Disney debuts its streaming service in India

Disney+ has arrived in the land of Bollywood. The company on Friday (local time) rolled out its eponymous streaming service in India through Hotstar, a popular on-demand video streamer it picked up as part of the Fox deal.

To court users in India, the largest open entertainment market in Asia, Disney is charging users 1,499 Indian rupees (about $20) for a year, the most affordable plan in any of the more than a dozen markets where Disney+ is currently available.

Subscribers of the revamped streaming service, now called Disney+ Hotstar, will get access to Disney Originals in English as well as several local languages, live sporting events, thousands of movies and shows, including some sourced from HBO, Showtime, ABC, and Fox that maintain syndication partnerships with the Indian streaming service. It also maintains partnership with Hooq — at least for now.

Disney+Hostar is also offering a cheaper yearly premium tier, priced at Rs 399 (about $5.3), that will offer subscribers access to movies, shows (but not those sourced from aforementioned U.S. networks and studios), and live sporting events. But it won’t include Disney Originals.

Access to streaming of sporting events, especially of cricket matches, has helped five-year-old Hotstar become the most popular on-demand video streaming in India. During the cricket tournament Indian Premier League (IPL) last year, the service had amassed over 300 million monthly active users and more than 100 million daily active users.

It also holds the global record for most simultaneous views on a live stream, about 25 million — more than thrice of its nearest competitor.

Prior to today’s launch, Hotstar offered its premium plans at 999 Indian rupees, and 365 Indian rupees. Existing subscribers won’t be affected by the price revision until the duration of their current subscription.

The service, run by Indian conglomerate Star India, offers access to about 80% of its catalog at no cost to users. The company monetizes these viewers through ads.

But in recent years, the company has begun to explore ways to turn its users into subscribers. Two years ago, Hotstar restricted cricket match streaming to non-paying users.

People familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that Hotstar has about 1.5 million paying subscribers, lower than what most industry firms estimate. But that figure is still higher than most of its competitors.

And there are many.

Disney+ will compete with more than three dozen international and local players in India, including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Times Internet’s MX Player, which has over 175 million monthly active users, Zee5, Apple TV+, and Alt Balaji, which has amassed over 27 million subscribers.

“The arrival of Disney+ in India is another case study in the globalization of entertainment in the digital era. For decades, the biggest companies in the world have expanded their reach into different markets. But it’s new, and actually quite profound, that everyone on earth receives the very same version of such a specific cultural product,” Matthew Ball, former head of strategic planning for Amazon Studios, told TechCrunch.

As in some other markets, including the U.S., streaming services have leveraged on partnerships with telecom networks, TV vendors, cable TV operators, and satellite TV players in India.

Most of these streaming services monetize their viewers by selling ads, and those who do charge have kept their premium plans below $3.

Why that figure? That’s the number most industry executives think — by spending years in the Indian market — that people in the country are willing to pay. The average of how much an individual pays for cable TV, for instance, in India is also about $3.

“I think everyone is still trying to sort out the right pricing. It’s true the average Indian consumer is used to far lower prices and can’t afford more. However, we need to focus on the consumers likely to buy this, who have the requisite broadband access and income, etc,” said Ball.

At stake is India’s booming on-demand video streaming market that, according to Boston Consulting Group, is estimated to grow to $5 billion from half a billion two years ago.

Hotstar’s hold on India could make it easier for Disney+, which has launched in more than a dozen markets and has amassed over 28 million subscribers.

As the country spends about two more weeks in lockdown that New Delhi ordered last month to curtail the spread of coronavirus, this could also compel many to give Disney+ a try.

On the flip side, if the lockdown is extended, the current season of IPL, which has been postponed until mid-April, might be further delayed or cancelled altogether. Either of those scenarios could hurt the reach of Hotstar, which sees a massive drop in its user base after the conclusion of each cricket tournament.

Disney initially planned to launch its streaming service in India on March 28, the day IPL was supposed to commence. But the company later postponed the launch by six days.

Industry executives told TechCrunch that if IPL is cancelled, it could severely hurt the financials of Hotstar, which clocks more than 50% of its revenue during the 50-odd days of the cricket season.

Some said Disney+’s premier catalog might not be relevant for most of Hotstar’s user base who seem to care about this streaming service only during the cricket season or to catch up on Indian soap operas.

Hotstar has also received criticism for censoring more content on its platform than any other streaming service in India. Last month, Hotstar blocked an episode of “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” that was critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi from streaming on its platform. YouTube made that segment available without any edits.

John Oliver slammed Hotstar for censoring the episode and noted that the streaming service had additionally edited parts from his older episodes where he made fun of Disney.

More to follow…

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Estimote launches wearables for workplace-level contact tracing for COVID-19

Bluetooth location beacon startup Estimote has adapted its technological expertise to develop a new product designed specifically at curbing the spread of COVID-19. The company created a new range of wearable devices that co-founder Steve Cheney believes can enhance workplace safety for those who have to be colocated at a physical workplace even while social distancing and physical isolation measures are in place.

The devices, called simply the “Proof of Health” wearables, aim to provide contact tracing – in other words, monitoring the potential spread of the coronavirus from person-to-person – at the level of a local workplace facility. The intention is to give employers a way to hopefully maintain a pulse on any possible transmission among their workforces and provide them with the ability to hopefully curtail any local spread before it becomes an outsized risk.

The hardware includes passive GPS location-tracking, as well as proximity sensors powered by Bluetooth and ultra-wide band radio connectivity, a rechargeable battery, and built-in LTE. It also includes a manual control to change a wearer’s health status, recording states like certified health, symptomatic, and verified infected. When a user updates their state to indicate possible or verified infection, that updates others they’ve been in contact with based on proximity and location-data history. This information is also stored in a health dashboard that provides detailed logs of possible contacts for centralized management. That’s designed for internal use within an organization for now, but Cheney tells me he’s working now to see if there might be a way to collaborate with WHO or other external health organizations to potentially leverage the information for tracing across enterprises and populations, too.

These are intended to come in a number of different form factors: the pebble-like version that exists today, which can be clipped to a lanyard for wearing and displaying around a person’s neck; a wrist-worn version with an integrated adjustable strap; and a card format that’s more compact for carrying and could work alongside traditional security badges often used for facility access control. The pebble-like design is already in production and 2,000 will be deployed now, with a plan to ramp production for as many as 10,000 more in the near future using the company’s Poland-based manufacturing resources.

Estimote has been building programmable sensor tech for enterprises for nearly a decade and has worked with large global companies, including Apple and Amazon. Cheney tells me that he quickly recognized the need for the application of this technology to the unique problems presented by the pandemic, but Estimote was already 18 months into developing it for other uses, including in hospitality industries for employee safety/panic button deployment.

“This stack has been in full production for 18 months,” he said via message. “We can program all wearables remotely (they’re LTE connected). Say a factory deploys this – we write an app to the wearable remotely. This is programmable IoT.

“Who knew the virus would require proof of health vis-a-vis location diagnostics tech,” he added.

Many have proposed technology-based solutions for contact tracing, including leveraging existing data gathered by smartphones and consumer applications to chart transmission. But those efforts also have considerable privacy implications, and require use of a smartphone – something that Cheney says isn’t really viable for accurate workplace tracking in high-traffic environments. By creating a dedicated wearable, Cheney says that Estimote can help employers avoid doing something “invasive” with their workforce, since it’s instead tied to a fit-for-purpose device with data shared only with their employers, and it’s in a form factor they can remove and have some control over. Mobile devices also can’t do nearly as fine-grained tracking with indoor environments as dedicated hardware can manage, he says.

And contact tracing at this hyperlocal level won’t necessarily just provide employers with early warning signs for curbing the spread earlier and more thoroughly than they would otherwise. In fact, larger-scale contact tracing fed by sensor data could inform new and improved strategies for COVID-19 response.

“Typically, contact tracing relies on the memory of individuals, or some high-level assumptions (for example, the shift someone worked),” said Brianna Vechhio-Pagán of John Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab via a statement. “New technologies can now track interactions within a transmissible, or ~6-foot range, thus reducing the error introduced by other methods. By combining very dense contact tracing data from Bluetooth and UWB signals with information about infection status and symptoms, we may discover new and improved ways to keep patients and staff safe.”

With the ultimate duration of measures like physical distancing essentially up-in-the-air, and some predictions indicating they’ll continue for many months, even if they vary in terms of severity, solutions like Estimote’s could become essential to keeping essential services and businesses operating while also doing the utmost to protect the health and safety of the workers incurring those risks. More far-reaching measures might be needed, too, including general-public-connected, contact-tracing programs, and efforts like this one should help inform the design and development of those.

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Daily Crunch: Amazon announces new warehouse safety steps

Amazon says it will start taking additional steps to ensure the safety of its warehouse workers, SoftBank backs out of its latest WeWork investment and Zoom tries to fix its security issues. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 2, 2020.

1. Amazon begins running temperature checks and will provide surgical masks at warehouses

Amazon has already taken some precautions, including mandatory paid 14-day quarantines for employees who test positive, as well as increased cleaning and sanitization efforts of families and infrastructure. The new measures to be introduced next week include taking temperatures of employees at the entrances to warehouses, with any individuals wth a fever of more than 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit to be sent home, where they’ll have to have three consecutive days without fever to return to work.

There have been a number of employee actions in response to Amazon’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, including a walkout at the company’s Staten Island warehouse.

2. SoftBank terminates $3B tender offer for WeWork shares

SoftBank was already rumored to be getting cold feet when the Wall Street Journal reported last month that it was using regulatory investigations as a way to back out of its commitment to buy $3 billion in shares from existing WeWork shareholders.

3. Zoom freezes feature development to fix security and privacy issues

Zoom has been widely criticized over the past couple of weeks for terrible security, a poorly designed screensharing feature, misleading dark patterns, fake end-to-end-encryption claims and an incomplete privacy policy. So the company says that for the next 90 days it’s enacting a feature freeze, which means it won’t ship any new feature until it is done fixing the current feature set. Zoom will also work with third-party experts and prepare a transparency report.

4. Luckin Coffee’s board initiates investigation into $300M potential fraud

In a filing with the SEC, the company’s board announced that it has initiated an internal investigation into the activities of its former COO Jian Liu, who may have inflated revenues by the company by an early estimate of more than $300 million (RMB2.2 billion).

5. How 6 top VCs are adapting to the new uncertainty

If you read VC Twitter, you might think that nothing has changed at all. It’s not hard to find investors who say they are still cutting checks and doing deals. But as Q1 venture data trickles in, it appears that VC activity is gradually slowing down. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. In a significant change, Apple customers can now buy or rent titles directly in the Prime Video app

For years, Amazon has prevented users from directly purchasing movies and TV shows from the Prime Video app on Apple devices as a way to avoid platform fees. A recent update changes that.

7. Air Doctor scores $7.8M to connect travellers with local doctors

Founded in 2016, Air Doctor aims to empower travellers who get sick when abroad and need non-emergency advice or treatment. It has created a network of local private physicians that travellers can access, typically via travel insurance or perks.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Why Do Some HTML Elements Become Deprecated?

The internet has been around for a long while, and over time we’ve changed the way we think about web design. Many old techniques and ways of doing things have gotten phased out as newer and better alternatives have been created, and we say that they have been deprecated.

Deprecated. It’s a word we use and see often. But have you stopped to think about what it means in practice? What are some examples of deprecated web elements, and why don’t we use them any more?

What is deprecation?

In everyday English, to “deprecate” something is to express disapproval of it. For example, you might be inclined to deprecate a news story you don’t like.

When we’re speaking in a technical sense, however, deprecation is the discouragement of use for an old feature. Often, the old feature remains functional in the interests of backward compatibility (so legacy projects don’t break). In essence, this means that you can technically still do things the legacy way. It’ll probably still work, but maybe it’s better to use the new way. 

Another common scenario is when technical elements get deprecated as a prelude to their future removal (which we sometimes call “sunsetting” a feature). This provides everybody time to transition from the old way of working to the new system before the transition happens. If you follow WordPress at all, they recently did this with their radically new Gutenberg editor. They shipped it, but kept an option available to revert to the “classic” editor so users could take time to transition. Someday, the “classic” editor will likely be removed, leaving Gutenberg as the only option for editing posts. In other words, WordPress is sunsetting the “classic” editor.

That’s merely one example. We can also look at HTML features that were once essential staples but became deprecated at some point in time.

Why do HTML elements get deprecated?

Over the years, our way of thinking about HTML has evolved. Originally, it was an all-purpose markup language for displaying and styling content online.

Over time, as external stylesheets became more of a thing, it began to make more sense to think about web development differently — as a separation of concerns where HTML defines the content of a page, and CSS handles the presentation of it.

This separation of style and content brings numerous benefits:

• Avoiding duplication: Repeating code for every instance of red-colored text on a page is unwieldy and inefficient when you can have a single CSS class to handle all of it at once. 
• Ease of management: With all of the presentation controlled from a central stylesheet, you can make site-wide changes with little effort.
• Readability: When viewing a website’s source, it’s a lot easier to understand the code that has been neatly abstracted into separate files for content and style. 
• Caching: The vast majority of websites have consistent styling across all pages, so why make the browser download those style definitions again and again? Putting the presentation code in a dedicated stylesheet allows for caching and reuse to save bandwidth. 
• Developer specialization: Big website projects may have multiple designers and developers working on them, each with their individual areas of expertise. Allowing a CSS specialist to work on their part of the project in their own separate files can be a lot easier for everybody involved. 
• User options: Separating styling from content can allow the developer to easily offer display options to the end user (the increasingly popular ‘night mode’ is a good example of this) or different display modes for accessibility. 
• Responsiveness and device independence: separating the code for content and visual presentation makes it much easier to build websites that display in very different ways on different screen resolutions.

However, in the early days of HTML there was a fair amount of markup designed to control the look of the page right alongside the content. You might see code like this: 

<center><font face="verdana" color="#2400D3">Hello world!</font></center>

…all of which is now deprecated due to the aforementioned separation of concerns. 

Which HTML elements are now deprecated?

As of the release of HTML5, use of the following elements is discouraged:

• <acronym> (use <abbr> instead)
• <applet> (use <object>)
• <basefont> (use CSS font properties, like font-size, font-family, etc.)
• <big> (use CSS font-size)
• <center> (use CSS text-align)
• <dir> (use <ul>)
• <font> (use CSS font properties)
• <frame> (use <iframe>)
• <frameset> (not needed any more)
• <isindex> (not needed any more)
• <noframes> (not needed any more)
• <s> (use text-decoration: line-through in CSS)
• <strike> (use text-decoration: line-through in CSS)
• <tt> (use <code>)

There is also a long list of deprecated attributes, including many elements that continue to be otherwise valid (such as the align attribute used by many elements). The W3C has the full list of deprecated attributes.

Why don’t we use table for layouts any more?

Before CSS became widespread, it was common to see website layouts constructed with the <table> element. While the <table> element is not deprecated, using them for layout is strongly discouraged. In fact, pretty much all HTML table attributes that were used for layouts have been deprecated, such as cellpadding, bgcolor and width. 

At one time, tables seemed to be a pretty good way to lay out a web page. We could make rows and columns any size we wanted, meaning we could put everything inside. Headers, navigation, footers… you name it!

That would create a lot of website code that looked like this:

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="720">
  <tr>
    <td colspan="10"><img name="logobar" src="logobar.jpg" width="720" height="69" border="0" alt="Logo"></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td rowspan="2" colspan="5"><img name="something" src="something.jpg" width="495" height="19" border="0" alt="A picture of something"></td>
    <td>Blah blah blah!</td>
    <td colspan="3"> 
  <tr>
  <!--  and so on -->
</table>

There are numerous problems with this approach:

• Complicated layouts often end up with tables nested inside other tables, which creates a headache-inducing mess of code. Just look at the source of any email newsletter.
• Accessibility is problematic, as screen readers tend to get befuddled by the overuse of tables.
• Tables are slow to render, as the browser waits for the entire table to download before showing it on the screen.
• Responsible and mobile-friendly layouts are very difficult to create with a table-based layout. We still have not found a silver bullet for responsive tables (though many clever ideas exist).

Continuing the theme of separating content and presentation, CSS is a much more efficient way to create the visual layout without cluttering the code of the main HTML document. 

So, when should we use<table>? Actual tabular data, of course! If you need to display a list of baseball scores, statistics or anything else in that vein, <table> is your friend. 

Why do we still use <b> and <i> tags?

“Hang on just a moment,” you might say. “How come bold and italic HTML tags are still considered OK? Aren’t those forms of visual styling that ought to be handled with CSS?”

It’s a good question, and one that seems difficult to answer when we consider that other tags like <center> and <s> are deprecated. What’s going on here?

The short and simple answer is that <b> and <i> would probably have been deprecated if they weren’t so widespread and useful. CSS alternatives seem somewhat unwieldy by comparison:

<style>
  .emphasis { font-weight:bold }
</style>
    
This is a <span class="emphasis">bold</span> word!

This is a <span style="font-weight:bold">bold</span> word!

This is a <b>bold</b> word!

The long answer is that these tags have now been assigned some semantic meaning, giving them value beyond pure visual presentation and allowing designers to use them to confer additional information about the text they contain.

This is important because it helps screen readers and search crawlers better understand the purpose of the content wrapped in these tags. We might italicize a word for several reasons, like adding emphasis, invoking the title of a creative work, referring to a scientific name, and so on. How does a screen reader know whether to place spoken emphasis on the word or not?

<b> and <i>have companions, including <strong>, <em> and <cite>. Together, these tags make the meaning context of text clearer:

• <b> is for drawing attention to text without giving it any additional importance. It’s used when we want to draw attention to something without changing the inflection of the text when it is read by a screen reader or without adding any additional weight or meaning to the content for search engines.
• <strong> is a lot like <b> but signals the importance of something. It’s the same as changing the inflection of your voice when adding emphasis on a certain word.
• <i> italicizes text without given it any additional meaning or emphasis. It’s perfect for writing out something that is normally italicized, like the scientific name of an animal.
• <em> is like <i> in that it italicizes text, but it provides adds additional emphasis (hence the tag name) without adding more importance in context. (‘I’m sure I didn’t forget to feed the cat’). 
• <cite> is what we use to refer to the title of a creative work, say a movie like The Silence of the Lambs. This way, text is styled but doesn’t affect the way the sentence would be read aloud. 

In general, the rule is that <b> and <i> are to be used only as a last resort if you can’t find anything more appropriate for your needs. This semantic meaning allows <b> and <i> to continue to have a place in our modern array of HTML elements and survive the deprecation that has befallen other, similar style tags.

On a related note, <u> — the underline tag — was at one time deprecated, but has since been restored in HTML5 because it has some semantic uses (such as annotating spelling errors).

There are many other HTML elements that might lend styling to content, but primarily serve to provide semantic meaning to content. Mandy Michael has an excellent write-up that covers those and how they can be used (and even combined!) to make the most semantic markup possible.

Undead HTML attributes

Some deprecated elements are still in widespread use around the web today. After all, they still work — they’re just discouraged.

This is sometimes because word hasn’t gotten around that that thing you’ve been using for ages isn’t actually the way it’s done any more. Other times, it’s due to folks who don’t see a compelling reason to change from doing something that works perfectly well. Hey, CSS-Tricks still uses the teletype element for certain reasons.

One such undead HTML relic is the align attribute in otherwise valid tags, especially images. You may see <img> tags with a border attribute, although that attribute has long been deprecated. CSS, of course, is the preferred and modern method for that kind of styling presentation.

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Staying up to date with deprecation is key for any web developer. Making sure your code follows the current recommendations while avoiding legacy elements is an essential best practice. It not only ensures that your site will continue to work in the long run, but that it will play nicely with the web of the future.

Questions? Post a comment! You can also find me over at Angle Studios where I work.

The post Why Do Some HTML Elements Become Deprecated? appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Rethinking Code Comments

Justin Duke asks if treating code comments like footnotes could help us understand the code in a file better. In his mockup, all the comments are hidden by default and require a click to reveal:

What a neat idea! Justin’s design reminds me of the way that Instapaper treated inline footnotes.

Instapaper (circa 2012)

I guess the reason I like this idea so much is that a lot of comments don’t need to be read constantly, — they’re sort of a reminder that, “Hey, this needs work in the future” or “Yikes, this is weird and I’m sorry.” Keeping these comments out of the code makes it much easier to scan the whole file, too.

I do wonder if there could be a toggle that shows every comment, just in case you need to read all the comments in sequence rather than clicking to toggle each one.

Anyway, all this talk about comments reminds me of an absolutely fantastic talk by Sarah Drasner at JSConf this year where she discussed why comments are so dang hard to get right:

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

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Amazon begins running temperature checks and will provide surgical masks at warehouses

Amazon has detailed someone  measures its taking to prevent any further spread of COVID-19 at its warehouse facilities in the U.S. and Europe, according to Reuters, including taking temperature checks and distributing facemasks to employees at Amazon warehouses and Whole Foods stores. The commerce giant has seen a dramatic increase in demand as countries and regions globally have ordered lock-down and varying degrees of self-isolation and quarantine measures, and has also seen confirmed cases of COVID-19 among warehouse workers across the U.S.

Amazon has already described some precautions it’s been taking, including mandatory paid 14-day quarantines for employees who test positive, as well as increased cleaning and sanitization efforts of families and infrastructure. The new measures to be introduced next week include taking temperatures of employees at the entrances to warehouses, with any individuals wth a fever of more than 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit to be sent home, where they’ll have to have three consecutive days without fever to return to work. Employees will also be provided with surgical masks starting next week, the company says, once it receives shipments of orders of “millions” placed a few weeks ago.

In addition to these measures, Amazon will also be using machine-learning powered software to monitor footage from cameras in and around buildings to ensure that employees are maintaining the safe, recommended distances from one another during shifts.

There have been a number of employee actions in response to Amazon’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, including a walkout at the company’s Staten Island warehouse, which led to the firing of the worker who led the action. Employees at a Detroit Amazon warehouse are also planning a walkout to protest what they cite as dangerous working conditions.

Meanwhile, Amazon is also staffing up to deal with the increased need for warehouse and fulfilment employees. The company previously announced a plan to hire as many as 100,000 new workers to handle the uptick, and told Reuters on Wednesday that it has already hired 80,000 since making that goal.

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Mostly Clear today!

With a high of F and a low of 34F. Currently, it's 51F and Clear outside.

Current wind speeds: 8 from the Southeast

Pollen: 2

Sunrise: April 1, 2020 at 06:34PM

Sunset: April 2, 2020 at 07:16AM

UV index: 0

Humidity: 43%

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April 2, 2020 at 10:01AM