Matthew Ball and Metaverse Expectations vs. Reality

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Vast fortunes will be made and lost chasing the metaverse, according to venture capitalist Matthew Ball. He believes that some of the current tech giants will be displaced, others will adapt, with still other new giants being formed along the way. 

“If the metaverse is to be a multi-trillion-dollar part of our economy, we certainly can’t pay a 30% tithe to two computing platforms especially when they are not alone building it,” says Ball.

Take that Apple and Alphabet.

No one has extolled the promise of the metaverse more than the former Amazon executive. He is regarded as a pre-eminent metaverse expert and is frequently quoted by technology industry leaders.

Now he’s collected those ideas in a book ‘The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything.’

In the book, Ball describes the metaverse as “a parallel virtual plane of existence that spans all digital technologies” - one that will “even come to control much of the physical world.

But building this is hard, not least because the Internet Mk 1 was designed

primarily to enable static files to be copied and sent from one device to another. It clearly wasn’t built for live and interactive experiences involving a large

number of participants.

As it stands, there’s no consensus on file formats or conventions for 3D information, no standard systems to exchange data in virtual worlds.

“We also lack the computing power to pull off the metaverse as we imagine it. And we will want many new devices to realize it—not just VR goggles, but things like holographic displays, ultra-sonic force-field generators, and, spooky as it sounds, devices to capture electrical signals sent across muscles.” 

For now, the metaverse is still waiting on affordable, mainstream hardware that’s still powerful enough to simulate real worlds.

“To pull it off with a degree of visual fidelity and complexity that we imagine for the metaverse, it will take a myriad of different innovations,” he tells Barrons. “We need fundamental advances in internet protocols, in broadband latency, and extraordinary advances in computing power and the attendant chips.”

The volume of content we produce online has grown exponentially from a few message board posts to a constant stream of multimedia content. Ball thinks the next evolution to this trend seems likely to be a persistent and “living” virtual world that is not a window into our life (such as Instagram) nor a place where we communicate it (such as Gmail) but one in which we also exist—and in 3D (hence the focus on immersive VR headsets and avatars).

Nonetheless, Ball does pronounce on the relative merits of major tech players and their plans to metaverse domination.

Given that metaverse requirements in computing, data centers, and edge services are so

extraordinary he finds companies like AWS and Microsoft Azure “likely destined for success”. Another golden child is Nvidia “a company that has spent 40 years waiting for this moment and decades investing for the era of graphics-based computing.”

Meta “has been more stymied by the lack of an operating system” which has adversely affected its cloud gaming offering, and is now precluding it “from having a particularly viable creator platform because of the 30% fee that other platforms charge,” says Ball.

Not that he thinks that monopolising fees a good thing. On the contrary, “If the future of all business is going into 3D real time, predominantly on Google and Apple devices, having to pay a 30% fee that has little to no direct competition doesn’t work,” he tells Barrons. “No business or developer can afford that. building it. It’s going to constrain everything that we do and the business models that are deployed and the developers who need to build it.”

Speaking to Axios he calls game developers “the world’s leading experts” in building synchronous virtual online spaces, attracting millions of people to them and prioritizing that they are having a good time inside.

Game design may have “seemed like a toyetic profession” to outsiders but “has turned out to be one of the most important skill sets of the modern era.”

Ball also takes aim at what the metaverse is not.  First, the idea that the metaverse is immersive virtual reality, such as an Oculus or Meta Quest.

“That's an access device,” he tells Protocol. “It would be akin to saying the mobile internet is a smartphone. In addition, we know that VR headsets, at least as mainstream devices, are quite a ways off. They may ultimately become the best, most popular preferred way to access the metaverse. But they're not the metaverse. They're not a requirement.

Another frequent conflation is that between the metaverse and Web3, crypto, and blockchains. This trio may become an important part of realizing the metaverse’s potential, Ball writes, but they are merely principles and technologies. In fact, many metaverse leaders doubt there is any future for crypto. 

His book’s title is a bit misleading since Ball doesn’t actually think the metaverse replaces everything.

“We’re in the mobile era, but we're still using personal computers,” he says. “I have a hard line into my household network, and all of the data transmission is on fixed-line infrastructure running on TCP/IP.

We should think of the metaverse as perhaps changing the devices we use, the experiences, business models, protocols and behaviors that we enjoy online. But we'll keep using smartphones, keyboards. We don't need to do all video conferences or all calls in 3D. It's supplements and complements, doesn't replace everything.”

While pushing back on the idea of the metaverse as inherently dystopic he does suggest that  it will be “a parallel plane of existence that sits atop our digital and physical economies, and unites both. As a result, the companies that control these virtual worlds and their virtual atoms will be more dominant than those who lead in today’s digital economy.”

The metaverse will thus render more acute many of the hard problems of digital existence today, such as data rights, data security, misinformation and radicalization, platform power, and user happiness.

“The philosophies, culture, and priorities of the companies that lead in the metaverse era, therefore, will help determine whether the future is better or worse than our current moment, rather than just more virtual or remunerative.”

In that case, and while “there isn’t really a metaverse product we can go buy, nor

“metaverse revenue” to be found on an income statement, it is beholden on us all to push back against some of the more venal and corporate shackles of those who are building the metaverse.

 

“As the world’s largest corporations and most ambitious start-ups pursue the metaverse, it’s essential that we—users, developers, consumers, and voters—understand we still have agency over our future and the ability to reset the status quo, but only if we act now.”

 

Is Local TV News Moving Toward OTT and NextGen TV?

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OTT is still a work in progress among local TV news stations as station owners try to juggle investments in digital transition with an audience still heavily reliant on TV for their news consumption.

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According to research compiled by the RTDNA/Newhouse School at Syracuse University, doing something with OTT continues to edge up from 53.8% in 2020 to 58% in 2022.

“Not exactly setting the world on fire, but clearly moving up,” observe the researchers — Bob Papper is an adjunct professor of Broadcast and Digital Journalism at Syracuse University, and Keren Henderson is an associate professor of Broadcast and Digital Journalism at Syracuse.

“On the other hand, stations in the top 25 markets went from 72% doing something last year to 65% this year. The smallest markets also went down in percentage while markets 26 through 150 all went up — if sometimes modestly,” they comment. “The smallest markets and stations with the smallest staffs are the least likely to be involved with OTT.”

Several stations either currently have or are setting up around-the-clock streaming services, and an increasing number have OTT desks to oversee the operation.

Developments range from producing exclusive online programs, including daily newscasts, to live streams and creation of a dedicated OTT Anchor Desk. Some stations have partnered with streaming platforms for distribution including live newscasts, multiple daily live streams, and video-on-demand. Several have breaking news channels ready online as required (also for weather events).

Local TV newscasters are doing this for a variety of reasons too. “To reach new audiences” is the main reason, followed by the opportunity to “go deeper with content” and “make extra revenue.” The “get more feedback from the audience” reason rose up in the agenda, but those ticking the “too early to tell” box were “still very high,” Papper and Henderson judged.

NextGen TV

When it comes to NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0), some TV companies like Sinclair and Nexstar see this as critical to the future of local TV while others are not as sure, the researchers comment.

“The key idea behind NextGen TV, or ATSC 3.0, is a merging of television and internet technologies. Through changes in compression, it allows a higher quality (4K) picture and better audio. But the reason TV companies are particularly interested in NextGen is addressability. Because of the internet connection, it allows stations to tailor commercials to specific zip codes or even homes.”

Nonetheless this is reliant on consumers going out and upgrading their current TV to be compatible with NextGen TV.

“More and more TV markets are starting to feed at least some material for NextGen, but we’re a long way from knowing if average (or even enough high-end) consumers will care,” the report found.

Overall, just 11% of TV news directors reported doing “something” with NextGen TV. That’s actually down from last year’s 12.3%. The number peaks at 41.2% in the top 25 markets, up 16 points from last year, but no other market size passed 15%.

The survey was conducted in the fourth quarter of 2021 among all 1,780 operating, non-satellite TV stations, and a random sample of 3,379 radio stations.

 

Why 5G is the Cool Thing That Still Hasn’t Happened

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5G was never going to be a big bang, so perhaps we should be more patient with its apparent lack of revolutionary impact to date. Yes, the network can be accessed by an increasing number of cell phones and the metro areas of big cities are being equipped with towers, but connectivity remains patchy and the 5G project a work in progress.

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The killer apps like automated cars and ubiquitous augmented reality are some distance from being realized — but they are getting closer.

Companies can continue to promise revolutionary leaps in different facets of technology, using better wireless networks as the underlying foundation. But until these networks actually improve in a significant way, much of it will remain just talk or limited-scale experiments.

The complexities of connecting personal devices like AR glasses to big networks have largely been solved, Qualcomm’s general manager of cellular modems and infrastructure, Durga Malady, told CNET.

The biggest roadblock is with battery life: though phones pack sizable 4,000mAh and 5,000mAh capacity batteries in their large rectangular forms, there’s far less space on glasses frames for big battery packs, which could limit how long they can stay connected to 5G networks.

We’ll almost certainly have that figured out before one of the tech world’s wilder predictions comes to pass. Apple is working toward completely replacing the iPhone with AR in a decade, according to a note seen by MacRumors’ Hartley Charlton.

5G Rollout Patchy

Smartphones have been connected to 5G since 2019 and, as networks improve, video streaming and gaming have become better with higher-speed connections. Yet coverage is patchy.

As reported by David Lumb at CNET, millimeter-wave, or mmWave, delivers the highest 5G speeds but covers less area than other types of 5G, so it’s used only in parts of some cities and event spaces. Low-band 5G is scarcely faster than the current 4G LTE networks in the US, though its farther range can reach suburban and rural users. Mid-band 5G is the sweet spot, not just delivering higher speeds, but also letting a lot more people access the network at the same time across large distances.

Most global networks are built largely on mid-band 5G, but US carriers have a mix of all three. Mid-band 5G makes up most of T-Mobile’s 5G network, which operates on 2.5GHz frequencies, while Verizon and AT&T are activating their C-band and other mid-band frequency 5G service throughout this year.

5G In the Home

5G is not just a mobile connectivity solution. It is a wireless-based home internet solution too at least comparable with if not capable of exceeding high speed wired broadband. Yet carriers still face an uphill battle in making customers aware that home 5G internet exists at all, so they’ve been offering services at discounted rates.

As charted by CNET, each US carrier has its own 5G home internet service, though AT&T offers it only in a few select areas. Verizon and T-Mobile have been expanding to offer their respective services, but they still don’t offer them everywhere that their faster 5G connections are available.

Compared with their mobile subscriber base, neither has a lot of customers signed up for wireless internet — Verizon reportedly had about 433,000 fixed wireless subscribers in March and hopes to grow that to four or five million by 2025, while T-Mobile announced it had reached one million subscribers in April and seeks toreach seven million by 2025.

Connected Cars

Automotive 5G allows your car to connect to nearby 5G networks, essentially upgrading the 4G LTE car-to-network capabilities that have enabled things like automatic crash detection and cloud services like maps, route guidance and traffic info.

5G networks could form the backbone of driverless travel. Regular cars will use 5G spectrum to talk to each other from hundreds of feet away with a technology called Sidelink. The technology will warn other cars about vehicles and pedestrians ahead.

Sidelink is starting to be included in automotive chipsets, but it isn’t expected to see mainstream adoption until 2024/25.

In sum, 5G continues to be a work in progress and we probably won’t discover the best uses for it until the high-speed networks deliver speedy, reliable service across cities, suburbs and rural areas.

 

Behind the Scenes: Nope

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Making the ‘Great American flying saucer horror’ with director Jordan Peele, editor Nicholas Monsour and DP Hoyte van Hoytema.

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The working title for Jordan Peele’s new movie was Little Green Men. This nods to the film’s close encounter with a UFO and the central character’s quest to capture undeniable proof of aliens on camera - the money shot they can sell to Oprah.

But it’s also about society’s troubling relationship with the ‘other’.

“This is really about all kinds of spectacle from media celebrity and fame to the kind of deeply disturbing psychological spectacle that sticks in your mind,” says NOPE’s editor Nicholas Monsour who cut the director’s previous satire US.

“Jordan’s films always have an analysis of power and a critique of society running through them,” he tells IBC365. “The dynamic in this story is we have Black owners of a horse stunt training ranch seeking fame and recognition in [white dominated] Hollywood so there is this inherent ‘us’ and ‘them’. Then we’re extrapolating that to humankind and whatever else is out there. What’s the power dynamic then? To me, that’s the big theme.”

Peele is certainly making a movie for cinefiles like himself who want to make cinema for theatres to celebrate the big screen experience which for Peele range from The Wizard of Oz to Alien and Point Break.

It is filmed in large-format 65mm and IMAX and given a Western style location in Southern California’s arid and rambling Santa Clarita Valley.

“The other part of the equation is that we foreground characters that have not traditionally been in movies of this scale of pop cultural spectacle,” says Monsour.

Daniel Kaluuya plays OJ and Keke Palmer is Emerald, siblings who own the Haywood ranch and, as the film makes explicit, are direct descendants of the very first film star.

“Did you know that the very first assembly of photographs to create a motion picture was a two second clip of a black man on a horse,” explains Emerald in the movie. “Since the moment motion pictures could move we had skin in the game.”

Yet Black talent has been excluded from the movie making industry until very recently. That idea is encapsulated in a famous series of 16 sequential photographs depicting a Black jockey on a horse, shown in the film. Created by Eadweard Muybridge in 1887, the loop of cards, known as Animal Locomotion, Plate 626, is one of the earliest examples of chronophotography, which established the foundation for what would become the bedrock of the entire film industry.

While we know the name of the horse (a mare called Annie G) the identity of the rider is lost to history. Peele moves this beyond a binary racial critique.

“I set out to design something that criticised what we do as much as it honours it,” Peele says in production notes. “It reveals the lives of the skilled, below-the-line crew —the animal wranglers, cinematographers, technology experts—who create the indelible images we see on screen but who are never seen themselves. And it shines a light on the realities of discarded actors, particularly child actors, who are abandoned by the industry once they cease to be adorable bankable assets.”

“You don’t have to be a cinefile or an intellectual to be involved in the story,” says Monsour. “It can be funny and scary and, if looked at from a sideways angle, a social commentary.

“To me it’s a sci-fi horror as much as a documentary, and a dramatic and comedic project. There’s not really anything off the table.”

Editors face the same challenge on every movie which Monsour likens to putting together a jigsaw. “You start with a huge pile of pieces that someone has thrown in the air. Sometimes you have too few to make the puzzle, other times you have too many. We could have made 100 puzzles from what Jordan wrote and shot.

“Based on that, my process is to look at each beat, asking what is scary and which bit of the performance is funnier, and whether that performance would hit harder if we placed it an hour earlier. You’re constantly zooming in and out. It wasn’t a challenge to convey the film’s ideas other than to hone in on which ones we wanted to layer in more.”

Peele’s challenge to himself was to bring something impossible to the big screen, like King Kong or Oz. Part of the solution was sound design on which Monsour worked with supervising sound editor Johnnie Burn (Under the Skin).

“While I was doing paper edits of a scene, Johnnie was sound designing using a library of wind effects to give Jordan every tool to help realise his vision,” Monsour explains.

“We are imagining abstract sounds for things that don’t exist but equally challenging is the creation of a reality in which, when the extraordinary happens, it is believable. That means paying attention to detail so you understand the sound of the location and to the sounds that might be heard subjectively in a character’s head.”

Shooting day for night

Another part of the solution was the camera work of DP Hoyte van Hoytema FSF NSC ASC (Dunkirk, Tenet) who was tasked with filming several sequences in the valley at night.

Shooting day for night is a classic cinematographic problem usually overcome by placing actors at a very specific direction into the sun, preferably backlit, and then darkening the image so that it looks as if the scene is lit by the moon.

However, after testing this option Peele and van Hoytema were not satisfied with the result.  “We wanted to create nights that felt spacious, epic and grand and gave us the possibility to peer into the night. Yet at the same time, we didn’t want those nights to look fake in any way,” says van Hoytema.

They built a special rig which combined of a variety of cameras (principally Alexa 65 with an infrared enabled chip) all perfectly aligned without parallax.

VFX supervisor Guillaume Rocheron enhanced the process for an effect that van Hoytema feels obtains “a magnitude that I haven’t really seen before unless it’s pure CGI. But CGI never looks as close or as tactile as these images do.”

Filmmaking as spectacle

Just as Steven Spielberg cast French director François Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so NOPE gets meta with the inclusion of a character who is a cinematographer. Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) is a reclusive DP asked by OJ and Emerald to film a mysterious phenomenon that seems, in fact to be unfilmable.

The character is apparently based on Robert Shaw’s grizzled ‘Quint’ in another Spielberg classic Jaws – a Captain Ahab obsessively pursuing the perfect shot.

Wincott shadowed van Hoytema to pick up some tips and the camera department supplied Holst with plausible equipment. This included an IMAX Mark II camera which had been into space aboard the Space Shuttle. The camera was re-engineered by Panavision with a hand crank so that it could be used without electricity - an important script element in the movie.

“Kitted out, [Holst] was even nerdier than most cinematographers I know in real life,” observes van Hoytema. “I wear a scarf as part of my day-to-day kit. And in the movie, you’ll see that Holst is wearing a scarf as well. It’s actually one of my scarves. Authenticity is very important.”

About 40 percent of the film is shot with IMAX cameras and nearly all the film is shot on Large Format 65mm, 5-perf film, with the exception of some 1997 sitcom footage which was shot on 35mm film, as would have been used at the time, and footage from the hand-cranked IMAX 35mm. Security footage depicted on monitors was shot with Blackmagic cameras.

Look up

To pull off “the quintessential flying saucer horror film,” the filmmakers had to take into account the huge canvas of the sky.

“Close Encounters is a huge influence of mine in its scope and in its vision,” explains Peele, “but more than anything, in Spielberg's ability to make us feel like we’re in the presence of something from another world. That immersive experience was something I desperately wanted to chase as well.”

This required clouds to be in the exact same formation for three straight days of shooting or more, which is obviously impossible. Instead, the VFX team created a CG cloudscape system to art direct the composition and speed of the clouds. They spent nine months implementing this system which contributed the majority of Nope’s 700 VFX shots.

An engineering professor at CalTech helped conceptual artists to imagine how the alien entity would move and behave. They discussed ion propulsion and underwater animal biology (like jellyfish) as well studying origami for clues as to how the ‘creature’ might reveal its inner self.

Another inspiration was the hyper minimalism of ‘90s Japanese anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, which has a “biomechanical design flair.”

One of the film’s most striking visuals features miles of brightly coloured sky dancers a detection system for the alien entity. Gaffer Adam Chambers (Tenet, Ad Astra) and lighting console producer Noah Shain (Tenet) were responsible for programming and controlling the sky dancers, up to 70 of which featured in one scene.

Production designer Ruth De Jong adds another layer of thought: “There’s an underlying theme we’re addressing there—exemplified by the colour palette, like a bag of Skittles—that the sky dancers are in of themselves a representation of mass consumerism.”

The Meta Hollywood machine

NOPE features a Gold Rush theme park called Jupiter’s Claim that is intended by Peele as an allegory for capitalism. It contains a gold-panning station, a sheriff’s office, and Sea World-esque stadium all built by De Jong at three-quarters scale.

In the film, ‘Jupiter’s Claim’ is run by a former child star exploited and then discarded by Hollywood.

Now – and you really can’t make this up – the set for Jupiter’s Claim has become a permanent attraction on the world-famous studio tour at Universal Studios Hollywood opening day and date with NOPE.

The teasing marketing campaign for NOPE has kept audiences in the dark about what the movie is about and that’s a good thing, says Mansour.

“This is unlike anything I’ve seen before but there’s also a familiarity with great cinema of the seventies to the 2000s, and an organic poetry that originates from being shot on film,” he says.

“I like going into a movie not knowing all that much or being told what to think about it. I want to make up my own mind.”

 

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Why Audiences Are Moving to AVOD

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Ad-supported streaming services are seeing adoption at a faster rate than subscription-based ones, according to newly published research from Comscore.

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In a new report, “2022 State of Streaming,” the global media measurement and analytics company charts a 29% increase in US households streaming AVODs in 2022 compared to 2020, versus a 21% increase during the same period for SVODs.

“While both ad-supported and subscription-based streaming services are growing in the US, we’re seeing that consumers are being more mindful of their budgets and leaning towards ad-supported services,” said James Muldrow, VP of product management at Comscore. “This makes sense as inflation continues to hit consumer’s wallets. The time is ripe for traditionally subscription-based streaming services like Netflix to consider launching an ad-supported tier to enhance their growth trajectory.”

Comscore’s analysis also found that American households watched 5.4 streaming services per month as of March 2022, compared to 4.7 in March 2021, as “The Big Five” streaming services became “The Big Six” with the rise of HBO Max. In terms of audience overlap, Netflix has an 82% overlap with the other top six streaming services, especially Amazon (66%) and YouTube (66%).

Diverse audiences (African American, Asian, American Indian and Hispanic populations) are a key driver of streaming growth, the research suggests. In terms of the streaming platforms viewing days per household, African Americans over-index for Amazon, FuboTV, YouTube and Pluto.TV, while Asians over-index for HBO Max, Hulu, YouTube and Sling. Accounting for the largest segment of diverse homes that stream, the Hispanic audience over-indexes for Netflix, YouTube, FuboTV and Sling.

Other findings:

Smart TVs are the fastest-growing segment of streaming devices with 48% growth year-on-year.

Amazon Prime Video has the highest resonance with the younger TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat and Twitch audiences.

Seventy-nine percent of Wi-Fi enabled homes are watching streaming content on Connected TV devices and each such household is spending about 122 hours per month doing so, a 19% growth from March 2021. Netflix captures the most hours per month watched at 43, followed closely by YouTube at 39 hours, and Hulu at 33 hours.

 

More Consumers Are Headed Into the FAST Lane

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Free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels are now in six out of 10 US households as consumers realize the value of having a TV-like viewing experience without the costs required for pay-TV or SVOD.

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In the age of streaming, a new report from Comcast’s advertising division, “Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV: Why More Advertisers (and Consumers) are Going F.A.S.T.” underlines the value consumers continue to place on the lean-back experience traditionally associated with linear TV.

Although FAST is technically an OTT option, what makes it unique is the ability to stream both linear channels and on demand content (linear streaming channels are created using specific technology that stitches video on demand together to create the linear playout).

This sets FAST apart from typical AVOD services. FAST gives viewers a familiar linear experience of choosing and scrolling through channels, rather than simply choosing individual videos on-demand.

As a result, when a user is channel surfing on their connected device, it’s easy for them to land on a FAST channel without even knowing it. Comcast finds this especially true of cord-cutters, who do not have a cable program guide.

Streaming experts gathered for a round table discussion hosted by The Wrap said they expect the looming recession will push consumers into FAST, “long stereotyped as a haven for a financially struggling Gen Z audience.” As premium services pivot to include ad-supported tiers to offset subscriber churn and slower-than-predicted growth, FAST services like Pluto, Tubi and Amazon’s Freevee are well-positioned to begin including premium content into the mix. Watch the entire conversation in the video below:]

FAST providers like Tubi and Pluto are reaching consumers with news, entertainment, sports and more in an environment that mimics linear TV and is often built right into a TV manufacturer’s interface (including smart TVs from Samsung, LG, TCL, Roku, Sony). Such services are also distributed on major OTT devices (Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Roku, TiVo and more), and even multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) like Xfinity.

Despite the range of viewing options, Comcast finds more than 80% of time spent with FAST services is on the biggest screen in the house.

“Many consumers may be unaware that the channels they access through their TV are FAST channels programmed directly into the channel guide by the manufacturer,” Comcast says.

These characteristics are also why, when the average US streaming household has 4.2 streaming services, FAST channels are seen as a free and easy alternative to supplement paid streaming — with no login required. Penetration has doubled in a year.

The industry does not yet track FAST viewership in a broad and consistent way, but Comcast has revealed facts and figures about consumption of its platform XUMO.

The average XUMO user spends about 104 minutes within the platform once they have entered. Some 70 percent of XUMO users are cord cutters, using it alongside SVOD services. Of those, 77% also subscribe to Netflix, 80% subscribe to Hulu and 65% subscribe to Prime Video.

The report recommends FAST advertising as a complement to traditional TV and streaming advertising. It suggests that streaming advertising (including FAST and other forms like AVOD which offers non-linear content) should make up about 20-30% of the overall investment for multi-screen campaigns.

“For advertisers, FAST provides a unique opportunity to reach cord-cutters while they are ‘scrolling,’ ‘channel surfing’ and discovering new content — a prospect not possible through ad-free services like Netflix, or even from ad-supported on-demand services like Crackle.”

Consumers also appreciate that FAST providers typically do not crowd their content with too much advertising, it states.

“As advertisers look to efficiently maximize their reach in an increasingly fragmented viewing landscape, FAST services are a valuable complement to traditional TV and other AVOD streaming options as part of a holistic multi-screen media plan,” James Rooke, president of Comcast Advertising, said in a prepared statement.

Also quoted is Amanda Garcia, Senior Director of Partnerships at Paramount+: “As customers find more ways to watch the content they love across a mix of services, FAST channels have become a key part of our media mix for acquisition and awareness, as well as targeted campaigns to super-serve key audiences.”

 

Metaverse Interoperability: Utopian Dream, Privacy Nightmare

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There are now myriad articles on the metaverse, but still the concept remains a vague. That matters because the way we conceive of the next-gen internet will form the foundations for its actual structure and right now the narrative is being controlled by a few.

At face value, Tom Boellstorff is an unlikely commentator on the subject. He’s a professor of Anthropology at the University of California and therefore understands the dynamics of social interaction and how that changes from culture to culture.

If, in future, we’re all going to be socializing a lot more online in virtual worlds, then Boellstorff thinks confusion now about what the metaverse is won’t help us in the long run.

“The metaverse is at a virtual crossroads,” he argues in an article for The Conversation. “Norms and standards set in the next few years are likely to structure the metaverse for decades. But without common conceptual ground, people cannot even debate these norms and standards.”

He goes on, “If we can’t distinguish innovation from hype, then powerful companies like Meta are free to set the terms for their own commercial interests.”

Most attempts to describe the metaverse use a similar set of phrases including virtual worlds, avatars, virtual reality, cryptocurrency, blockchain, and non-fungible tokens. The problem as the professor sees it is that humans don’t categorize by such lists.

Decades of research in cognitive science have shown that most categories are radial and will differ in people’s conception depending on their cultural experience. Using Boellstorff’s example, a “bird” for North Americans looks something like a sparrow. Hummingbirds and ducks are further from this prototype. Further still are flamingos and penguins. Yet all are birds, radiating out from the socially specific prototype.

Taking this idea to the metaverse, he picks on the idea of interoperability — the idea that identities, friendship networks, and digital items like avatar clothes should be capable of moving between virtual worlds.

Clegg warned that “without a significant degree of interoperability baked into each floor, the metaverse will become fragmented.”

Other companies like Epic Games and NVIDIA have espoused similar arguments, but Boellstorff says that this ignores how interoperability isn’t “prototypical” for the metaverse. In many cases, he suggests, fragmentation is desirable.

“I might not want the same identity in two different virtual worlds, or on Facebook and an online game. This raises the question of why Meta — and many pundits — are fixated on interoperability. Left unsaid in Clegg’s essay is the “foundation” of Meta’s profit model: tracking users across the metaverse to target advertising and potentially sell digital goods with maximum effectiveness.”

Clegg’s claim about interoperability isn’t a statement of fact, according to the professor. “It’s an attempt to render Meta’s surveillance capitalism prototypical, the foundation of the metaverse. It doesn’t have to be.”

For Boellstorff, this example illustrates how defining the metaverse isn’t an empty intellectual exercise. It’s the conceptual work that will fundamentally shape design, policy, profit, community, and the digital future.

He says we need to beware attempts by companies like Meta to lock in definitions of the metaverse, otherwise this will become our digital reality before it’s too late.

 

Why Is 5G Advanced So Important to 5G Adoption?

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The foundations of 5G have been laid, but operators are at risk of missing the full benefits of 5G not just for potential customers, but also for their bottom lines.

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It’s glass half full and half empty as far as ABI Research is concerned in its latest report, “Is the Industry — and the World — Ready for 5G Advanced?” While 5G is already the fastest growing cellular generation ever, nearly all of this growth is concentrated in the consumer market, it states, leaving the enterprise market “woefully underserviced.”

So, three years after the initial deployment of 5G, the technology — and the industry — is at a crossroads.

“In order to fully realize the transformative potential of 5G, operators must look beyond selling data plans and SIM cards and instead get serious about enabling new use cases and empowering the enterprise.

“While there have been some mild successes for enterprises, such as private cellular (small cells typically deployed in a factory floor, or warehouse), the revenue generated to this point remains miniscule.”

AIB points to Release 18 — referred to as 5G Advanced — as the key to unlocking new capabilities and revenue streams however there are questions about whether operators are poised to take advantage.

“Without 5G Advanced, 5G is doomed to fail and the industry will be forced to wait for 6G,” the report warns.

5G Advanced Advances

The researcher expects 5G Advanced will be commercially launched in 2025, and that, by 2030, 75% of 5G base stations will have been upgraded to 5G Advanced. That accounts for approximately 76 million radios, 23 million macro basebands, and 13 million small cells globally in the consumer market. In the enterprise market, slower adoption is expected with half of small cells upgraded to 5G Advanced, accounting for 14 million in 2030.

5G Advanced will introduce several organic improvements to the cellular standard, but it will also introduce new “radical” features that aim to introduce significant value for enterprise applications, according to ABI.

These include positioning improvements that aim to ultimately reach <1 centimeter accuracy in the future, enable sidelink relays for a much more flexible deployment approach for on-premises deployments, and extend the network coverage through Device-to-Device (D2D) communications.

5G Advanced will also support further sidelink enhancements beyond Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X). Reduced Capability (RedCap) is another key feature for 5G Advanced, which will extend 5G capabilities to a number of power-constrained devices, including smartwatches and other wearables, smart accessories, surveillance, and machine vision cameras.

The tech will also extend 5G connectivity to a new category of User Equipment (UE) beyond smartphones to include wearables, drones/Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), surveillance and machine vision cameras, massive Internet of Things (IoT), and passive IoT devices.

“The new standards will be packed with a number of transformational features likely to enable the creation of new use cases and business opportunities not possible with existing 5G frameworks.”

For example, ABI suggests that commercial availability of 5G Advanced networks will mark a key milestone for the scalability navigation and wayfinding in public venues, such as sporting and entertainment arenas. A number of use cases will open up including enhanced AR/VR experiences through providing accurate positioning information on moving targets like players.

By 2030, ABI Research expects more than one billion smartphone shipments worldwide to support 5G Advanced positioning alongside more than 90 million 5G Advanced RedCap wearables and AR/VR devices, and 595 million 5G Advanced personal trackers.

Perhaps most critically, adoption of 5G positioning technology requires timely support from 5G infrastructure suppliers and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).

“Barring a couple of proofs of concept from companies like Qualcomm and Huawei, incumbent 5G infrastructure suppliers are barely talking about 5G positioning capabilities, which is a stark contrast from how heavily 5G was promoted in its ability to target high-throughput low-latency enterprise applications several years ago.”

ABI adds, “It is not clear whether operators are motivated enough to support these advanced positioning capabilities, and questions remain about the ability of these operators to monetize 5G positioning in the future.”

6G Discussions Ramp Up

It wasn’t that long ago that the idea of a 6G was dismissed as irrelevant but research into 5G’s successor is well underway. 5G Advanced is considered the foundation for the next generation of Mobile Broadband (MBB) and will set the scene for 6G.

6G will focus on such concepts as distributed intelligence, blending the physical and virtual worlds, and the full use of AI/ML throughout the network.

 

What Will Work for the Metaverse… at Work

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It’s inevitable that elements of the 3D internet will be co-opted into the work environment and become as ubiquitous as email.

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With tech giants like Meta and Microsoft throwing billions of dollars into developing holographic versions of video conference technology, at some point soon corporate life will entail some form of team meeting in a virtual space.

It’s a vision that includes offices in the metaverse, one where companies are already using VR headsets and virtual worlds to onboard and train new staff.

However, experts cast doubt on whether AR / VR is likely to replace face to face communication any time soon, while raising ethical questions about what rights employees will have in the metaverse.

“I don’t think it’s going to fully replace it or even come close to it,” says Lynn Wu, Wharton Business School professor and an expert on emerging technologies, in a conversation with Working It host Isabel Berwick and Dave Lee, the Financial Time’s San Francisco-based tech correspondent. “I think [it’s best to] think of AR/VR as an additional communication tool, just like email.”

The principal reason is the sheer discomfort of wearing a VR headset and of actually being in a virtual world for any length of time.

“As technology has improved, maybe we can extend [the time], but I don’t think that’s something that’s fully gonna replace face-to-face communication.”

Some enterprises are taking to the pseudo-metaverse in a big way. Consultancy company Accenture, for example, has been onboarding hundreds of thousands of staff into online work spaces, principally to combat business continuity during the pandemic and to make working from home and office more practical going forward.

“Whereas previously you might have flown all these people to a head office, somewhere to have a presentation from the CEO and have them sign all their HR forms and do all that kind of stuff — that’s increasingly happening in the metaverse,” says Lee. “The pandemic forced that as a way to bring people into companies, but also you can see the appeal. It’s much cheaper. It’s much quicker. You can do it in a broader way than perhaps you could have done before.”

Companies like BMW are also using virtual tools to train staff, “and finding that’s a pretty effective way of capturing people’s attention,” according to Lee. “Whether it’s as good as meeting people in person… that’s a big question we’ve yet to answer.”

As corporations gradually co-opt more regular working processes into the 3D internet then workplace practices need to evolve along with it. There are important HR aspects to consider, not least around privacy.

“Are we recording these [virtual] meetings?” poses Wu. “If so, HR rules need to reinvented to accommodate this. You may need new hiring practices, new cultural work norms. VR headsets are pretty expensive so you risk creating potentially even greater digital divide among those who have, and those who have not. And what about people with disabilities? What are we gonna do about that? Some might find VR helpful. Others might not.”

There are burning questions about how close someone can get to you, or your avatar, in the metaverse rules governing how we interact with other online.

“If the metaverse is going to be a much more immersive and realistic place to exist in, then it stands to reason that abuse and harassment and just general uncomfortable behavior, whether it’s from colleagues or whoever is going feel much more intrusive as a result,” Lee says. “There’s also, there’s lots of questions about what kind of employment law exists in the metaverse, who is deciding what’s okay and what’s not okay. Is that up to Microsoft or Meta or is that up to governments?”

A key strategy to engage employees in the 3D office and boost productivity is that of gamification — a somewhat fanciful term for creating 1984-style data serfs.

Amazon, for example, “gamifies” its warehouses in the sense that it creates targets and charts for its pickers and packers.

“One person’s gamification is another person’s monitoring,” says Lee. “I think making work a game is as much about logging progress as it is incentivizing people. The metaverse definitely has the capability and potential to be the most heavily monitored workplace environment we’ve ever known.”

He continues, “If you’re running a company, you might think gamification is fantastic. We can provide these incentives, we can treat work like a game. We can get more out of employees. [But it could be suffocated by the idea that you’re being watched so heavily in your work. You might see that as a far more negative state of play for our working lives.”

 

Another pitfall is the impact that working in the virtual office might have on our health. How do you feel now when you’ve had multiple zoom meetings when there’s a strain to be “always on,” staring at a screen without relaxing?

“Absolutely exhausted because the feeling of being on camera, the feeling of looking down the camera, looking at other people on camera. these are all behaviors that we didn’t have as a workforce to this degree until just a couple of years ago,” says Lee. “The metaverse could exacerbate all of those feelings, particularly as the technology gets better.”

Further down the line there might be an expectation to have a hologram in your room at home rather than just a screen. Microsoft is among companies developing the next level of video communications which involves something more like holoportation in which full-body three dimensional representations of ourselves are beamed into conference rooms.

Bill Gates has suggested that the tech will advance from 2D camera zoom calls to a 3D space with digital avatars in just a few years. But this will still likely be a basic digital presence.

“Holograms, that’s a much taller order,” says Lee. “The hardware to create good holograms is extremely expensive. The technology to consume this kind of stuff is also still pretty nascent. Microsoft’s Hololens is probably the closest thing we have to a very good technology that puts holograms in front of you in the real world — but that’s still very heavy, very expensive. It’s still not a mainstream product.

“If this is going to be part of the future of work, then [this tech] need to be as ubiquitous as a laptop or a television in people’s homes before that really becomes something that we all use as a natural part of our day.”

 

“Nope:” Jordan Peele, Social Commentary and Cinema Spectacle

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The teasing cryptic marketing campaign for Nope didn’t reveal much other than it was from the master mind of Jordan Peele. From the director of Get Out and Us audiences might imagine a new psychological horror but perhaps not one that involves UFOs and filmed as a popcorn spectacle not an arthouse satire.

It prompted articles like one at Vanity Fair ‘Everything We Know About Jordan Peele's Nope’– which it turns out, is not a lot.

That’s as it should be. Far better to go into a film without the preconceptions of critics – or even of a plot – or in this case of genre. It seems to be sci-fi horror with comedy and drama, shot through with Peele’s trademark satire.

Peele also aims to deliver pure entertainment, feeling that’s what we missed and what cinema needs to drive us back to the darkness of the big screen.

The Universal Pictures film, which stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as a brother and sister who run Hollywood’s only Black-owned horse ranch, has prompted plenty of speculation from cinephiles about its UFO plotlines.

On verge of release Peele has been doing interview rounds and revealed a bit more info. But not much more.

“It’s so tricky being considered in the vanguard of Black horror, because obviously Black horror is so very real, and it’s hard to do it in a way that’s not re-traumatizing and sad,” Peele told Essence magazine. “I was going into my third horror film starring Black leads, and somewhere in the process I realized that the movie had to be about Black joy as well, in order to fit what the world needs at this moment.”

It’s partly a homage to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg’s epic that made a lasting impression on Peele (it was released in 1977 two years before he was born).

 “I set my sights on the great American UFO story,” he told Fandango “And the movie itself deals with spectacle, and the good and bad that come from this idea of attention. It’s a horror epic, but it has some points in it that are meant to elicit a very audible reaction in the theater.”

 Spectacle means more than just a blockbuster canvas, although this film is made with large format 65mm and IMAX film cameras.

 “When you're shooting on IMAX you just know you're doing something cinematically special,” Peele says in the production notes. “The image is so overwhelming it feels like you're there. I wanted immersion, an awe, a fear and a wonder we all had when we were kids.”

 Threaded throughout the tale, overtly and more subtly, is what it means to be addicited to spectacle (the cinema-going experience if you will), and to be the subject of spectacle passed through the Hollywood machine (one of the characters is a washed-up child actor), and also what it means to be passed over by the film factory. This means below the line artists from stunts to wardrobe as much as it calls out the history of film’s blindness to people of color.

 “The first film clip [Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion] was essentially a Black man on a horse who has been forgotten and erased,” Peele told Essence, quoted in Variety “Part of this film, to me, is a celebration and a response to that. We can be the leads not only of a horror movie but also action, adventure, comedy, etc.”

 In an otherwise vacant interview by Uproxx, Peele reveals that he deliberately wrote a story about an extraterrestrial without any regard to how possible it was to actually film it (not coincidentally this is also the dilemma of one the film’s characters which includes a retired, revered cinematographer).

 “Whereas Get Out started with this notion of: what if I write a script that no one would ever let me make? And how can I make a movie that’s impossible? Well, with the fortune of success, I’ve had greater tools I can work with. It’s very important to me to continue to push and continue to start from that same starting point of, what can I do that’s impossible? What is the movie that I’m not supposed to make? That I can’t make? That I don’t know how to make? And that was the starting point.”

 On his side in this endeavour was Hoyte Van Hoytema ASC, the Swiss-born Dutch-Swedish cinematographer whose last sci-fi works were Ad Astra and Tenet.

 He tasked with filming several sequences on location day for night.   Shooting day for night is a classic cinematographic problem usually overcome by placing actors at a very specific direction into the sun, preferably backlit, and then darkening the image so that it looks as if the scene is lit by the moon. 

 However, after testing this option director and DP were not satisfied with the result.  “We wanted to create nights that felt spacious, epic and grand and gave us the possibility to peer into the night. Yet at the same time, we didn’t want those nights to look fake in any way,” says van Hoytema.  

 They built a special rig which combined of a variety of cameras (principally Alexa 65 with an infrared enabled chip) all perfectly aligned without parallax.  

 All of the guessing games about the film might have been rendered null and void had the writer/director kept the project’s working title "Little Green Men."

 “Though that would more directly reference the concept of aliens, it's actually a double entendre that speaks to the larger themes his story has in mind,” notes Slashfilm 

“I'm always talking about something human, a human flaw,” Peele says. “And there was something about our connection with spectacle and money and our monetization of spectacle. And so, the 'little green men' that I started talking about [were] the little green men on the money."

 

In an Era of Alternate Realities, Do We Ever Know What’s Actually Real?

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We’ve collectively gone so far down so many different rabbit holes that we’ve lost our ability to find our way out.

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It may be that we don’t even want to.

What if confirmation bias (the vicious circle of social media content that confirms what we already believe) is so ingrained because we like it?

“It’s the emotional relish we feel, the sheer delight when something in line with our deepest feelings about the state of the world, something so perfect, comes before us,” says Jon Askonas, assistant professor of politics and a fellow at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at the Catholic University of America.

“Those feelings have a lot in common with how we feel when our sports team scores a point or when a dice roll goes our way in a board game.”

In particular, Askonas draws parallels between the way different versions of truth gain ground and the rise of Alternative Reality Games. ARGs use the real world as a platform to tell an interactive story that may be affected by player’s ideas or actions. Examples include Playstation’s Xi, Blizzard’s Sombra and Disney’s The Optimist (a fictional alternate history of Walt Disney and his involvement in a secret society connected to the 1964 World’s Fair released alongside with 2013 movie Tomorrowland).

He’s not the first to make the connection. In 2020, Adrian Hon, designer of the game Perplex City, wrote a widely shared Twitter thread and blog post drawing parallels between QAnon and ARGs.

“I don’t mean to say QAnon is an ARG or its creators even know what ARGs are,” Hon tells Askonas. “This is more about convergent evolution, a consequence of what the internet is and allows.”

In other words, the similarities between QAnon and ARGs do not owe to something uniquely insane about Q followers. Rather, Hon says, both are outgrowths of the same structural features of online life.

In ARGs, Hon writes, “if speculation is repeated enough times, if it’s finessed enough, it can harden into accepted fact.”

Michael Andersen, a writer on gaming, tweets that “All of the assumptions and logical leaps have been wrapped up and packaged for you, tied up with a nice little bow. Everything makes sense, and you can see how it all flows together.”

To be a consumer of digital media is to find yourself increasingly “trapped in an audience,” as Charlie Warzel puts it, playing one alternate reality game or another. ARGs take advantage of ordinary human sociality and our inherent need to make sense of the world.

With both QAnon and alternate reality games, it can be hard to tell what is and isn’t “real.” Of course, QAnon followers think that their world is the real world, whereas ARG players know they are in a game. That’s an important difference.

“But the point of an ARG is also to blur the boundaries of the game,” insists Askonas. “In fact, many use a ‘this is not a game’ conceit, intentionally obscuring what is real and what are made-up parts of the game in order to create a fully immersive experience.”

Widely held beliefs on Russiagate? On the origins of the coronavirus? Absurd denial of 2020 election results? COVID hysteria?

You can call it the gamification of conspiracy theory if you want, but electronic ARGs didn’t start the war. Askonas traces it as least as far back as fantasy role playing game Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s, where “the point of playing was not to beat your opponent but to share in the thrill of making up worlds and pretending to act in them.”

Cynics might argue that the bygone era of mass media was not a golden age of truth, but was subject to its own overarching narratives and its own biased reporting.

Askonas is ready to counter.

“What [mattered then] is that mass media, rooted in an advertising business model and in broadcast technologies, created the incentives and capability for only a small number, perhaps even just one, of these narratives to emerge at one time. Both journalists and spin doctors attempted to massage or manipulate the narrative here or there, but eventually mass media converged on whatever the narrative was.”

However: “In an age of alternate realities, narratives do not converge.”

He proceeds to argue that the media ecosystem of today produces alternate realities that also undermine what remains of consensus reality by portraying it as just one problematic but boring option among many.

Sometimes called “red-pilling,” after The Matrix — the process of arriving at this contrary view of the consensus, according to Askonas, goes something like this:

A real-world event occurs that seems important to you, so you pay attention. With primary sources at your fingertips, or reported by those you trust online, you develop a narrative about the facts and meaning of the event. But the consensus media narrative is directly opposed to the one you’ve developed.

The more you investigate, the more cynical you become about the consensus narrative. Suddenly, the mendacity of the whole “mainstream” media enterprise is laid bare before your anger. You will never really trust consensus reality again.

 

The Metaverse Can’t Be Built by Meta… Because It Already Exists

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The metaverse is the emperor’s new clothes. It’s a vague concept of a second life in the digital space provided to humans by tech corporations via VR sets. It’s nothing more than a marketing ploy that Meta, for one, is using to divert attention from scrutiny of the damage Facebook has done to truth and democracy.

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That’s one way of looking at it, of course, and one that Vasily Petrenko, CEO and co-founder of Another World VR, adheres to.

He’s irked by the confusion around the idea of the metaverse “because tech leaders typically don’t bother to elaborate on the practicalities of it.”

Another problem Petrenko has with the current usage of the word “metaverse” is that it erases the decades of VR innovation history that came long before Meta.

“The truth is that metaverses already exist, while Zuckerberg’s metaverse at this point is a hazy concept-in-the-making.”

Petrenko points to concrete examples that until recently would be called Virtual Reality but can justifiably now be called metaverse prototypes.

His list includes Fortnite, Epic Games’ online multiplayer game, which has also become a platform for hosting social events like concerts.

Petrenko likens the pioneering nature of theme park attractions, where virtual reality rides have for years combined ultra-resolution visuals with haptics like moving seats and full-body interaction to “provide a far more robust experience,” and one that “more closely resembles that of the physical world, compared to the experience of traditional video gameplay.”

There are, of course, many examples of VR’s almost routine use as an educational tool in schools or a training tool in military or medical facilities, while museums are using the technology to take their exhibitions on tour — virtually.

While acknowledging the technical limitations that these VR ‘verses have, Petrenko argues that the singular focus of VR developers will likely succeed in creating more fully rounded metaverse experiences long before Facebook.

It’s an odd opinion to hold given that Meta’s Oculus is the market-leading consumer headset, and that Meta is pumping billions into building practical metaverse experiences such as Meta Horizon Worlds, a platform expressly encouraging VR creators and users to collaborate and participate in virtual communities.

What Meta is trying to achieve, and this has been Zuckerberg’s vision since acquiring Oculus, is a social virtual experience: to transplant the networks of relationships of Facebook into a 3D digital space. His idea is that users can experience live events virtually in VR (entertainment, work, training) and enable users communicate in real time with other people inside them.

You can argue whether Meta’s vision extends to the true interconnectivity demanded of metaverse purists or whether Meta will want to manage it as a closed shop, but surely Oculus with all of the millions of dollars being pumped into it will succeed on a grander scale than piecemeal independent VR projects.

In addition, wearing VR gear inhabiting a VR experience for any great length of time is simply uncomfortable, disorientating and not a lot of fun.

Petrenko also completely ignores the idea gaining ground that augmented reality is likely the most acceptable form of real/virtual fusion that will take the metaverse mainstream.

 

True (True) Crime: Making Dennis Lehane’s “Black Bird”

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Here’s your choice: Serve a 10-year jail sentence, or go free after transferring to a maximum-security prison and getting a potential serial killer to confess. That seed feeds the drama of Black Bird, a true-crime saga adapted by thriller novelist and screenwriter Dennis Lehane.

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“The thing I locked in on was the sense of being dropped into a type of hell and having to navigate without a map,” says Lehane quoted by TV Insider. 

The AppleTV+ series stars (Taron Egerton as charismatic drug dealer Jimmy Keene) and Paul Walter Hauser as serial killer Larry Hall with Keene’s father played by Ray Liotta in his final TV role.

As the story unfolds, many gray areas emerge. Says Lehane, “I don’t think too many people are just straight-out evil.”

The 6-episode drama is based on the real James Keene’s 2010 autobiography, ‘In With the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption.’

Game Rant spoke with Lehane, who is also showrunner. “This might sound strange, but I've been looking to tell a story that has a clean mythological line, and this was it,” he said. “If you look at it, it has all the trappings of a classical hero's journey: you have this young man, he is sent out by his village to confront an ogre that is threatening members of the village, he heads out into a dark forest and battles the monster, and he comes back a changed man. It's as old as time.”

In the Just Shoot It podcast Lehane explains that the tone for the show was influenced by Netflix shows Mindhunter and Ozark among others.

“I was really clear with the production designer and with the DP and the directors that that I had a strong visual palette for what I wanted to see. The palette that I wanted for the pastoral scenes was a Days Of Heaven Terrence Malick vibe, and I wanted Jimmy's life to be Michael Mann. I wanted it to be very sleek, very cold. So that the juxtaposition of the two worlds is that they can't really ultimately come together. And then into this pastoral world comes the [serial] killer.”

He says he also made a point not to show any of the actual murders on screen, preferring to suggest horror in much the same way that Hitchcock did in Psycho.

The podcast hosts also ask about of Taryn Egerton, who is also a producer on the show, “Are we ever allowed to cast American actors to play Americans? In America?

“I'm worried those days are coming,” jokes Lehane. “I feel like with Taryn, it just goes back to you know, the Brits, man. Gotta love working with the Brits. You just get so much range and you get a lot less BS. You know, they're not like running around going out and shooting dogs at night. So they can authentically play a psycho. They're trained, classically trained actors.”

Lehane was a writer on The Wire and earns most praise for his dialogue. The Guardian judges “this allusive, switchbacking dialogue Lehane’s finest work yet.”

Indiewire’s Ben Travers thinks Black Bird “a stealthy piece of storytelling that works quite well as a tense, cat-and-mouse thriller.” he continuing investigation into Larry’s murders “creates a familiar rhythm that the show can be a little too eager to lean on, but Lehane still subverts the traditional TV detective genre by illustrating law & order’s systemic limits.”

THR is less convinced, finding the true crime tale “never especially authentic or convincing on any factual level. It is, however, thoroughly unsettling and anchored by exceptional performances who collectively more than compensate for myriad flaws of structure and focus.”

Reviewer Daniel Fienberg singles out Liotta who died last month aged 67.  “There’s a raw immediacy to Liotta’s work here that I’m sure would hit home without the real-life grief.”