Patrick McGee and Hannah Murphy, Financial Times:
According to recent internal documents seen by the Financial Times, Snap wanted to gather data from companies that analyse whether people have responded to ad campaigns, including aggregated IP addresses, the labels that identify devices connected to the internet.
It hoped it could take that data and cross-reference it against the information it holds on its own users to identify and track them, in a technique known as “probabilistic matching”, according to several people familiar with its plans.
After being contacted by the FT about its plans, Snap acknowledged it had run a probabilistic matching programme for several months to test the impact of Apple’s new policies, but said it had always intended to discontinue the program after Apple introduces its changes, as such a system would not be compliant.
Expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing as marketing companies and data brokers you’ve never heard of try to find surreptitious ways of tracking users instead of just asking permission.
Jim Vorel, Paste:
And this, ultimately, is the tragedy of losing that Netflix DVD collection of old — there’s genuinely no alternative for replacing it within the streaming world, no matter how much you’re willing to spend. Certainly, there’s no other service out there mailing DVDs at anywhere near this scale, even after Netflix’s own DVD.com has contracted significantly. Nor is there a local, brick and mortar video store in the vast majority of American cities at this point. It comes down to direct comparisons with what other streamers can offer — HBO Max, for instance, doesn’t have a huge selection of streaming movie titles, but it does have a comparatively high quality one. Amazon Prime Video offers the exact opposite experience — an insanely, incomprehensibly vast library that is large primarily because it’s filled with zero budget films that look like home movies uploaded directly by users. The Netflix DVD library struck what was perhaps the ideal balance here — truly vast and eclectic, but also with a baseline quality level of films that had to at least qualify on the front of “had a physical release at some point.”
Even though streaming media is a young industry, it is possible that its golden days are already behind it.
The curious thing is that these services are both balkanized — in that they have vast amounts of stuff licensed exclusively to one service — and conglomerated — there are only a handful of parent companies that own all of Hollywood’s major studios. So instead of the music streaming model, where most people just pay for one service and then listen to a massive catalogue of music ranging from mainstream hits to independent artists, the movie industry thinks we’re all going to pay for each of their siloed services that are mostly full of original programming that is the purest definition of “content”. That seems customer hostile, and quite unlikely.
Many of these studios also own record labels, so I hope this model does not expand into music or other forms of media. I cannot imagine paying separate subscriptions for different libraries of music.