Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
Next up for free video services: Original shows

Good morning, and welcome to Protocol Next Up. This week: free video services are launching more and more original content, and we've got the scoop on the headsets HTC will announce at its Vivecon event next week.
(Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Next Up every week.)
This week, a couple dozen media and technology companies tried to wow advertisers at the annual NewFronts. Social media companies like Twitter and Snap and online publishers like Vice Media and HuffPost were joined by a growing number of companies running ad-supported video services, including Samsung, Vizio, Crackle and Roku.
These companies are all benefitting from a massive consumer and advertiser swing to streaming, as I outlined in a feature story Monday: 73% of connected TV ad buyers are shifting money away from broadcast and cable TV, according to a new IAB survey. To convince those advertisers that their particular service is worth spending money on, many of these companies are now starting to stream original content.
Online originals are nothing new, per se. "A lot of [ad-supported video services] have started talking about this incredible new idea they've had called original programming," joked Crackle Head of Programming Jeff Meier on Monday. "We've been pioneering original programming for over a decade."
Yes, but: In the past, investments in original programming for free online services were often more experimental in nature, and frequently had a hard time finding an audience. It's no accident that Crackle's most prestigious original, "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," now streams on Netflix.
This particular moment in time does feel different:
It's worth keeping in mind that subscription services started small with originals as well. When Netflix debuted "Lilyhammer" as its first original show back in 2012, it didn't exactly aim for HBO-level audiences. Less than a decade later, Netflix is spending $17 billion on content in a single year, with the vast majority of that money going towards originals.
"The TV business is a very low-margin business. It's not a glorious business to be in." —Vizio CTO Bill Baxter, explaining during the Next TV Summit why his company built its own data and advertising business.
"If I was Facebook, I wouldn't be trying to create a Metaverse. I'd be trying to use VR/AR to improve (and even revolutionize) social interactions between two people. That's the only way to have a strong foundation for a virtual universe worth living [in]." —Sharp observation from AR and VR artist/mad scientist Lucas Rizzotto.
When it comes to sources we trust, the masterminds at Harvard are certainly up there… so when they say that at least 20% of your portfolio should be invested in a mix of alternative assets, we're inclined to listen. Meet Masterworks, your passport to the contemporary art market, where prices crushed S&P returns by 174% from 1995–2020. Protocol Next Up Subscribers can skip their 20,000 person waitlist with the special link below.*See important information.
On Tuesday, HTC is holding a two-day online Vivecon event to outline the future of its Vive VR line of products and services. HTC has been using its social media accounts to drum up excitement for hardware announcements at the show, but I was able to learn some key details ahead of time.
HTC will announce two new headsets at the show:
I haven't seen any images of the two headsets, and also don't know anything about the specs, but earlier leaks suggest that the Focus 3 will make use of Qualcomm's XR2 processor. Which made me wonder: What else could HTC be working on? To find an answer, I scoured the company's recent patent applications.
Companies do file patent applications for all kinds of technologies all the time, and don't necessarily turn those technologies into actual products. What's more, HTC has a particularly poor track record even for the things it does announce or hint at. Remember the Vive Cosmos extension that was supposed to enable users to power the headset with a phone?
Still, if I had to pick anything, I'd say the finger tracking sounds the most intriguing, and also doable: Valve's Index controllers already feature 87 sensors for precise hand-tracking.
We'll know more about the two headsets and any other hardware HTC may announce Tuesday.
Streaming-video aggregator JustWatch recently launched an interesting widget for Earth Day: The site's Streaming CO2 Calculator tries to crunch the numbers on the climate impact of your Netflix viewing habits. I was curious, so I decided to give it a try.
JustWatch asks you to download your Netflix watch history, which is easier said than done when you have multiple profiles. But after a bit of copy and paste, I got my results: In April, my family's Netflix streams apparently resulted in 53.4 pounds of CO2 emissions, which equals about 100 miles of driving with a gas guzzler. Granted, the math is fuzzy and imperfect: JustWatch does some rough estimates on the length of each show, and it also didn't calculate the impact of all of our Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime and Hulu viewing. Still, good to know that one single day trip can be as bad for the climate as hundreds of hours of binge watching. Brb, need to save the planet for a few hours…
When it comes to sources we trust, the masterminds at Harvard are certainly up there… so when they say that at least 20% of your portfolio should be invested in a mix of alternative assets, we're inclined to listen. Meet Masterworks, your passport to the contemporary art market, where prices crushed S&P returns by 174% from 1995–2020. Protocol Next Up Subscribers can skip their 20,000 person waitlist with the special link below.*See important information.
Thanks for reading — see you next week!
To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. you accept our use of cookies. You can review our privacy policy to find out more about the cookies we use.