Welcome to Lowpass! This week: Why Glance is betting on AI for your TV’s downtime moments, and how Netflix is transitioning to HDR10+.

An idle opportunity: How the TV industry wants to monetize non-viewing times 

The average US adult spends about 4.5 hours a day watching TV. Consumer electronics makers and smart TV platform operators have for some time tried to make better use of all those other hours left in the day. Now, a startup is betting on AI to keep you engaged even when you’re not actively watching.

Solutions for these idle times. 4.5 hours a day may seem like a lot of time to spend glued to the TV, but it doesn’t even account for multi-family households. Some estimates put the total average use time of TVs in US households at around eight hours per day.

Even so, this still means that for much of the day, TVs remain unused. They’re either turned off completely, which turns them into massive black holes at the center of people’s living rooms. Or they’re idle, displaying home screens with long lists of apps, or screensavers with more or less random slideshows. Over the years, companies have tried a bunch of things to make those idle times a bit more entertaining:

• Samsung’s Frame TV, first launched in 2017, doubles as an art display when not in active use. The TV is equipped with a sensor to adjust display brightness to ambient light conditions, making sure that it looks more like a picture frame than a super-bright TV screen during these times. The concept has been so successful that it’s now being copied by Hisense and other TV manufacturers.

• Google’s Chromecast, Android TV and Google TV devices have long shown slideshows that can be personalized, including with pictures from consumers’ Google Photos accounts. Other manufacturers have tried to mimic this, but getting consumers to upload photos to yet another service has been challenging.

• Roku’s Roku City screensaver has become an unexpected cult hit, to the point where the company has been able to get major advertisers to sponsor the screensaver.

Non-viewing hours have been a minefield. TV prices have declined for decades, forcing manufacturers to look elsewhere to make money. In addition to ad-supported video, some have started to monetize non-viewing hours as well – at times resulting in pushback.

• Amazon has been showing ads as part of its Fire TV screensaver for some time now, to the dismay of some consumers.

• Roku has been trying to find additional advertising opportunities beyond its Roku TV screensaver – but a test that included showing ad interstitials when consumers navigate back to their TV’s home screen faced significant backlash.

• The monetization potential of hours of idle time has also led to some friction between app publishers and platform providers. Roku, for instance, now tells developers that their streaming apps can’t include screensavers to protect its own Roku City screensaver.

There may be another way. Last week, I went to Inmobi’s San Mateo office to get a demo from its sister company Glance, which has been working on an AI-powered screensaver replacement for TVs that it plans to launch in the US next quarter.

• Glance began working on personalized lock screen replacements for mobile phones in 2019, and now has partnerships with major phone manufacturers and carriers including Samsung, Xiaomi and Docomo.

• The company’s lock screen replacements  are installed on 350 million devices globally, and are being accessed by 250 million people every day, according to Glance’s SVP and GM Manish Kumar Gupta.

• Now, Glance wants to expand into the TV space with a screensaver that serves up glanceable nuggets safe for living room consumption. “This is a family service,” Gupta told me. “It needs to be positive. You can't show murders and disasters.”

• During a demo, Glance TV showed teasers for recipes, “this day in history”-like tidbits, motivational quotes and more, accompanied by related visuals. “Every time you just glance at a TV, those two second glances should give you some value,” Gupta said.

• Glance TV also overlays personalizable weather and sports widgets over its screensaver, and it makes ample use of QR codes to unlock additional content on mobile phones.

• The company has been testing these screensavers with Airtel in India, and its early numbers are impressive: “Glance TV runs for almost four hours a day,” Gupta told me. 

• And while one wouldn’t necessarily expect a  whole lot of interaction with a screensaver, 20% of Glance TV’s daily active users do dig in deeper every day, and navigate through a cards-like interface. “Our interaction rates have been through the roof,” Gupta said.

Can AI help turn these moments into money? Glance TV uses AI to summarize and visualize information, with company reps telling me that there’s also a human curation layer to make sure things don’t go awry. However, the company also wants to use AI to further personalize, and one day monetize, idle moments.

• Gupta showed me a demo for something the company calls future memories: I took a selfie on a phone and added a bit of extra context about my hair style and body shape. A few minutes later, Glance showed me on TV wearing clothes I don’t own and posing in locations I have yet to visit.

• Scrolling through those AI-generated looks made me feel a bit bad about the random sweatshirt I had thrown on earlier that day. Glance offered a solution for that predicament: Opening a tab showed which retailers offered the clothes I was wearing in each AI photo, with an option to order right then and there.

• Glance wants to eventually expand this beyond clothing, and allow consumers to browse vacation destinations and more.

• Glance TV is currently not monetized, and Gupta told me that the company plans to stay clear of invasive video ads. Instead, it’s considering sponsored slides as part of its screensaver, as well as e-commerce integrations via its AI future memories.

The proof is in the pudding. I gotta admit: Seeing a better version of yourself on TV feels a bit strange, and I am not entirely sure this feature will get a whole lot of use after an initial novelty phase wears off. Then again, there is a clear push to incorporate generative AI into TV screensavers – and why not add yourself, or maybe your loved ones or furry friends, to that mix?

We may get an idea of how consumers are really going to react to this sooner rather than later: Glance TV is getting ready to launch in the US in Q2, and Gupta told me that he sees the company’s TV product in 20 million homes by next year.

Netflix embraces HDR10+

Earlier this week, Netflix announced that it is now streaming videos in HDR10+ in addition to its existing support for HDR10 and Dolby Vision. That’s especially good news for Netflix subscribers who own Samsung TVs, as the South Korean consumer electronics giant never licensed Dolby Vision, opting to back HDR10+ as a royalty-free alternative instead.

But the announcement is also indicative of both the importance of HDR for streaming services, and the growing momentum for the AV1 video codec. The company expanded on both in a  developer blog post, highlighting a few interesting factoids:

• Netflix’s catalog now includes over 11,000 hours of HDR titles.

• HDR streaming has grown over 300% on Netflix over the past five years.

• The number of devices capable of playing HDR content more than doubled in the same period.

• AV1 is already the second-most-streamed codec on Netflix, surpassed only by H.264/AVC.

• Until now, Netflix has only used AV1 for standard dynamic range streams. “With the addition of HDR10+ streams to AV1, we expect the day is not far when AV1 will be the most streamed codec at Netflix,” the blog post declares.

Netflix has long been at the forefront of advanced encoding techniques, and the company has been a vocal supporter of open video codecs like AV1. However, its rollout of HDR10+ shows that these things take time: Netflix has been able to re-encode only about half of all eligible titles in AV1-HDR10+ to date, and hopes to complete this process by the end of the year.

What else

YouTube is changing the way it counts views. Blink and you might miss it: YouTube will base view counts of Shorts videos on the times a video starts playing, no matter how much you watch.

New York theater adds AI translations. An off-Broadway theater in New York is now using an AI translation service to allow foreign audiences to watch one of its shows.

752 million people subscribe to paid music services. Global music industry revenues are now close to $30 billion, according to IFPI.

DJs can soon use Apple Music for their mixes. The streaming service will integrate with popular DJ apps and hardware. So why isn’t Spotify offering he same? Email me if you know the answer!

Napster gets acquired for $207 million. What’s that saying about cats having seven lives? Depending on how you count, this appears to be Napster’s sixth incarnation.

Samsung may introduce its Ray-Bans competitor this year. The company’s smart glasses are based on Google’s Android XR platform and are reportedly being developed under the Haean code name.

That’s it

What a week for accidental investigative journalism. By now, you’ve probably seen a bunch of jokes about group chats; my favorite take so far was The Daily Show’s trailer for a fictional All the President’s Men remake. Also, completely unrelated: I’m on Signal, in case you ever want to add me to any fun group chats …

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

And many thanks to Whale TV for sponsoring this issue of Lowpass.