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Google Cloud makes it easier to set up continuous delivery with Spinnaker
Google Cloud today announced Spinnaker for Google Cloud Platform, a new solution that makes it easier to install and run the Spinnaker continuous delivery (CD) service on Google’s cloud.
Spinnaker was created inside Netflix and is now jointly developed by Netflix and Google. Netflix open-sourced it back in 2015 and over the course of the last few years, it became the open-source CD platform of choice for many enterprises. Today, companies like Adobe, Box, Cisco, Daimler, Samsung and others use it to speed up their development process.
With Spinnaker for Google Cloud Platform, which runs on the Google Kubernetes Engine, Google is making the install process for the service as easy as a few clicks. Once up and running, the Spinnaker install includes all of the core tools, as well as Deck, the user interface for the service. Users pay for the resources used by the Google Kubernetes Engine, as well as Cloud Memorystore for Redis, Google Cloud Load Balancing and potentially other resources they use in the Google Cloud.
The company has pre-configured Spinnaker for testing and deploying code on Google Kubernetes Engine, Compute Engine and App Engine, though it also will work with any other public or on-prem cloud. It’s also integrated with Cloud Build, Google’s recently launched continuous integration service, and features support for automatic backups and integrated auditing and monitoring with Google’s Stackdriver.
“We want to make sure that the solution is great both for developers and DevOps or SRE teams,” says Matt Duftler, tech lead for Google’s Spinnaker effort, in today’s announcement. “Developers want to get moving fast with the minimum of overhead. Platform teams can allow them to do that safely by encoding their recommended practice into Spinnaker, using Spinnaker for GCP to get up and running quickly and start onboard development teams.”
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Netflix will roll out a lower-priced subscription plan in India
Netflix said on Wednesday that it will roll out a cheaper subscription plan in India, one of the last great growth markets for global companies, as the streaming giant scrambles to find ways to accelerate its slowing growth worldwide.
The company added 2.7 million new subscribers in the quarter that ended in June this year, it said today, far fewer than the 5 million figure it had forecasted earlier this year.
The company said lowering its subscription plan, which starts at $9 in the U.S., would help it reach more users in India and expand its overall subscriber base. The new plan will be available in India in Q3. According to third-party research firms, Netflix has fewer than 2 million subscribers in India.
Netflix started to test a lower-priced subscription plan in India and some other markets in Asia late last year. The plan restricts the usage of the service to one mobile device and offers only the standard definition viewing (~480p). During the period of testing, which was active as of two months ago, the company charged users as low as $4.
The company did not specify the exact amount it intends to charge users for the cheaper mobile-only plan. During the testing period, Netflix also provided some users the option to get a subscription that would only last for a week. The company also did not say if it intended to bring the cheaper plan to other markets. TechCrunch has reached out to Netflix for more details. (Update: Netflix declined to elaborate at this point.)
“After several months of testing, we’ve decided to roll out a lower-priced mobile-screen plan in India to complement our existing plans. We believe this plan, which will launch in Q3, will be an effective way to introduce a larger number of people in India to Netflix and to further expand our business in a market where Pay TV ARPU is low (below $5),” the company said in its quarterly earnings report.
The India challenge
Selling an entertainment service in India, the per capita GDP of which is under $2,000, is extremely challenging. The vast majority of companies that have performed exceedingly well in the nation offer their products and services at a very low price.
Just look at Spotify, which entered India earlier this year and for the first time decided to offer full access to its service at no cost to local users. Even its premium option that features playback in higher quality costs Rs 119 ($1.6) per month.
That’s not to say that winning in India, home to more than 1.3 billion people, can’t be rewarding. Disney-owned streaming service Hotstar, which offers 80% of its content catalog at no cost, has amassed more than 300 million monthly active users. There are about 500 million internet users in India, according to industry reports.
In fact, Hotstar set a global record for most simultaneous views to a live event — about 25.3 million users — during the recently concluded ICC cricket world cup. It broke its own previous records. Hotstar’s free offering comes bundled with ads, while its ad-free premium option costs Rs 999 ($14.5) for year-long access.
Amazon, another global rival of Netflix, bundles its Prime Video streaming service in its Prime membership, which includes access to faster delivery of packages and its music service, for Rs 999 a year.
For Netflix, the decision to lower its pricing in India comes at a time when it has hiked the subscription cost in many parts of the world in recent quarters. In the U.S., for instance, Netflix said earlier this year that it would raise its subscription price by up to 18%.
During a visit to India early last year, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said the country could eventually emerge as the place that would bring the next 100 million users to his platform. “The Indian entertainment business will be much larger over the next 20 years because of investment in pay services like Netflix and others,” he said.
So far, Netflix has largely tried to lure customers through its original series. (Many popular U.S. shows such as NBC’s “The Office” that are available on Netflix’s U.S. catalog are not offered in its India palate.) The company, which has produced more than a dozen original shows and movies for India, this week unveiled five more that are in the pipeline.
“We are seeing nice, steady increases in engagement in India. Growth in that country is a marathon and we are in it for the long haul,” Ted Sarandos, chief content officer at Netflix, said during an earnings call today.
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How much HR does a scale-up need?
Nora is an unconventional HR expert based in Toronto. After helping successful startups like FreshBooks and Wealthsimple grow, she founded Bright + Early, an HR consultancy focused on helping scaling companies build impactful people programs.
There is a special chaos that happens when a startup reaches 30 employees. People have a harder time tracking what’s going on, and it’s easy for some to feel left out or ignored.
Right when you want employees focusing on taking the company to the next level, they’re suddenly focused on their own futures. Insecurities and politics can abound, and the work can suffer.
How to stop the madness? In my experience, it all comes down to structure. It might seem early, or scary to a company used to succeeding on grit, but 30 is a key time to begin putting processes into place.
You’re no longer 10 people sitting around a table together, and communication can start to break down. Looking to large companies is no help either. It’s easy to get lost in a sea of frameworks, and you don’t want to overwhelm your team.
What steps can you take to keep things on track and scale effectively? How much is too much?
My company, Bright + Early, works with companies at exactly this stage, helping them grow up without losing the culture that makes them special. For a company just on the verge of scaling, here’s what I recommend.
Values
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App revenue tops $39 billion in first half of 2019, up 15% from first half of last year
App store spending is continuing to grow, although not as quickly as in years past. According to a new report from Sensor Tower, the iOS App Store and Google Play combined brought in $39.7 billion in worldwide app revenue in the first half of 2019 — that’s up 15.4% over the $34.4 billion seen during the first half of last year. However, at that time, the $34.4 billion was a 27.8% increase from 2017’s numbers, then a combined $26.9 billion across both stores.
Apple’s App Store continues to massively outpace Google Play on consumer spending, the report also found.
In the first half of 2019, global consumers spent $25.5 billion on the iOS App Store, up 13.2% year-over-year from the $22.6 billion spent in the first half of 2018. Last year, the growth in consumer spending was 26.8%, for comparison’s sake.
Still, Apple’s estimated $25.5 billion in the first half of 2019 is 80% higher than Google Play’s estimated gross revenue of $14.2 billion — the latter a 19.6% increase from the first half of 2018.
The major factor in the slowing growth is iOS in China, which contributed to the slowdown in total growth. However, Sensor Tower expects to see China returning to positive growth over the next 12 months, we’re told.
To a smaller extent, the downturn could be attributed to changes with one of the top-earning apps across both app stores: Netflix.
Last year, Netflix dropped in-app subscription sign-ups for Android users. Then, at the end of December 2018, it did so for iOS users, too. That doesn’t immediately drop its revenue to zero, of course — it will continue to generate revenue from existing subscribers. But the number will decline, especially as Netflix expands globally without an in-app purchase option, and as lapsed subscribers return to renew online with Netflix directly.
In the first half of 2019, Netflix was the second highest earning non-game app with consumer spending of $339 million, Sensor Tower estimates, down from $459 million in the first half of 2018. (We should point out the firm bases its estimates on a 70/30 split between Netflix and Apple’s App Store that drops to 85/15 after the first year. To account for the mix of old and new subscribers, Sensor Tower factors in a 25% cut. But Daring Fireball’s John Gruber claims Netflix had a special relationship with Apple where it had an 85/15 cut from year one.)
In any event, Netflix’s contribution to the app stores’ revenue is on the decline.
In the first half of last year, Netflix had been the No. 1 non-game app for revenue. This year, that spot went to Tinder, which pulled in an estimated $497 million across the iOS App Store and Google Play, combined. That’s up 32% over the first half of 2018.
But Tinder’s dominance could be a trend that doesn’t last.
According to recent data from eMarketer, dating app audiences have been growing slower than expected, causing the analyst firm to revise its user estimates downward. It now expects that 25.1 million U.S. adults will use a dating app monthly this year, down from its previous forecast of 25.4 million. It also expects that only 21% of U.S. single adults will use a dating app at all in 2019, and that will only grow to 23% by 2023.
That means Tinder’s time at the top could be overrun by newcomers in later months, especially as new streaming services get off the ground (assuming they offer in-app subscriptions); if TikTok starts taking monetization seriously; or if any other large apps from China find global audiences outside of China’s third-party app stores.
For example, Tencent Video grossed $278 million globally in the first half of 2019, outside of the third-party Chinese Android app stores. That made it the third-largest non-game app by revenue. And Chinese video platform iQIYI and YouTube were the No. 4 and No. 5 top-grossing apps, respectively.
Meanwhile, iOS app installs actually declined in the first half of the year, following the first quarter that saw a decline in downloads, Q1 2019, attributed to the downturn in China.
The App Store in the first half of 2019 accounted for 14.8 billion of the total 56.7 billion app installs.
Google Play installs in the first half of the year grew 16.4% to 41.9 billion, or about 2.8 times greater than the iOS volume.
The most downloaded apps in the first half of 2019 were the same as before: WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook led the top charts. But TikTok inched ahead of Instagram for the No. 4 spot, and it saw its installs grow around 28% to nearly 344 million worldwide.
In terms of mobile gaming specifically, spending was up 11.3% year-over-year in the first half of 2019, reaching $29.6 billion across the iOS App Store and Google Play. Thanks to the fallout of the game licensing freeze in China, App Store revenue growth for games was at $17.6 billion, or 7.8% year-over-year growth. Google Play game spending grew by 16.8% to $12 billion.
The top-grossing games, in order, were Tencent’s Honor of Kings, Fate/Grand Order, Monster Strike, Candy Crush Saga and PUBG Mobile.
Meanwhile, the most downloaded games were Color Bump 3D, Garena Free Fire and PUBG Mobile.
Image credits: Sensor Tower
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Stranger Things portals have appeared in Fortnite
This summer has blessed us with a wealth of awesome television options, from Big Little Lies to Chernobyl to The Handmaid’s Tale. And the good times keep rollin’. Tomorrow, Stranger Things Season 3 drops on Netflix.
To celebrate, it would appear that Epic Games is adding portals in Fortnite’s Mega Mall.
Netflix’s Chris Lee, director of interactive games, confirmed on a panel at E3 that there would be more crossover goodness after fans noticed the Scoops Ahoy ice cream store, which is the same name of the ice cream parlor in the show, in the Fortnite Mega Mall. Today, portals (that look like the ones leading to the Upside Down in the show) were also added to the Mega Mall.
Here’s what it looks like when you enter the Portals… pic.twitter.com/PZskPcXq9u
— FortniteMaster | Stats, Guides, Esports, News (@FNMasterCom) July 3, 2019
These portals don’t actually transport you to the Upside Down, but rather to a separate shop in the Mega Mall.
Based on Fortnite’s past collaborations — the game did an in-game promo with Avengers: Endgame, Avengers: Infinity War and John Wick 3, to name a few — we can expect to see plenty more Stranger Things content on The Island starting tomorrow.
Fortnite has a growing revenue opportunity from these types of native advertising/marketing promotions. The Verge cites analyst firm SuperAnalytics in saying that Epic earned $2.4 billion in 2018, estimating the revenue earned from in-game purchases and BattlePass subscriptions. There was no mention of advertising revenue, however, which seems to be a growing segment for the company.
And let’s not forget, Netflix considers Fortnite to be bigger competition than HBO or Hulu. So it’s no surprise then, maybe, that Netflix is heading on over to The Island to promote one of its most popular original series this July 4 holiday.
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Netflix’s ‘Stranger Things’ comes to Roblox ahead of its July 4 premiere
Netflix is bringing its hit TV show Stranger Things to Roblox. On Monday, Roblox announced the launch of limited-time, Stranger Things-themed items that will be made available to its more than 90 million players, who can earn them by solving daily riddles and puzzles. Other free, limited-time items like a “Scoops Ahoy” hat and Demogorgon mask will also be offered as virtual items for players’ Roblox avatars.
The first of the two themed items are live now and will be free to download through July 12. Four more items can be unlocked by solving daily riddles and puzzles, with a new clue arriving each day ahead of the July 4 premiere of Stranger Things Season 3.
Roblox will also share clues across its social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it says.
What’s interesting about the Roblox integration is that it may reach children younger than those ages 14 and up — the ages that the series itself is rated for (TV-14). (Likely, some braver tweens are already familiar with the show and are watching alongside mom or dad… or at least with their approval.)
However, the Roblox partnership is only one of several gaming-focused initiatives Netflix has planned to market some of its most anticipated programming, including both Stranger Things and other titles.
To unlock Eleven’s Mall Outfit from @Stranger_Things, you’ll need to learn the score. Check our Facebook and Instagram pages for more clues and solve today’s puzzle before July 18th! https://t.co/y78FWxfQUn pic.twitter.com/DYSqhTPoH3
— Roblox (@Roblox) July 2, 2019
At this year’s E3, Netflix detailed a series of gaming initiatives, including integrations with partners like Ubisoft, Behavior Interactive and even Fortnite, in addition to Roblox. Already, some Fortnite players had found the “Scoops Ahoy” Easter egg back when Season 9 launched, Netflix said.
Plus, the company is preparing not one but two new Stranger Things-themed games. The first, called Stranger Things 3: The Game, will launch across platforms including Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, Android and iOS on the same day the third season premieres. Like its predecessor, also by developer BonusXP, the game is meant to be a companion to the current season and features 16-bit action for a nostalgic feel.
Next year, Netflix is planning another new Stranger Things title, with a mobile game for iOS and Android. This one is a location-based RPG/puzzler where players explore The Upside Down hidden all around them, while working with other players to “overcome its emerging evils.”
Netflix is also preparing to launch on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC and Mac a turn-based tactics game adapted from the Netflix Original series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.
A wave of digital marketing isn’t entirely new for the streaming service.
In the past, it toyed with mobile experiences to advertise its shows — like the standalone Orange is the New Black app it launched back in 2014, or the “FakeBlock” app introduced to advertise the new season of Arrested Development.
The company also toyed around with a cross between games and TV with the 2018 launch of Minecraft: Story Mode, which some could consider a form of gaming. Netflix, however, did not. It even claimed at the time that the company did not have any plans “to get into gaming.”
Well, that’s no longer true.
While many of the integrations and games themselves are built by partnered developers, Netflix is clearly involved. And unlike the throwaway apps from years prior, these are more series efforts on Netflix’s part — not just promotional vehicles for its shows.
The marketing doesn’t stop at digital games either.
Netflix’s Stranger Things is more than just a show, it’s a whole business unto itself. It’s Baskin-Robbins ice cream flavors, and Target exclusives like a Stranger Things bike, toys and apparel. It’s posters, games and all kinds of other merch, too. And that’s just one show. An analyst previously said Netflix’s merch biz could be a billion-dollar addition to the company’s revenue.
Beyond gaming and other stuff to buy, the Stranger Things empire extends to brand deals with Coke, Levi’s, H&M, Nike, Eggo, Schwinn, Trivial Pursuit, Burger King and more.
The Roblox and Fortnite integrations are live now. The Season 3-themed game arrives July 4.
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Northzone’s Paul Murphy goes deep on the next era of gaming
As the gaming market continues to boom, billions of dollars are being invested in new games and new streaming platforms vying to own a piece of the action. Most of the value is accruing to the large incumbents in a space, however, and the entrance of Google and other big tech companies makes it difficult to identify where there are compelling opportunities for entrepreneurs to build new empires.
TechCrunch media analyst Eric Peckham recently sat down with Paul Murphy, Partner at European venture firm Northzone, to discuss Paul’s view of the market and where he is focusing his dollars. Below is the transcript of the conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Eric Peckham: You co-founded the hit mobile game Dots before moving to London and joining Northzone last year. Are you still bullish on investment opportunities in mobile gaming or do you think the market has changed?
Paul Murphy: I’m bullish on mobile gaming–the market is bigger than it has ever been. There’s a whole generation of people that have been trained to play games on mobile phones. So those are things that are very positive.
The challenge is you don’t really have a rising tide moment anymore. The winners have won. And so it’s very, very difficult for someone to enter with new content and build a business that’s as big as Supercell or King, regardless of how good their content is. So while the prize for winning in mobile gaming content big, the likelihood is smaller.
Where I’m spending most of my time is not on content, it’s on components within mobile gaming. We’re looking at infrastructure: different platforms that enable mobile gaming, like Bunch which we invested in.
Their product allows you to do live video and audio on top of mobile games. So we don’t have to take any content risk. We’re betting that this great product will fit into a large inventory ecosystem.
Peckham: New mobile game studios that are launching all seem to fall under the sphere of influence of these bigger companies. They get a strategic investment from Supercell or another company. To your point, it’s tough for a small startup to compete entirely on its own.
Murphy: It’s possible in mobile gaming still but it’s really, really hard now. At the same time, what you’ve seen is the odds of winning are lower. It is hard to reach the same scale when it costs you $5.00 to acquire a user today, whereas when Candy Crush launched, it was $0.05 per user. So it’s almost impossible to achieve King-like scale today.
Therefore, you’re looking at similar content risk with reduced upside, which makes that equation less attractive for venture capital. But it might be perfectly fine for an established company because they don’t need to do the marketing, they have the audience already.
The big gaming companies all struggle with the challenge of how to create the next hit IP. They have this machine that can bring any great game to market efficiently, with a large audience they can cross promote from and capital they can invest to build a big brand quickly. For them, the biggest challenge is getting the best content.
So it’s natural to me that the pendulum has swung towards strategic investors in mobile gaming content. Epic has a fund that they set up with Improbable, Supercell is making direct investments, Tencent has been making investments for years. Even from a content perspective, you’re probably going to see Apple, Google, and Amazon making more content investments in mobile gaming.
Image via Getty Images / aurielaki
Peckham: Does this same market dynamic apply to PC games and console games? Do you see a certain area within gaming where there’s still opportunity for independent startups to create the game itself and find success at a venture scale?
Murphy: The reason we made our investment in Klang Games, which is building an MMO called Seed that people will primarily play through PC, is that while there is content risk–you’re never going to get rid of the possibility that the IP doesn’t fly–if it works, it will be massive…an Earth-shattering level of success. If their vision comes to life, it will be very, very big.
So that one has all the risks that you’d have in any other game studio but the upside is exponentially larger, so the bet makes sense to us. And it so happens that it’s going to be on PC first, where there’s certainly a lot of competition but it’s not as saturated and the monetization methods are healthier than in mobile gaming. In PC, you don’t have to do free-to-play tactics that interfere with the gameplay.
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A Netflix hack lets you feel the action in a scene by vibrating your phone
Netflix Hack Day, the company’s internal hackathon, has a habit of producing some amazing gems — like a brain-controlled interface, a Fitbit hack that shuts off Netflix when you fall asleep, a Netflix app for the original NES and a way to navigate the Netflix app with Face ID and ARKit, to name a few. At this year’s Netflix Hack Day, employees ventured into areas like voice technology and haptics — the latter, so your phone could vibrate right along with the on-screen action, among other things.
Project Rumble Pack, as the hack that used haptics was called, takes inspiration from mobile gaming. Some games vibrate, which allows players to feel the action — like a bouncing ball, a car on a race track, an object getting hit or destroyed and so on.
Similarly, Project Rumble lets you feel the action in a scene from a show or movie — like a fight, battle or big explosion. (Imagine a Michael Bay movie with Rumble Pack turned on!) The team behind the hack, Hans van de Bruggen and Ed Barker, demoed haptics in an episode of Voltron where a huge explosion makes the phone shake in your hands.
The hack was created by syncing Netflix content with haptic effects using Immersion Corporation technology.
Another hack, called The Voice of Netflix, taught Netflix to speak using the voice of Netflix’s favorite characters. The team trained a neural net to find words in Netflix’s content, which could then be used to create new sentences on demand.
A third favorite was TerraVision — a practical hack that sounds like a business opportunity.
The hack lets filmmakers drop into an interface a photo of a look they like for a film location, then get back the closest results from a library of location photos. The hack used a computer vision model trained to recognize places for its reverse-image search functionality.
The final highlight was a silly hack that plays “walk-out music” — like the music that kicks in when Oscar speeches go too long — when someone overstays their allotted time in a booked conference room.
Sadly, many of Netflix’s hacks don’t tend to escape the confines of the hackathon itself. But they can inspire real-world projects in other ways, and help to keep the creativity flowing.
An overview of this year’s Netflix Hack Day, which focused on Netflix’s studio efforts, is below.
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Carmen Sandiego returns to Google Earth with a new caper
Google Earth first made use of its rich global 3D visualization as a backdrop for a Carmen Sandiego tie-in back in March, but today there’s a new adventure to explore. After solving The Crown Jewels Caper, amateur home gumshoes are now tasked with finding out the secrets of The Keys to the Kremlin Caper, which kicks off in Russia, as you might’ve guessed from the name.
Google makes use of the Netflix re-imagining of the classic globetrotting Carmen Sandiego character, which debuted in a 1985 computer game released by Broderbund Software. The Google Earth version includes pixelated graphics and gameplay inspired by the original series, with the modern look that’s used in the Netflix show by educational publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
The game can be played on Android, iOS or desktop (via Chrome) and has a lot of the same charm and appeal of the original series, with similar educational value in terms of highlighting some key cultural and geographic details along the way as you investigate the case.
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What do subscription services and streaming mean for the future of gaming?
The future of gaming is streaming. If that wasn’t painfully obvious to you a week ago, it certainly ought to be now. Google got ahead of E3 late last week by finally shedding light on Stadia, a streaming service that promises a hardware agnostic gaming future.
It’s still very early days, of course. We got a demo of the platform right around the time of its original announcement. But it was a controlled one — about all we can hope for at the moment. There are still plenty of moving parts to contend with here, including, perhaps most consequentially, broadband caps.
But this much is certainly clear: Google’s not the only company committed to the idea of remote game streaming. Microsoft didn’t devote a lot of time to Project xCloud on stage the other day — on fact, the pass with which the company blew threw that announcement was almost news in and of itself.
It did, however, promise an October arrival for the service — beating out Stadia by a full month. The other big piece of the announcement was the ability for Xbox One owners to use their console as a streaming source for their own remote game play. Though how that works and what, precisely, the advantage remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that Microsoft is hanging its hat on the Xbox as a point of distinction from Google’s offering.
It’s clear too, of course, that Microsoft is still invested in console hardware as a key driver of its gaming future. Just after rushing through all of that Project xCloud noise, it took the wraps off of Project Scarlett, its next-gen console. We know it will feature 8K content, some crazy fast frame rates and a new Halo title. Oh, and there’s an optical drive, too, because Microsoft’s not quite ready to give up on physical media just yet.
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