smartphones

French rolling digital news channel BFMTV debuted “Live Vertical,” a new smartphone user experience. Developed in collaboration with French start-up, Wildmoka, the Live Vertical solution automatically converts the horizontal frames […]

Today’s multi-media journalists are jacks and jills of all trades. They report, write, shoot, edit, post to social media and, after all that, arrive at tomorrow’s morning meeting with three more original hard news story ideas. With so much to do, MMJs are forever in search of ways to make the job simpler. Here’s one: Use your smartphone, which you already have with you on every assignment, to tell your story more creatively.

An annual CTA study shows smartphones are now the second-most owned tech device, behind TV sets, growing 13% to 238 million last year.

A new study finds that time spent on smartphones has double in just the past three years. We spend more than a trillion minutes a month on our devices. No wonder ad dollars are following.

ATSC 3.0 technology — the audio and video transmission standard TV broadcasters are hoping to eventually migrate to — carries with it the promise of many new features, including delivering enhanced broadcast TV to mobile devices. But that means, at some point, new receivers will be needed in those devices, and that process will take time.

A new report from the Pew Research Center depicts a news-consuming public that’s increasingly using smartphones to access its information with two-thirds of Facebook users turning to news there — a particularly chilling number given the social platform’s algorithm shift last week devaluing news in its feed. Among numerous other takeaways, the study finds 75% of Americans think news organizations are biased. 

Mobile video viewing is growing as a share of all digital video viewing, in large part due to the increase of smartphone viewing. In 3Q 2015, the share of smartphone digital video starts worldwide was 18.1%, an increase from the year before where the share was 13.6%. The share of digital videos viewed on a smartphone was up 33% year over year.

Nielsen data show an increase in the number of 18-to-34-year-olds who used a smartphone, tablet or TV-connected device like a streaming box or game console. That grew 26% in May compared with a year earlier, to an average of 8.5 million people per minute. Those devices, which all showed gains in usage, more than offset declines in TV, radio and computers. In the same age group, the demographic most highly coveted by advertisers, use of those devices fell 8% over the same period to a combined 16.6 million people per minute.

Simon Perez: “Every year, during my breaks from teaching at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, I return to KPIX TV in San Francisco to work as an MMJ. On several stories, I’ve whipped out my smartphone to capture video I just couldn’t get with my professional video camera. Here are three occasions where my smartphone, shooting HD video, helped to make a professional TV story look better.” But , he adds, there are also downsides to this new trend.

Newsgathering keeps getting faster and easier using non-traditional equipment. But now there’s a tsunami forming that, when it hits full force, will revolutionize video newsgathering with a device not even designed for news photographers and video journalists.

Smartphone video viewing is having a corrosive effect on TV watching, research from On Device Research for the Interactive Advertising Bureau finds. The study finds most smartphone viewing is also taking place at home, as 90% of respondents reported home consumption as opposed to 49% saying they watch smartphone videos away from home.

While work is progressing on developing ATSC 3.0, the next-gen broadcast TV standard that stations hope will let them deliver signals to all digital media devices, a roadblock looms. To get the tech included in smartphones will require the OK of the wireless carriers and while have no incentive to allow broadcasters into the phones, they have considerable incentive to keep them out.

Newsgathering experts weigh the virtues of bonded cellular against the necessity of supplementing with Ka bandwidth, the flexibility of smartphones and the enduring value of microwave.

When ice covers the roads, it can be just as hard for news crews to get around as it is for the general public. So, reporter Margaret Ann Morgan and some of her colleagues at Raycom-owned WDAM in Hattiesburg, Miss., got serious about newsgathering with their smartphones during their recent encounter with winter.

The ability to target consumers and advertise to them at the point of purchase is moving out of the blue sky zone and closer toward market implementation, posing a threat to local media’s already declining advertising revenue. At last week’s Place summit in San Francisco, the emerging indoor marketing industry showed it still has a few kinks to work out, but it may eventually pose a serious threat to local media. “The people who should be nervous are traditional media,” says Neg Norton, president of the Local Search Association. “That’s the pool of money that’s ultimately going to get reduced.”

Now that smartphones with video capability are everywhere, it’s worth talking about techniques that can help the journalists who use them get the highest quality video possible.

When it comes to watching entertainment programming, it turns out size doesn’t matter as much as people previously thought (or hoped). According to a new study conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey, consumers are using their tablets and smartphones to stream video programming at an increasing rate, and they’re doing it in their homes, where televisions are available.

Roughly 40% of tablet and smartphone owners in the U.S. used their devices daily while watching TV, while only 14% of eReader owners said they watched TV while using their device every day.

Looking to gain a deeper marketing experience for mobile consumers, Starz Entertainment has become the first TV partner to sign up for AT&T’s new mobile barcode program.

With smartphone use steadily increasing in the United States, companies are preparing for the new opportunities that widespread use of mobile devices will bring.