi hotspot, take your chances on congestion and high data charges on a cellular network, or plug in a special dongle that picks up TV broadcasts (see “Broadcast TV Aims for Your Smartphone”).
Early next year, an emerging wireless technology known as LTE Broadcast could change all that, essentially making it possible for carriers to put a TV-like broadcast stream within LTE cellular signals.
Tiffany Shlain of IndieWire writes: Tiffany Shlain, who has been a player in the Bay Area tech scene for over a decade and who directed the 2011 Sundance film "Connected," is currently promoting her cloud filmmaking project, a way for organizations and others to get filmmakers all over the world to contribute to collaborative film projects on specific topics. Shlain also recently announced that she would be creating a web series, "The Future Starts Here," about connected life, for AOL.
Here is the full transcript of filmmaker Tiffany Shlain’s keynote address “The Cloud Filmmaking Manifesto” delivered at Tribeca Film Festival’s Interactive Day 2013 in New York on April 20th.
Neal Ungerleider of FastCoCreate writes: What happens when a major film producer decides to create original entertainment for tablets? Canada’s National Film Board (NFB) is experimenting with a series of new tablet-centric projects that merge gaming, journalism, and cinema. The applications come in iOS, Android, and web-Flash flavors and are intentionally created to mash up movies and computer games once and for all. The National Film Board is a publicly funded film producer and distributor known for its legendary animation work and, lately, for becoming a pioneer of new, interactive forms of storytelling.
