Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Friday, July 1st, 2022
A new way to annoy friends and family.
Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Friday, July 1st, 2022.
THE WEIRD POINTLESS NATURE OF XUMO
AVOD services (ad-supported streaming services) are extremely hot right now and they are throwing off increasingly large amounts of revenue. Both Pluto (owned by Paramount Global) and Tubi (owned by Fox) are rapidly expanding and have become the leaders in the space.
And then there is Comcast-owned Xumo.
Comcast acquired Xumo in 2020 from Viant Technologies, which was once also the owner of MySpace. Xumo was the originally created by Viant in a partnership with Panasonic, which rolled the service out on its line of Smart TVs. But Xumo never quite gelled as a business plan and when Comcast bought the service, the presumption in the industry was that the media company was going to build out its on-demand content offerings in much the same way. Instead, it's limped along with a mix of live channels you can find on a dozen other services and a line-up of on-demand programming that is shockingly sparse for an AVOD owned by a company that also owns a legacy movie studio.
Right now, the "most popular" films on Xumo are Gods Of Egypt, Snowpiercer, Devil In A Blue Dress. Push and the original Flatliners. That's not exactly a powerhouse lineup of films.
The TV section is even more lightweight, and is primarily filled with a few of the Universal TV dramas that are licensed to a bunch of platforms and a bunch of second-shelf Canadian shows. The only slight thing of interest is that for whatever reason, Xumo's on-demand offerings include a few cheesy syndicated action shows from the 80s and 90s that I haven't see anywhere else: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Ralf Moeller's Conan, Tarzan: The Epic Adventures. Weirdly, you can also watch the one season and done UPN series Legacy as well as the 1992 syndicated competition series Knights And Warriors.
It's not clear what the future holds for Xumo. In April, Comcast announced it was contributing Xumo as part of a 50/50 partnership with Charter to roll out a nationwide "next generation streaming partnership." So my assumption is that nothing much with happen with the current platform until it is rolled into whatever the Charter/Comcast serviced looks like when it launches in 2023.
WHY I LOVE REDDIT
LIKEWISE WANTS TO BE STREAMING'S RECOMMENDATION ENGINE
Likewise is one of several companies hoping to become the default content recommendation. Verge has a good look at the company and their plans:
Now, when you first start using the Likewise app, it requires you to tell it about things you like. If you want movie recommendations, first you have to pick a couple of genres — comedy, drama, western — and then choose some of your favorites from a curated set of titles. You can’t access the rest of the app until you’ve picked at least 20. “The payoff is huge,” says Salim Hemdani, Likewise’s CTO. “The more you tell us, the better it’s going to be.” He says people never stop at 20 because it’s just fun to pick things you like. And in doing so, you tell Likewise’s algorithm who you actually are.
Likewise uses that information to put you into a “cluster,” which refers to a group of people with similar tastes to yours. These clusters are constantly changing based on what else you watch and rate, and they inform everything else Likewise recommends to you. “It gives us an initiation point to say, how many people are like you in the world, and how many clusters can we create?” Hemdani says. The more granular and specific those clusters are, the more accurate they can be. Knowing you like Succession is slightly useful; knowing you like Succession, novels by Michael Crichton, the podcast The Adventure Zone, and anything with Marvel in the title is vastly more useful.
As I mentioned, there are several other services trying to do the same thing and aside from the scaling issues, the biggest problem is that I am not convinced that collaborative recommendations are especially accurate. But I haven't tried Likewise yet, and maybe they have figured it out.
A NEW WAY TO ANNOY FAMILY AND FRIENDS
After a lot of beta testing, Spotify has rolled out its karaoke mode, which allows subscribers to sing along with their favorite songs, while the app judges their accuracy as the lyrics progress. The feature uses your phone's microphone to hear your voice and rate your performance.
The feature is being rolled out in waves and you'll need to update the Spotify app to use the service.
But if it is available to you, here's what you need to do:
Choose a song you really want to sing out loud and play it.
Find the 'Lyrics' section on the app and tap it.
On the top right-hand of the lyrics, tap 'Sing.'
Lyrics will appear on screen with an audio analyzer.
Based on the info provided by Spotify, while you do receive a percentage score for your performance, it's not "gamified" like you find in the GameStar app. Still, it's a fun bonus and another way for Spotify to keep its subscribers engaged with the service.
ODDS AND SODS
* A couple bought a home in Seattle only to find out that it would cost $27,000 to get access to the internet.
* FuboTV and Univision have settled their carriage dispute.
* The Xfinity Stream app is now available on Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD.
WHAT'S NEW FOR FRIDAY
Here's a quick rundown of all the new stuff premiering today on TV and streaming:
Funny Girls (Crackle)
How to Screw It All Up (Cómo mandarlo todo a la mierda) (HBO Max)
Marvel Studios Assembled: The Making Of Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness (Disney+)
Stranger Things Season Four Part Two Premiere (Netflix)
The Black Hamptons Series Premiere (BET+)
The Brokenwood Mysteries Season Seven Premiere (Acorn TV)
The Last Drive-In With Joe Bob Briggs Season Four Finale (Shudder)
The Princess (Hulu)
The Terminal List Series Premiere (Amazon)
Click Here to see the list of all of the upcoming premiere dates for the next few months.
SEE YOU TUESDAY!
If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.